- Joined
- May 30, 2002
- Messages
- 374
Originally posted by munk
Yvsa, I gave up the idea most indians have an insight into the 'balance'. Perhaps I need to meet different indians. I find some people have the idea of balance, an intuition, or if it pleases some of you, a scientific approach, that finds this. Some people have this.
Many many more do not. Lots pay lip service. It is sold in movies and books. It kinda reminds me of what my dear old ma used to say, "there have always been real human beings."
respectfully,
munk
I second Munk in on that one.
I have done a course in animal terrestrial geography and I learned there that the extinction of the ancient megafauna (mammoths and sabre toothed cats and so on) was caused partly by people living in "harmony with nature". The extinction of the megafauna happened both in Eurasia and America.
The same thing happened on isolated tropical islands where so called indigneous people arrived on the scene as the first human beings there.
I remember a list of something like at least 10-15 communities of indigneous people all over the world (and one of them were North American Indians) living in "harmony with nature" who had to abandon their settlements because they stripped the land of vegetation, over used the water resources and hunted out all the prey. And this was before White men came to the scene introducing their technology and foreign species.
But from my very personal point of view, the myth that indigneous people lived in harmony with nature can indeed bear a truth. It seems some of them did indeed develop a mythology that praised the their ecosystem, and some species were even protected from hunting by religious taboos. So what I see this as is that some individuals in those tribes were wise, they understood. It must have been the shamans, and perhaps their subconsciousness understood these things and told them in their trances and visions that the bear was their brother to not kill, or the brother bever or whatever. And further from the reading I have done it seems that there was some times a conflict between the shamans and their people and taboos would be broken.
I dare say we are just the same today as 10 000 years ago. We are still tribal. So I draw a parallell from that society into society of today. Today we have our shamans, in the form of scientists who tell people how this world was created and how we must live to protect it. And I see the same problems as in tribal times, people don't listen and we strip the hillsides of vegetation, we kill brother endangered species into extinction. Society is still pretty tribal to me, it is just on a bigger scale and has increased complexity in societal structure.
The reason why ancient indigenous people have managed to live in "harmony with nature" many places was that they extinguished some native species on their first arrival. And those remaining were fit enough in a Darwinian sense to survive the primitive technologies of indigenous societies. So we are still the same fools today, only with much more devastating technologies and an improvement in medicine so that we get this population explotion that we have today.
Ok, my 0,2 cents.