Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If we then ask which sections of society are concerned about the environment, the answer is largely people in the least developed societies; the indigenous populations – or the remnants of them; tribal societies and first nations in Canada.
“Black people need to return to being growers, builders, and producers, so when we’re consuming, we’re also feeding one another, and we’re feeding our liberation,”
This is not a fable from a galaxy far, far away. It’s from a study by researchers at Lund University in Sweden. Jedek is spoken by a small community of people in the Malaysian highlands, and the language features described above are not uncommon among cultures not yet swept aside in the civilizational deluge. They are part of our human heritage.
The three-year voyage of the Hōkūleʻa, a giant Polynesian sailing canoe, helped spread indigenous knowledge and concern for Earth’s future around the globe. In the summer of 2017, after a three-year voyage, spanning more than 40,000 nautical miles with stops in 23 countries and territories, the Hōkūleʻa—a giant Polynesian sailing canoe—returned home to the shores of Honolulu, Hawaii.
Our egalitarian hunter-gatherer ancestors developed sophisticated social technologies for keeping upstarts in check. What can the popular resistance movement learn from them in confronting the worst excesses of Donald Trump? The recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere suggest that the tide may be turning away from the egregious behavior exhibited by Donald Trump, and back toward a sense of decency in American politics. How can we keep that momentum going over the next three years?
Affordable housing-related CLTs are probably best-known, but this model can be applied for any community goal, including lowering costs for small businesses and ensuring local food production. Though the CLT model has been re-emerging since the late 1960s, it is actually somewhat of a return to indigenous practices around ownership of land and resources.
A collective space for storytelling and talking about indigenous culture from various regions of Brazil, online radio contributes to maintaining the traditions of various ethnic groups. In the Tupi-Guarani language, the word “yandê” means at once “we” and “our”. It’s no coincidence that this vocabulary was used to name the first online indigenous radio station in Brazil, created in 2013 by three friends…
Over the centuries, indigenous peoples have provided a series of ecological and cultural services to humankind. The preservation of traditional forms of farming knowledge and practices help maintain biodiversity, enhance food security, and protect the world’s natural resources.
Traditionally, extended families were the unit of reproduction, and thus the unit that requires inputs and maintenance. In rural communities, a large proportion of those inputs were from free renewables.
The National Movement of Maya Weavers think it’s time for Guatemala to safeguard their textile creations and the very fabric of Maya philosophy. But the Weavers aren’t just politely asking for change. Last month, they introduced a new bill in Congress to have their collective intellectual property rights recognized under Guatemalan law.
Today the theater state is shown in high definition and 3-D, and it resembles in its own way the grand Berlin pageants of Albert Speer as much as the scenes from Apocalypto. Mad-Men have refined the manufacture of consent, to use Chomsky’s phrase, to a fine science, and as in Classic Maya times, military recruitment is viewed as a fortunate outlet for the unemployed.
The EPA proposed yesterday (July 11) to remove restrictions for the planned Pebble Mine Project near Bristol Bay, Alaska. Alaska Native communities, along with fishermen, fought hard to establish protections for the proposed site, which holds valuable copper and mine but sits dangerously close to the watershed that is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery—a resource on which many groups of Native people rely for their culture and subsistence lifestyle.
