This weekend, the National Museum of the American Indian hosted the Living Earth Festival 2011 and opened its new exhibition, “Conversations with the Earth: Indigenous Voices on Climate Change.” Friday through Sunday, the festival featured an outdoors farmer’s market, cook-off, hands-on family activities, basket-weaving demonstrations, live outdoor concert, special “Dinner and Movie” event, and a symposium dedicated to celebrating indigenous contributions to environmental sustainability, knowledge and activism.
The symposium on Saturday featured renowned social thinker Jeremy Rifkin and American Indian authors and educators Gregory Cajete and Melissa K. Nelson. Jose Barreiro, the assistant director for research of the NMAI, moderated the three-hour discussion, and members of the Pueblo of Acoma Buffalo Dancers blessed the symposium with drumming.
Rifkin is the founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends and often advises the European Union. He began his talk by describing how humans are just 1% of all biomass on the earth yet consume 31% of photosynthesis. He carefully addressed parents in the audience in describing how the Iroquois lived in consciousness of seven generations of their descendants—the people determined to leave the earth in better shape for their grandchildren.
To Rivkin, the decline of oil indicates the end times of the Industrial Revolution. With extinction rates skyrocketing and the greenhouse effect heating our atmosphere, he posed the question, “What is wrong with us? What is wrong with this species?”
Enlightenment philosophers would say that man is a self-interested, libidinous monster, he said, but Rifkin believes that humans are evolved to experience “empathetic distress.” According to him, we reach for our mothers, our families, and our communities in a way that few other animals do, and as homo empanthicus, we can and will do more than sit idly by while the world irrevocably changes.
In fact, he said, now that power is organized in a more side-by-side way thanks to Facebook and other new technologies, there is no reason for power to be organized in its old centralized format. Rather than use the old “elite energies” of coal, oil, and uranium, we can rely on the “distribution energies” of wind, sun, water, geothermal, food waste, etc. that nearly everyone can find in their own backyards.
Rifkin then detailed the Five Pillar Plan he conceived that the EU adopted in 2007 and hopes to fully implement by 2050—the Third Industrial Revolution. The plan attempts to replace elite energies with distributive energies by working on higher renewable energy standards, converting every single existing building into a power-generating plant, using hydrogen fuel cells to store excess energy, converting the energy infrastructure into an “energy internet” for rapid energy access and sharing, and creating rapid electric vehicle charging capabilities everywhere, particularly for public transit vehicles.
What Rifkin calls “biosphere consciousness” is still the important aspect of this new revolution—all people, especially in the United States, where energy and climate policy is scatterbrained and ineffectual, must embrace the mindset of the Iroquois in preserving the globe for our descendants.
Cajete, a professor at the University of New Mexico, is from the Santa Clara Pueblo and has lectured all over the world on indigenous education and other issues. He began his lecture with optimism: “Good day. Every day you get up and you’re still alive, it’s a good day.”
He described how indigenous peoples are like the miner’s canary because changes in their cultures and languages are indicators of a “profound sickness in the ecology.” He reminded the audience that “all of us are indigenously human” and that climate change affects hunting, fishing, economic infrastructure, water and housing availability, forest and agricultural resources, and the health and well being of indigenous peoples. In his own pueblo, persistent drought has erased his entire watershed.
Cajete also talked about the differences between metaphors for life between indigenous languages and other languages. Biological metaphors are alive, while mechanical metaphors are dead, and their usage influences how we think and the ways in which we affect others.
“People are searching for meaning,” he said, continuing, “A healthy society can only be comprised of healthy individuals united in selflessness.” He encouraged the audience to recreate indigenous education because teaching and learning is transformative and anticipates change and innovation.
The last speaker, Nelson is a professor of American Indian studies at San Francisco State University and the president of The Cultural Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to indigenous rights. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
She spoke on the necessity of eating native foods for human and climate health. Food, she said, is one of the most important parts of our communities as sustenance and celebration, and native foods can connect us back to the earth. She advocated for socially, culturally, economically, and ecologically appropriate food and food production as a way to revitalize food.
The current methods of food production in a paradigm of division and dominance have disrupted our ties to the environment, as producers in a capitalistic system feed us “toxic sludge” and things that cannot nourish or heal people. These types of food can and have led to diabetes, depression, infertility, and many other health side effects.
“We need to protect our organs, whether in our earth…or likewise in ourselves,” Nelson concluded.
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