GM Watch
  • Main Menu
    • Home
    • News
      • Newsletter subscription
      • Daily Digest
      • News Reviews
      • News Languages
    • Articles
      • GM Myth Makers
      • GM Reports
      • GM Quotes
      • GM Myths
      • Non-GM successes
      • GM Firms
        • Monsanto: a history
        • Monsanto: resources
        • Bayer: a history
        • Bayer: resources
    • Videos
      • Latest Videos
      • Must see videos
      • Cornell videos
      • Agriculture videos
      • Labeling videos
      • Animals videos
      • Corporations videos
      • Corporate takeover videos
      • Contamination videos
      • Latin America videos
      • India videos
      • Asia videos
      • Food safety videos
      • Songs videos
      • Protests videos
      • Biofuel myths videos
      • Index of GM crops and foods
      • Index of speakers
      • Health Effects
    • Contact
    • About
    • Links
    • Donations
    • How donations will help us
News and comment on genetically modified foods and their associated pesticides    
  • News
    • Latest News
    • Newsletter subscription
    • News Reviews
    • News Languages
      • Notícias em Português
      • Nieuws in het Nederlands
      • Nachrichten in Deutsch
    • Archive
      • 2021 articles
      • 2020 articles
      • 2019 articles
      • 2018 articles
      • 2017 articles
      • 2016 articles
      • 2015 articles
      • 2014 articles
      • 2013 articles
      • 2012 articles
      • 2011 articles
      • 2010 articles
      • 2009 articles
      • 2008 articles
      • 2007 articles
      • 2006 articles
      • 2005 articles
      • 2004 articles
      • 2003 articles
      • 2002 articles
      • 2001 articles
      • 2000 articles
  • Articles
    • GM Myth Makers
    • GM Reports
    • How donations will help us
    • GM Quotes
    • GM Myths
    • Non-GM successes
    • GM Firms
      • Monsanto: a history
      • Monsanto: resources
      • Bayer: a history
      • Bayer: resources
  • Videos
    • Index of speakers
    • Glyphosate Videos
    • Latest Videos
    • Must see videos
    • Health Effects
    • Cornell videos
    • Agriculture videos
    • Labeling videos
    • Animals videos
    • Corporations videos
    • Corporate takeover videos
    • Contamination videos
    • Latin America videos
    • India videos
    • Asia videos
    • Food safety videos
    • Songs videos
    • Protests videos
    • Biofuel myths videos
    • Index of GM crops and foods
  • Contact
  • About
  • Donations

LATEST NEWS

  • Japan's first genome-edited food, a tomato, gets green light for distribution

  • New report shows EFSA systematically ignores risks of GM crops and foods

  • Brexit voters reject lower food standards

  • Victory in fight against deregulation of GMOs in Italy

  • France has not backed deregulation of gene-edited crops

GMWatch Facebook cornfield banner

SCIENCE SUPPORTS REGULATION OF GENE EDITING

Plant tissue cultures

GENE EDITING: UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES AND RISKS

Damaged DNA on fire

GENE-EDITED CROPS & FOODS

Help stop the new threat

LATEST VIDEOS

  • Seed keepers and truth tellers: From the frontlines of GM agriculture
  • Myths and Truths of Gene-Edited Foods
  • Dangers of gene-edited foods

News Menu

  • Latest News
  • News Reviews
  • Archive
  • Languages

Please support GMWatch

Donations

You can donate via Paypal or credit/debit card.

Some of you have opted to give a regular donation. This is greatly appreciated as it helps place us on a more stable financial basis. Thank you for your support!

Coronavirus shows we must change how we live or face self-destruction

Details
Published: 02 April 2020
Twitter

Indigenous knowledge has a lot to teach us about global pandemics

EXCERPT: Indigenous societies... are based on worldviews where human needs are balanced with the needs of other life forms. This worldview inherently acknowledges the constraints of an ecosystem, the essence of sustainability. When the integrity of an ecosystem is guarded, the integrity and very existence of human communities are guarded as well. In a philosophical system that respects other life forms as relatives, an ethic of respect, responsibility and reciprocity automatically follows, mediated by reverence. This is the opposite of the vulgar, endless extraction of resources for short-term economic gain.
---

Coronavirus shows we must change how we live or face self-destruction

Dina Gilio-Whitaker
High Country News, March 31, 2020
https://www.hcn.org/articles/covid19-coronavirus-shows-we-must-change-how-we-live-or-face-self-destruction?ct=t(RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN)

* Indigenous knowledge has a lot to teach us about global pandemics

By now, it’s clear the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most serious collective events most of us alive today have ever faced. The spread of the virus has been a massive wake-up call for humankind, and not just in a scientific, logistical or even personal sense. It has also shown us that the way we live on the planet is fatally out of balance. We should think of COVID-19 as a warning.

We must change the way we inhabit the planet, or otherwise face self-destruction caused by our own negligence, if not by the pandemic then by environmental destruction (or both). The changes we need to make are not just economic and scientific; they are philosophical and practical, and they concern the things we value. We need to seriously re-examine and revise the philosophical frameworks that undergird modern society. Indigenous peoples who have lived sustainably in the same territories for thousands of years have important knowledge systems that can productively intervene in the destructive social structures currently orchestrating our downfall. But first, societies need to listen.

The world as we know it — shaped by centuries of technological advancement, aggressive migration and colossal population growth — is the result of particular beliefs about how humans should live on the earth. Perhaps most recognizable to us would be the belief that the earth’s resources are there for unrestrained human taking. So deep-seated is this view that entire populations of Indigenous peoples were considered expendable by way of germs and warfare in order to give way to more “advanced” societies who would use the land “properly”. As Indigenous peoples, we know all about foreign diseases.

A 2015 white paper produced by the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission, which gave birth to the budding field of planetary health, concluded that not only do failures at the governmental and implementation level contribute to many of our current problems, so too do failures of imagination and knowledge, including the over-reliance on economics as a measure of human progress. Altogether, these reveal that societies based primarily on a utilitarian and extractive orientation are based on a worldview that has gone horribly wrong.

Mushrooming social movements and a huge body of academic literature have for decades criticized unquestioned, unlimited capitalist economic growth, including its impacts on planetary health — the study of the ways commercial development affects the environment and its consequences to human health. Recent media stories, for instance, have highlighted the ways zoonotic diseases and pathogens cross from animals to humans, unleashing hellish illnesses as a result of our unending exploitation of the natural world. Ebola, SARS, MERS, Lyme disease, the ever-mutating avian influenza viruses, and our most recent coronavirus, COVID-19, are perfect examples.

Indigenous societies, on the other hand, are based on worldviews where human needs are balanced with the needs of other life forms. This worldview inherently acknowledges the constraints of an ecosystem, the essence of sustainability. When the integrity of an ecosystem is guarded, the integrity and very existence of human communities are guarded as well. In a philosophical system that respects other life forms as relatives, an ethic of respect, responsibility and reciprocity automatically follows, mediated by reverence. This is the opposite of the vulgar, endless extraction of resources for short-term economic gain.

Just as scientists are finally waking up to the ways Indigenous knowledge can inform climate science, so planetary health scientists should also look to Indigenous knowledge to fill in the gaps of the failures of imagination, knowledge and implementation.

As Indigenous peoples, we have always understood that ecocide — the killing of an ecosystem — is commensurate with genocide. In the U.S., this socially acceptable form of genocide continues in the way our lands and resources are still targeted for toxic development, as the Dakota Access Pipeline and countless other fossil fuel projects make clear. Now, coronavirus shows that the entire human race faces the ramifications of ecocide and biodiversity loss. But applying Indigenous thought patterns today presents a challenge.

Indigenous knowledge involves the application of particular knowledge in particular contexts. It is not universal like universalist religious and capitalist value systems. Before Indigenous knowledge can be incorporated into research and policy toolboxes, powerful entities will need to learn how to partner with local Indigenous communities in ways that are respectful, equitable and non-extractive.

It might, at first, sound like lunacy: Expecting societies to begin valuing the knowledge of the peoples they have systematically been trying to eradicate for centuries. I am not naïve about that. But as a teacher and an “almost elder”, it is not the older generation I place my faith in. Instead, I look to the youth. Historically, it has always been the younger generations who fought the hardest for change. With their futures at stake, now will be no different. It is up to us as elders to help lay a transformative philosophical foundation for them. And the sooner the better, because as scientists tell us, this will not be the last — or the worst —pandemic we are likely to see.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos, and an independent educator and consultant on Indigenous environmental justice policy. She is the author of As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Indigenous Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock (Beacon Press, 2019).

Menu

Home

News

News Archive

News Reviews

Videos

Articles

GM Myth Makers

GM Reports

GM Myths

GM Quotes

How Donations Will Help Us

Contacts

Contact Us

About

Facebook

Twitter

RSS

Content 1999 - 2021 GMWatch.
Web Development By SCS Web Design