As my Palestinian-Iraqi-Lebanese-Irish-French-Spanish-German-American son, not quite 2 years old, continues to have magical face to face encounters with the native Florida wildlife we are trying to bring back and steward where we live off-grid at the Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science and Sustainability Center in Land O Lakes Florida, once the ancestral hunting grounds of the Mikosukee People, I spend a lot of time contemplating how best to create a thriving ecology and joyful future for him and his older brother and sister, Kilian, 13, and Ava, 9, who live in Germany and who are currently walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
The invasion of Ukraine underscores a bleak reality that needs to be addressed through truly radical approaches -- and by "radical" I mean getting to the ROOT of the problem-- "radical", of course, actually means "root".
When we dig down and explore the root causes of modern conflict and the existential crises caused by Climate Change (from property loss to displacement and refugee conflicts to the earth's sixth and largest extinction crisis) we of course find oil and gas and other fossil resources down there at the bottom of it. Russia's military adventurism is undergirded by the world's dependence on its fossil reserves and reliance on Russia and Ukraine's fossil subsidized grain production. The use of fossil fuels in industry, transportation and agriculture are the prime causes of anthropogenic global warming. The dependency on them has been the cause of wars and unholy political alliances.
But if we dig down even deeper we find that global society's blunder into these untenable crises may more broadly derive from a loss of indigeneity which entails the erasure of place-based identities and a consequent callous disregard for bioregional ecology and human health and happiness. Allow me to explain.
At UCLA when I was in graduate school studying Environmental Analysis and Policy and Regional and International Development, Urban Planning Professor Ed Soja, author of "Thirdspace", took pains to emphasize how many of our problems stemmed from a privileging of text over space. He exhorted us to re-privilege SPACE, to engage in spatial geography and reclaim the primacy of PLACE in our planning. He, like Yale Professor James Scott, author of "Seeing Like a State: How Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed", explained that the Global North's (read "Empire Builders'") obsession with "Techne" (reproducible, immutable, transferable technologies) at the expense of "Metis" (irreproducible, intensely local and mutable but otherwise non-transferable techniques) subtends the homogeneity of food and energy options available and their complicity in the command and control economic structures that are used to further both colonialist and imperialist political ambitions and corporate monopolization of otherwise free markets.
Indigenous groups self-define through an intense devotion to and appreciation for their particular spatial geographies as well as their ancestral languages whose special features derive from the locations in which they originated. There is an emotional attachment to place that most non-indigenous Americans and Australians have a hard time understanding. Those of us who grew up as descendants of colonizers or slaves or indentured servants or refugees in the former colonies of the European imperial expansions can't look at a landscape or seascape and see traces of our origin or recall any powerful incentive to protect the places we've occupied since our displacement. How could we, since a major part of the European occupation of indigenous lands went beyond genocide and erasure of the people and cultures who inhabited the land, but involved a wholesale attempt to transform the landscape with complete disregard for indigenous ecology, so that it most closely replicated sites from Old Europe in what they rebranded New York, New Jersey, New Caledonia, New Haven, etc, right down to Shakespeare's sparrows and the grasses of English manor lords?
The idea of conquering other's territories, killing and/or kicking out as many of the native people, plants and animals as possible, and terraforming the terrain to make it pay visual and emotional tribute to the conquerors has always been accompanied by some kind of propaganda that what was brought and installed was somehow superior to what had originally evolved there. But if the "new" people or ways were indeed superior in any way then it was only in their ability to terrorize, something that wasn't of interest to most of the rest of the world.
Territorial expansion was always a "locust-like" effort, settling and consuming and flying off to another killing field leaving devastation in its wake. Afterward only weeds thrive and the barren depopulated and dispirited landscape is ready for cookie-cutter buildings surrounded by horizontal and vertical deserts of grey concrete and black asphalt studded with an impoverished palette of easy to control and maintain plants and animals. The legacy has been invasive species and invasive ideas whose success mostly comes from a parasitical relationship to the land -- the one-size-fits-all "techne" from the industrial revolution that now dominates the world is deliberately uniform and demands a massive subsidy from a faceless energy supply to continue its reproduction; we are now almost all the slaves of a kind of viral explosion of products that destroys their hosts (host countries, host bodies) from the inside out. Even we who have benefitted the most from the legacy of empire building can see this. Climate change and biodiversity loss, poverty, endless wars, and economic collapse are the inevitable byproducts of the Borg-like disregard for the natural and political ecologies of place whose hegemony can only be maintained (but in the long run never sustained) by concentrated, mobile and immutable energy sources and technologies and products..
The solution, which was originally listed as Drawdown solution # 39 in Paul Hawken's book, is "Indigenous Peoples Land Management", calculated to yield a possible 6.19 gigatons of reduced CO2 with 849.37 gigatons protected at a "global cost and savings to variable to be determined".
Impressive, but I would like to suggest that this solution is misunderstood, misrepresented and misapplied. It is usually construed to pertain only to the land currently occupied by peoples currently considered by the Global North, by the Empire, to be "indigenous" and assumes that they will be permitted to implement the kind of indigenous place-based stewardship they once observed as the most salient part of their cultural heritage. What obviously isn't considered here is the effects of displacement on that stewardship ethic (you can be of indigenous ancestry yet live in diaspora on a reservation or on conquered and metis-featureless land and hence have no interest in the sustainability of the hegemonic simulacra you find yourself living in) -- in other words, you aren't really indigenous if you have lost your connection to the natural and cultural features through which your indigeneity evolved. If you manage the land using the eco-cidal techne and techniques of conquest you will no doubt fail to make the right kind of changes (or, better yet, protect the land from outside changes and preserve conditions!) that can endure for 7 generations.
But there is something else missing from the narrative about "Indigenous Land Management" that drastically reduces its possible drawdown and environmental justice capabilities. The lacuna lies in the hopelessly narrowed definition of indigeneity, which assumes that the people of the empire-building cultures (members of the former "FIRST" and "SECOND" worlds dominated by Europe and America and the former Soviet Union and China -- the so-called "Capitalist Bloc" and "Communist Bloc" countries) can not reclaim THEIR (our?) Indigeneity and through it a sincere sense of stewardship.
From my delightfully edifying time in discussion with Marcus Briggs Cloud of the Muscogee Ecovillage "Ekvn-Yefolecv" (meaning "returning to the earth/returning to our homelands") in their ancestral Alabama (after 180 years living in that "Trail of Tears" diaspora on the impoverished reservations in Oklahoma) I've learned why it will be very difficult for even the best-intentioned Euro-American settlers to truly embrace and live bioregional stewardship (the colonizing impact of the English language on our thoughts and world view has something to do with it, the toxic legacy of our dummification-machine-cloistered-as-education through our propaganda factory school system has something to do with it, and our complete saturation in and comfort within techne and simulacrum landscapes has a lot to do with it). We could try and become adoptive members of a truly indigenous American culture (by learning the languages and thought patterns and observing what is sacred and living by certain ethics) -- throughout the encounter with European settlers and African slaves and other immigrants over the last 500 years there have been many non-indigenous peoples adopted into native societies -- unlike Euro-USA Eugenicists, the original Americans never said genes mattered, nor color or race, but a certain credo definitely counts. The credo that seems to be extant in almost all indigenous groups who never sought to expand and conquer others, is true land stewardship (not "management" really, a term which uses the conqueror's aggressive language to suggest control and domination.)
If the ideas of the indigenous people of each locale could truly be used as the guides for sustainable development EVERYWHERE (whether in the hands or the heads of the people currently also holding those indigenous genotypes or in the hands and heads of those currently settled on or occupying the land) I'm inclined to believe this solution ("investing in the locale in ways that can sustainably benefit the people and other living beings -- for at least seven generations -- without environmental or political conflict") would be worthy of being ranked #1 in the Drawdown portfolio. It would be the universal application of "metis", which isn't as paradoxical as it sounds (since techne is defined as that which you can universalize!). It would be a demand that leadership on any project and any development was completely informed by an intensely local consideration, and it would involve bringing in stakeholders who truly have a stake in the perpetuity of regional ecosystems and watersheds, not developers who see every landscape as a potential tabula rasa to be bulldozed and razed and re-imagined with mass production techne. The inclusion of so-called "modern" technologies (hi-tech solar panels and Nickel-Edison batteries, the concrete biodigester "dragons" I helped introduce from China and build, solar light tubes and LED lights etc.) isn't an anathema to an indigenous revival of culture and ecosystem, but the logical result of what indigenous cultures have always done when allowed to stay intact, borrowing and transforming best practices from around the world -- at best from OTHER indigenous groups who know the very personal value of functioning ecosystems.
I've had the privilege of seeing some of this work take place in the Global Eco-village network and seen its fruition in the truly indigenous Muscogee Eco-Village we were blessed to be able to work in during Spring Break of 2022. What has been missing from THIS narrative too often is the concept of "indigeneity" among the so-called "white people" (whom our Lakota friends have always referred to not by color but by cultural trait as "The Wasicu" -- "those who are greedy and steal the fat".)
For "the Wasicu" to give up their greedy ways and reclaim their indigeneity we have to be radical once again, in the sense of "finding our roots". For European Americans and African Americans that may take some serious de-colonization work and self-reflection since we have been divorced from our lineage landscapes for quite some time, but the healing has already started and can continue apace in Europe and Africa and other regions from which immigrants and refugees settling in America derive.
A good case study that I'm involved in through one of our PCGS Masters Students is Serbia. Many people in America and Europe are distressed that Serbia, itself both the cause and the victim of war aggressions in the 1990s, will not condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine or join in international sanctions. The Serbian president, acknowledging the country's desire to join the European Union, publicly agreed that the Russian position violates international law but refuses to take sides. Part of this stems from resentment over the NATO bombing of Belgrade during the Balkan war, but another part of it conforms to a nearly three quarters of a century long tightrope act to remain "non-aligned" and thus to preserve an indigenous Serbian identity that resists being engulfed and appropriated by unions of empires, whether European or Soviet or American. Serbia is an advanced developed economy and yet was and is the epitome of a "third world country."
It helps to remember the true meaning of that phrase. It does NOT mean "undeveloped" or "under-developed". It does not imply "substandard" or underperforming" economies. The terms "First world" and "Second World" do not imply any ranking (much to the discomfort of Jingoistic propagandists pedaling Capitalist or Communist rhetoric). "Third World" is more like Professor Soja's "Third Space" -- in the triangle of relations it speaks only of an alternative dimension to the straight line connecting the first and second dots in the figure being drawn. Serbia and the other countries who refused to become enveloped in the political spheres of the two blocs of nuclear powers could just as well have been designated the first world if only we would stop using loaded terms in the world-dominating languages to mess up our world views. "Third-World" merely means "NON-ALIGNED COUNTRIES. That's it. Not "shit-hole countries", not countries in need of a make-over or a patron or a conquerer or a civilizer or an emperor. Third world does not mean "barbarians" -- and by the way, "barbarians" doesn't mean what you think it does either -- the Roman empire called anybody who didn't speak Latin "barbarians" because to them other language speakers seemed to be saying "bar-bar-bar-bar-bar" much the same way we now claim people who don't speak our "lingua franca" (now English but once Latin for "the French language") are merely saying "blah-blah-blah-blah" or "mwah-mwah-mwah-mwah". "Barbarians" means "unintelligibleians" nothing more (and while we're at it, "Savages" means "free people" from the French "sauvage" which meant wild when wild meant free. Freedom apparently offended the empire builders so they made the word "savage" seem "sinister" which, to carry this even further, merely means "left-handed" and shows what power holders felt about anybody who was a member of a creative minority resisting doing what the majority do and seeking independent thought and action. )
Serbia, when it was part of the Republic of Yugoslavia, was part of a collective Balkan region entity (a member of states whose indigenous identity evolved from their position in the Balkan mountains and peninsula through which the once fertile and species rich Danube river flows) that DEFINED ITSELF as the first "third world country", declaring its independence, refusing to align with the nuclear nation empires and starting the entire "non-aligned country" movement that then spread to all the other countries who weren't interested in being satellites of the superpowers. These "third space" nations wanted to maintain a consistent and independent relationship with their unique cultural and bioregional ecologies and as such continued to house a large number of indigenous peoples and movements with historic ties to their homelands. It is true that "from the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, its stated aim has been to give a voice to developing countries and to encourage their concerted action in world affairs." One doesn't, however, aspire to then transform into a "First" or "Second" World country, one aspires to be sustainably developed and remain non-aligned. This is also the goal of every indigenous group I've had the pleasure of working with.
Wikipedia reminds us,
" In 1961, drawing on the principles agreed at the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Non-Aligned Movement was formally established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, through an initiative of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesian President Sukarno.[6][7][8]
This led to the first Conference of Heads of State or Governments of Non-Aligned Countries.[9] The term non-aligned movement first appears in the fifth conference in 1976, where participating countries are denoted as "members of the movement". The purpose of the organization was summarized by Fidel Castro in his Havana Declaration of 1979 as to ensure "the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries" in their "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."[10][11]
The countries of the Non-Aligned Movement represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations' members and contain 55% of the world population. Membership is particularly concentrated in countries considered to be developing or part of the Third World, although the Non-Aligned Movement also has a number of developed nations."
This article also misuses the term "Third World" (using it in a derogatory sense) and for our purposes we will maintain its original meaning, equivalent to "non-aligned" and the stated resistance to imperialism and colonialism.
When Serbia enters the European Union, if it can remain a non-aligned thirdspace resistant to such forms of hegemonic expansion, it will have a chance to show the world what European indigeneity means and can do for true sustainable development. The Serbs, like all of the former members of the non-aligned Yugoslavia, are intensely regional and proud of it. Their heritage goes back along the Danube river to the Paleolithic civilization of Lapenski Vir, which I had the privilege of visiting as part of our PCGS Sustainable Tourism initiative with Dr. Brooke Hansen in November of 2021, set up by PCGS Master's Student Marko Bajic. And Lapenski Vir -- why that incredible archeological site is testimony to a wholly thirdspace alternative to the usual imperialistic "agricultural expansion narrative" that is used to justify the conquest mindset of everyone from the Mesopotamian Kings and Egyptian Pharoahs to the Greek and Roman empires and on to the establishment of institutional race-based slavery of the European empire.
Lapenski Vir today shows the remains of a highly urbanized civilization of tall, healthy nutritionally robust "hunter gatherers" or "foragers" who were able to live for thousands of years in the same settlements thriving on the abundant sturgeon and other fish and wildlife of the Danube river and surrounding forests and spending most of their time engaged in art and sculpture. To consider that today's Serbs are descendants of these creative grain and gluten-free, actually agriculture-free, peoples is to consider that another world is possible -- a possibility to create third or fourth or fifth worlds, to garner new dimensions in thinking about sustainability and the land and waterscapes needed to support it.
The trick is to remain non-aligned with those empire-oriented movements that encourage and enable constant locust-like movement and the consumption, assimilation and destruction of whatever it lands on. The trick is to retain one's unique relationship to the land, to a place and its ancestral ecosystem dynamics, and its wild, free heritage.
I believe that Serbia, with its commitment to maintaining its own language, with its intense commitment to cuisine and cultlure based on the bioregional offerings of its mighty rivers and the biodiversity found within them, of its Carpathian forests, its deer and wild boar and mushrooms, its tree cereals like its mighty Chestnut trees, and plums and quince trees and its native raspberry shrubs, can prove the thesis that there are answers to the problems of endless war and imminent climate change in European indigeneity if the "more perfect union" is achieved through a better Balkanization (to use the term in its sense of "breaking down into smaller political units", where E Pluribus Unum, our stated goal for the United States, is observed ("from the MANY, ONE"). Homogenization can be defied and heterogeneity can provide solutions (we saw this happening in our several trips to Ireland to work on our Solar CITIES Biogas projects, delightfully witnessing how the resurgence of our ancestral Gaelic and traditions is creating an ever more sustainable and unique Irish culture that adds so much more to the EU than the former British colony ever could, Brexit be damned.)
And what of us hybrids then, of Irish-Americans like me who are actually Irish-Iraqi-Lebanese-French-Canadian-German-Spanish-Americans, born in the USA? Can we reclaim our indigeneity and put it the service of halting fossil aggression and reversing climate change?
I think yes.
I long ago abandoned the idea of the US as a "melting pot" and started thinking of it as a multi-cultural pot-pourri and of myself as a blooming flower in that complex and never homogenized mix. Merkel famously claimed that in Germany and the EU "multi-kulti ist tot", declaring it dead on arrival. Though it may not have been her intent it surely pleased the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and racists who think everybody should behave and see the world as they do. But I studied for my German residency with the other immigrants and refugees to the European Union, with my Iraqi and Syrian and Iranian and Nigerian and Cameroonian and Turkish friends living in diaspora in Germany, and I learned that multiculturalism was Europe's strength, just as it is America's...
As long as we can find and reclaim and retain our own indigeneity, a perspective that makes the sustaining of living landscapes and seascapes the foundational priority.
So how do you do that as a person in perpetual diaspora? Do you retain a devotion to and investment in a hypothesized ancestral landscape as we see descendants of Nazi Holocaust victims do? For someone with as many homelands as I have, who has tried to live in Iraq and Lebanon and Ireland and France and Spain and Germany (and Egypt and Indonesia, from whence I can claim no obvious genetic legacy) at various times in my life but always came back to America, this is problematic. And to claim allegiance to a more general "sustainability" ethic based on universalized "best practices" smacks of techne rather than an appreciation for the nuances of metis.
I believe the best way forward for us, for the children of the great displacement and wandering, the descendants of refugees and slaves and immigrants, whether driven out, carried out or adventuring outward, is to acknowledge that we make up a new type of nation, a culture of neo-nomads who must be eternally grateful to our indigenous hosts and now must dedicate ourselves to getting to know them and their ancestral landscapes. We have to be clear that we are settlers and that we must be good tenants and that unless we do well by the people and the ecology of that particular landscape we may only temporarily inhabit the property and yet do so intimately and always be their allies, allies to the ecology and the cultures who have adopted us. We should live in service, in the best Christian tradition, in service to higher principles, yet understand that our notions of "higher" have no rank greater than those who live with the land. We who live in the long diaspora can never claim ownership over either ideas or property, and must allow final decisions to rest with those who are dedicated to resting for eternity in that land. We must defer to the indigenous voice. And after all of our displacement-born-restlessness, when we've travelled the world and lived in so many places and seen so much, acting as bridges and as ambassadors of a plethora of foreign ideas gleaned from our travels, when we decide where we finally want to remain and for our remains to reside, we should then ask to be adopted into the indigenous group that has dedicated itself to sustainable stewardship over THAT alt-space, and we must learn their languages and their ways, and let that land-and-life-tied identity and its contributions be our sustainable legacy.
This is the truly radical journey that I am on as I seek to reclaim my roots and indigeneity in the age of climate change and fossil aggression.
