Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Aboriginal peoples from their land, their history, their religion and their beliefs, and
therefore from themselves. However, in this process of development, the modernizers
themselves lost their own sense of connectedness, value and belonging. Environmental
philosopher Jim Cheney (1989) argues that Aboriginal peoples use language and
knowledge to bind the individual and community together by virtue of their roots
being deeply embedded in a sense of place (Westerners should learn from this). Social
relationships are reproduced through stories that reside in the land, in the geography
of particular bioregions, but which in some (urban) areas are likely to be further
dislocated and marred by political power and the physical manifestations of class,
gender and race. Individual human and community identity, understanding and health
will consequently require continual recontextualizing to achieve, or retrieve, a
bioregional grounding. For Cheney, nature needs to speak to us, a complex set of
images and myths of the human-land community needs to instruct us, and only when
the necessary model of individual and community health has been fashioned will
peoples in the 'developed' societies be able to acquire the images needed to mediate
relationships with one another and to the land. A cultural language needs to grow
out of and articulate this experience so that both human action and nature are jointly
responsible for constructing the world, constructing the reality of bioregional, local
and authentic selves and communities. It is this dual process that will produce genuine
knowledge, 'the result of deep and continuous communication between humans and
the more-than-human world of which they are citizens' (Hester and Cheney, 2001:
325). Western science simply offers a monologue and a knowledge based on
epistemologies of domination and control. Writing about the belief systems of Native
Americans, Vine Deloria, Jr et al . suggest, disarmingly:
It is difficult to understand why Western peoples believe they are so clever. Any
damn fool can treat a living thing as if it were a machine and establish conditions
under which it is required to perform certain functions - all that is required is
a sufficient application of brute force. The result of brute force is slavery.
(1999: 13)
Native peoples in the Amazon have seen their bioregions, communities and selves
destroyed by logging and global capitalism. The virtual genocide of Native Americans
in the US and the attempted cultural annihilation of First Nation Peoples in Canada
enable common stories to be told that resonate throughout the world. The lack of
respect, perhaps due to fear, has led to inequalities and those inequities persisting
well into the twenty-first century. A damning report on the health of Aboriginal
peoples in Australia and New Zealand presented to the World Health Organization
in 2007 revealed one small instance of unequal or unsustainable development and
the reason why the wisdom of the elders should be retrieved (Marks, 2007). Some
facts, then, which show that, compared with white Australians, the health of many
Aborigines is appalling: there is a significant incidence of leprosy, rheumatic heart
disease and tuberculosis among the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders; these
peoples have a life expectancy seventeen years less than other Australians; and the
average life expectancy for Aboriginal men in some parts of New South Wales is
just 33. John Pilger's 2013 documentary Utopia , powerfully and graphically condemns
the racism that Pilger believes has characterized white Australia's treatment of its
native peoples. Black Australians have hardly benefited from the economic boom
 
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