Description write a summary for the provided text. use PEER REVIEWED sources and they should be between 2025 and 2023 no earlier than that. "5.21 Mending Our Relationship with the Earth Robin Wall Kimmerer Where is the snow? It's December and forty degrees warmer than it should be. Glaciers melting, raging wildfires, towns shredded by epic tornados - grief is everywhere. The most I can hold at the moment lies in my hands: a fallen oriole's nest that was blown down from the bare winter branches in an unseasonable thunderstorm. This little pouch woven of roots and bark was a container for incipient birdsong and is now the container for my grief. My heart breaks at visions of climate refugees fleeing drought and floods, storms and starvation. The world is full of climate migrants - it's estimated that 30 million people in 2020 were displaced by the floods, droughts, wildfires and heatwaves that are increasing in frequency and intensity as a result of climate change. What about the bird people and the forest beings? What of their removal, their uncounted suffering? My orioles fly back and forth between northern New York and Central America. They are safe when they're here with me but traverse a broken landscape on their way to wintering grounds. Sixty per cent of all songbirds have been lost in my lifetime. The odds are against them returning this spring. This fallen nest, as every bird nest, beaver lodge, bear den and womb, is in the shape of a bowl. It's a sacred shape, the shape that nurtures life. My Anishinaabe people, as well as the Haudenosaunee people who are my neighbours, have adopted the bowl as the symbol for the nurture and provisioning of the land. We have agreements with one another, known as the One Bowl, One Spoon treaties. The land is understood as the Bowl, filled by Mother Earth with everything that we need. It is our responsibility to share it and keep that bowl full. How we take from the bowl is represented by the spoon. There's just one spoon, the same size for everyone, humans and more-than-humans alike. Not a tiny one for some and a gouging shovel for others. One of the oldest 'conservation policies' on the planet is a statement about sharing, about justice, about reciprocity with the gifts of the land. After a long winter I welcome every returning bird with delight, from the first raucous red-winged blackbirds to the crescendo of warblers, but none with more joy than my orioles. We greet each other with what feels like mutual joy when they announce their arrival; they with their clear song like musical sunshine and me with an open-arm twirl of love and relief at their safe return. They are loyal to one grandmother maple, where they have raised babies who have faithfully returned for decades now. They join me at dawn in the morning thanksgiving and at twilight as I put the tools away. Hoeing the corn or reading in the shade, my summer is made of oriole song and flittering glimpses of orange and black, like tiger lilies in flight. Did you know that, according to a recent study of human mental health, psychological well-being is strongly correlated with the presence of birdsong? Of course you did. The little 7-acre patch of land I care for is songbird paradise. With a combination of intention and benign neglect, the land and I have together fostered thickets, groves, flowery meadows and wetlands that call birds from the sky. My neighbours out here in farm country tend to uniform lawns, pastures, hay and cornfields. It's green and pastoral but designed for human economy. My shared-fence-line neighbour thinks I've ruined my pasture with thickets and brambles, but it's a choir of birdsong, toad song, frog song, bug song and a sparkling lightshow of fireflies in July. My neighbour and I have different definitions of wealth. The land is a sharp reflection of the worldview of the peoples who care for it, or don't. My orioles fly over hundreds of miles of land degraded by the outcomes of the western worldview, miles of pavements, mines, oil rigs, frack wells flaring methane, industrial sacrifice zones, urban sprawl. Many of the green places are monocrop agriculture - fields or forest plantations toxic with herbicides and nothing to eat. This, the worldview of human exceptionalism, understands land primarily as natural resources, property, capital and ecosystem services; this worldview is not One Bowl, One Spoon, but the land as a warehouse of commodities where the spoon is the property of just a few members of a single species. My beloved singers navigate this wasteland, looking for a place to rest. They must be as grateful as I for the patchwork of protected land, public and private, refuges, parks and forests. These intact places are ever more critical, not only for shelter for other species but for purifying air, sequestering carbon and making it rain. These are places, islands in a sea of loss, where the birdsong still rises and insects stitch together the fabric of the land, pawprints follow ancient trails, fish still guard the water as they were asked to do and where human people have not forgotten their gifts and their responsibilities. From a bird's-eye view they are full bowls of life, forest islands beckoning them to safety. If you look at a map of 'biodiversity hotspots', those places remaining on the planet where ecological integrity is intact, where species richness is highest - they overlap to a very high degree with hotspots of cultural diversity, with the homelands of Indigenous peoples. Estimates indicate that 80 per cent of the world's remaining biodiversity is sheltered in lands under the care of Indigenous peoples. A 2019 report from the United Nations found that biodiversity is declining perilously all over the planet, but the rates of loss are dramatically lower in areas under Indigenous control. After centuries of colonial land dispossession, genocide, forced assimilation and attempted erasure of the Indigenous worldview, the dominant society is now waking up to the understanding that what it once sought to exterminate is essential to survival today. My elders spoke of this time. Against all odds, they protected our knowledge, our philosophy, our sacred One Bowl, One Spoon worldview against the colonial onslaught, because, they said - with prophetic clarity - there would come a time when the whole world would need it. The humans, the waters and the orioles too. Many orioles spend the winter in the tropics of Mexico. The Yucatán Peninsula, housing the great Mayan Forest, is a vast biodiversity hotspot, where Indigenous land care nurtures the wellbeing of people and their more-than-human relatives. I'm told that orioles are beloved there as well, and people slice open oranges from their gardens to greet them, like delicate orange bowls of welcome. I fantasize that my orioles migrate from my little patch of Indigenous Potawatomi land care to a verdant patch stewarded by a Mayan family on the Yucatán Peninsula. Traditional Mayan communities use sophisticated practices of silviculture, working with the successional processes of the land - its cyclical developmental changes - to continually renew the forest. We grow corn, beans and squash for our families and forests and thickets and berry-rich hedgerows for the other species, because we recognize that the world does not belong to us, that we are all fed from the Bowl with One Spoon, human people, salamander people, tree people and oriole people. We are all related, woven together in webs of reciprocal connection, where what happens to one happens to all. I like to think that my orioles join the morning prayers of their Mayan family just as they join mine. But all around them, the forces of warehouse thinking, the worldview of human exceptionalism, threaten their homelands. Why are Indigenous homelands also biodiversity hotspots? At the superficial level of geography, it is undeniable that remnant tribal lands are often in remote places deemed inhospitable to the colonizing forces of development. These lands and peoples survive due to fierce defence by Indigenous land protectors, from the Arctic to the tropical rainforest. But the causes of the teeming species richness go far deeper than geography and governance. Biodiversity thrives in Indigenous homelands because of the land's response to traditional land care practices, which are grounded in Indigenous science or Traditional Ecological Knowledge. It is the way we keep the Bowl with One Spoon full. Such practices, which western conservation terms 'land management', are myriad; they represent locally evolved adaptive strategies which enhance biodiversity. Some of these practices are becoming well known to mainstream conservation, like the skilful application of prescribed fire, methods for carbon sequestration, intentional habitat creation, agroforestry. For centuries, such practices of Indigenous science were dismissed as unscientific and destructive. My ancestors could have been jailed for using their fire knowledge for the good of the land. Currently, western science is beginning to take off its colonial blinders and there are glimmers of understanding of the brilliance of Indigenous science. These carefully tended cultural landscapes offer western science a glimpse of how people and land can be a source of mutual thriving. They are libraries of ancient knowledge and every single one is threatened. Our work is clear. It's not enough to revere Indigenous wisdom. We have to fiercely defend land rights for Native peoples. It's not enough to uphold teachings like the Honourable Harvest as paragons of virtue and sustainability. Everyone must become a humble student and learn to live as if they were native to place, as if the Earth were One Bowl and One Spoon, to live as if the future were in our hands. Because it is. Indigenous homelands are the finger in the dyke holding back a flood of extinction. Yet only 10 per cent of those lands are legally protected with Indigenous title. And all are being encroached upon by corporate, private and governmental interests all over the world. This crisis demands that the world's governing bodies, nations and states prohibit any further loss of Indigenous homelands and strengthen protections. They must uphold the hard-won provisions of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ensure that climate mitigation practices do not displace Indigenous peoples from their homelands in a new, green colonialism. Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of climate warnings, have suffered disproportionate climate impacts and have created visionary approaches to climate justice, mitigation, and adaptation. Collectively, dominant society has a responsibility to elevate Indigenous voices in climate justice leadership. Climate action must prioritize nature-based solutions for mitigation, supporting the plants in doing what they do best: absorb carbon, store it away, regulate microclimates, cool the planet, generate oxygen, rebuild soil and make rain. The movements that call for protection of half the world's lands from development are essential for reducing climate impacts. However, Indigenous homelands show us clearly that people and nature can coexist and even promote mutual flourishing. It's not a matter of locking up 'nature' in one place and being granted permission to wreck it elsewhere. The call for land protection cannot be one of removing Indigenous and local people from land, but of harmonizing people and land, of aligning economies with the laws of nature. Let's remember that ecology and economy share the same root word, oikos, the Greek word for home. Our work is not just to protect the remnants of biodiversity but to restore them with a combination of the tools of environmental science and the philosophy and know-how of Indigenous knowledge. Restoration must also include restoration of an honourable relationship with land, of restoryation, the adoption of a new narrative for the relationship between people and place. One that asks not 'What more can we take from the Earth' but 'What does the Earth ask of us?' Meaningful climate action rests on many changes. We have to change tax structures, laws, policies, industries, governance, technologies, ethics, but at root the most important thing we have to change is ourselves. Transformation of worldview from Warehouse to Bowl is a spiritual change. David Suzuki has written that 'spirituality may be our chiefest adaptation - the means by which we touch the sacred, hold together against disintegration. The forms and varieties of spiritual belief and ritual among cultures on Earth may be another example of evolution's incredible, extravagant invention of ways for life to survive.' When I listen to that song from the orioles and all their feathered kinfolk, to me it sounds a wake-up call. I am heartened by how many have risen to a new consciousness and are giving heart and soul to the transformation we need. There are breathtaking examples of Indigenous and ally leadership in the protection of land and waters, of restoration and healing, in seeding old/new ideas into law through the application of Indigenous principles, from the UNDRIP to Rights of Nature. We have to celebrate it, even while acknowledging that it's not yet enough to stem the tide of climate disruption. Why is it not enough? Because even with alarms sounding everywhere, so many have not woken up. I've come to think that the sleepers are drugged with a powerfully addictive narcotic of material wealth and spiritual poverty. I almost can't blame them. If you wake to a world in which all that is asked of you is to be a good consumer and a passive bystander, wouldn't you put the blanket back over your head too? It is fear and powerlessness that keep people from awakening, intentionally produced by a worldview which understands Mother Earth to be nothing more than stuff to be consumed. Instead of living in a world blessed with a wealth of species richness, sacred water and living mountains, they live in a world of rapidly dwindling stuff. What is it that makes someone wake up, put their feet on the ground and get to work? For too long, fear has been that tool, and here we are, still floundering as the climate clock ticks. I don't think it's fear that we need. I'm often asked: where do you find hope in these dark times? I'm not sure I really know what we mean by hope. A source of optimism? Wishful thinking? Evidence of a turning towards life and away from destruction? I don't know about hope, but I do know about love. I think we are in this perilous moment because we have not loved the Earth enough, and it is love that will lead us to safety. I'm dreaming of a time when we are propelled not by fear of what is coming towards us, fearsome as it is, but by love for a beautiful vision of a world whole and healed. One of the great gifts of Indigenous environmental philosophy is that it provides that expansive vision of what it means to be a human: it is an invitation to be a member of the sacred web of life, to belong. As we join the oriole in singing thanks to the Earth, we can live in such a way that the Earth will be grateful for us. As I have travelled and listened, I have been deeply moved by the myriad manifestations of people's love for the land, by their deep longing for a different way of being which celebrates the joy of reciprocity, of giving back to the Earth in return for all we've been given. In my culture, a warrior is not someone who is motivated by fear or power, but someone called by love. Not the sentimental, pink-hearts kind of love, but the kind of love that makes sacrifices for the well-being of the other, who puts the beloveds ahead of themselves. Let us ask each other, what do you love too much to lose? For me, my acts of love for the land are teaching and writing and science and voting, raising good children, raising a garden and raising a ruckus when needed. This is how that love calls to me: I will do the big things and the small things, even though I don't know which is which. I will work for system change. I will write for cultural change. I will tend my patch of berry-full ground with science and with love, so that the One Bowl is filled, for my grandchildren and for the grandchildren of orioles. Listen. How does love call to you?" This is the paragraph. User generated content is uploaded by users for the purposes of learning and should be used following Studypool's honor code & terms of service.
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