The ecology of indigenous peoples
The Wisdom of the Elders
By Peter Knudtson and David Suzuki
Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 232pp. $19.95.
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Human history is part of natural history. Human beings arose via their
interactions with nature.
Human society developed out of animal social organisation. Active social
forces continue to act like natural ones. Their blindness and
destructiveness merely reproduce the logic of evolution in the natural
world.
However, as society gives rise to class divisions, the human population
ceases to be the unit of adaptation. ``Thereafter'', write biologists
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, ``each regular interaction of people in
a given culture with nature is determined by the interests of the different
social classes in their conflictive or cooperative relations with each
other''.
Consequently, the laws that govern social organisation become as foreign to
us as the many laws of nature. But once we understand them and grasp their
action, we can subject them more and more to our own will.
The modern ecology movement is absorbed in this problem. If we are to
survive as a species, we urgently need to find a better way of interacting
with nature. The quest is to discover the relationship that connects living
things to one another and their surroundings. The narrow focus of modern
science is found wanting. Barely does it comprehend the interconnectedness
of life.
Writers like David Suzuki have grasped this urgency. In The Wisdom of the
Elders, written with Peter Knudtson, he pursues better human relationships
with nature by turning to the cultures of the world's indigenous peoples for
insight.
Peoples such as the !Kung San of southern Africa, the Aranda of central
Australia, the Dayak of Sarawak and the Canadian Inuit all have perspectives
on nature that are culturally valid and worthy of respect in their own
right. Through a series of vignettes selected from the literature on and by
first peoples, Knudtson and Suzuki argue that while the dimension of the
interconnectedness of all life may have escaped the methods of Western
science, indigenous ecological consciousness has done much better.
``The most fruitful dialogue between Nature and western modes of thought'',
they write, ``will take place not under the scorching light of scholarly
western intellectual analysis but individually and internally within
individual human minds, through mental and emotional processes of personal
transformation that take place as culturally different ideas and values
collide without the need for any final `proof', mutual exclusion, or
conclusive `conquest' of one tradition's vision over the other.'' The
authors consider that native ecological consciousness is compatible with
modern science.
In this holistic quest, Knudtson and Suzuki advocate that the solution for
us rests in a quasi-religious movement along the lines advocated by deep
ecologists such as Paul Ehrlich. Intrinsic in the scientific world view is a
progressive despiritualisation of nature, and ``if western science does not
need the Native Mind, the human mind and in particular, the western mind and
society do''.
In his personal foreword, Suzuki - a professor of genetics - attacks the
arrogance and shallowness of modern science, which is unable to comprehend
the deepest secrets of the universe. However, Suzuki is missing something
very significant here.
We are both part of the natural world and separate from it. We are creatures
in a society of our own making but still must relate to the community of
nature. The view of nature that dominates our society has arisen as an
accompaniment to the changes in our own social relations over the last 600
years.
Inevitably, we see in physical nature a reflection of the social relations
in which our lives are embedded. Charles Darwin applied the economic
theories of Thomas Malthus to explain the process of evolutionary biology.
Thereafter these very same discovered natural ``laws'' were used to justify
the ``survival of the fittest'' in capitalist society. Because termite nests
have ``queens'', ants are ``soldiers'' and hives are maintained by
``worker'' bees, then it must be part of the natural order of things for
society to reproduce these divisions.
Modern science also characterises the world as alienated - parts are
separated from wholes and are described as things in themselves. Causes are
separated from effects so that a new physical structure is imposed on the
world.
In contrast, the ecology that Suzuki subscribes to is one in which living
systems are interconnected and mutually dependent. But if nature is like
that, why should we be different? Why is our society so careless in its
relations with the natural world when the indigenous peoples on this planet
are so protective of their environment?
Their proximity to and direct dependence on nature sometimes obscure the
fact that their social arrangement is very different from our own. They live
as members of a collective whose workings are self-evident to every member
of the tribal unit. We, on the other hand, perceive ourselves as mere atoms
in social space. Whereas the native peoples relate to nature as a group,
Knudtson and Suzuki believe that our salvation instead lies in addressing
nature through personal and individual transformation, employing the
spiritually charged knowledge of native peoples.
This outlook mystifies what time has done. The changing social relations
throughout human history have been a necessity imposed by nature itself. We
are consequently stuck with the mess as succeeding human societies attempt
to dominate and transform nature.
Paiakan - an Amazonian native whom Suzuki toured through Canada - understood
this. ``People destroy the forest in Brazil because they are poor and
ignorant. What'', he asked Suzuki, ``is Canada's excuse?''
For the first time in human history, we have the capacity for plenty without
relying on the continuing degradation of nature to fulfil our needs. What
separates us from the wisdom of the indigenous peoples is not our minds but
our social system.