I was now reminding the production of our… Trash. To simplify it, our debris. Two indigenous thinkers separated by time, one in 1860, 1865, and another at the end of the 20th century.
The first was that text attributed to a speech of Chief Seattle when the government in Washington sent an emissary to go with a troop of soldiers to tell the Suquamish people to leave the Pacific coast because they were going to occupy that territory, and Chief Seattle asked the general, a military. The general approached the chief by saying, "We came to buy your land, the chief of Washington said to come and buy your land. " And he said, “No, we cannot sell this land.
"We do not have ownership over this land, "and even when you die, you will be buried here. What pretension of yours is that to own this land? ” Continuing the exhortation to the general, he told him, “Certainly, you will take this place, "and your children will occupy it.
"Teach your children to tread softly upon the Earth. "If you keep the same pace as you are following, "you will produce so much debris "that, in time, you will succumb, "die under this debris. You will die under your vomit, under your debris.
" That was in 1865. At the end of the 20th century, our dear friend Davi Yanomami, in his conversations with Bruce Albert, said that the world, the white world, the West, the culture of technological men, humans with technology are filling the Earth with trash. I met Davi Kopenawa for the first time in '85, and he asked me something.
I went to visit him in the forest and he asked me, “Is it true that the white people are many? ” So I wondered how to answer my friend's question because I know that, for the Yanomami, "many" is anything more than seven, eight, or ten. Many.
Things that you can count on the fingers of one hand are already many. I couldn't mislead him into thinking that humans were merely the number of fingers on a hand or something like it. But I didn't want to terrify him either.
I couldn't let him be mistaken about this, so I said, "Look… The white people are as many as the stars in the sky, "the sand on beaches, on streams, on rivers. They are as many as that. " He was very scared.
Then he asked me, “What do they eat? ” I said, “Look… They eat everything. “They eat trees.
They eat stones. "They eat rivers. They eat everything.
All of it. They eat this whole forest of yours. " He was even more terrified.
Then he asked, "And where do they shit? " I said, "They shit on the world. " So I enjoyed listening to both Fabio and Dorion saying that active organisms produce other sorts of matter, other materials.
In the case of our unbridled humanity on the planet, I am sometimes careful not to mention this observation on the demographic explosion on the planet because, mainly in the 20th century, this kind of observation was considered reactionary, elitist, that only some had the right to reproduce and others had to stay like that priest in the elevator. The one that metabolizes but doesn't reproduce. The story he told about the elevator.
The production of new matters in the environments, without purpose was an observation of the questions Davi Yanomami asked me, which to this day guide my observations about the immense population we are on the planet, one that produces debris everywhere, enough to bury us. As a community, we have been producing more than we are able to observe. If when we were born the planet's population was half than it is today, that is scandalous.
With the idea of progress, the Green Revolution, and all of the medical apparatus, pharmaceuticals, to extend life, the experience of living might be much more motivated by a fear of not knowing what living is or what comes after living than a creative experience in dialogue with other living beings. As if we were the only organisms with the expectation of continuing to exist and the others we eat, like trees, for example. For the Yanomami shamans, the idea of humankind eating forests is such a monstrous idea that relates to an event in a narrative about the origin of the world, which is: When humans, out of curiosity, pierced the Earth and awoke from within the body of the Earth a transformation of stable matters inside the Earth, once outside those became poison.
There is a Yanomami word that is <i>Xawara</i>. <i>Xawara</i> is an unbalance that, beyond ecological unbalance, is one of the energy fields in all terms. And the shamans work the whole time with an image of suspending the sky, precisely so that the excessive heat of our movement won't burn the chest of the sky.
I find that image to be very educational because the sky having the sensibility to be affected by the heat we produce here, piercing the sky, is an observation common in several narratives. Chief Seattle warned the American general. And we keep warning our neighbors about the work that the forest does in regenerating, recycling the organism of the Earth.
It sounds like a naive animist observation. "Oh, there's no problem. Take the forest.
We'll cool this later somehow. " This idea is that technology can always answer our next question. Relativizing the capacity of technologies to provide an answer to everything should be a possibility for us, considering that the greatest part of development in terms of humans having experienced supported by technology, advancing technology, produced very much heat and very much trash on the planet.
We will have to handle that. There's no way to pass it on to space. Perhaps, some of us may even make that incredible journey to other planets, but most likely, we will not be able to take the trash we made with us.
Unlike a walk in the park where they would tell you to take your trash, on this trip here, you can't take the trash. It's an issue, "a stone in the pathway," as Drmmond would say.
