Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
subconscious. This is real, this is profound and knowledge of it only becomes truly
meaningful if it is used to help the community.
To learn from this, people in the developed world will require a change of mindset,
including the desire and capacity to rethink, re-evaluate and challenge their long-
held and fundamental assumptions about the world, about the nature of intelligence,
about leadership and about themselves. As environmental educator Chet Bowers
(1995, 2003) says, unintelligent behaviour is really any action, way of thinking or
moral view that degrades the environment. We therefore need to think and understand
relationships in similar ways to that of many indigenous peoples, applying ecological
principles of interdependence, sustainability, ecological cycles, energy flows,
partnership, flexibility, diversity, complexity and co-evolution. We need to rethink
the mechanistic linear root metaphors we live by and recognize that the dominant
target-driven, goal-directed managerialism is neither realistic nor effective. It has
disconnected humanity from the source of its meaning and, if the process of sustainable
development needs leaders, then these leaders should perhaps best be perceived as
actors, as agents, as people with the wisdom to create and to conserve. As Swedish
management theorist Karl Erik Sveiby and Australian aboriginal artist Tex Skuthorpe
(2006) write in their book
Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World's
Oldest People
, the Aboriginal people of Australia have a sophisticated culture that
has enabled them to live sensitively with the rhythm and dynamics of the Earth for
40,000 years, and they have done so without leaders.
Or rather, they have done so by recognizing the value of respect for all of nature,
that knowledge is embedded in nature and the way we tread upon the Earth. It is
through the wisdom of the elders that a human social environment may be nurtured,
enabling consensus and the empowerment of all people through sharing. The elders
have no power as understood in the developed world, but they do have a responsibility
to empower by fostering participation, discussion, dialogue and agreement. Survival
requires balance. We need balance. Instead of looking ahead, we need to look around
us, for only by examining our environment and all our relations, our 'context', will
we be able to see what is to come. As Black Elk noted, if the buffalo disappears,
then the people do too:
Moving around the lodge in a sun-wise manner, the mysterious woman left, but
after walking a short distance she looked back towards the people and sat down.
When she rose the people were amazed to see that she had become a young red
and brown buffalo calf. Then this calf walked farther, lay down and rolled,
looking back at the people, and when she got up she was a white buffalo. Again
the white buffalo walked farther and rolled on the ground, becoming now a
black buffalo. This buffalo then walked farther away from the people, stopped
and, after bowing to each of the four quarters of the universe, disappeared over
the hill.
(Fixico, 2003: 58-9)
The moral lesson offered is that in studying and reflecting upon indigenous ways
of life, we must recognize that other, quite different, and probably better, ways of
understanding the world and the human condition are possible. We need to examine
our present situation at the most fundamental level, recognizing the harm we have
done to the planet and being determined to change our ways, if we are to have any
