Do we Really Understand Nature Better than the Indigenous?

[@chookbuffy]

Thanks Charles. Since reading your book I have been changing the way I speak, thinking about how important it is to recognize our disconnection from nature along with working to protect the land I love around me and be with my local community.

[@araboushi]

I hear you.. thank you! - the uluru Rock (Ayers Rock) in Australia was, after years of battling, finally reclaimed by the Aborigines as a sacred site and climbing was at last prohibited in October 2019... it makes complete sense to me that this rock.. that sits in the centre of Australia, was finally allowed to' breathe' and release...and the wave of that energy radiating out across the land..hence the ferocity of the bush fires in the past few weeks could be perceived to be a deep purification or baptism by fire if you like... seeking to purge the traumatic memory of the colonial inavasion and the years of disrespect that followed... the intensity of the fires seems to be around the areas where that invasion first ahppened... and the escalating abuse of the earth in australia by corporations that have recently been hoarding water.. damming the flow of rivers...(natural energetic flow... parching the land to tinder.. obviously pushed things to the brink....the Earth, the Spirits of the land... finally allowed to respond... will tolerate it no more... when we view 'disasters' like this ... they become alchemical moments of transformation, and healing... painful and terrifying as they are to navigate or simply survive through..(All deep lasting change is 'uncomfortable and disruptive at the very least... but the pain of this process is relative to the force of resistance to that change that needs to happen) they are necessary.. for the Earths restoration and balancing of its elemental energy system... and for ,- hopefully, - a deep humbling of Man.. who gets to see the his smallness in the face of Natural forces that he cannot control.... get ready for more... this is an energy wave that will be sweeping the world over the next decade..

[@jamesskinnercouk]

A brilliant talk. Makes me think about the invisible gods that I and many others worship and don’t even know it. My brain makes sense out of very local phenomena, and the rest of the phenomena around the world is just explained away without any real question but just carried with blind hope and belief in what others are saying. Go even further out beyond our regular senses and we are in the utter unknown, and I’m guessing this area is infinite. So are we to judge how this reality actually works.

[@cdcss]

Well said. Good question, great answer.

[@lorebrown5307]

I'm intrigued by the native cultures that created the Terra preta soils, how their closed loop lifestyle contributed to their ongoing survival. Also, the Shaker religious sect which viewed their craftsmanship as an act of prayer.

[@tiffanibeckman-mcneil7862]

beautifully said

[@differentstones]

YES!!

[@epoicosa]

FYI the are called Mamos based in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia

[@storypaths6]

my favorite so far

[@tomsawyer9560]

Not even one critical comment? Just praises? What is this a cult? When Jesus is watching you will do right things?

[@SirViette]

When the indigenous people say that if we take gold out of the mountains, then the mountains won't be able to make wise decisions anymore, does anyone stop for a moment, take a long, calming breath, and ask themselves "WTF is that guy talking about"?

[@aleksandrakrolak]

The way that I view it is that humanity likes to anthropomorph everything around them and "golden mountain making wise decisions" is the native's way of understanding "why disrupting whole habitat under and around a mountain is a bad idea", in example earthquakes in region, more human activity, more humans stampeding all those little critters etc. But that's just my brain trying to make sense out of this "indigenous wisdoms", it's like a children telling you not to "go into the woods cause fairies will kidnap you". They don't know that pedos exist so faries are a good workaround for them :P

[@SirViette]

​@@aleksandrakrolak That's probably the best answer that could be given, and thanks for replying. But we can't live our lives taking heed of superstitions on the off-chance they might contain a deeper wisdom somewhere. Firstly, there are so many of them that we'd tie ourselves in knots trying to believe in them all. But mostly, we wouldn't pay attention to beliefs of this calibre if we encountered it in any other context. If a builder showed up offering to build a wall in your garden because he had folk wisdom that unicorns were about to eat the cabbages, you'd call the police! A better approach is to rely on the scientific method to get a more solid model of the world and go from there. If no-one's gone into the woods because they're scared of the faeries, even if it's based on some real danger, the best thing to do is to have someone go out there and find out what's really going on. Back to the original example of whether gold is the soul of a mountain, mining engineers have done the experiments to figure out how to extract gold from a mountain without a collapse. Take that, indigenous wisdom!

[@aleksandrakrolak]

@@SirViette I also preffer scientific evidence and I'm glad someone is also doing this :D Too many hippies and "pray to make rain" people these days... But as you said, it's not that every "native wisdom" is the best or the worst - every one of them should be filtered by scientific approach. Cause some of superstitions are pulled from the arse, some are just mixing cause and effect (or correlations), but sometimes those people find something that works, no one knows why, and in example you can discover some fascinating things by filthering them through Science ;) And overall the biggest wisdom those natives have is to "respect the Nature", some do this through fancy rituals, some have sacred groves, but the essence is the same. Also, superstitions are nice for anthropologist to research thought-processes of those people :P

[@lewisc3785]

SirViette perhaps our scientific methods and tools cannot measure everything. And if we then throw away indigenous beliefs as simple superstition, we lose a wisdom that’s ancient. Wisdom that comes from observation, experience and these people’s connections to the land over generations. Modern science, by comparison, is new. But I believe the two can exist side by side.

[@aleksandrakrolak]

@@lewisc3785 "Modern Science" is not new. It's the simpliest "assume - do - check if assumption was correct" rule. It's as ancient as our primate grandparents or even older. Even native people did this, but their conclusions were not always right. The simpliest example of this is "Plants grow from seeds in ground - put the seed in the ground - plant grew from seed in the ground so putting seeds in the ground make plants". And if something cannot be measured that's probably because it's made up, like Judeochristian god or hobbits.

[@globaldigitaldirectsubsidi4493]

Yes but we are selfish.