When American aid worker-turned essayist William Powers went to Bolivia, he found the Chiquitano indigenous people didn’t share our concept of “the environment.” How could a people living in one of the most pristine tropical forests in the world fail to grasp this?
To us, the environment stands in contrast with the manmade, built world. There are homes and offices, roads and bridges, cars, trucks, warehouses — all manmade — and then there’s “the environment.”
And for anyone raised here, that requires no explanation. The environment encompasses our air, water, soil, and living things from the tiniest microbes to the largest blue whale. The environment is made by nature, not people.
For many people in other countries, there’s no such contrast. Everything needed for life — food, building materials, cordage, thatching, and even toys and musical instruments — come directly from nature. They would no sooner destroy “the environment” than an American would bulldoze her local grocery store or drive his car into a lake.
For them, an abstract concept of an environment distinct from the manmade world makes no sense.
When I first began traveling to far-flung places like the Amazon, the intimate knowledge the locals possessed about how to use everything around them struck me. Here in America, I go hiking all the time, yet I could not even name any of the plants I walked past, let alone find any use for them.
On the shore of Lake Titicaca, I got sick from my malaria medicine one morning. My host, an Aymara man, grabbed a local plant and promptly made me a cup of tea with it. In western Kenya, the friends I stayed with were busy gathering materials to thatch their new house, which they were making from wood and mud.
If nature provided such incredible bounty all over the world, I thought, perhaps the environment in my home did so too. And, it turns out, it does.
To find out, I asked the best experts I could think of: Native Americans. With their guidance, I learned that the scrubby vegetation of arid California provides for food, medicine, basketry, and more.
In truth, everything in our lives comes from “the environment” too — only our system is set up to obscure that fact. Look at the items around you. Your computer, your clothes, the carpet on the floor, the paint on your walls — where are they from? And if there was an environmental catastrophe, would you still have them?
Despite the occasional hiccups to the market, like the looming Velveeta Shortage of 2014, we’re pretty well equipped to get what we want, when we want it. If a hurricane takes out the banana crop in one country, we’ll get our bananas from somewhere else.
Have you ever seen an ingredient label list something like “soybean oil or canola oil or sunflower oil”? You don’t even know which one was used to make your tortilla chips, but the chips taste the same anyway.
If soybean prices go up, then the manufacturer uses a different oil instead. As the consumer, you’re none the wiser.
But somehow, somewhere, everything in our lives comes from nature, including Velveeta. Despite all appearances to the contrary, we’re hardly different from the Amazonians or rural Kenyans, who live so close to nature that they instantly feel the impact of one dry season or one flood.
We’d do well to realize that there is no such thing as “the environment” as a separate and distinct realm. We live in it and we owe everything in our lives to it. If we squander it, we’ll feel the impact sooner or later — and it won’t be pretty.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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