Welcome to the web version of Need to Know: Science & Insight, a newsletter on what we all Need-to-Know about climate impacts, energy transitions, the decline of nature’s support systems, living safely during a pandemic and more. It comes with an often funny personal story and some useful ideas. All in a 5 to 10 minute read in your inbox once or twice a week. It’s free. No ads. No spam.
Hello Friends
The last issue, Living Well Is Living Harmoniously With Nature, looked at how Indigenous values and ways of living with nature can help guide us out of the mess we’ve created. Now in Part 2, we’ll look at some of the fundamental reasons we’re in this mess, how world leaders are reacting and what you and I can do. But first, let’s go back to that small island off the coast of Panama.
Vikings and Children of the Moon
“Do you know about the Children of the Moon?” asked Alejandro Argumedo, a Peruvian scientist, glancing toward an albino child entering a straw-roofed hut.
Alejandro and I were sitting under some palm trees overlooking a very languid south Caribbean sea. It was mid-afternoon; windless, hot and humid; siesta time. I was exhausted and jet lagged but still wired with excitement having arrived a few hours earlier in the village of Ustupu. If you’ll recall it’s a small low-lying island off the eastern coast of Panama and home to 4,500 Kuna Indians.
”We’re pretty close to the equator. The Kuna are very dark skinned so they’re protected from the sun’s ultraviolet rays,” Alejandro explained.
While we sat, two Kuna men began loading fishing nets into dugout canoe called an ‘ulu’ that’s fashioned from a single enormous tree. Another Kuna, not quite five feet tall, staggered across the white coral sand carrying an outboard motor as big as he was.
“I couldn’t even lift one end of that motor,” I said in amazement.
Alejandro just smiled. He was a Quechua from the Andes Mountains and well aware of the practical strength, toughness and endurance of indigenous people living traditionally. He continued: “Albinos don’t have any protective melatonin so they get skin cancer and the sun damages their eyes. They usually don’t live very long, even today.”
“That’s horrible” I said recalling the slim albino teenager who’d eagerly hauled me and my luggage out of the canoe that brought me here. His eagerness had an anxiousness, as if trying to prove he was as capable as the other short, wide-bodied, dark-skinned Kuna teens.
“Less than 100 years ago any albino child was killed soon after birth,” Alejandro said. “‘Called Children of the Moon for their pale skin, they were considered bad luck.”
The Kuna are a subsistence culture living off fishing and small gardens. Healthy, strong children who could pass on their skills as adults were essential to survival of the community.
Surprisingly, the Kuna have the highest rates of albinism in the world, with one child in 150 born albino.
Alejandro continued with the story:
In the early 1900s the Kuna had increasing conflicts with officials from the new Republic of Panama who wanted them to give up their culture and lands. In addition some Kuna men were tricked or forced into doing work on sugar and banana plantations. Conflicts became violent with police raiding villages and arresting Kuna men.
Genetics was a new science at this time and the abundance of Kuna albinos attracted growing interest. American adventurer Richard Marsh believed the albinos were a “white” race descended from errant Vikings who arrived in the Americas long before Columbus. In the early 1920s Marsh brought several albino Kuna to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington to be studied by researchers.
The Panama canal had been completed and the US had a considerable presence in the country including several naval vessels. However doing additional genetic research with the Kuna in Panama was difficult because of the ongoing conflict. Marsh lobbied the Panamanian government to give them autonomy. The Kuna, seeing US support, declared independence and attacked police outposts in their territory freeing Kuna prisoners. In response the Panamanian military were about to invade Kuna territory until, at Marsh’s urging, the US Navy intervened.
With American support, the Kuna obtained autonomy over their territory — all because of their Children of the Moon. They were now seen as a blessing; a special gift from the ancestors, Alejandro concluded.
One result of that autonomy is that over 90 percent of the original forest in their territory remains after nearly 100 years. As I noted in Part 1, an estimated 80 percent of the Earth’s plants, insects and animals are found in Indigenous territory. However Indigenous people rarely have autonomy over the lands they have occupied for hundreds and thousands of years. Nation-states are loathe to give up control of “public lands”, although happy enough to sell or auction off those lands to the highest bidder. Of course European states had previously laid claim to Indigenous lands which included the Americas, Australia, Africa and elsewhere during the 15th and 16th centuries.
Clash of worldviews
During the era of foreign takeovers, the Spanish were sometimes considerate enough to read a statement laying out their claims to the local native people. There wasn’t much discussion since the local people didn’t understand Spanish. And even if there was good translation, the Spanish claims involved strange and bewildering concepts of “property” and “ownership of land”. For many Indigenous peoples, individual ownership of a piece of ground was an alien, even absurd concept, akin to claiming you that owned the air or the clouds.
Concepts like property, boundaries, and the economy are imaginary constructs. A useful Need-to-Know to keep in mind is that we invented these abstract ideas. They don’t exist in the real, physical world. As a long-time property owner it’s taken me a long time to wrap my head around this. The living world, that we’re a part of, is a complex web of relationships and interactions. Everything is connected to everything else. That’s why if you slap a big glass bowl over your home and surrounding area, things will start to go bad pretty quickly. That’s our fundamental ecological reality. It makes the idea of private property ownership — ‘this is mine and I can do whatever I want to it’ — absurd.
Even more problematic in our interconnected, finite world is a market-based economic system that encourages buying a piece of land, stripping and selling off the trees, minerals, soil, etc to buy more land to do the same thing again, and again. Those abstract concepts — property ownership and market-based economy — are two of the main reasons more than 75 percent of Earth’s land areas have been severely altered resulting in up to a million species that may be pushed to extinction.
We are nature and nature is us
If nature is in trouble, then we are in trouble. This is an overarching Need-to-Know. This reality is being increasingly recognized. So it’s another Need-to-Know that 76 world leaders including Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Boris Johnson recently signed a statement that said: “We are in a state of planetary emergency”. They also committed to protect 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030. (Only 15 percent of the Earth’s lands and only 7 percent of the oceans currently have some formal level of protection.)
I’m on the fifth or sixth version of this issue. I was going to talk about how the term “protection” has 50 different shades of meaning and that Indigenous and local peoples need to be the ones defining it for their communities. Then how countries and conservation organizations want to use market-based incentives to raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually to protect 30 percent of land and oceans by 2030. And then how using the same economic system that’s destroying nature to protect it isn’t likely to work since it’s not grounded in our ecological reality. But I’m not going there right now.
One of my goals with NtK is to share useful ideas and helpful bits of wisdom. So here’s a practical suggestion based on something Indigenous architect Alfred Waugh told me a few days ago: Let’s put nature at the centre of our lives. There are lots of ways to do this. Acknowledging that “we are nature and nature is us” is one way. For me it also means being outside as much as I can. I’m writing this in a small forest I walk to every day when I’m home. It means walking or riding a bike to go places so I can feel the wind, hear the leaves and smell.…well life I guess. And it means stopping often to really see and appreciate nature in its bazillion variations.
There’s tons of research on the health and well-being benefits of our being in any kind of natural setting — a backyard, a park, an urban garden. We feel better outside because that’s our true home. (In an upcoming issue I’ll tell you my story of feeling way too much at home while cluelessly walking around the African savanna on my own. Hello herd of African Cape Buffalo!)
What does putting nature at the centre of your life mean to you? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Until next time, stay safe.
Stephen
P.S. Here’s a 15 minute participatory video created by a group of teenage girls and community members in Ustupu about cleaning up rubbish and pollution. It’s part an amazing program from InsightShare who help Indigenous peoples tell their own story.