From Original Sin to Original Revolution: Fighting the Climate Crisis with Indigenous Knowledge
“We have to shift our attitude of ownership of nature to relationship with nature. The moment you change from ownership to relationship, you create a sense of the sacred.” — Satish Kumar
Fanatical commodification of Earth’s natural resources under today’s capitalist economy has created, in the form of climate change, the worst potential catastrophe that humankind has ever seen. It has been well documented that if such a crisis is allowed to happen, the most marginalized and vulnerable populations will suffer the most. Perhaps even more disgusting, it is this very fact, that the upper echelons of the capitalist class won’t be affected and may even profit from the ruins, that prevents meaningful climate solutions from being adopted under the current economic system. This point is understood well enough by current socialists; solving the climate crisis requires dismantling capitalism. However, it would be a mistake to assume that a move to a more equitable economic system alone could sufficiently address the environmental issues of today.
To achieve a sustainable future, a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the environment is needed. This is because the current conception of our relationship to the environment, a relationship built on fear and mistrust, is incompatible with said sustainable future. Western thought has traditionally held the view that there exists a rigid hierarchy of beings, with humans at the top and plants and animals at the bottom. Such a view teaches us that the environment is something to be subdued, to be dominated, and the fact that this view persists to this day is unsurprising given the history of colonization. Cultures that were spiritually connected to nature were frequently called savages by white colonizers. Indeed, a survey of French writing in the 16th and 17th centuries suggests that over time, the old French adjective “sauvage” went from simply referring to a forest habitat to being used as a derogatory term for peoples living in accordance to nature. Seeing as this etymological change occurred around the height of European colonization, it can be argued that colonization wasn’t just a war against the native peoples of a given land, but a war against the spirit of the land itself . One only has to read a few excerpts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to understand the extent to which white colonizers viewed nature as an enemy of their imperialist systems. It is without a shred of doubt that we can say the ideological predecessors of our modern capitalist system held themselves in opposition to a healthy conception of nature.
While traditional colonization as advocated for by the European monarchies is essentially a dead ideology now, it seems that the conception of nature it developed, among others such as free trade and imperialism, was adopted by the modern capitalist status quo. However, using an absurd amount of logical gymnastics, the idea that humans are above nature has now been used to fuel propaganda that the climate crisis is, in fact, not a systemic problem of capitalism. In other words, by taking advantage of deep-rooted cultural beliefs that humans and the environment are separate, opposing entities, corporations have been able to create convincing campaigns arguing that it is the actions of the individual that have exacerbated the climate crisis, not the systemic failings of capitalism. One of the most notable examples in recent years was BP’s promotion of the carbon footprint, a device used to shift blame for the climate crisis from oil and gas companies toward individuals. Their online carbon footprint calculator is advertised as a tool that consumers can use to calculate the carbon footprint of their products, giving the false impression that it is the act of purchasing high emission products which is unsustainable, not BP’s production practices. In reality, individual actions cannot possibly make up for systemic failures. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology class found that a homeless person in the US would still produce 8.5 tons of carbon emissions annually, 4.5 tons more than the world average, just by virtue of living in a developed capitalist country. The capitalist propaganda of the environmental blame game has taught us that it is our individual actions that have caused the climate crisis, totally ignoring the fact that, for centuries, capitalism’s ideological underpinnings have promoted the view that domination of the environment is essential to human flourishing. This lie undercuts prospects for meaningful climate action.
The question for socialists then becomes, How should we fight back? What must people know to facilitate a radical shift in the perception of the environment, thus insulating them from corporate propaganda? The most obvious answer begins with a turn to empiricism and other scientific ways of knowing. After all, these ways of knowing have been the predominant source of information the climate movement has utilized in its activism thus far. And while quoting that Procter & Gamble has been purposefully under-reporting its carbon emissions by 98% excluding Scope 3 emissions, or that just 90 companies account for nearly two-thirds of anthropogenic carbon emissions, may help some cut through some of the propaganda, it does nothing to change the underlying human relationship with nature. This is because scientific ways of knowing exacerbate the paradigm that humans are separated from the environment.
As a system of knowledge, science relies on certain laws that have been found through the application of the scientific method. As every third-grader learns, this method begins with observation followed by formulating an empirically testable hypothesis. What isn’t taught, however, is the large number of limitations put on that first step: observation. In a scientific framework, it is assumed that, to understand a system, it is sufficient to understand its individual components in isolation. This means that the first step of the scientific process is not simply observation, but isolated observation: observation where a hard barrier is erected between the observer and observed. Thus, when science is applied in an attempt to understand environmental relations, the human is seen as a separate entity, above the system that is being studied. This is not to say that scientific methods are invalid or false; certainly scientific methods have brought the climate movement very far in its understanding of the mechanisms by which climate change occurs. However, scientific methods will not in themselves be sufficient to present a proper solution for the reasons outlined.
Rather, socialists must look back in history to the systems of knowledge held by the indigenous populations whom European colonizers held in such contempt. The original revolutionary ideals of the time, indigenous culture and beliefs were such a danger to the development of “advanced society” that Western governments have been waging a calculated war in an attempt to wipe them out for hundreds of years. Thus, it makes sense intuitively that adopting their worldviews in the present day would be a revolutionary act against capitalism.
One of the most striking examples of how powerful indigenous knowledge can be is the Native American concept of the Three Sisters Garden. Nearly every Native American nation has its own version of the Three Sisters legend, but they all revolve around the understanding that the ecological relationship between corn, beans, and squash is analogous to the mutually beneficial relationship between three sisters. By conceiving of a spiritual connection between the crops, Native American tribes could immediately see that, when planted together, these crops grew much better than when planted apart — just like three sisters. This holistic approach to the concept of knowledge, which strives to understand the relationship between the three crops in not just body (the mere physical interactions between the plants) but mind and spirit as well, has allowed Native Americans to be hundreds of years ahead of their scientific counterparts in terms of agricultural understanding. Science can only just now offer explanations that this relationship is indeed true, that through certain biological processes the three plants assist each other in their growth. The corn provides support for the beanstalks, the squash reduces surrounding weeds, and the beans house special bacteria that release nitrogen into the soil.
Not only that, but the Three Sisters story shows that Native Americans had an acute understanding of the benefits of permaculture farming over monoculture farming. As it turns out, monoculture farming, the farming model that scientific understanding suggested, has been incredibly destructive to the ecosystems in which it is implemented. From decimating the nutrient capacities of the soil to a massive dependence on oil based fertilizers to taking up thousands of acres more land than their permaculture counterparts, it is only recently that scientists are beginning to understand the many drawbacks of monocultures.
Perhaps even more disastrous, the move away from diverse farming practices aimed at subsistence and local markets has allowed for the formation of giant agro-corporations. Over the years, these companies have merged with one another to create giant monopolies over the world’s food supply. Just four corporations control 75% of the global grain trade. Not only do these monopolies hurt consumers by lowering the quality of their food, but they also threaten to put the very farmers they depend on out of business. The most striking example of this happened very recently when mega corporations Bayer and Monsanto merged in a $66 billion deal despite outcry from farmers who were concerned about increased seed and fertilizer prices.
In this context, it is apparent that the Native American view of the Three Sisters is much more than just a curious folktale. Rather, it allowed indigenous populations the framework with which to avoid the pitfalls of monoculture farming’s destruction of ecosystems all the way up to its evolution into giant exploitative agro-corporations. Indigenous populations understood that monocultures did not exist in nature, and because of their spiritual connections to their surrounding ecosystems they respected this observation enough to understand that this meant monocultures did not work. This is in stark contrast to science, which would reject the Three Sisters Legend as an anthropomorphic fallacy and insist on isolating each individual crop and experimenting on it to understand which fertilizer or genetic modification allows it to grow best. Because of its insistence on separating the human from the system, the observed from the observer, the fact that monocultures don’t occur naturally does not hold the same meaning to a scientist because their framework treats humans themselves as separate from the rest of the natural world.
From analyzing the behavior of hawks, to mariculture, to correcting incomplete historical accounts, it is clear that the holistic, spiritual views of indigenous cultures are just as valid ways of knowing as science. For thousands of years prior to colonization, indigenous populations managed to avoid instigating the climate destruction wrought by contemporary systems. The opposite view, which has been pushed from nineteenth-century colonialism all the way up to the contemporary propaganda machine, has brought us to the brink of irreparable environmental breakdown. While it is clear that a dismantling of capitalism is needed to perform meaningful climate restoration, the destructive views it has disseminated must be dealt with too. Science, which has proved supremely useful in other areas of climate research, will fail to mount a significant challenge to these views. As socialists move forward on the topic of climate change, they must spread the values and beliefs of the original revolutionaries, the indigenous peoples of the world, with the understanding that a radical shift in human relationships with the environment is needed to prevent the climate catastrophe.
