Will Indigenous knowledge, as instantiated in Native North American tribal “ways of knowing”, help ameliorate climate change? One would think “not much” because anthropogenic climate change, now a virtual certainty, is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and it’s hard to imagine that Native Americans either generate much of those gases or have any knowledge to slow their accumulation, which derives mostly from industrial countries.
But the Biden administration thinks otherwise, perhaps for two reasons: the “progressive” sacralization of indigenous people and their knowledge, and, second, the assumption that Native American knowledge, which derived largely from finding empirical ways of making a living (when to grow food, how to hunt, etc.), made them “stewards of the environment.” The latter isn’t really the case, as Native Americans engaged in several practices, among them overhunting of bison and overburning of the prairie and woodlands (the latter also was done to facilitate hunting). At any rate, a reader sent me a link to the right-wing Free Beacon site below that reports a last-minute Biden Administration initiative to meld modern science with Native American ways of knowing to attack the problem of climate change. Below that is the press release from the Administration that gives details and links to the official government memorandum of collaborating with indigenous people.
Here’s an excerpt from The Free Beacon which is explicitly hostile to wokeism, but is otherwise pretty accurate:
The White House ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal regulatory agency, to expand its use of “Indigenous Knowledge” on Monday, as part of a last-minute push in the federal government to embrace what scientists call pseudoscience.
The agency, according to a press release, signed a formal memorandum of understanding with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to “advance Indigenous Knowledge” and “achieve strong climate resilience for our tribal nations.” The agreement will impact at least 35 accredited universities and “empower our tribal colleges and universities to be leaders in the ongoing response to climate change.”
“Indigenous Knowledge” is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works. While scientists have referred to its ideas as “dangerous” and a rejection of the scientific method, those criticisms have not stopped the Biden administration from ordering the federal government to consider “Indigenous Knowledge” when implementing rules and regulations.
President Joe Biden issued a memo in November 2022 that directed more than two dozen federal agencies to apply “Indigenous Knowledge” to “decision making, research, and policies.” The memo called on agencies to speak with “spiritual leaders” and reject “methodological dogma.”
NOAA’s language in its announcement echoes Biden’s guidance. The agency contrasts “Indigenous Knowledge” with “western science,” although it declined to define either term.
Now I’m wholly in favor of trying to incorporate Native Americans into modern science and higher education. After all, they were largely given a raw deal by the government, still suffer more than many others from poverty and ill health, and deserve the same chance that other Americans get. Ergo, incorporating modern science into universities largely serving Native Americans, as well as casting a wider net to bring Native American science, is something to be admired. The problem with the Free Beacon piece is that not all “indigenous knowledge” is “pseudoscience”. For there are empirical facts that indigenous people discovered—in fact, that they needed to discover—for Native Americans to make a living before the U.S. was colonized by Europeans. Saying that “it’s all pseudoscience” is simply a slur.
Likewise for this sentence: “‘Indigenous Knowledge’ is a discredited belief system posting that native-born peoples possess an innate understanding of how the universe works.” This is wrong on several counts, including the characterizing of indigenous knowledge as “discredited.” While much of it is, both in North America and New Zealand, not all of it is! Further who claims that indigenous people have an innate knowledge of how the universe works? Nobody has that—it has to be discovered by observation! The implication that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow in their bearers’ DNA is misleading.
Neverthless, we have to be very careful of both diluting science with wokeness to expiate our guilt, and of using spiritual, religious, and moral teachings as part of indigenous knowledge, for those teachings have nothing to do with modern science, whose job is to understand the universe.
Perhaps you’ll get a better idea of this “two-eyed” seeing that melds of modern and indigenous knowledge from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s press release on the agreement. Click below to read:
But although this release affirms the admirable desire to give opportunities to Native Americans, several aspects are worrisome—especially the claim that we can help solve global warming in a big way by incorporating indigenous knowledge. I’ll give a few quotes.
First, a good aim:
NOAA and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) signed a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) to advance Indigenous Knowledge, science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, and workforce training opportunities for tribal communities with the goal of building climate resilience.
But this is worrisome:
“NOAA is excited to team up with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium to accelerate information-sharing aimed at building climate resilience, adaptation and co-production of knowledge in communities across the United States and tribal nations,” said NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, Ph.D. “Indigenous Knowledge has made it possible for Indigenous Nations to persist and thrive for millennia. These knowledge systems are needed more than ever to inform NOAA and our nation’s approach to environmental stewardship.”
Are they needed more than ever? I doubt it. Modern science has long ago eclipsed indigenous knowledge as a way of understanding the universe. And, of course, “indigenous knowledge” often incorporates nonscientific forms of spirituality and superstition.
Can we have some examples, and not just trivial ones, about how indigenous knowledge has aided conservation of the North American environment? I’m sure there will be something, but I doubt that we’ll find any equitable “coproduction of knowledge” except for that of people engaged not in indigenous ways of knowing but in modern science. And the worries are exacerbated when considering how the NOAA plans to deal with our most serious environmental crisis: climate change. Here are some of the program’s goals:
- Identifying western science and Indigenous Knowledge priorities for the AIHEC, an organization that provides leadership and influences policy for 35 accredited U.S. tribal colleges and universities.
- Creating opportunities for NOAA to learn from faculty and students from tribal colleges and universities through coordinated partnerships that promote co-learning and co-development of knowledge, include community-driven research to advance NOAA’s mission to build a Climate-Ready Nation, as well as shared AIHEC-NOAA objectives.
I think we have to face the fact that if climate change is to be stopped or reversed, the main impetus for that will come from modern science (as well as political agreements to curb greenhouse gas emissions), and not from indigenous knowledge. “Environmental stewardship” that helped native Americans hunt and cultivate food will, I suspect, play almost no role in this endeavor. How could it?
So far the U.S. isn’t nearly as bad off in sacralizing indigenous knowledge as is New Zealand, where the battle continues to rage about whether Māori knowledge is comparable to modern scientific knowledge (it isn’t). But these American initiatives are the canary in the coal mine. I wish that somebody in charge would make rational decisions about exactly what indigenous knowledge could contribute not only to climate change, but also to the progress of modern science.
A quick search awhile ago produced that the Maori had not come up with something very important and basic – The Wheel – when westerners first landed, and similarly Native Americans apparently had only developed the Wheel as something used with toys. That would suggest that their ways of knowing was somewhat deficient in the ability to conceptualize, or something like that.
I wouldn’t go for the idea that Native Americans and others were dumb and primitive for not having used wheels. Have you ever seen Mayan temples and pyramids in the Yucatan? Not as big as the Egyptian pyramids, but quite impressive. They must have been very smart and had ingenious engineering techniques that are lost to history. And the South Americans built some very impressive stuff too. As for agricultural efficiency, there is simply no comparison. When Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs had amazing efficient agriculture. The Valley of Mexico had a population density that was rivaled only by parts of China and India and was much greater than any part of Europe. Also in South America the Incas and Aymaras had impressively efficient agriculture. European and American agriculture was mediocre by world standards prior to the twentieth century and the introduction of nitrate fertilizers. Mayans and Aztecs had much more accurate astronomy than Europeans at the time. If Aztecs had discovered Europe in the 1400s, they would not have felt that they were encountering a superior, more advanced civilization.
I say Native Americans, more south of the Rio Grande than north, were smart and accomplished impressive things. The clear and evident superiority of Western science and epistemology is a recent phenomenon of history only a couple centuries old. That does NOT, repeat NOT, mean that Native Americans or Mauri or anybody else had any special insights into the workings of the universe, or that their traditional lore could possibly be useful to combat global warming.
I find the lefty double standard about this amusing. Christian creationism is rightly sneered at, but equally bullshitical Amerindian creation myths are treated with reverence. In contrast to previous centuries the mostly false “history” of the Hebrews recorded in the Old Testament is now understood to be largely fiction. But equally false Navaho “history” must be respected and taken seriously. I don’t get it.
You might enjoy a counter factual/alternate history book based on the premise that disease kept Europeans out of Central America and the Aztec civilisation conquered much of the world with advanced technology whilst retaining some gruesome habits and rituals… Aztec Century by Christopher Evans
e.g. https://www.scifibookgroup.com/Books/Display/273
“If Aztecs had discovered Europe in the 1400s, they would not have felt that they were encountering a superior, more advanced civilization.”
I can assure you that an aztec landing in Europe mid 15th century would have been blown away by its level of sophistication and technological developement. By almost all standards, 15th century western civilization was thousands of years ahead of pre-columbian cultures. That’s certainly not a recent phenomenon of the last couple of hundred years like you seem to think. This discrepency in technological capabilities of course explain why it’s european that were capable of crossing the Atlantic and reaching the Americas and quickly conquer all of it, and not the other way around…
“The Valley of Mexico had a population density that was rivaled only by parts of China and India and was much greater than any part of Europe.”
The population of Paris in 1300 was around 200 000 and had reached nearly 400 000 by 1575. In antiquity, Rome had a population estimated to be close to a million people. By comparison, the aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had a population estimated at 200 000 when it was conquered by Cortez in 1521.
One must not pick and choose only certain specific aspects to reach conclusions. For example, tropical climate greatly help in agricultural yields. Yet there were famines documented in pre-columbian societies. In agriculture, european had invented ploughs, crop rotations, horse collar, etc in the early middle ages. Moreover, in general, Europeans had a level of knowledge in astronomy that was far superior to the mayan contrary to popular myth. Copernicus did not invent everything from thin air in the late 15th early 16th century ! Again, technologicaly speaking, medieval Europe was at least a thousand years ahead of any pre-columbian culture which could only be compared to early ancient european culture.
In SOME respects Aztecs were 1000 years behind Europe. For example, their metallurgy was a few thousand years behind. But I stand by my statement that Mayan and Aztec astronomy was more accurate. Richard Feynman, in one of his memoirs, recounts a time he and his wife visited Mexico and toured ancient Mayan pyramids and stuff. Feynman got a copy of an ancient Mayan codex that consisted of numbers nobody over the centuries had figured out. Feynman concluded that the numbers described phases of the planet Venus (Venus was very important in Mesoamerican mythology). But the numbers were a bit off. The reason the numbers were off is that he was using outdated astronomical tables published in the 1910s. When he got updated 1950s info, the numbers agreed much better with what Mayans had figured out circa 800 AD.
And you are wrong about the agricultural efficiency of the Aztecs. The capital city Tenochtitlan may have been much smaller than Paris. But I was speaking of the entire Valley of Mexico which had a much bigger population density than any similarly sized region of Europe. If you disagree, take that up with professional historians rather than me.
They were a thousand years behind in almost any respect. This is precisely why europeans could travel around the globe at the time and conquer the Americas with only a handful of people while the reverse was not even imaginable.
Europe also had overall a much higher population density than central and south America at the time. Of course you can always define an arbitrary scale (e.g. the Valley of Mexico) compute the population density within these boundaries and claim that the density is higher than some other arbitrarily defined area elsewhere, but this is meaningless.
European agriculture had been sustaining huge populations in Europe for millenia and was succesfully adapted around the globe. I don’t know why you seem to think that pre-columbian agriculture was so efficient but it certainly didn’t help the mayans and aztecs to avoid being decimated by devastating famines like the one in 1452-1454 that apparently led the aztecs to sacrifice 42 children between the age of 2 and 7 years old…
As for astronomy, by the late 1400s, Copernicus was rethinking the Ptolemaic system, which was itself a very succesful model. The mayan could perhaps predict the phases of Venus, but nothing they did led to anything further than that. Pre-Columbian cultures were comparable (barely) to very early cultures of the old-world antiquity and were probably more similar in some respect even to neolithic cultures.
The reason the Copernican model is better than the Ptolemaic model is not because it predicts planetary movements better. Why should it? One is just a transformation of the other with different centres of reference and both agree closely. The important thing is that Copernicus had the curiosity to propose a mechanism of how the solar system works, which was not only a closer approximation to reality than anything published before but which also was completely counter-intuitive. Of course the sun and the planets and fixed stars revolve in hollow spheres around a stationary earth. All you need to add is epicycles for the planets and Bob’s your uncle for practical navigation or Venus-worship.
Tycho Brahe didn’t trust Copernicus. He was a Ptolemacist. His detailed, minutely accurate measurements with brass instruments crafted by artisans able to carry their skills into their sixties (thanks to convex spectacles), showed 8 minutes of arc error in where the planets should be according to circular orbits. Kepler had the insight that once the heavenly bodies weren’t lights painted onto the inner surface of a sphere (or holes, some stationary some epicyclic, that let God’s celestial light through), their orbits, including ours, didn’t have to be Aristotelian “perfect” circles. They could be ellipses. He even figured out the relation between radial distance and orbital angular velocity which closed the errors. And then Galileo observed four moons orbiting Jupiter, which you can see with good binoculars right now in the Northern Hemisphere, btw. The game was up for the geocentric universe.
If the Mayans were doing anything like this (including the spectacles), they certainly didn’t write anything down about it.
The reason is not that Tycho didn’t trust Copernicus. He was not Ptolemacist (Ptolemist?). Rather, he had his own system in which the Sun and Moon revolved around the Earth but all the other planets in the Solar System revolved around the Sun. Why? He reasoned, correctly, that, given the angular size of stars of about a minute of arc, and assuming that they were at most the same size as the Sun (but intrinsically dimmer), then he should have been able to observe the motion of the Earth. But he couldn’t. His mistake: he didn’t know wave optics. The apparent size of stars is due to diffraction on the pupil. In telescopes with much larger “pupils”, the angular sizes of stars are much, much smaller.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
I read that while we treat the wheel as completely obvious and basic, it only starts being useful for transportation in certain types of landscapes, and even there only after putting a lot of work into infrastructure (basic roads). Like, in the Andes, you are better off with llamas and human carriers than with carts in any non-industrial society.
This is RFK jr. level of nonsense
It does seem like the sort of thing he’d like.
As an anthropologist who is quite familiar with the people who lived on the Northern Plains I can assure you that the inhabitants of the Northern Plains neither “overburned” the plains nor overhunted the bison. The bison were nearly extinguished by “white people” who killed them by the thousand and sold the hides to other white people living east of the plains and collected the bison bones (see famous picture of a pile of bison skulls about three humans high collected for the fertilizer factories). The people who lived on the plains used and ate just about everything one could extract from a dead bison – guts, blood and all.
There may be some truth in that (although there are examples of some tribes “raping & pillaging” an area and moving on to the next resource-rich area), but the reason why North American natives didn’t harm the environment in the way that we see us all doing now is simply because of their scant, few numbers, there were barely any of them! To assume that they had some superior insight and wisdom the basics of survival in their particular environment, and that they were some amazing “stewards of the land” is nonsense. They were primitive, superstitious, scientifically illiterate humans, who, given the same amount of time to advance as Europeans, did not.
Too few? What about the millions killed by successful waves of small pox and a few other assorted diseases. And then there was the United States Army. Read about Sand Creek (Colorado) as an example and Wounded Knee (South Dakota) of US Army massacres and atrocities.. Even before the Pilgrims settled here European diseases were killing Native Americans. Small pox was deadly and vaccines were not available to them until the late 1800s. About 90% of the Mandans were killed by small pox and half or more of the Hidatsas in the Middle Missouri region. Ultimately they and the Arikara (Sahnish) were living together in a single fortified village. And they are still living together. these days
Your use of “successful” to describe waves of smallpox indicates bias. There is no documented deliberate use of smallpox to reduce the native population anywhere in the Americas. The oft-cited strategem of a gift of blankets containing smallpox crusts to break the Indian siege of Fort Pitt turns out to have been a suggestion by a resourceful junior officer in a desperate situation but it’s not clear that it was actually tried. Smallpox was a dangerous thing to mess with even for Europeans as only those with immunity due to childhood cowpox were protected (until Jenner’s vaccine became trusted and widely used.). Getting smallpox vaccine all the way to the Americas by the 1800s to vaccinate the natives at all was a humanitarian accomplishment (organized in what is now Canada by the Hudson Bay Company.)
The population of the pre-Contact Americas is often exaggerated to make the subsequent reduction by disease more compelling as genocide. Perhaps because the number killed in actual massacres is so small there needs to be an implication that disease was deliberate, too.
Perhaps ‘successful’ is an autocorrect for ‘successive’; at least that’s how I initially misread Michael’s sentence.
Likewise, in NZ we have similar problems of historical distortion – romanticised pre-European society contrasted with exaggerated brutalities of colonialism. There’s enough bad stuff in reality without inventing it.
“The population of the pre-Contact Americas is often exaggerated to make the subsequent reduction by disease more compelling as genocide.”
Many people don’t understand how ecosystems work, and in particular, how natural ecosystems such as in the Plains could not be productive enough to support dense populations of hunter-gatherers.
The civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas were another matter, they had agriculture and, respectively, much higher population numbers.
To Mayamarkov,
And this explains why there must always be conflict between hunter-gatherers and farmer-pastoralists. The former need large tracts to exploit nomadically and move on to new grounds when they deplete where they are now. The latter have developed sessile methods of sustenance which allow development of what we call civilization. They will want to fence off their land to keep roving bands of H-Gs out. They will shoot them or demand their governments put them in jail if the H-Gs can’t get the concept of private property into their heads. If the H-Gs see a ranch and a wheat field as a store of pemmican and bannock free for the taking, in unilateral compensation for being dispossessed of their rights to their creator’s land, they and the F-Ps must be enemies, as Hobbes predicted. They simply can’t share it for two such mutually contradictory purposes.
Doesn’t matter who got there first, or whose traditional lifestyle is being uprooted. The society that can use the land more productively will always prevail, simply because it can divert more resources to protective violence. This is Lockean and rubs people the wrong way, I know.
Michael Scullin:
It appears that you completely misunderstood my point. I’ll try again:
The reason why North American natives didn’t harm the environment in the way that we see us all doing now is simply because of their scant, few numbers, there were barely any of them! In other words, there are eight billion of us humans drawing resources from the planet now, whereas in 1700, it was a “scant” 600 million. In the area we now call the United States, we now have nearly 350 MILLION people, whereas the number of natives in that same area in 1700 was a “scant” 250 thousand. They couldn’t have done any damage if they wanted to because their numbers were so few.
Hopefully that makes my point clear.
Umm. . . . they didn’t drive more bison over the cliffs than they could eat? And their burning was optimal, even though they couldn’t stop it.
Yes, of course a lot of damage was done by “white people,” but I didn’t contend that Native Americans did more damage. I contended that they were not optimal stewards of the environment. See below about the small population effect.
What Your Teacher Didn’t Tell You About Native Americans
I presume The Free Beacon meant “positing” not “posting”.
This chapter is worth review, in:
Wilfred Reilly
Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me — Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula
Broadside Books
2024
Lie #3 : “Native Americans Were ‘Peaceful People Who Spent All Day Dancing'”
… I’ll leave it to readers, as I do not have quotes at hand – it is a rather wide ranging chapter IMHO… but I make this comment as Reilly examines the notion of the American indigenous peoples living in harmony with nature and each other.
‘Course, that was then, and this is now. So, extra background, at least.
Wanted to add this completely different bit of history which doesn’t get attention but is worth examining :
Korenizatsiya – “indigenization” in the Soviet Union ca. 1920 :
“an early policy of the Soviet Union for the integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet republics.”
(Wikipedia).
Isn’t everyone an indigenous person?
No need to mince words, these initiatives are nonsense, the products of panderers, self-loathing Caucasians, etc.
Edit: intended as a reply to Hempenstein @1
I think you need at least primitive hard-surfaced roads and draft animals before the idea of the wheel occurs to you. Wheels are a bloody nuisance in the mud. Not only do you have to carry your load on your back when your vehicle bogs down, you have to rescue the furshlugginer vehicle from the mud, too. Wheeled vehicles even today are difficult to get up grades with effort — a lot of people walk their bikes up hills — and down grades in safety. If your draft animal — which is you if you are riding a fixed-gear bicycle — can’t provide the retarding force you will surely crash.
The earliest wheeled vehicles were chariots drawn by horses over the kind of terrain that battles are fought on: flat open plains of hard-packed earth. But saddled horses with bridles and stirrups replaced chariots. The Plains Indians improvised a travois when European horses diffused into the prairies but they had no ability to fashion carts.
The birchbark canoe, on the other hand, was almost ideally adapted to the environment it found itself in on the inshore Great Lakes and the many interconnecting lakes and rivers of the Canadian Shield. One of its sterling virtues is its ability to be carried by one man around unnavigable stretches and to be repaired in the field. Europeans adopted it for travel long before wheeled vehicles ventured outside the larger towns with blacksmiths and wheelwrights…and roads.
Wheels!
I remember those discussions here – especially your point about mud!
Only new thing I came across was a book that I have not obtained yet :
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
David W. Anthony
Princeton University Press
2007
There is this, google search and from eh…movies I can remember.
“triangle-shaped pole frame attached to a dog’s shoulders, used to carry goods, children, and possessions. Dogs could pull up to 100 pounds.”
Then horses I guess took over.
“Bullboat: A round, tub-like boat made from bison bull hide stretched over a willow frame, used for traveling on rivers, carrying people or heavy loads, and covering the smoke hole on an earthlodge.
Snowshoes: Essential for winter travel.
Toboggans: Used to transport heavy loads.
Sleds: Pulled by dogs and people.
Canoes: Used to travel with belongings on rivers and lakes during the summer.
Walking: A traditional method of transportation for the Navajo.
Riding horses: The Navajo were one of the first Native American tribes to master riding horses.”
… but still no greenhouse gases so there is that.
Sleds have been used effectively not that long ago. In the English Lake District there are a number of graded tracks that were used well into the 20th century to take peat down on horse-drawn sleds from moorland bogs. That practice has long since ceased (we need to preserve all the peat we can), but in that terrain it was clearly much more efficient than wheels.
You’re right about the US Government giving the Native Americans a hard time, they made the Brits look tame!
And less Bison and more Mammoths, Mastodons, Horses, Giant Sloths and Glyptodonts. The Bison got it worse during the “Indian Wars” when many were slaughtered to limit their food supply, a classic anti-guerilla tactic.
No, because climate change is not anthropocentric.
But it is anthropogenic. Also our response to it will be mostly anthropocentric.
Society should welcome indigenous peoples to participate in science by providing scholarships, internships, and other incentives. Those who have the interest and aptitude should be offered every opportunity. If those who participate have unique cultural perspectives that can help advance the scientific enterprise, their unique perspectives will be rewarded through acceptance of their contributions. Legislating, or in this case ordering, scientific institutions to incorporate indigenous knowledge will not be helpful. Ordering them to provide opportunities for indigenous peoples to join the scientific enterprise may.
People who see the world in spiritual terms sometimes do that, especially if they believe in the Noble Savage fallacy. It’s usually done under the blithe assumption that it’s not racist if the innate wisdom isn’t supposed to be found in the Oppressor, but within the soul of the Oppressed.
It’s my impression though that all the talk about indigenous wisdom and climate change is going to come down to this: lower consumption, drive less, and live more simply. It’s what the average person thinks a wise elder of the tribe would personally advise them to do. It won’t really help, but I suspect they’re going to gussy it up in a lot of impressive language in order to make people think they’re doing something noble if they do a bit.
I subscribe to the idea that ‘indigenous peoples’ did not decimate their environments because they were few in number. This would have been true of the early Europeans, Asians, & Africans, as well as the more recent peoples of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. Most people died of disease, infection, accident, predation, famine, warfare, etc. at much younger ages, many pre-procreating. I suspect I quite possibly would have died of several infections I’ve had were it not for antibiotics, and that’s not accounting for any of the many diseases I’ve been vaccinated against. As recently as a century or so ago, most people could expect to lose some of their children, a reason for having more than just ‘an heir and a spare’ (as well as not knowing how to prevent that). As recently as 50 years ago I can remember people saying “Dilution is the solution to pollution”. I’m sure it was already too late for that 50 years ago, but it worked up until just a few centuries or so ago. ‘Science’ has created the current problems of overpopulation, over-exploitation and consequent environmental degradation and science will be needed to ameliorate those problems. ‘Indigenous peoples’ never faced problems on the scale of our current ones, so there is no reason to expect that they should have developed solutions to problems they did not have.
Yes, that and the fact they didn’t have technology to bespoil the fauna/flora. Or they surely would have. Like we did before we stopped to think about it.
D.A.
NYC
Then there’s this:
“The Hawaiians Who Want Their Land Back”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/hawaii-monarchy-overthrow-independence/680759/
The scientific solution to climate change is straightforward. Emit less CO2. What all countries are trying to do now is figure out how to convince their global competitors to emit less while 1) not reducing their own emissions and 2) not suffering from the loss of production for export that would result if the effort against their competitors turned out to be at all successful.
Technological solutions involve the creation of vast quantities of reliable nearly free non-emitting electricity. With enough energy you can make fuel for jet aircraft and ocean ships from their own engine exhaust and you can sequester CO2 from the atmosphere as (very expensive) synthetic limestone. But how do you make sure that all countries pitch in to pay their share of this effort when they aren’t taking the shared burden of climate change seriously now? What’s to stop China and India from continuing to burn coal while we faff around with solar panels and CO2 sequestration because it’s the right thing to do?
If there is something in indigenous traditional knowledge that knows how to solve collective action problems involving players who compete and exploit weakness while giving the illusion of cooperation, it would be worth listening to.
The latest I picked up on CO2 that I can recall but have not critically evaluated/ compiled references :
• CO2 saturation in the atmosphere occurs ~100 ppm. That means all radiation trapped by CO2 absorption is done by that ~100 ppm.
• CO2 reached the thousands of ppm in previous ages – ~10s of thousands of years ago.
• CO2 concentration increases in the atmosphere after temperature has already been increasing for some time. IOW CO2 lags behind T.
• 400 ppm total CO2 is about 0.04% mole fraction of all gases, neglecting water vapor – i.e. clouds, albedo – surface temperature is lower under clouds.
Obviously those should stand up for criticism, and why I put it up, so – make of it what one will – I’m not married to them.
One of the trade offs of the misfortune of Trump in the W.H. is the possibility that this kind of nonsense, and much of wokeness, MIGHT be reversed or slowed at best.
I look forward to that before we ape the worst behavior of NZ.
Keep safe PCC(E). Looking forward to having you back in one piece. It seems like quite a lot of people come to grief on stages. Perhaps one’s concentration is absorbed by the biz at hand so it might be easy to neglect levels, stairs, etc. Just speculating here. My only “stage” was in court and there are no gradients usually.
D.A.
NYC
“The implication that indigenous “ways of knowing” are somehow in their bearers’ DNA is misleading.”
It isn’t as misleading as you think. Jennifer Grenz, in her book Medicine Wheel for the Planet, claims that indigenous knowledge is a “worldview that lay[s] within [her] DNA”. That’s a direct quote.
There are others, too. In Drumming Our Way Home, Georgina Martin says much the same thing. Memories – knowledge of ancestors and their ways – come to them through “blood”, through DNA.
It’s common (in Canada) to hear this sentiment. I’ve been to many conferences where “blood memory” is touted; the explanation, if pushed, is via DNA.