Water Part 3 – Conquering the World.
Either greed or ignorance seem to run away with projects like Keystone and DAPL as well as the building booms of desert cities like Puerto Peñasco and Las Vegas. We built it and then hopefully have made the money to deal with the problems we might have caused. Just like those monster pipeline projects. Ask the Russians* and see the latest leaking pipeline of the US, on how well those work. Keystone and DAPL will leak and we clean up then? Is the risk of contamination and destruction of the land calculated into the true costs of these mega projects and mega cities in the desert?
I think, that we need to get before the horse now, instead of running after it. The public seems to hear about the projects and mounts the protests after the projects are already green-lighted. Corruption moves mega projects so quickly through the institutions that nobody seems to be able to grasp the size and importance of the proposed projects. Or is nobody looking? Protesters, or better ‘protectors of the land’, have to be bitten by unlawfully deployed attack dogs, before mainstream media wakes up to the facts. But by then it is already too late. Ancestral burial sites and sacred lands were bulldozed over night. Oops. The mostly Native American protestors and protectors of the land get bitten and charged with trespassing. How can this be? How did we let this come to this?
We should start anew the discussion about ‘who owns the land’ and even ‘can own the land’. In the western European thinking, the land should belong to the Native American tribes, because they were here first. *history article. But then they lost it to the Europeans and never got it back. And a century or two later, the Native Americans are fighting for the land again. But they aren’t fighting to own the land, they are fighting to protect the land. The Europeans want it back, but to own it and exploit it.
The fight of indigenous people against a brutal, ignorant invader, who sees land as commodity and an exploitable resource and has no concern for bulldozing sacred lands, was dramatized in the most watched movie of all times ‘Avatar’. Sound familiar? The movie was inspired by the destruction and plundering of the Americas by the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries and this brutal aggressor is still operating today. The movie was even prophetic, in that tribes came together and are victorious. Tribes are coming together today, North Dakota’s Sioux have the support of indigenous tribes all over the planet, from New Zealand to the Amazon, but, different to the movie, they are choosing non-violent actions to disrupt pipeline construction.
When I visited and learned from the Kumeyaay tribe of San Diego region, I learned, that they see us Europeans as visitors. We came, overran them and the land, asphalted plains and valleys, dried out lakes and concreted-in rivers and submitted the rest to agriculture so much so that the ‘original’ land can only be seen and visited in National Parks. Or on Native American reservations.
The Kumeyaay have also a very different way of treating land. Their ‘land management’ practice, to use a vile Western word describing a imperialistic, ignorant way of submitting land, is utterly different. The native Americans respect the land and it’s plants, understand its ecosystem and how to support it. They took only what they needed and what was taken, rejuvenated the land rather depleting it. This practice allowed the Kumeyaay to thrive in Southern California and Northern Baja for more than a fifteen hundred years. Western ‘civilization’ survived so far for about 120 years and has rendered Southern California unrecognizable in that short blib of time. European food production grows what it needs on an empty field. Native American harvesting is similar to corrective pruning, if you will, leaving the plant, shrub, tree intact and in an even better state by taking out dead wood and crossing branches and never pruning out more than 30% of that plant. Gardening and pruning flowers and shrubs comeS closest to their practice. What surprised me even more was that forestry and other land-management agencies weren’t in a dialog with Native Americans to learn from their knowledge.
Ignorance is at the core of Western or better European land management, as it doesn’t display any real knowledge of the land. The techniques used are more or less dependent on the ancestry and background of the person managing it, and therefore foreign methods are being instituted: French, Italian, German, Polish but definitely not Southern Californian. An English botanist, Theodore Payne, is the exception. Payne came to California in the late 1900, built gardens and fell in love with the native Californian Flora, so much so, that he collected seeds of native plants and cultivated them in his nursery. This is one of the very few examples that an immigrant is charmed enough by what he encounters in the foreign world, that he puts his energy towards preserving it. Most immigrants bring their plants and foods with them. So did the Japanese, many working as gardeners after WW2 in Southern California, creating a Japanese landscape in most Southern California’s gardens until those low-wage jobs were taken over by Central Americans.
Immigration can bring support or imperialism, enhancement or defeat. Native Americans have been here for a very long time and have been patient, but now that we are threatening the land once more, they have decided to protect. Not to take, to build on, to profit from. No, to protect.
‘Water is life’ is life is their slogan and couldn’t be clearer.
Water Series
Water Part 2 – Water in Puerto Peñasco.
Water Part 3 – Conquering the World.
