Robaird O’Cearbhaill
Hong Kong Correspondent
The second title of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, is On Care for Our Common Home. As “St Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister….our sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us. Our sister now cries out because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use.” Laudato Si’ quotes Pope XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terris where he strove “to address every person living on the planet…to enter into a dialogue with all people about our common home.”
All people are needed to urgently prevent the environmental destruction of Earth, as one Pope after another has said in the past decades. Some societies who have ancient, precious, knowledge of ecologies have not been listened to enough: indigenous peoples who have cooperated beneficially with nature. Likewise ancient natural advice has been disregarded.
An article in the university’s ecology magazine, YaleEnvironment360, “Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning from Indigenous People,” shows how tried-and-true, constructive experience of their natural environments can provide reliable solutions to today’s pressing, risky, ecological problems. One striking example stands out about how to prevent devastating, huge fires linked to climate change. As in Australia, California and the Brazilian Amazon, largest ever fires have broken out in recent years, natives have known how to solve natural big fires for many centuries before colonization and Western ignorance took over their lands. In the Land Down Under, aboriginals’ used fire and fire breaks to prevent fires spreading too widely.
The article above reads: “Bill Gammage, an academic historian and fellow at the Humanities Research Center of the Australian National University, and his book, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How the Aborigines Made Australia, looks at the complex and adept way that aborigines, prior to colonization in 1789, managed the landscape with “fire and no fire” – something called “fire stick farming.”
“They used ‘cool’ fires to control everything from biodiversity to water supply to the abundance of wildlife and edible plants. Gammage noted five stages of the indigenous use of fire – first was to control wildfire fuel; second, to maintain diversity; third, to balance species; fourth, to ensure abundance; and five, to locate resources conveniently and predictably. The current regime, he says, is still struggling with number one.”
More on how the genius of the indigenous Australians successfully remade Australia and its ecology, and how the arrogant and ecologically ignorant colonizers destroyed that in Part 2. (Photo: Getty Images/Vox)
Follow
