From Crisis to Cosmos

From crisis to cosmos: could a shift in our values save the planet?
Guest Post by Maria Fernanda Gebara, author of forestless

Frog Medicine

The roots of our ecological crisis can be found in the economic, political and social realities of modern industrial society, its organization of labour and methods of production. To turn things around, a total rethink of the traditional Western values that caused this crisis may be held to be the necessary response to fundamentally shift our attitudes towards the natural environment.

Some argue that the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis1. Spirituality is a category of growing salience for many Westerners. While its genealogy remains complex and usage fluid, it has come to mean something specific, referring to what may be known, as ‘new age’ or ‘spiritual era’. Certainly, indigenous spirituality offers a valuable perspective from which to question and rethink traditional Western values. Indigenous narratives emerge from low-lying islands, the tropics and subtropics, where environmental vulnerabilities are acute. Those inhabiting these ecosystems are on the front lines of environmental change, despite often being invisible to the international community. The ways in which such communities navigate environmental change are often shaped by understandings of the ‘other-than-human’ world; understandings that, if not always recognized as spiritual, can certainly be described as cosmological or theological2.

Around the world, indigenous peoples’ movements are protesting against how they, and their sacred landscapes, are impacted by imposed environmental change, normally originating from Western neoliberal policies. In Brazil, the president Bolsonaro’s government is being seen as the essence of a barbarism that for 519 years attempted to exterminate indigenous peoples from their lands. One million of the country’s 209 million inhabitants are indigenous, living on lands that occupy 13.3% of the country’s territory, mostly in the Amazon forest. Indigenous lands remain the forest’s main protective barrier. Last year, deforestation in the Amazon increased by almost 14% on the previous year, the highest rate in ten years. Yet the president, feeling legitimized by polls, attacked native peoples with policies that threaten their lives and rights. According to British NGO Global Witness, Brazil is already the most dangerous country for activists and environmental defenders: in 2017, 57 indigenous leaders, community activists and environmentalists were murdered for protecting the forest and traditional culture from threats like mining and agribusiness. Land conflicts have now increased and will likely get worse.

In a world where artificial intelligence, biogenetics, and very powerful interests are at play, learning to think critically through different ethical models and value systems is timely. We know we depend on our natural environment, that we have the power to destabilize it, thereby threatening our own species. Yet few of us are sensitive to our moral or ethical environment – the surrounding ideas we absorb around how to live. It is this that determines our beliefs; what we find acceptable or unacceptable, what we feel is due to us or from us, and how we relate to others and nature. It shapes our very identities, predispositions, roles and the reciprocal interactions between human beings and their social and natural environments; ultimately, determining our personal and planetary wellbeing. At stake here is not simply whether a tradition supports action on environmental change, but how a tradition’s ideas and values are mobilized to interpret the relations and responsibilities of a particular context. Such ideas and values establish our possibilities for environmental politics; although not always mapping neatly into distinct political positions, they help us interpret which policies seem more or less responsible.

Tata Shaman

In the past, religion was used to delineate “primitive” from advanced cultures, and thereby legitimate colonialism. It is sometimes still used in the postcolonial period to marginalize indigenous ecological knowledges (as sacred but not scientific) or treat relations with a landscape as individual spiritual experiences and, therefore, in the secular imagination, as inessential to political governance and portable across geography3. Many environmental thinkers consider the extension of sociability to non-human domains and persons as central to indigenous cosmologies, creating a moral field based on mutual obligations and respectful relationships4. Others, such as Sessions5, maintain that the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition – and its human mastery over an inanimate nature – represses the ecologically sustainable cosmographies of indigenous peoples. Some political scientists have suggested that the environmental antipathy of some American Evangelicals is tied up with “end times beliefs”6 .

With such reflexivity in view, scholars have begun to anticipate how contemporary environmental change may be stimulating religious and spiritual changes, and how this may affect human participation in ecosystems. Indigenous cultures implicitly locate human beings in larger social, as well as physical, environments. People belong not only to a human community, but to a community of all nature. Existence in this larger society, just as existence in a family and tribal context, places people in an environment in which reciprocal responsibilities and mutual obligations are taken for granted and assumed without question or reflection.

Yawanawa Festival

Spirituality, often experienced in and through relationship with nature, allows us to talk more broadly about such existence, and acknowledge what is strangely invisible, but necessary, if we want to rethink and shape our values. This may rest upon a renewal of humans’ connection to the natural world, one that can drive inward change within the human spirit. Such change, according to Pope Francis, is required to hear “both the cry of the earth and … of the poor”7. It is time to question old certainties, current ideologies and practices, seek intellectual justification for beliefs and practices, and discover new ways to align individual and planetary wellbeing with traditional values, so Western societies can be steered towards more sustainable lifestyles. As Powys Whyte observes, many indigenous peoples are already living their ancestors’ worst fears; with climate change, they must live through yet another period of settler-imposed environmental dislocation8. Finally, according to Danowski and Viveiros des Castros9, if “the Anthropocene is the Apocalypse” then, “indigenous people have something to teach us when it comes to apocalypses…for the native people of the Americas, the end of the world already happened – five centuries ago.”

For more content from Maria Fernanda Gebara, please visit her blog at forestless.

Cited Sources:

1. Vaughan-Lee L. 2013. Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. California: The Golden Sufi Center.

2. Jenkins et al. 2018. Religious and Climate Change. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43:9.1–9.24.

3. Weaver J. 2015. Misfit messengers: Indigenous religious traditions and climate change. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83(2):320–35.
Howe N. 2016. Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Tsotie R. 2013. Climate change and indigenous peoples: Comparative models of sovereignty. Tulane Environmental Law Review 26(2):239–58.

4. Kimmerer R. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Escobar A. 2016. Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South.
Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11 (1): 11-32.

5. Sessions G. 1995. Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications.

6.Barker D and Bearce D. 2013. End-times theology, the shadow of the future, and public resistance to addressing global climate change. Political Research Quarterly 66(2):267–79.

7.Francis I. 2015. Laudato Si—On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican City: Vatican Publications. 49.

8. Whyte K. 2017. Our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation in the Anthropocene. In: Heise, J Christensen and Niemann M (eds.) Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, 206–15. London: Routledge

9. Danowski D and Viveiros des Castros E. 2016. The Ends of the World. Translated by Nunes RG. Malden, MA: Polity. 104.

Book Review: What is Environmental History? by J. Donald Hughes
LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS
Rose Deller
January 22nd, 2016

In the second edition of What is Environmental History?, J. Donald Hughes outlines the development of the study of the relationship between humans and nature across time. In tracing the emergence of the field, Hughes’s work underscores the extent to which environmental history is a necessarily interdisciplinary endeavour covering a wide geographic scope. Paulo Rui Anciaes positions this as a text to be approached as a concise reference work to supplement environmental history research.

What is Environmental History?. 2nd Edition. J. Donald Hughes. Polity. 2015.

The question that What is Environmental History? asks is answered in its first sentence: environmental history is the study of the mutual relationships of humans and nature through time. More specifically, it delves into three main themes: how the environment shapes human history; how attitudes towards the environment influence human actions; and how these actions bring about environmental changes.

It sounds like a very broad field, and it is. In a sense, this is the broadest of all history sub-disciplines; after all, the natural environment provides the context for all human events. On the other hand, environmental history can be regarded simply as an interdisciplinary methodology. J. Donald Hughes points out that when discussing the implications of their work, geographers often become in effect environmental historians (5), and that many of the finest environmental histories were written by non-historians, including geographers, philosophers, anthropologists and biologists (102).

The structure of the book is the same as the first edition, published ten years ago. The first chapters define the discipline and give an overview of early contributions. The central part of the book describes recent developments around the world. The final section discusses global problems, future directions for the field and methodological issues. The contents have been updated in this edition, which now includes a section on the Middle East and North Africa.

While environmental history is one of the newest scholarly endeavours, having begun in the late twentieth century, the questions asked have attracted interest since the time of the Ancient Greeks and Chinese, who wrote about problems such as deforestation. The study of the relationship between humans and the environment since those times is useful for understanding problems that only appeared in the last half-century. This point is not developed in detail, but interested readers can search for more information in the author’s extensive accounts of environmental history in ancient civilisations.

The geographic scope of the works reviewed in this book is also wide. Once again, the author knows what he is writing about, being a founding member of the American, European and South Asian Environmental History societies. Refreshingly, there is information about countries that are often ignored in academic reviews because their output is in a language different from the author’s own. However, because of this breadth, the text is at times reduced to a tedious listing of authors, books, institutions, societies, journals and conferences, especially in the European section, where it almost becomes a ‘who’s who’ of environmental history rather than a review of theories and methods.

A striking example of humans’ ability to make a living in a hostile environment, the Pico vineyards have been vulnerable to cycles of prosperity and failure, transforming the island’s economic and social structure since the fifteenth century (Paulo Rui Anciaes)

There is also a disproportionate emphasis on developments in the USA, which have their own separate chapter, whilst the rest of the world shares an all-encompassing chapter titled ‘Local, Regional, and National Environmental Histories’. The author mentions in several places that the field of environmental history emerged in the USA, but also admits that this aspect has perhaps been overemphasised by some of its practitioners. He quotes Richard Grove, who observes that analyses by US environmental historians tend to be narrow in terms of the geographic scope of the sources of information used and topics studied (50).

Despite the growing number of environmental historians in many countries, disparities in levels of participation in the field are transparent from the names and institutions mentioned throughout the book. For example, studies in countries that are ex-colonies tend to be conducted in many cases by researchers from, or locals based in, the ex-metropolis. Judging from the bibliography at the end of the book, there also seems to be a gender bias in the field, as only a small proportion of the authors are women.

The need to consider environmental problems in a global context is also evident in the ‘Next Issues’ section, as the majority of the issues described are global, including population growth, energy and resources, biodiversity, biotechnology and oceans. Environmental history could, in fact, be the study of world history, although it could also fall into the trap of not being able to say anything in general about the world that is true of its diversity. The author suggests that it is probably better to focus on a particular topic or historical period but, like other scholars, he has also attempted (and successfully managed) to write a book covering environmental history from the prehistoric to the contemporary age (Hughes, 2009).

The book not only reviews the evolution of human behaviour towards the environment, but also the evolution of environmental thought across time. This review is solid in the pre-twentieth-century chapter but patchy in the others. The object of analysis is not very clear: is this a review of ideas about the environment or a review of books containing those ideas? There are also a few gaps. The histories of Deep Ecology and Marxist Ecology, documented by David Pepper in 1996, are not updated in this book. There is only one paragraph about the environmental justice movement, which does not mention developments outside of the USA. On the plus side, the author does not fail to notice that environmental ideas have in several instances come dangerously close to racial prejudice, even in the writings of renowned historians such as Lucien Febvre (33).

Environmental historians have always been suspect for promoting an environmentalist point of view, which, according to John McNeill, is particularly true in India and Latin America. But this is not necessarily a problem, if it is based on their ‘understanding of history [and] in the light of ethics’ (103). The author himself is mostly neutral, and it is not until page 99 that his personal views are heard when discussing the meaning of ‘development’ in history books. While others see environmental history as being theory-poor, the author notes that its practitioners occupy the whole spectrum between environmental determinism and cultural determinism. The only criticism that he finds harder to rebut is the tendency for the field to produce ‘declensionist narratives’: that is, accounts of progressive environmental degradation as a result of human action.

Overall, the book is a short, concise and accessible introduction to the field, synthesising topics that can be explored in more detail in the author’s other books or in the works of McNeill. The book is especially useful as reference material, as one third of its two hundred pages are bibliography, although the references could have been better organised if they were in a single place; currently they appear twice, in the Notes and in the Bibliography sections.

Paulo Rui Anciaes is a researcher at the Centre for Transport Studies, University College London. He completed his PhD at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. Paulo blogs about Community Severance and Alternative Environmentalism and contributes to the UCL Street Mobility project blog.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.

Early Canadian Environmental History Series: Introduction & Essential Reading


Sean Kheraj and Denis McKim

Welcome to a series on early Canadian environmental history, jointly hosted by Borealia and The Otter ~ La Loutre, the blog of The Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE).

This joint series provides environmental historians of Canada the opportunity to reflect upon the state of so-called “pre-Confederation” history in the field. As was evident from the discussion at a panel on the subject of pre-Confederation Canadian history at the 2015 annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, the field has not vanished. It goes by other names and it no longer focuses on the framework of the nation-state. Many historians of Indigenous peoples of North America, for instance, focus on chronologies that pre-date 1867. Historians of the Atlantic World examine aspects of what might have once been called “pre-Confederation Canadian history,” but now fall within a transnational framework.

Environmental historians of Canada often examine the deep past, but do not necessarily adopt pre- and post-Confederation as a rubric for periodization. Instead, environmental history spans broad periods of time marked by different kinds of transitions:
pre-industrial/industrial
organic energy regime/mineral energy regime
conservation movement/environmental movement
age of miasmas/bacteriological revolution/new ecology
pedestrian era/equestrian era/ automobile era
holocene/anthropocene

The field of pre-Confederation environmental history is varied and vibrant, as the essays featured in the NiCHE-Borealia collaboration demonstrate. Anya Zilberstein’s contribution, “Jamaican Maroons in Nova Scotia: The Politics of Climate and Race,” will appear on May 18th. It discusses the experiences of the Maroons, ex-slaves who were expelled from Jamaica and migrated to Nova Scotia in the 1790s. Zilbertstein reveals that while certain figures welcomed them – John Wentworth, the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor, felt the Maroons could accelerate Nova Scotia’s sluggish growth – other figures objected to their migration due, in large part, to the belief that peoples of African descent were ill equipped to thrive amid northern environmental circumstances.

Appearing on May 20th, Jason Hall’s essay, “The Environmental and Cultural History of the St. John River,” is a distillation of his doctoral dissertation on the relationships among three groups of people – the Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik), the French, and the British – and one of northeastern North America’s principal bodies of water from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Among other things, Hall’s essay highlights similarities and differences between the groups’ interactions with the river, and concludes with a heartening message for readers interested in securing its long-term conservation.

Colin M. Coates’s essay will appear on May 23rd. Entitled “Who Was the King of the Beasts in New France?,” it examines a “natural history” of New France written in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit priest, Louis Nicolas, and dedicated to Louis XIV. Given the dedication, readers may not be surprised to learn that Nicolas’s work devoted considerable attention to North American species that were thought to possess majestic characteristics. Yet readers might be surprised by at least one of the species that supposedly displayed such traits … although they will need to read Coates’s essay to find out what the species was! Additionally, as Coates shows, the species included in Nicolas’s natural history and the way in which they are described arguably tell us as much about the work’s author and its audience as they do about the species themselves.

On May 25th, the series will conclude with a dialogue between all three authors – Zilberstein, Hall, and Coates – who will have the opportunity to reflect on their own and each other’s scholarship, and comment on the varied, vibrant field to which they have contributed.

Scholarship on early North America is critical for understanding Canadian environmental history. These are a few of the primary works in early North American environmental history that stand out as essential readings for Canadian historians (please add further suggestions below):
Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

This is, in fact, a global history of European imperialism, but one that is fundamental to understanding the environmental history of Canada. Canada is one of Crosby’s so-called Neo-Europes or “Lands of demographic takeover,” the places where Europeans, their plants, their animals, and their microbes thrived at the expense of Indigenous peoples and other indigenous organisms. As Liza Piper and John Sandlos argue, however, Subarctic and Arctic Canada do not entirely fit within Crosby’s framework. Nevertheless, ecological imperialism is a powerful explanatory framework for understanding European colonial expansion and therefore essential for understanding societies, such as Canada, that were born from colonialism. [1]
Binnema, Theodore. Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.

Spanning an enormous geographic area that straddles what would become the international border between Canada and the United States, this expansive history of the Northwestern Plains traces numerous transformations of this region: environmental, economic, political, diplomatic, technological. Binnema explores the history of the plains looking from the continent outward rather than from the coasts inward. In doing so, he situates Indigenous peoples at the centre of this narrative and shows the ways in which their histories intersected with European colonial expansion, but were not necessarily dominated by the interests of Europeans.
Coates, Colin M. The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.

Much like Jason Hall’s article in this series, Coates’s book traces landscape change over time in a single place as different human communities engaged with the natural environment. In this case, the settling is two seigneuries, one along the Batiscan River and the other along the Sainte-Anne River. The book follows changes in the landscape over the course of changes in human regimes: Aboriginal, French, English. It confronts both material transformations to the environment and the evolution of human perceptions of nature.
Hackett, Paul. “A Very Remarkable Sickness”: Epidemics in the Petit Nord, 1670-1846. Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2002.

Building upon Crosby’s analysis of the role of microbes in European colonial expansion, Hackett’s research provides a precise examination of the spread and impact of European diseases on Indigenous North Americans from the late decades of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. This book is not only significant for Canadian environmental history, but it is critical for understanding Canadian history more broadly. “Given its impact on the Aboriginal population and the fur trade,” writes Hackett, “the smallpox epidemic of 1779-1783 can arguably be called one of the most significant events in pre-confederation, western Canadian history.” (pg. 94)
Forkey, Neil. Shaping the Upper Canadian Frontier: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003.

Here we have another case study that examines environmental change in a single place over the course of a long period of time with a focus on the impact of European colonization and the displacement of Indigenous people. Forkey chronicles the environmental history of the Trent Valley from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Sharing common themes from William Cronon’s groundbreaking work Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, this book similarly seeks to explain how European imperialism transformed North American environments. [2] Forkey sees the Trent Valley as “a microcosm for much wider human and environmental changes that were occurring throughout North America as the transplantation of European peoples sparked new relationships between humans and the new environments that they encounters.” (pgs. 1-2)
Trigger, Bruce G. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976.

While this book was not written as environmental history, it is of tremendous importance for understanding the environmental history of Canada. Trigger’s history of the Wendat (Huron) confederacy has recently been updated by the work of Kathryn Magee Labelle, but its detailed evidence concerning the impact of introduced diseases on the subsequent breakdown of the confederacy is a critical component of the environmental history of European imperial expansion into what would subsequently become southern Ontario. [3]
Harris, R. C. The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada Before Confederation. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009.

Written by one of the leading historical geographers of Canada, The Reluctant Land is a broad, synthetic work suitable as a textbook for specialized courses in early Canadian environmental history but also a critical overview of historical transformations in space and environment in northern North America. This lengthy analysis focuses mainly on the period after the arrival of Europeans with an interest in how European colonists settled the land and transformed the environment. Harris concludes with observations of patterns in European settlement. He articulates some of this argument in a provocative and insightful 2010 article in Canadian Historical Review that is also worth reading. [4]

This reading list is, of course, not exhaustive. It is, however, indicative of the breadth of scholarship in early Canadian environmental history. Certainly much of the scholarship in Canadian environmental history focuses on the modern period or “post-Confederation” but there is a strong early modern field and there is much more to be explored. We hope this series shows some of the possibilities.

[Editor’s note: As this is a jointly-hosted series, some of the conversation about this post is taking place in the comments at The Otter ~ La Loutre. There you will find an important comment by Sean Kheraj on gender and authorship, and some additional titles on environmental history written by women.]

Sean Kheraj is an associate professor of Canadian and environmental history in the Department of History at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He is also director and editor-in-chief of the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) where he hosts and produces Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast.

Denis McKim teaches Canadian and American history at Douglas College, BC. His research explores the intellectual, political, and religious history of British North America. He is also a founding co-editor, with Keith Grant, of Borealia.



[1] Piper, Liza and John Sandlos. “A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North.” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 759–95.

[2] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

[3] Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed but not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth Century Wendat People (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013).

[4] R. Cole Harris, “The Spaces of Early Canada.” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (December 2010): 725–59.

Featured image: “Head of the Lake, Lake Ontario,” Elizabeth Simcoe, 1796. Archives of Ontario.

DIVINE WOMEN IN SANTERIA: HEALING WITH A GENDERED SELF
By
ELIZABETH TRACY
A Thesis submitted to the
Department of Religion
In partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester 2005 
https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:176047/datastream/PDF/view

ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the formation of gender identity through the presence of female
deities and related mythology. Using the theory developed by Luce Irigaray in “Divine
Women”, it proposes that women need a religious mythology that includes complex
females in order to create a whole self and to build a healthy society. In order to
demonstrate an example of this theory, the paper examines the way that divine women
are created in the stories of Santeria as well as how through ritual, female (and male)
practitioners gain a better sense of self; they are able to become divine women through
their human characteristics, are able to heal through an enhanced intimacy with the
deities and through a deeper connection to their selves, their bodies and their
environment

An Environmental History of Canada - UBC Press

https://www.ubcpress.ca › asset

 PDF

by LS MacDowell - ‎Cited by 57 - ‎Related articles

Canadian environmental history was perhaps sparked by Ramsay Cook's comment in 1990 that early Canadian historians such as W.L. Morton and Arthur Lower 

UBC PRESS SAMPLE WITH INTRODUCTION, CHAPTER I 

Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Canadian Environmental History

   January 22, 2015    on Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Canadian Environmental History

“Dynamic Serenity” by Andrew E. Larsen

By  Sean Kheraj

Canadian environmental history is a burgeoning sub-field of Canadian history, but it is not very well known outside of academia. This is my own research speciality. On many occasions, I have had to answer the question: what is environmental history? Periodically, this is a question that environmental historians ask themselves. There have been several reflective articles about Canadian environmental history, including a recently published forum in Canadian Historical Review, edited by Alan MacEachern. You can actually read MacEachern’s full introduction to that forum here.

In short, environmental history is the historical study of the changing relationships between people and the rest of nature. It is an alternative way of thinking about the past that can offer new insights into understanding Canadian history. To help illustrate this point, I thought I would share five open-access journal articles that reveal things about Canadian environmental history that you might not have known about.

1. In 1815, the Tambora volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia erupted and spewed a global “dust veil” into the atmosphere, causing a sudden cooling of the Earth’s climate. The following year, this resulted in what was known as the “year without a summer” in colonial New Brunswick. Both agriculture and forestry were affected as farmers in the British North American colony struggled with hunger and economic insecurity caused by the global cooling.

Source: Piper, Liza. “Backward Seasons and Remarkable Cold: the Weather over Long Reach,
New Brunswick, 1812-1821″ Acadiensis 34, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 31-55.

2. Between 1890 and 1920, the development of Banff National Park in Alberta resulted in the exclusion of the Nakoda First Nation from its traditional hunting and resource-gathering territories. The federal government and the Parks Branch sought to exclude the Nakoda from the park in the interests of game conservation, tourism, sport hunting, and Aboriginal assimilation policies.

Source: Binnema, Ted and Melanie Niemi. “‘Let the line be drawn now’: Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada” Environmental History 11, no. 4 (October 2006): 724-750.

3. One of the biggest challenges for early twentieth-century prairie farmers in Manitoba was not a lack of water but an abundance. Drainage was central to the establishment of agriculture in southern Manitoba, an area best characterized as a “wet prairie.”

Source: Stunden Bower, Shannon. “Watersheds: Conceptualizing Manitoba’s Drained Landscape, 1895–1950” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (October 2007): 796-819.

4. Before the re-development of it sewage infrastructure, Vancouver’s English Bay was often closed to public swimming due to sewage contamination.

Source: Keeling, Arn. “Sink or Swim: Water Pollution and Environmental Politics in Vancouver, 1889-1975” BC Studies No. 142/143 (Summer/Autumn 2004): 69-104.

5. During the Second World War, the federal government implemented energy conservation programs targeted mainly at female consumers in an effort to control Canadian energy use. The purpose, however, was not to reduce the overall consumption of energy in the country but to divert energy resources away from ordinary consumers toward industrial manufacturing for wartime purposes.

Source: Evenden, Matthew. “Lights Out: Conserving Electricity for War in the Canadian City, 1939-1945” Urban History Review 34, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 88-99

Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor of Canadian and environmental History at York University. He is the co-editor of http://niche-canada.org and producer of Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast.

  Orisha Journeys: the Role of Travel in the Birth of Yorùbá-Atlantic Religions
Peter F. Cohen

Archives de sciences sociales des religions117 | janvier - mars 2002
Les religions afro-américaines : genèse etdéveloppement dans la modernité

Electronic versionURL: http://journals.openedition.org/assr/2474 

DOI: 10.4000/assr.2474ISSN: 1777-5825PublisherÉditions de l’EHESSPrin


EXCERPT 

1830 the «Yorùbá» did not exist. Or put less dramatically, the peoples no
known by that name considered themselves neither a political nor a cultural unity;
but identified with the city-states into which the region was organized. Yet by
1895, a British-educated Christian Yorùbá intellectual could confidently state: “It is
beyond doubt that the Egbas, Ketus, Oyos, with their subdivisions etc., are of one
stock; their manners and customs agree; what is held sacred in one town is held
sacred by all of them without exception” 4.

The concept of a single “Yorùbá” people and its baptism with the Hausa term
for the inhabitants of Òyó was largely the work of liberated captives and their 
children returning from Sierra Leone, particularly as Protestant missionaries. 

The terms by which the descendants of Yorùbá-speakers are known today in the New World –
“Nagô” in Brazil, “Nago” in Haiti and Jamaica, “Lucumí” in Cuba, “Akú” in Sierra
Leone, and “Yorùbá” in Trinidad – emerged as meaningful categories in the con-
text of enslavement and exile 5. The “Yorùbá” can in this sense be seen as a product
of displacement and dispersion. 6

The emergence of Orisha religious traditions in several distinct localities
around the Atlantic basin is correlated with similar and interrelated historical 
processes involving people from a particular region of Africa. Enough work has now
been done on the local level to justify an attempt at synthesizing of the various 
histories and an exploration of their similarities and differences, as well as of their
 historical interrelationships.

Such a synthetic approach has precedents. Verger’s (1968) monumental history
of the «flux and reflux» between Bahia and the Bight of Benin, presented under the
sponsorship of Braudel, was the first study to give a sense of the richness and
complexity of cultural interaction between the “Old” and “New” sides of what
Thompson (1968) would term the “Black Atlantic World”. Thornton’s (1992)
definition of an “Afro-Atlantic” region along Braudelian lines identifies an emergent
“Afro-Atlantic culture”. Matory’s more specific formulation of a «Yorùbá-Atlantic
complex» emphasizes the dialogue between the historically “coeval” Yoruba

 

 

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation

Karl Jacoby
University of California Press, Feb. 23, 2001 - History - 324 pages
Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=1EWkFMBuMiwC&dq=Karl+Jacoby%E2%80%99s+seminal+Crimes+against+Nature

Moral Ecologies

Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance

Editors: Griffin, Carl, Jones, Roy, Robertson, Iain (Eds.)

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030061111

Extends the concept of “moral ecology” developed by Karl Jacoby to case studies across Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas

Examines how conservation efforts dispossess local populations, particularly poor Indigenous peoples and settlers

Features an afterword by Karl Jacoby

This book offers the first systematic study of how elite conservation schemes and policies define once customary and vernacular forms of managing common resources as banditry—and how the ‘bandits’ fight back. Drawing inspiration from Karl Jacoby’s seminal Crimes against Nature, this book takes Jacoby’s moral ecology and extends the concept beyond the founding of American national parks. From eighteenth-century Europe, through settler colonialism in Africa, Australia and the Americas, to postcolonial Asia and Australia, Moral Ecologies takes a global stance and a deep temporal perspective, examining how the language and practices of conservation often dispossess Indigenous peoples and settlers, and how those groups resist in everyday ways. Drawing together archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers and historians, this is a methodologically diverse and conceptually innovative study that will appeal to anyone interested in the politics of conservation, protest and environmental history.

WORLD ASH WONDER TREE
Life Cycle, Tu Bishvat, the environment …and the contested phosphate quarry near Arad


Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin
January, 2019

The below article was first published in Jpost Magazine

Tu Bishvat is mentioned in the Mishna as Rosh Hashanah L’Ilan, the New Year of the Tree. It gained in popularity when the 16th-century Kabbalists in Safed began to hold a Seder Tu Bishvat and eat up to 30 types of fruits, while the Zionists in the 20th century began to plant trees on Tu Bishvat.

In more recent years, it has become a day when Jews throughout the world learn about the environment and sustainability.

Therefore, as we approach Tu Bishvat, it is worth informing the Israeli public about a major ongoing environmental issue that has slipped under the radar, and what Jewish law has to say on the subject.

What are the facts?

Since 2004, the Rotem Amfert Negev company has wanted to open a phosphate quarry at Sde Brir near Arad. It is 3.5 km. Southwest of Arad (population 27,000), right next to the 2,500 Bedouin of Al-Fura’a, and 3 km. From the Bedouin town of Kuseifa (population 10,000). Sde Brir contains 65 million tons of phosphate, which is enough to be mined for 35 years.

In that same year, 5,800 residents of Arad signed a petition against this quarry. The mayor of Arad then commissioned a telephone poll of Arad, which determined that 88% of the residents opposed the quarry. In May 2005, the Arad City Council decided unanimously to oppose the quarry. Even so, in 2007 Rotem Amfert Negev renewed its request to open the quarry. Despite all of the opposition to the plan, it was approved by the housing cabinet in January 2018.

Most of the residents of Arad object to this quarry for the following reasons:
According to an official letter of the district engineer from February 2008, quoting a health impact study of two public health experts, exposure to dust and radon will lead to an increase of 4.25% in the general mortality rate in Arad, which means seven more people will die every year. An unknown number of people will also contract lung cancer as a result of exposure to radon gas. It is clear that the effect will be even greater on the Bedouin who live in Al-Fura’a and Kuseifa.
The residents do not trust the Environmental Protection Ministry to have the power to stop Rotem Amfert Negev, if need be, in light of failure to do so in similar cases around the country.
Arad has a reputation for clean air. This open quarry will ruin the air and destroy Arad’s tourism industry for generations.
If this quarry is opened, 2,500 Bedouin will need to be expelled from Al-Fura’a.
This quarry is unnecessary. The area of Mount Nishpe in the Arava, which is far from any city, has 320 million tons of phosphates, according to a report of the Geological Institute. It might cost more to mine, but that pales in comparison to opening a quarry near Arad, which would kill people, cause cancer, destroy Arad as a center of tourism and expel 2,500 people from their homes. In any case, Rotem Amfert Negev would not lose money, since the break-even price for phosphates is $40 per ton, while the current price is $92 per ton.

Finally, on February 8, 2018, an unusual demonstration took place at the entrance to Arad – 3,000 haredim, secular Jews and Bedouin demonstrated together with Deputy Health Minister Litzman against the plan to dig the mine. Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his capacity as health minister, has submitted an appeal against the decision.

What does the Jewish law have to say about this issue?

The Tosefta, edited in Israel 1,800 years ago, ruled (Bava Batra 1:10) that “large furnaces must be built at least 50 amot [25 meters] from the city.” This law was codified by Rabbeinu Asher in 14th-century Spain (Bava Batra, chap. 2, parag. 25); by his son Rabbeinu Ya’acov ben Asher in the Tur (Hoshen Mishpat 155) and by the Shulhan Aruch in the 16th century (Hoshen Mishpat 155:23). Indeed, there was an ancient rabbinic enactment not to build furnaces in Jerusalem in the Second Temple period (Bava Kamma 82b). The Talmud explained (ibid.), “because of kutra (smoke).” Rabbi Reuven Bulka interpreted this passage in modern terms: “This is because the pollutants which are emitted by furnaces harm the inhabitants of the city, who need to breathe fresh air.” Therefore, digging an open-air quarry in close proximity to 40,000 people is forbidden because it pollutes the air.

Such a quarry is also forbidden according to the halachic principle of “geirei dilei (his arrows).” In other words, it is forbidden for a person to stand in his domain and to shoot arrows elsewhere claiming that he did not intend to cause damage (Bava Batra 22b; Maimonides, Laws of Neighbors 10:5-6).

Maimonides ruled (ibid. 11:1, cf. Hoshen Mishpat 155:34): “A person who made a threshing floor on his own property or established a latrine or a type of labor that makes dust and dirt and the like, must distance the [source of pollution] so that the dirt or smell of the latrine or the dust should not reach another person, so that it should not harm him. Even if the wind [was responsible for bringing the dust or the smell in the direction of another person, the polluter] is required to distance [the source of pollution] so that they should not reach [other people] and cause damage…. For all these are like a person who damages by shooting his arrows.” If this was true for a private laborer in Talmudic times, how much the more so is it true for a phosphate quarry, which would pollute three towns with dangerous, life-threatening air pollution. As the Tosafists said (Bava Kamma 23a): “From this we can derive that a person should be more careful not to harm others than not to be harmed by others.”

Finally, what happens if Reuven built a furnace or other source of pollution near Shimon and Shimon did not protest – can Shimon protest a few years after the pollution began?

The classic reply is found in Bava Batra (23a): “Rav Nahman said in the name of Rabba bar Abuha: There is no ḥazaka for damages. Rav Mari said: The reference is to smoke. Rav Zvid said: The reference is to the bad smell from latrines.” “Ḥazaka” means the acquisition of a right by a person causing damage to continue causing that damage in the future, because no one has protested. This Talmudic passage said that if Reuven produced smoke pollution or a bad smell for three years and Shimon did not protest, there is still no ḥazaka, and Shimon can protest at any time.

A good example of the application of this law is found in the Responsa of Rabbi Abraham son of Maimonides (No 101). Reuven complained that Shimon was ruining his life because he had built a cloth-dyeing pit and built a fire and caused smoke in Reuven’s direction. Shimon replied: I bought the house and turned it into a dye shop 15 years before you bought your house, so I have a ḥazaka to run my dye shop. Rabbi Abraham ruled: “About smoke and the like, the rabbis said that there is no hazaka for these damages…. Reuven’s argument is therefore upheld and Shimon must do away with this damage.”

In conclusion, digging a huge phosphate quarry near three towns inhabited by 40,000 people is absolutely forbidden by Jewish law before the fact and can also be stopped after the fact. I hope and pray that Netanyahu, Litzman and other Israeli leaders will succeed in stopping this dangerous and unnecessary project.

The  Orisha   Changó   and   Other  African   Deities   In  Cuban  Drama 
Robert  Lima 
LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW 1990
https://core.ac.uk/reader/235876410

 The   body   of   Cuban   drama   contains   many   accretions   from   African   sources.  Among the most  important  of these is the presence  of ancient  deities  from the Yoruba pantheon, a vast hierarchy of spiritual entities termed  Orishas  who  range   from   the  aloof  Maker   (variously  Olofi,  Olorum,  Olodumare),  through  the  hermaphroditic  creative  force  (Obatalá)  and  the  Mother  of  the  gods  (Yemayá),  to  those  associated  with  specific  aspects  of  Nature  (Changó,  for  one).1  These are the traditional  deities still worshipped  in what  is present-day  Nigeria  and  its  environs.    Many  of  the  Orishas  figure  prominently  in  modern  Cuban  life  and  are  manifest  in  the  drama  of  the  Caribbean  island  because  they  have  had  a  long  history  there.  Religio-mythological  beliefs  from  many  sectors  of  Africa  came  to  the  "New  World"  between   1517  and   1873  with  the   enslaved   peoples   of   the   continent.   These  cultural  elements  survived  the  shock  of  transplantation  and  the subsequent break  in continuity, first through the preservation  of the deeply-rooted  indigenous  oral  tradition  by the  slaves themselves,  and,  in  due  course,  through the  adoption  of written  expression  for  lyrical and narrative  literature,  old  and  new,  both  by  educated  slaves  or  freemen  and  white  folklorists.   All   kinds  of African  and Afro-Cuban  folklore  came to the fore  in the process  and,  having been  collected  in written  form,  survived  alongside  Hispanic  traditions.  Despite  the  adversities  suffered  by  the  Africans  through  their  diaspora  and  the  oppressiveness  of  those  who  enslaved  them,  particularly  in  regard  to  their  religious practices, their  culture persevered.  Today, many  of the  creative  works  of  the  Caribbean  basin  and  Brazil  are  founded  on  African  traditions  extant  in  the  Americas,  if  often  in  syncretic  form.2  Nowhere is this more  evident than in Cuba.  The  island nation's  literature  is  replete  with  plays,  poems,  stories,  and  novels  whose  focus  is  Afro-Cuban,  that  is, whose  themes  and  motifs  manifest  how  integral  to  Cuban  life  is  the  religio-mythological  system  of  belief  brought  to  the  island  by  the  Yoruba-Lucumi peoples  of western Africa,  as well as by those from  the Gulf  of Guinea