Can Indigenous Wisdom Help Prevent the Worst of Climate Change?

Can Indigenous Wisdom Help Prevent the Worst of Climate Change?

April 2024

James F Sallis, Ph.D.

I presented some of these ideas during my keynote talk at the International Society of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity conference in Auckland, New Zealand, October 2024

www.drjimsallis.org 

Like many people around the world, I am worried about the growing threats of climate change and insufficient efforts to reduce the threats. It has become clear that fossil fuel and related industries are committed to protecting current business models and profits, regardless of the consequences to ecosystems and humans. Though I participate in climate advocacy, I find it hard to be optimistic that existing efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be powerful enough to avoid catastrophe. I want to share my story of how I “found” a ray of hope. It is not a technology, an organization, or a law. My ray of hope is not something new. Being ancient is the source of its power. As I get older, I have become more attracted to enduring truths and universal principles than shiny new technologies, which often have disappointing or even dangerous outcomes. This is my story of “discovery” of an ancient worldview that seems to be commonly held by indigenous cultures across the globe. Though I had a general familiarity with this worldview, recently I heard it expressed in a way that gives me hope it could help us avoid the worst of climate change.

In October 2023 I was fortunate to be in Auckland, New Zealand as part of an international group working on a series of papers on physical activity for the journal Lancet. The meeting was hosted and organized by Erica Hinckson, PhD of Auckland Institute of Technology. We all benefitted because Erica had the foresight to apply for a grant to support the meeting and the skill to obtain competitive funding. More to the point of this piece, she included in the proposal arrangements for attendees to participate in a 3 day “immersion” in Maori culture so we could learn about Maori worldviews and values, with the goal of incorporating what we learned in some of the resulting papers.

The extended contact with Maori hosts and instructors was multi-faceted and provided an unusually extensive interaction with an indigenous group for virtually all the attendees. The initial session included learning about Maori canoes and how to paddle them as a team, culminating in practicing our skills in the ocean and having short races. On another day we gathered in a modern version of a traditional meeting house where we had presentations by local Maori leaders, group discussions, and dance performances. They taught us Maori games intended to build social, physical, and mental skills. Our Maori hosts were consistently welcoming, warm, open to all our naïve questions, and happy to teach us about their culture, which is a justifiable source of pride. This openness to indigenous groups sharing with visitors is not common, due to trauma from centuries of colonization and ongoing marginalization by mainstream societies in many countries. Thus, I want to express my humble appreciation to all the Maori people who were so generous with their time and talents during our interactions, and especially to Robb Hogg and Dr Isaac Warbrick who are Maori AUT faculty who played leading roles in planning and implementing the interactions with Maori people.

This blog was stimulated by a simple learning that I made in the initial session during which Robb provided the visitors an overview of some key principles and values that are central to Maori culture. He explained the Maori worldview that revolves around land, water, and people, and it is common to express gratitude for these resources every morning. He showed us these elements are symbolized by making a triangle shape by touching the tips of the thumbs together and the index fingers together, with the fingers pointing down. The two top corners of the triangle represent land and water, and the bottom point represents people. This symbol communicates their value that “place is more important than people,” because people cannot survive unless the land and water are healthy.

This simple statement hit me like a bolt of lightning. I was well aware that many, perhaps all, indigenous groups around the world consider the places where they live as sacred and consider themselves part of nature, not separate from it. But I had never heard the concept that place is more important than people expressed so clearly. Maybe I have not been listening closely enough.

This simple declaration made it crystal clear that the current dominant cultures are built upon the opposite belief or value: people are more important than place or nature. Valuing people over nature seems to be a powerful fundamental assumption across virtually every political category, including capitalist, socialist, communist, authoritarian, and anarchic regimes. I now see this mostly-implicit belief or assumption as a fundamental cause of many of the very biggest challenges humans have created for ourselves. I’m thinking about loss of biodiversity, mass extinctions, ubiquity of plastic and chemical pollution--and of course, climate change.

I did not have to think for long about the catastrophic consequences of valuing people over nature before I realized the dominant ideology is actually much worse than that. Our dominant societies have added a fourth element of money and placed it firmly at the top of the hierarchy. Destroying and defiling nature is a routine byproduct of economic activity, and big businesses routinely defend the necessity of such trade-offs through lobbying and public (dis)information, among other less public means of influence. Protecting the health and well-being of people is not a priority of many industries and businesses, and the belated recognition of this reality has necessitated a relatively new emphasis in public health on understanding and opposing “commercial determinants of health”. (https://www.thelancet.com/series-do/commercial-determinants-health ) Fossil fuel, plastic, chemical, mining, tobacco, food/agriculture, technology, and other industries vigorously defend their current business models and fight efforts to hold them responsible for the harms they cause to environments and people. Even governments that try to impose restrictions and regulations to reduce the harms caused by industries typically fail due to the political and economic powers industries marshal in their own defense.

It is clear the world is not on track to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, so massive suffering of life on Earth is virtually assured and, in fact, is already underway. Just the extent of damage and suffering is unknown. All of the efforts so far to reduce climate change and its causes have not been sufficient, so are there any better alternatives? My proposal is that as long as the worldview that money is more important than people and nature remains dominant, we will continue to fail.

Adopting an indigenous worldview that nature should be valued above all other considerations may be the only effective exit from our current highway to destruction. Unfortunately, few non-indigenous people understand indigenous worldviews or how they could be implemented in today’s world. Indigenous people, cultures, and beliefs have been attacked, dismissed, and ignored by colonizing and conquering groups for centuries, so is there any hope of taking indigenous values seriously now that they may hold the keys to avoiding global catastrophe?

Perhaps we could start by humbly asking indigenous people to share their wisdom with the rest of the world’s population. This could start with a grassroots movement for non-indigenous people to request teaching on indigenous knowledge and advice on how to slow down the destruction of natural systems. Non-indigenous organizations, particularly those focused on climate action, could develop initiatives to partner with indigenous communities, learn from them, recruit them into organizational leadership, and incorporate their wisdom and guidance into action plans. Such partnerships could then grow into public education and political influence efforts that will be needed to change entrenched business practices and government policies that harm the environment.

I would understand if indigenous people would not want to subject themselves to the dismissal, skepticism, scorn, ridicule, and rejection they would almost certainly experience when they communicate their worldviews, wisdom, and advice. Those have been the reactions of non-indigenous colonizers throughout history. But as the consequences of climate change continue to intensify, people may become more open to re-considering ideas that have long been rejected. Many would consider widespread adoption of indigenous worldviews and values by non-indigenous cultures around the world to be unrealistic, impossible, and an attack on mainstream cultures. But we may have to try something as bold and radical as fundamentally changing our view of the world, because our current dominant worldview that values money and people over nature is leading us toward catastrophe. The solutions to climate change and other threats to life on Earth may have been in front of us the whole time. But we non-indigenous people will need to move from rejecting and ignoring indigenous worldviews and wisdom to listening, accepting, and acting.

Thanks to Erica Hinckson, Robb Hogg, and Isaac Warbrick for reviewing a draft of this blog and fact-checking my statements about Maori culture and worldview.