Nature Fights Back

When I look back on last summer and hurricane season I wonder why it is that we keep experiencing natural disasters that have been unlike any that have come before.   However, it’s not just my own thoughts that got me thinking about the most recent devastation of the land and the current people that inhabit it.  One thing I am certain of is that industrialization is the reason why the Earth has begun to fight back.  We American’s are wasteful and overly greedy.  We always take, take, take and never give back.  Our technology gets better and better, but at what cost? We pay the price with damages to the Earth and soon these damages will not go unchecked. 

There have been recent green movements, but are they enough to rectify the damages that have been done?  How will we cope when there is nothing left? I shudder to think about the repercussions.

Some might argue that we are coming up on End Times and are being punished for our sins. This belief is right in one concept and one concept only.

 We are being punished for our sins. We are being punished for the sinful rape of mother Earth.
These are thoughts that have come to occupy my mind lately, and the more I see natural disasters the more I wonder how they could have been prevented. Yes I know there are factors beyond our control, but I like to think of life as the pebble effect.  You throw the pebble in the pond it creates a ripple that creates another ripple, until it gets so big it reaches the edge of the pond with nowhere to go. Sometimes it overspills the edges. 

Life is like that, and how we treat nature is the same way. These thoughts are not of my own making, and they have been influenced by a Native Response.  I came across a blog entry from a blog I have been following called Unsettling America—I found the blog when doing research for my Post-Colonial Theory class.  If you are interested in the act of decolonization—whether it be a person’s mind or a person’s environment—it’s a great place to start.

The essay that got me thinking about this issue of Nature fighting back is called “In the Eye of Issac” (Link to esssay) by T. MayT. Mayheart Dardar.  Dardar is a Houma Native from the Area of Louisiana. ( Let me remind you first that last summer we dealt with two major Hurricanes unlike any we have seen in the past decade—Sandy and Issac.)  His essay was a response to the latter hurricane Issac, Sandy had not yet hit us with her unnatural rage.  Dardar recounts as a young boy how his father taught him the lessons he needed to help sustain himself from the land—never taking more than was necessary (Dardar ¶2).   Dardar says that “All this [his father’s lessons] served to make real to me the basis of the Houma’s relationship to land and water, the very basis of my identity as Houma. It is the connection we have as a people to one another and to this homeland that feds us, cares for us, and has given birth to us that make us the people we are”( ¶3).   Through this passage one can infer that the Houma’s conveyed certain rhetoric when it came to understanding and living in harmony with the land.  The body was intricately linked to land, and then water, and community was established through these relations.  It didn’t matter what Houma tribe one belonged to, you were human and connected simply through your relationship with the Earth.  Your humanness was determined by nature.  Rhetorics of living in harmony with the Earth!

Read the Essay I think what Dardar has to say is beautiful, and he speaks eloquently on the rhetorics of decolonization and the Earth.

I want to leave you with a little documentary about the Houmas and who they are and the issues they deal with when sustaining their own culture.  But what I want to do most is make you revaluate your own position in terms of the Earth that sustains you.  Will you let capitalistic practices ruin the only thing that gives you life?

 

 

Decolonize your mind, Decolonize the environment, Decolonize Nature.