Ancient Answers To Climate Change: Reconnecting with the planet through new eyes from our ancestors

The planet and with it human life are in crisis. We are living at a time of intense environmental changes that appear to be happening much faster than our ability to adapt. Many of us are still in denial, others are fatalistic, while others still think the current crisis is the precursor to a profound transformation of humanity. Whatever the future may hold, this is a time that is calling us to take real responsibility for our actions in the present, and challenges us all to grow as human beings. There need to be changes to the way we show up in the world, in particular the level of consciousness we bring to our interaction with the planet and all its life forms. Our CO2 emissions are just a small part of the picture. The changes to our footprint in the world actually need to be much more systemic and profound than that, because the balance of the ecosystem is much finer and more tender than simply a question of carbon in the atmosphere.

Indigenous people have warned of an environmental crisis ever since they first saw how the European colonisers interacted with the natural world. The indigenous perspective is highly localised, identifying complex minutia in the local environmental system rather than at a global level. But this network of localised expertise traverses (or at…