RT @nick_routledge: @RizomaSchool @LwrWrl 1/ Not so much alternative, as Real refinement. 'It is not enough to aim, one must hit," as the Italian proverb goes. "We get connected when we act connected." What is it to _live_ interdependence? To make the Word flesh?
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Where might such a commitment begin? We find hints perhaps in the original, root etymology of the word ecology deriving from the Greek, oikos, meaning not ‘earth’ but ‘home’. The distinction is crucial, not least because the semantic drift appears to mirror an actual cultural point of departure and, now, return, suggesting that a refined ecological sensibility is not a function of a generic ‘earth science’, nor is it to be found in an amorphous ‘environmentalism’ devoid of a sense of belonging which typifies an intellectual love of the earth without feeling an emotional connection: rather, it is unearthed in the deeply-felt, intensely personalized, particularized intimacy of individual home-making. “First Nations spiritual life is completely tied to territory, to their home places.” For indigenous peoples, an experience of ‘home’ is indistinguishable from a fully-engaged ecological conscience - what anthropologists identify as an ‘ethic of reciprocity’ and ‘contingent proprietorship’.
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Simply put, where an ‘ethic of reciprocity’ acknowledges the mutual dependence of everything within an ecological system with the result that humans are seen as occupying a complementary as distinct from dominant role, the practice of ‘contingent proprietorship’ embodies this kincentric worldview within formalized social and ceremonial structures. For example, in so far as indigenous people did ‘own’ land in the Pacific Northwest, ownership was not perceived in the European legal sense of land ownership. Rather, a home territory’s most productive sites were identified with families or individual owners who had the right to harvest and to control the harvest of other people there. Crucially, however, such rights came with a binding obligation to tend to the needs of the clan or community by sharing with them, and to look after the land’s interest and the interests of future generations of people and other life forms...
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Furthermore, contradicting a century of anthropological orthodoxy, recent research reveals that “First Nations peoples actively managed those resources through strategies more commonly considered as ‘horticultural.’ It was these ‘anthropogenic’ or ‘humanized’ landscapes that Europeans first encountered and mistook as ‘natural.’ ” Such habitats not only supported an astoundingly dense and long-lived variety of human cultural forms – one distinct language or dialect per watershed seems to be about the going rate in the PNW as far as I can make out - but are consistently recognized as being more productive and more biologically diverse than ecosystems without an evident human presence. Some voices, not unwise, suggest that such bio-cultural paradigms - upheld by a lifestyle ethic of ‘pragmatic reverence’ as Turner describes it - hold foundational lessons for all of us, wherever we live.
6/ The ramifications are totalizing & immediate. For one, ‘survival of the fittest’ is now re-envisioned at a deeper level as a foundational existential resilience deriving from our capacity to positively integrate with mutualisms we are nested within - our ability to ‘fit in'.
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