Left Hemispheric Thinking is Wiping Out the Massai
They’re Being Wiped Out by Logocentric Ideas, from The Lion King to Nationalism
The question: How can people who make the smallest carbon footprint be responsible for making the largest carbon footprint?
The answer: They can’t.
Except in the mental world of our brain’s left hemisphere.
The Massai: Vilified
This is a real-life (real-time) example from Tanzania and the plight of the Massai people, who are the subject of this splendid feature essay at The Atlantic (summary excerpt is pasted below, in the postscript).
The Massai are nomadic cowherders. They are the African archetype: dancing pagans with multiple wives and colorful clothing. They have lived for hundreds of years by tending their cattle, roaming throughout East Africa, their cows grazing one spot, then rotating to another, in an organic and highly-responsible form of agriculture that nourished the Serengeti.
But now the Massai are being eliminated. Often ruthlessly, with death and violence, with overt intentions of eliminating their tribal character (which the government says is incompatible with merely being “Tanzanians”).
