[IPSM] Sacred Law and Traditional Wisdom: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Peoples

[usman x]

http://counterpunch.org/stephens03282005.html

March 28, 2005

Sacred Law and Traditional Wisdom
Environmental Justice and Indigenous Peoples
By TOM STEPHENS

Earlier this month, on March 5, I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel
at the Law Union of Ontario's annual conference in Toronto. Another speaker
was Kate Kempton of the Toronto law firm Olthuis Kleer Townshend. Kate's
discussion of what she has learned representing indigenous peoples regarding
rebuilding sovereignty and self-determination holds profound lessons
regarding environmental justice, which I will try to briefly summarize here.


Different World Views

The applicable world-view of "environmental law" in 21st century
post-industrial society is linear, hierarchical, and based on dominance.
This dominance permits and provokes subjugation of nature and peoples who
hold nature as sacred and internal, and provokes creation and recognition of
rights in individual and especially corporate property, in the form of
precisely defined and carved-out parcels. These property rights, in turn,
are valuable for purposes of commodification and exploitation of resources,
primarily for their narrowly defined economic benefits. Environmental
regulations and law are "linear," in the sense that they assume a direct
progression, from proposals and initiatives about resource exploitation and
protection, to the outcomes of regulatory and legal proceedings. Interests,
all themselves defined within boxes, are weighed and ostensibly "balanced"
against each other, not with each other as a model of sharing would create.
That ostensibly rational, linear, ahistorical and economistic model does not
accurately describe the fundamental issues and values at stake in today's
world-reshaping and -defining conflicts over resources, sovereignty and
environmental health and justice.

One characteristic of the dominant, linear world-view that distorts our
perceptions and our decisions regarding our relationship to nature involves
putting the environment in a box, separated from issues of cultural and
economic survival. Under this view, "more" is "better," including more
exploitation of the environment by dominant economic and cultural forces.
The false ideological and psychological "box," separating the environmental
from the socio-economic and from self-identity, blinds us to the permanent
and irreversibly damaging consequences that more exploitation of a rapidly
diminishing resource base threaten for us all. In our time, the "line" that
symbolizes this world-view depicts us, through the transnational corporate
forces of dominance and hierarchy, patriarchy and white supremacy, driving
ourselves to the end of the line (lines end in "dead ends"), and off the
edge of the cliff of social, ecological, economic and civilizational
survival.

The contrasting indigenous world-view, symbolized by the circle, in which
our environment, humans and our culture are embedded within and
intrinsically sharing with each other, is the basis of indigenous sacred and
traditional law and wisdom and, at its best, also of environmental justice.
Kate Kempton has an indigenous client/associate who describes her practice,
in his language of Cree, as "ses-qua", or "Wait! Pull back!" That is what we
must do to meet the fundamental environmental justice challenges of the 21st
century, by recognizing and consistently acting upon the interrelationship
between our environment and our cultural and economic survival. Such
practices and philosophies encountered our natural resources in their
spectacular fullness millennia ago, they established ways of living on
sacred ground in peace and justice, and they continue to safeguard a remnant
that remains subject to their jurisdiction today. When will we ever learn?



Change or Die

Trying to protect the essential environmental interests and fundamental
human rights of indigenous peoples, and other people of color and low-income
people, within the dominant, hierarchical and linear framework of what we
know as "environmental law," is like trying to fit a big round ball into a
small square box. It is bound to fail. And because of the huge global issues
at stake in today's world regarding environmental health and human survival,
if we continue to pursue this failed strategy, we will eventually fail
ecologically, socially, economically, and as a matter of human survival. No
amount of scientific regulation or careful legal or administrative weighing
of data will change this stark reality.

Unlike the line, the circle never ends (it has no end points), yielding a
very different and much more authentic version of cherished human "freedom."
This is potentially the basis of a different, more holistic, sustainable,
fair, and potentially successful environmental law. Only within a sacred
(and truly democratic) circle is it possible to see how things weighed in
dollar amounts do not always outweigh things that are beloved,
irreplaceable, unique, invaluable, and necessary for survival; to
effectively assert rights, power, and control over vital interests, without
falling into the trap of dominance and subjugation that denies them to
others; to implement sustainability on individual, local, state/provincial
and national/ international levels. On all these levels, dominance
systematically threatens human and ecological survival today. Therefore we
have to implement alternatives to dominance. Both to preserve material
survival of the environment, and to establish justice among humans, we
urgently have to implement alternatives. To continue with unfettered
exploitation, with the illusion of the separate environmental "box" and the
potential for infinite "growth," is a death sentence for both humans and our
cultures.

We urgently have to remember the sacred wisdom of our childhood, that (in
Kate Kempton's words) what we "need" is not the same thing as what we
"want." And what we think we want, in the world of lines, is not what we
really need ­ for identity, survival, and happiness. We need to say "wait,"
to "pull back," and "we need to take this whole assembly of lines apart" in
order to provide both a human future for our children and a natural future
for our world. The long-overdue recognition that environmental justice must
become an integral part of the public policy of democratic governments
around the world, and that environmental racism and disproportionate
exposure to environmental contamination and risk must be opposed and
eliminated, is just one necessary step on this sacred road.

I would like to express his appreciation to Kate Kempton,
KKempton at OKTLaw.com, for her review and editorial assistance with this
essay.

Tom Stephens is a lawyer in Detroit. He can be reached at:
lebensbaum4 at earthlink.


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"The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely
the oppressive situations which we seek to escape,
but that piece of the oppressor which is
planted deep within each of us." Audre Lorde
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