~Mahatma Gandhi
“Now polluters are looked upon as ordinary Joes just doing their jobs. In the future, they will be looked upon as swine”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Later this week will be Earth Day (Technically on Saturday the 22nd, to be specific). Usually, I celebrate the entire week, making it Earth Week or Earth Day week, if you will. It is a big deal to me, and has been since the first one that I can remember way back in 1990. In another post, if memory serves correctly, my memories of that day are expanded upon quite a bit. It only gained in importance over time, especially when I joined the Environmental Club at Bergen Community College (BCC). Obviously, that was many years ago, but it is still an important day, and for me, an uplifting one as well. My son and I usually take a hike in or around the Earth Day holiday, and for a few years now, I celebrate it with a series of blog entries (like this one). It conjures up images of spring, of new life, and allows me to appreciate Earth Day memories both recent and more distant.
This year, it will begin with this particular blog entry. It almost is surprising that I never used this title "Nothing Changes Until You Do" before. Where did it come from? What does it mean? Well, it came from my days at the BCC Environmental Club. That was the slogan that we used, and sold pins and bumper stickers with the slogan, as well. It was designed to mean that real, meaningful change - obviously particularly positive change to improve the environmental conditions of this world and this country - begin with the individual. Begin with YOU, in other words. And nothing will change if you do not make any changes. Of course, this can apply to much more than that, and can be used as an inspirational quote, if you will, to create any positive changes that you wish to make, from improving the environment to helping to create a better country to doing better in school or work or losing weight, or pretty much anything else that you want it to mean. So it is powerful to me, but for the purposes of this particular blog entry, I am using it with the same meaning that the old Environmental Club used it back in the day. Environmental degradation will not be minimized until we all actively take a part in it. Again, that means YOU.
So on some level, I tried to keep up my environmental activism ever since first learning about the deterioration of the Amazon rainforest back in the eighties, which is when I became aware of the dangers facing us. It is difficult, to be sure, because my own suspicion is that there is something inherently wrong with how we in our modern society choose to live, and how convinced we are that either it is the best way, or perhaps even the only way, that was can live. This gives us an out, if you will. If this is the only possible way that we can live, then we cannot change it. And that is how the world keeps getting worse and worse. To me, it is completely unnecessary for us to live like this, and there are things that we could and should do, and this goes beyond mere political wrangling. This should not be a left versus a right thing, because we really are reaching a crisis point.
But I digress. Yes, I have kept - or at least tried to keep - something of the spirit of environmental activism alive within me, and this means engaging in conversations and keeping abreast of relevant issues. It also means keeping up some sort of reading material, as well. That, specifically, is what I wanted to talk about here today, in fact.
Every now and then, you read a quote from somebody that just knocks you off your feet. Of course, that has been happening throughout my life. Admittedly, there are likely some quotes that had a profound impact on me two or three decades ago which, most likely, would not seem like such a big deal today. Our tastes and perceptions, as well as our understanding of the world, changes as we grow older, and hopefully, wiser.
There have been some thoughts from Native Americans, specifically, which I have grown to love. The first one I first learned about, if memory serves me correctly, back in my own old Environmental Club days back at Bergen Community College. It was from Chief Seattle, and this was it:
"The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth."
There was another one that I also thought was quite memorable at the time, and it was also by Chief Seattle. Here it is:
"Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
These were sentiments that I thought I understood at the time. But the more I read about Native Americans, and the more familiar I got with this way of thinking, and the more profound and relevant these thoughts seemed to me. It was not new, obviously, but it was new to me. Just a very different way of seeing things than our cultural myths and conditioning tend to allow.
Back in those days, though, I liked what was largely the mythology of Native Americans themselves. Like many people, I viewed them, as many others did, as these pure and innocent people who were far nobler than we ever could be. They possessed a wisdom and simplicity in their way of doing and seeing things that our society, caught up as it was in our maddening and ever faster pace of life and blind obedience to advanced technology (yes, we still had this addiction well before the age of the internet), could simply never have. These quotes, and a movie like "Dances With Wolves," allowed for this kind of an understanding.
But it was deceptive. Don't get me wrong, I still love that movie, although "Blackrobe" is likely a more accurate portrayal. As for those quotes, I think that I love and understand them now far more than I did back then, when they were literally just a bumper sticker that someone at the Environmental Club had (and I managed to obtain one of those bumper stickers myself).
Indeed, my understanding of Native Americans, their way of life and thinking, was greatly enhanced when I picked up one book in particular (perhaps ironically, I first picked up a copy from the Bergen Community College library). It is called "Touch the Earth," and there really is no one author. This book had Native Americans describing things as they see them in their own words, both as they were happening, as well as reflecting on it later. Surely, this book was likely one of the five books that had the most profound impact on me, and on my way of viewing the world. It actually changed how I viewed things, as well as how I saw Native Americans. No longer could they be viewed as "noble savages" (I would not have used the term, but still likely viewed them in a similar way to Jean-Jacques Rousseau), as just pure in thought and action. No, these people had actually existed, and were very human, just like us. But they had a way of life about them, and specifically a way of understanding the connection to their world and themselves, that our modern society simply lacks. We focus on separating ourselves from the nature, pretending that we are separated from it, not a part of it, but very much outside of it. Nature is a actually not a very good or apt word to describe this, as it is more the community of life, but nature as a word will suffice for now, since this is a word that people of our modern culture can and will understand.
Recently, I ran into another quote that really made me stop in my tracks and think. I may have read this one before, but my memory is not always accurate on these things. In any case, this came before my eyes recently, and definitely seemed worth sharing. It is, again, from the perspective of a Native American, and it takes an ironic approach on all that Native Americans have "gained" since being swept up by the wave of modern (white) culture that took over this land and bestowed their civilization upon it.
“Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a an was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were to uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.”
― John Lame Deer, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions
It reminds me of lyrics by one of my favorite groups, Living Colour:
A peaceful land that was born civilized. Was robbed of its riches, its freedom, its pride.
Sometimes, you read something like that, and you realize that there were people who once inhabited this land, and who had the apparent wisdom of knowing how important it is to live in balance with their world. With this earth. And it seems to me that we could do worse than to try and get acclimated with it, and benefit from their wisdom now, all of these years later, even a century or two since they last inhabited this land.
As we approach another Earth Day officially - and realistically, I believe that every day should be Earth Day, but I guess that is a topic for another day - we can remember the words and way of thinking and living of those who came before us, and who had an approach to life and their land that was sustainable. Let us benefit from their wisdom.
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