Heloise and Abelard: The Power of Love

FOR THOSE OF YOU CONCERNED WITH THE FATE OF THE EARTH:

THE PARABLE OF THE PLEISTOCENE

We're not the first people to be rocked by climate change. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era, a major climate shift resulted in glacial melt, human migration, and large mammal die back. In one case, that shift caused people to rethink their relationship to nature, in another, it made them determined to control it. 

If you've hung around Canada and Alaska, you'll know the story they tell up there, about the day long ago when the animals upped and went away. Hard times followed. Whole families starved. Things fell apart.

A group of elders gathered, and asked one another what had gone wrong. One said, "Ask the animals."

From their hidden place, the animals answered. "You took us for granted. You hunted us without mercy. You did not treat our bodies with respect. So we left you."

"Will you ever come back?"

"If you promise to do as we say. If you promise to hold ceremonies every year for us. If you treat us with love and respect, we will come back to feed you."

And thus was born what we know today as The Native Way. The Native people were not always lovers of Nature. Once they were as arrogant as we, a nation, they say, of sorcerers. But they learned. As they became not users, but partners of the land and its rivers, springs, grasslands, and trees, its eagles, ravens, spiders, and salmon and even, sometimes, Coyote, they found they could not live in any other way.

When the Europeans crossed the sea, bearing discontent and ideas about progress, the Natives knew that discontent was no progress at all.

Those people, too, had experienced the animals leaving, but they did not respond in the same way. They did not see collapse as an opportunity to learn. They reacted with fear and anger, and instead of renewing their relationship to the waters, the plants and the animals, they began to domesticate and control them. And thus a great suspicion of Nature began.

"Cursed is the ground because of you," God said in response.

How are we to reconcile the genius of our  minds with the wisdom of the earth?