Environmentalists From The United States

"I pledge myself to raise my voice, raise my vote, raise every ounce of strength I have to keep up our struggle and to continue it all-demand that votes get counted, struggle for a set of systems that work, and work to protect Mother Earth."

"George W Bush is definitely the worse of two evils, to use the vernacular of the Green Party. Few of us thought it possible for him to be in office today, and we are still stunned."

"What I want to do is to rebuild the hemp industry in Indian country. And I want us at the table, not on the menu. I want us to be in the leadership of this next economy, because we have a lot of territory upon which you can grow hemp. And we can rebuild the light manufacturing industry in this country."

"We have a lot of teachings and language about how a people can live a thousand years in the same place and not destroy things. The phrase anishinaabe akiing, for example, means the land to which the people belong. It’s not the same thing as private property or even common property. It has to do with a relationship that a people has to a place—a relationship that reaffirms the sacredness of that place…"

"And in our covenant with the Creator, we understand that it is not about managing their behavior—it’s about managing ours, because we’re the ones who cause extinction of species. We’re the youngest species, and we don’t necessarily have the most smarts. We’ve bungled up along the way, and we acknowledge these mistakes in our stories and in our history as Indian people. The question is whether you have the humility and the commitment to get some learning out of these experiences."

""Akiing" is the word for land in our language, and in the indigenous concept of land ownership or the Anishinaabeg concept of land ownership, it is much more a concept that we belong to that land than the land belongs to us."

"The first 100 days of the Bush Administration have been an unbelievable nightmare."

"I spend a lot of time fighting with county commissioners because they look at my reservation and refer to it as timber resources; I call it a forest. It's a very different way of thinking. I do not look out there and see timber resources; I see a forest. That does not mean that I'm opposed to logging. It does mean that I'm opposed to lazy logging, which is what I call clear-cutting. You can selectively cut in a beautiful manner, and leave a forest standing."

"Just because the coal exists, do they have to strip mine it? Just because the water flows, does that mean they have to dam it? Just because the trees are there, does that mean they have to cut them? At what point do we restrain ourselves in this society so that something is left because it has value on its own?"

"Sometimes when you ask people to consume less, to not use it and toss it, there's this puzzled look like, "That sounds painful. That sounds like I'm not going to really get what I want, and I have a right to it." That's what we have to deconstruct."

"Forests are worth more standing than cut."

"There should be beauty in "process," whether it is harvesting with intelligence, whether it is the use of recycled materials, or whether it is observing energy efficiency."

"There was a view at that time which is, to a great extent, maintained today: that only those Christian nations had rights to the land. That only those who were in the folds of the church and were in the folds of Christ had rights to the land, and the rest of the vast majority of the world, who were not Christians, did not have rights to land on par with those who were Christians. That is why the church became a "handmaiden to colonialism.""

"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air, water, and land. Contaminating the commons must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as defacing private property is wrong. On that basis, the Seventh Generation Amendment to the Constitution of the United States declares, "The right of citizens of the U.S. to enjoy and use air, water, sunlight, and other renewable resources determined by the Congress to be common property shall not be impaired, nor shall such use impair their availability for use by the future generations.""

"I always greet people in my language because I believe that cultural diversity is as beautiful as biodiversity, and that is reflected in language."

"I am fully aware of how little an American education teaches you about Native people."

"There is, in many Indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change. Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be."

"In the final analysis, the survival of Native America is fundamentally about the collective survival of all human beings. The question of who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people who live on it-those with the money or those who pray on the land-is a question that is alive throughout society."

"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares its intent to be to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves, and our posterity." In reality, U.S. laws have been transformed by corporate interests to cater to elite interests in society."

"While I was introduced as an activist, I consider myself more a concerned parent. To be a mother in this day and age, you have to be concerned with a wide array of issues."

"The challenge at the cusp of the millennium is to transform human laws to match natural laws, not vice versa. And to correspondingly transform wasteful production and voracious consumption. America and industrial society must move from a society based on conquest to one steeped in the practice of survival. In order to do that, we must close the circle. The linear nature of industrial production itself, in which labor and technology turn natural wealth into consumer products and wastes, must be transformed into a cyclical system."

"the poverty of dispossession is almost overwhelming. So is the poverty of complicity and guilt. That shame combined with guilt and a feeling of powerlessness, creates an atmosphere in which hatred buds, blossoms and flourishes. The hatred passes from father to son and from mother to daughter. Each generation feels the hatred and it penetrates deeper to justify a myth. Norman Grist suffered from Indian Hating Disease. He had it bad, knotted tightly and pungently in his gut"

"Native American teachings describe the relations all around-animals, fish, trees, and rocks as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together."

"There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity."

"There is a peculiar kind of hatred in the northwoods, a hatred born of living with with three generations of complicity in the theft of lives and land. What is worse is that each day, those who hold this position of privilege must come face to face with those whom they have dispossessed. To others who rightfully should share in the complicity and the guilt, Indians are far away and long ago. But in reservation border towns, Indians are ever-present."

"I haven't seen anyone improve on the tepee-you can have a fire inside it, and you can love it."

"The rights of the people to use and enjoy air, water, and sunlight are essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These most basic human rights have been impaired by those who discharge toxic substances into the air or water, thereby taking life, liberty, and the ability to pursue happiness. These rights are also damaged by those who cause a crash of our fish or destroy our oceans. Such "taking" must be recognized as a fundamental wrong in our system of laws, just as a taking of private property is a fundamental wrong."

"It's hard to imagine those who framed the U.S. Constitution could have imagined the U.S. at the millennium. It's harder yet to imagine what we'll pass on, if we don't think of the seventh generation from now."

"While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of the most invasive industrial interventions imaginable."

"The framers of the U.S. Constitution envisioned life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that document, but had little idea of what was to come. Since that time we've seen the land of the continent change dramatically-culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically. Today, the social and technological foundation of the society has, in fact, outstripped the law itself. It's time to amend the Constitution to preserve "the commons" for all of us. It's time for a Common Property, or Seventh Generation, Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

"The preamble to the U.S. Constitution declares as one of its purposes, to "secure the blessings of liberty, to ourselves and our posterity." Should not those blessings include air fit to breathe, water decent enough to drink, and land which is as beautiful for our descendants as it was for our ancestors?"

"American public policy has come to reflect short-term interests, fiscal years, "deficit reduction" programs, and is increasingly absent of any intergenerational perspective. That long-term perspective is crucial to our well-being and a valuable role for democratic government."

"This is not a struggle for women of the dominant society in so-called "first world" countries to have equal pay and equal status if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model that is unsustainable. It is a struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth."

"Today, on a worldwide scale, we remain in the same situation as one hundred years ago, only with less land and fewer people."

"Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny or improving our conditions."

"Public policy is lagging behind our ability to destroy ourselves."

"Consumption causes the commodification of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, children, and women. And unless we speak and take meaningful action to address the high levels of consumption, we will never have any security for our individual human rights as women."

""Minobimaatisiiwin," or the "good life," is the basic objective of the Anishinaabeg and Cree³ people who have historically, and to this day, occupied a great portion of the north-central region of the North American continent. An alternative interpretation of the word is "continuous rebirth." This is how we traditionally understand the world and how indigenous societies have come to live within natural law. Two tenets are essential to this paradigm: cyclical thinking and reciprocal relations and responsibilities to the Earth and creation."

"Rarely is there money in the federal bureaucracy for the cultural and environmental needs of the Natives. I find it ironic however, that federal monies always miraculously appear to study and develop coal strip miners, uranium mines and nuclear waste dumps on Reservations."

"A house is more than a shelter: It is home, it is something that reflects you."

"The Earth is our Mother. From her we get our life, and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our Mother, and in caring for our Mother, we care for ourselves."

"I will argue that native societies' knowledge surpasses the scientific and social knowledge of the dominant society in its ability to provide information and a management style for environmental planning. Frankly, these native societies have existed as the only example of sustainable living in North America for more than 300 years."

"What gives corporations like Conoco, Shell, Exxon, Daishowa, ITT, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the World Bank the right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator or of Mother Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth? Is that right contained within their wealth, which was historically acquired immorally, unethically through colonialism and imperialism and paid for with the lives of millions of people, species of plants, and entire ecosystems? They should have no such right. And we clearly, as women and as indigenous peoples, demand and will recover that right-the right of self-determination, to determine our own destiny and that of our future generations."

"If private property has found safe haven in the Fifth Amendment, where is common property equally protected?"

"In Minnesota, they say we made nice about it a long time ago. They say, "You Indians should get over it." Well that's really nice to say when you are holding all the assets. Why are Indian people the poorest people in this country in every economic or social statistic at the bottom or the top of where you don't want to be? Is that because we're stupid? No. It's because we have structural poverty enforced by intergenerational appropriation of our wealth. That's the reality."

"one of the country’s leading science journalists."

"you have a situation where we really need to be taking serious action on climate change, and we’re still having this surreal—I guess I would use the word—debate over whether it’s happening or not. And I think a clip like that shows that, you know, people are really speaking entirely different languages. We’re just not even speaking to each other using—you know, we’re using English, but we’re not really speaking the same language. We’re not looking at the same—well, some people are looking at scientific data, and some people are not, let me just put it that way. And it’s very, very hard to carry on, you know, a reasonable and sort of post-Enlightenment conversation."

"massive things need to be done. Obviously we need to start transitioning our whole economy off of fossil fuels. That’s not—that’s not a small thing. That’s a big thing. And if you were going to ask, you know, policy experts what we should do, they would say, “Well, we need some kind of price on carbon.” Now, that is—that requires legislative action. In the absence of that, in the absence of putting a price on putting CO2 into the atmosphere, there are things the administration can do and that they are supposedly working on—you know, power plant regulations that would reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s very difficult to get the kind of action that we need without any hope of getting anything through Congress."

"we’ve already set so many changes in motion, right? I mean, climate change is occurring; whatever anyone in Congress says, it’s occurring right now. You can watch, and scientists are watching, tracking species on the move all over the planet, trying to track the climate as it changes, so either moving upslope or moving toward the poles. And to the extent that we can preserve any parts of the planet that are not being chopped up or chopped down, so that we can allow species to move where they need to go, to track climate change, that is one thing that we can do, even as climate change unfolds. And unfortunately, climate change has been set in motion so that, really, though we desperately need to reduce our carbon emissions, we’re not stopping that process anytime in the near future, so that we need to start thinking about, you know, a world in which everything is on the move and preserving corridors that things can migrate through."

"now the sort of general theory is, you know, yes, the Earth changes very slowly, except for these extraordinary moments. And I’d say the whole point of writing the book is that we are in one of those moments right now."