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Chapter 9 ecological evidence of large-scale silviculture by california indians Lee Klinger The previous chapter raises some serious questions. If we are not necessarily by our Indigenous nature a warring people, or if most of the original people of the Americas managed to live in relative peace, then why are we led to believe the opposite through literature, film, the academy, and popular discourse? Is it because we then are more likely to acquiesce to the existence of wars, trusting our leaders to decide which ones are for liberty or democratic ideals? If such a design exists, then indeed cultural/educational hegemony is operating. Whether we are learning false histories about Indigenous People; or that Columbus was a hero; or not learning that true heroes like Helen Keller or Martin Luther King Jr. were avid antiwar activists, we tend to use this “knowledge” in ways that cause a blind form of common sense to support the policies of those in power. The current Iraq war may be a classic example of the ultimate effect. In this chapter we are reminded that there is another war that profits those in power and also seems to benefit from a false history of Indigenous People and their ways of seeing the world. I refer to a war against the natural systems of the planet. For example, during just the first few years of George W. Bush’s administration, hundreds of environmental protections were dissolved and some of the worst corporate polluters were placed in key environmental protection positions.1 In supporting the claim that pre-contact Indigenous People devastated their natural environment, we are left to again trust that because of technology and American leadership, we have no reason to question the dominant worldview . Yet how difficult is it to see the corporate/government profit motive behind such hegemony? Robert Whelan expresses the dominant view in his book Wild in Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage: “The opposition of native wisdom to market forces is as familiar as it is wrong. Thus, in the cases where native peoples did practice sustainable use of resources it was because they had developed the institutions of private property and the market, often as a result of contact with white settlers.”2 In this chapter, Dr. Klinger gives us one of many examples revealing that the Indigenous perspective is in line with preserving our Earth for future lee klinger 1 5 4 generations. (Note: Although he refers to the distant past, there are also many examples of how Indigenous People today are working against great odds to stop the corporate, military, and government policies that are unnecessarily killing life on this planet, such as the Duwamish River Cleanup project, whose goal is to fix one of the most toxic sites in the nation in Seattle and King County.) LUMINOUS Project Director Dr. Lee Klinger has worked in the fields of ecology, complexity, and Gaia for more than twenty years and is recognized as one of the world’s leading scholars in earth systems science. His recent work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences has helped to expand human consciousness through revelations about the profound ecological wisdom of Indigenous People. His studies have taken him to all the major ecosystems of the earth, from arctic Alaska to central Africa, where the key stories of Gaia’s metabolism are told. Dr. Klinger also helped to found the Gaia Society (now a part of the Geological Society of London) and served for several years as its Vice-Chair. He has held scholarly appointments at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Colorado, the University of Oxford, and the University of East London. He is currently a Senior Visiting Scholar with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and serves on the Graduate Faculty of Eco-psychology at Naropa University. The fieldwork here was supported, in part, by the Institute of Noetic Sciences and by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. *** The Earth does not belong to us. We belong to the Earth. —chief seattle The native trees of California are famous for being among the oldest, largest, and tallest creatures in the world. Besides their great age and size, these trees possess various idiosyncrasies in their arrangements and shapes that are revealed in ecological surveys. Indeed, some characteristics, such as the extremely narrow and disjunct distribution of the giant Sequoia groves, appear to defy basic principles of population biology. When taken together, the...

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