The Earth doesn’t need us at all, it certainly doesn’t need us to awaken. It needs us to pay attention, to get involved, and to become ecologically literate.
I tend to agree with this article, but it is also a very slippery slope.
We must be careful not to erase once more indigenous/local narratives because we don’t like the vocabulary used. We risk to contribute into reproducing the colonisers’ power imbalance by disregarding local knowledge, just because it is presented in non-western way (i.e. cultural burnings).
I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.
And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.
Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?
People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.
The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.
Of course cultural appropriation of spiritual indigenous narratives from westerners is something that has been happening for decades. And I totally see the point of your analysis.
In a way, what I was trying to say is that even tho this kinds of appropriations need to be fought so they don’t take over the political discourse about ecology, by itself this doesn’t seem enough imo. In order to fight the power imbalance that colonisers have created throughout the centuries, I believe there is also a need to consciously take into consideration, as well as incorporate the suggestions and approaches of indigenous people in the relevant discourses in western politics, ecology, and their intersections. Certainly, without the element of appropriation, but as as equals.
I tend to agree with this article, but it is also a very slippery slope.
We must be careful not to erase once more indigenous/local narratives because we don’t like the vocabulary used. We risk to contribute into reproducing the colonisers’ power imbalance by disregarding local knowledge, just because it is presented in non-western way (i.e. cultural burnings).
I think “we” (secular Westerners) are more likely to appropriate spiritual indigenous narratives, take them out of context, and trivialize them into meaninglessness - as the article describes we did with the concept of mindfulness - than we are to erase them. And I think this will happen because we, secular Westerners, are living lives devoid of spiritual meaning, and it’s terribly tempting to steal other people’s beliefs in the hope we can find a fraction of their meaning in life.
And though I’m sure people online are going to go full Reddit atheist on me and tell me belief in a higher power is ignorant and primitive, every society in human history that we know anything about has either had some sort of belief in higher powers or has aggressively suppressed such belief, and that belief served a function of social cohesion that a lot of the left no longer have.
Honestly, I think part of the reason Trump won - and part of the reason populist, religious nationalism is surging worldwide, Trump being just one example - is that the secular West threw out its own spiritual narratives without replacing them with anything. We condemned Christianity as ignorant, bigoted, and repressive, but we didn’t create anything in its place to serve its role. We walked away from the churches, which were the “third places” of our towns, the centers of our social and cultural lives, and we replaced them with what? Coffee shops?
People need something to believe in, and we told them “do your jobs and vote blue, but it won’t matter anyway because the environment is fucked”.
The environmental left needs the warning not to engage in empty spirituality because so many people in it are desperate for the kind of meaning spirituality gives.
Of course cultural appropriation of spiritual indigenous narratives from westerners is something that has been happening for decades. And I totally see the point of your analysis.
In a way, what I was trying to say is that even tho this kinds of appropriations need to be fought so they don’t take over the political discourse about ecology, by itself this doesn’t seem enough imo. In order to fight the power imbalance that colonisers have created throughout the centuries, I believe there is also a need to consciously take into consideration, as well as incorporate the suggestions and approaches of indigenous people in the relevant discourses in western politics, ecology, and their intersections. Certainly, without the element of appropriation, but as as equals.