Part II: The Chapter 11 from book: Charles Eisenstein: Climate – A new story
I.
The REALITY and TRUTH is that these and similar events are repeated, repeated…
What we call the consequences of climate change are in fact also very personal personal tragedies, losses, horror, suffering – not only of people, but of our living Planet and everything on it.
Climate change, people and relationships
My previous post on this topic is available under this link. For many, a rather shocking truth about the epidemic of callousness that is the cause of many tragedies, including those related to the actual causes of climate change.
This, second post on this topic, is is from the book Climate – A new story, from author Charles Eisenstein. This “New story”, helps that humans recognize, that Earth is alive being, which feels! Which is crucional to stop causes of Climate changes.
“Threats of global catastrophe won’t move people to action. Only the heart can inspire zeal.” (Charles Eisenstein: Climate – A new story)
II.
“Climate change means a revolution in the relationship between nature and civilization.“
“A MATTER OF THE HEART
If we knew she was feeling it, we would stop.
It is not only Western climate catastrophists who are warning about the mass extinction. Many indigenous peoples also see that we are under serious threat. But their warnings do not refer to ever-increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions, but to another matrix of causation that includes the desecration of life itself. This deeper causal system suggests a deeper set of responses, all of which arise from a reconceptualization of life and matter as sacred. It gives new hope, a way out of the senselessness of the endless ‘fight’ against climate change.
If you’ve read chapters four and five of this book, it won’t surprise you that many of their warnings are simply about destroying ecosystems in some way. Shaman Davi Kopenawa of the Janomami tribe wrote in his book The Falling Sky:
“The forest is alive. He can only die if the whites continue to destroy him. If they succeed, the rivers will overflow, the soil will dry up, the trees will wither, and the stones will crack in the heat. The parched land will become empty and silent. The xapiri ghosts that come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will run far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to summon them to dance and thus protect us. They will be powerless against the eruptions of noxious gases that are destroying us. They will no longer be able to contain the evil creatures that will cause chaos in the forest. One by one we will die, white people and so will we. Finally, all the shamans will disappear. And when there is no one left to support the sky, it will collapse.”[3]
Kopenawa explains about a belief widespread among indigenous people: that human activity, including ritual, is part of the binder that holds the world together. When we forget our true role and stop serving life, the world falls apart.
Tribes from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia (the Kogi tribe being the most famous) share a similar belief.[4] They believe that all sacred places on Earth are connected by a black thread, a network of hidden connections. If this thread is broken, disasters will happen and this beautiful world will fall apart. If we destroy a forest somewhere or drain a swamp elsewhere, it can have severe consequences all over the world. Shamans will not be able to maintain the balance of nature much longer due to our predation.
How should we interpret such warnings?
The Western mind interprets them in several ways, none of which are satisfactory. Most of us are no longer foolish enough to dismiss the warnings as the magico-religious babble of ignorant primitives who need to be awakened from their silly superstitions. Today, we silence their message in more sophisticated ways.
The first way, which could be called ‘ontological imperialism’, says:
“Yes, the natives are on the right track. The black thread is a metaphor for ecological interconnectedness. The xapiri spirits represent hydrological cycles, the circulation of water. Native peoples are good observers of nature and have described scientific truths in the language of their culture.” That sounds perfectly fine, doesn’t it? We praise the natives as shrewd observers of nature. But such a position takes for granted that scientific materialism is the basic truth, thereby rejecting the conceptual categories and causal explanations of the indigenous people. It communicates that we basically understand the nature of reality better than they do.
If the natives were simply telling us that we need to take better care of nature, the above explanation would be sufficient. But people like the Kopenawa Davi and the Sierra Nevada tribes are calling for a much more fundamental change. Do we understand the nature of reality better than they do? It once seemed that way, but today the fruits of our supposed understanding – a social and ecological crisis – are eroding our certainty.
The second way of silencing their message, which is related to the first one, Edward Said calls ‘Orientalism’ – it is a distortion (romanticization, demonization, exaggeration, reduction) of another culture, which we adapt in this way in a narrative that is pleasant and useful for us. Thus, the Kogi tribe could be turned into a kind of cultural or spiritual fetishistic object, included in the mythology of our culture, perhaps treated as an academic subject and its beliefs and way of life lumped into various ethnographic categories. This would make us feel at home and no longer threaten us. This is just another form of imperialism.
We would do the same if their messages were captured in a convenient framework called aboriginal wisdom, elevating the aboriginals to superhumans while also dehumanizing them. True respect is not worshiping an image—the reverse image of our own shadow—that we project onto another culture. In true respect, we seek to understand others on their terms.
The Sierra Nevada tribes are known today for two films, namely From the Heart of the World and Aluna.[5] I have always enjoyed watching documentaries about other cultures felt a little uneasy because their subjects are always objectified and treated as the material (video) of the ‘document’. When we document them, we include them in our world, in a safe educational or entertainment or inspirational framework and in the society of the spectacle according to Debord. But fortunately, these films are not documentaries.
Who is the director in this case? Normally the answer would be: Alan Ereira, a former producer at the BBC who brought his own cameras and crew. But Ereira and the members of the Kogi tribe do not say so. According to them, the Elders noticed the accelerating degradation of the planet and contacted the outside world to convey the message that we must stop the destruction. They first did it in the early 1990s with From the Heart of the World and then backed off again.
It is obvious that we did not pay attention to their message. The elders concluded that perhaps they had not been clear enough, so they contacted Ereira again to record a follow-up. A cynical observer trained in the tools of postcolonial analysis might think that the claim that the Kogi tribe wanted to make this film to convey a message is merely a cinematic allegory or a way to avoid accusations of exoticism, orientalism, and cultural appropriation. But such an analysis is in itself a kind of colonialism that patronizes the Kogi tribe as powerless figures in the hands of the director, as it ignores their explicit claim that they invited the director again to deliver an important message to the younger brother (ie us).
Dare we take the elders of Sierra Nevada literally? Do we dare to fully acknowledge them as the authors not only of this film, but also of the message they gave us because they wanted to? This would reverse the power relations implied even in ethnographic research, the most correct from a postcolonial perspective, in which the distinction is usually preserved in some form (and institutionalized, when such research is published with all the appropriate disclaimers in academic publications). between the ethnographic subject and the ethnologist. Anthropologists do not usually acknowledge the role of authors of messages intended for academic circles to ethnographic populations.
In these films, the colonialist mentality turns against us: stern, roaring and with a lot of love. The elders tell us: “You are mutilating the world because you do not remember the Great Mother.” If you don’t stop, the world will die.” They beg us to believe them and say we have to stop. “Do you think we are telling you this just to talk? We are telling you the truth.”
Why didn’t the younger brother listen? It has been almost thirty years since the elders of the Kogi tribe first delivered their message to the modern world. Maybe we didn’t listen to them because we didn’t know how to be humble enough yet. We are still trying to somehow package, limit and reduce the Kogi tribe and their message so that we can fit them comfortably into our existing story of the world. In this book, I stated that our reductionist story of the world is the foundation of a literal reduction of the world: extinction, soil impoverishment, ecosystem collapse, and the like. The teaching of the Kogi tribe communicates the same. He says that thought is the construction of matter, that without thought nothing would exist. (This is not an anthropocentric point of view, as they do not see thought as merely a product of the human mind. Thought existed before humans; the human mind is only one of its recipients.) On the official website of the film Aluna, the Kogi tribe’s position is described as follows: “It is not only that of plundering the world, but of simplifying it and destroying its physical structure and the thought on which existence is based.”
Fortunately, we are not far short of the humility required to truly listen to the elders of the Sierra Nevada, and for that we have nothing to thank but – humility. As our culture’s mythology crumbles, we face the humiliation time and time again as our cherished technological, political, legal, medical, educational, and other systems fail us. Only by turning a blind eye more and more tirelessly will we continue to be able to deny that the great project of civilization has reached a dead end. We realized that what we do to nature, we do to ourselves, and that preying on nature also impoverishes us. The utopian vision of the technologist and social engineer is dissipating faster and faster.
The disintegration of our categories and narratives, the disintegration of our story about the world, gives us humility. This is the only thing that can get us to accept the teachings of the aboriginals – to truly accept them and not just to capture them in a convenient framework called aboriginal wisdom, as if they were a museum piece or a spiritual acquisition.
I am not suggesting that we should fully embrace aboriginal cosmology. We don’t need to imitate their shamanic practices or learn to listen to the bubbles in the water. We must embrace the fundamental understanding that makes the natives try to listen to the water in the first place: the understanding that nature is alive and intelligent. Then we will find our own ways to listen.
The Western civilized mind is incapable of easy to understand ideas about the intelligence of nature. It anthropomorphizes and often deifies nature, which is also an attempt to subjugate it.
To acknowledge the subjectivity and autonomy of nature and everything in it is not to acknowledge human subjectivity and human autonomy, thereby creating fairy-tale versions of ourselves. It means asking: “What does the Earth want?”
“What does the river want?” and “What does the planet want?” – questions that seem crazy if we perceive nature as a thing.
Materialism, however, is no longer what it once was. Science is evolving to recognize that nature, like the human body, is made up of interconnected systems that are embedded in other systems, which in turn are embedded in yet other systems; that mycorrhizal networks in soil are as complex as brain tissue; that water can carry information and structure, and that the Earth and even the Sun, like our bodies, maintain homeostatic balance. We realize that order, complexity, and organization are fundamental characteristics of matter, which are expressed through physical processes that we recognize, and perhaps also through other processes that we do not recognize. The ignored spirit returns to matter (not from outside, but from within).
Therefore, the question “What does nature want?” requires nothing supernatural and no external intelligence. Desire is an organic process, an intellect that arises from subjectivity, from the desire to achieve wholeness.
Once we understand this, we will no longer be able to cut down forests and drain swamps, build river dams and roads that divide ecosystems into smaller parts, dig open pits and drill gas wells without a bad conscience. The Kogi tribe says that doing so harms the entire organism of nature, similar to cutting off a human limb or removing an organ. The well-being of the whole depends on the well-being of each part. We cannot cut down a forest in one place and plant a new one in another, and calculate the net CO2 emissions and console ourselves that we have not caused any damage. How do we know we haven’t removed an organ? How do we know we haven’t destroyed something the Kogi tribe calls the esuana—a key node in the black thread that holds the natural world together? How do we know we haven’t destroyed the sacred tree that the Kogi tribe calls the father of the species, on which the entire species depends for its existence?
Until we can know, we prefer to refrain from further ecocide, however innocent it may seem. We must treat every pristine estuary, river, forest and wetland we have left as sacred, while restoring what we can. Davi Kopenawa and the elders of Sierra Nevada agree: We are approaching the death of the world. This warning does not contradict the possibility of humanity’s survival in the destroyed world, the concrete world, the dead world, which I described in chapter seven. Perhaps the world will die, but we will survive.
Science is beginning to realize what many cultures have always known. An invisible web of causality actually connects all places on Earth. Building a road that interrupts the natural flow of water at a key location can trigger many changes – increased evaporation, soil salinization, plant death, floods, droughts – with far-reaching effects. We must understand this as an example of the general principle of interconnectedness and aliveness. Otherwise, we are left with only the logic of instrumental utilitarianism as a reason for protecting nature – we save the rainforest because it is useful to us. But that kind of mentality is part of the problem. We need more love, not more selfishness. We know that it is not right to exploit another person for one’s own benefit, because that person is a complete subject with their own emotions, desires, pain and joy. If we knew that nature is also a complete entity, we would stop ravaging it. As the elder says in the movie Aluna: “If we knew she felt, we would stop.”
If we knew she was feeling it, we would stop. Isn’t it also obvious that until we not know that she feels, we will never stop? Isn’t it obvious that we need a story about the world to help us realize that she feels?”
(Cited from: Charles Eisenstein: Climate – A new story, book, Chapter 11: If only we knew she felt)
Final remarks
[3] From the foreword of the book by Kopenawa and Albert (2013).
[4] Other tribes are the Arhuaco (or Ika), Viva and Kankuamo. The Kankuamo tribe is mostly assimilated. The Arhuaco tribe is politically active in the movement to protect indigenous rights, while the Kogi tribe has retreated to the mountains to minimize contact and protect their culture. All these tribes have suffered at the hands of coca farmers, paramilitaries, land developers and the like. In this part of the chapter I usually refer to the Kogi tribe, although much of what has been said applies to other tribes as well.
[5] This piece of text is an adaptation of a review of the film Aluna that I wrote for Tikkun magazine: Aluna: A Message to Little Brother (Eisenstein, 2015a).
“Threats of global catastrophe won’t move people to action. Only the heart can inspire zeal.” (By Charles Eisenstein: Climate – A New Story)
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