Thursday, July 12, 2012

Guardians of Mother Earth

"Native Americans’ drive to protect the earth is of course steeped in history. Alfredo Acosta Figueroa, now 77 and a descendant of the Chemehuevi Tribe, recalled in a phone interview a 113-day peaceful occupation he led to protest The Ward Valley Nuclear Waste Dump, leading to the government’s 1998 decision to abandon its plans for radioactive waste disposal.


“We were placed here on Earth to be the guardians of Mother Earth,” he said.

Many Native Americans revere the inter-connectedness of the natural world. You can’t take action in one part of the environment and have no repercussions elsewhere, says Bob Gough, a descendant of the Lenape Tribe in Canada who is secretary of the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, a non-profit representing 15 tribes in the Upper Great Plain states. “We are all related,” so “you behave differently” and treat resources as part of a big family, he said..."


Native Americans and a Changing Climate | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media

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