This essay is exploratory, and I am writing it to bring some clarity and focus to my ideas and vision for this section. “The Return to Divine Stewardship” has presented some unlearning challenges for me. I created this section, originally, to present some of our responses to a growing awareness of our relationship, or lack thereof, with the Earth.
I begin by looking at the recent protests around the Dakota Pipeline, also known as #NoDAPL; these protests are serving to raise our awareness, hopefully, about our relationship with the Earth and Indigenous North Americans. In short, the protests are in response to a pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Illinois, crossing the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, a crossing that would include a part of Oahe Lake near the Standing Rock Indian reservation.
As a result of a massive gathering on the Standing Rock Reservation, our attention has been focused on the relationship between the United States government and the Indigenous of North America. Some of us are discovering, what the Indigenous have been voicing for more than 100 years, that broken treaties, continued land theft and containment of the Indigenous people is not history at all, but a continuation, although in a slightly different form, of settler colonialism, invasion, and forced assimilation. The assimilation that I speak of here is the assimilation of the dominant belief in separation. In this case, assimilation takes the form of corporate greed backed by state sanctioned military-force to divorce or permanently sever the relationship between Indigenous people and the Earth.
I’ve concluded that the return to Divine Stewardship may and often does intersect with long-standing social justice issues and glaring inequity. There is a clear connection, for example, between racism and environmental quality in communities of people of color. But upon closer examination, we will find that we are having few experiences that do not involve some egregious violation of the Earth’s sovereign right to live in peace and well-being.
There is the fashion industry, the industry that clothes us; it is the second largest polluter in the world. The same folks that brought us agent-orange are bringing us GMO’s. Agent-orange was used to conduct biological warfare in Vietnam. GMO’s are used, consciously or unconsciously, to conduct biological warfare at the dinner table, except for a few countries who have banned them. We now see that the so-called improvement in quality of life we believe we are experiencing due to advances in medicine is an illusion. The pharmaceutical industrial complex provides us with drugs to numb our separation anxiety from the Earth, animals, plants and each other. Simultaneously, the manufacturing of those drugs emit toxic chemicals into the air which makes us and all life on this planet sicker! These connections, in my mind, are what we must become aware as we return to Divine Stewardship.
Our separation belief and its effects of disconnection is mirrored in all of our dysfunctional relationships, and relationship-deterioration. When we are not conscious of our inter-relatedness, interconnection and intra-dependence, it is no surprise that as the environment deteriorates, we deteriorate as a collective; nor will it surprise us that as we heal the separation, so we heal ourselves and all of our relationships.
So this section will be devoted to the many ways that we are healing the separation in our relationship with the planet, from the burgeoning urban farming/permaculture movements to leading edge research by scientists such as the late Dr. Masaru Emoto and natural farming advocate Masanobu Fukuoka. Deep ecologists, environmental psychologists and activists, people like you and I are waking up and making a commitment to interrogating our relationship with the belief in separation. As a result of this questioning, we are co-creating and laying the blueprint for a new paradigm that views all relationships as “holy” and deserving of respect, compassion and Stewardship.
THE FOOD WE EAT, the food that nourishes us, is a gift from the earth, from the sun, from millions of years of evolution.
It is also a gift from the farmers, livestock herders, fisher folk, who till the land, care for animals, and harvest fish. When we forget the earth from where we receive our food, food becomes non-sustainable. Food is life.
~Vandana Shiva, from “Annadana: The Gift of Food,” in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, editor.
Bullard, Robert D., editor. Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. South End Press, Boston Massachusetts, 1993.
Emoto, Masaru, author and Thayne, David A., translator. The Hidden Messages in Water. Atria Books, 2011.
Korn, Larry. One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2015.
