7 minute read

For millennia, Indigenous peoples around the world have cultivated deep relationships with their community, land, and the more-than-human world. Though each nation holds unique and diverse views, there is a common thread: Indigenous societies tend to practice reciprocal relationality with the living world to ensure its survival.

Indigenous knowledge does not understand humans as separate from nature. Indigenous practices, spiritual beliefs, and kinship systems reflect living in balance with nature and ensuring the sustainability of all that exists. This holistic worldview holds the potential for fundamentally reshaping our approaches to the causes of climate change, such as Western overconsumption, pollution, and industrial animal food production, among other noxious practices. Indigenous knowledge may be the seed unsown in combating environmental unsustainability and might hold lessons that can teach industrialized Western societies how to relearn to live in balance, interconnection, and harmony.

Western Exploitative Systems

Western capitalist society inhibits well-being by promoting a culture of consumption and disconnection. This socio-economic system prioritizes economic growth to accumulate short-term gains over long-term sustainability. It fosters an anthropocentric approach that treats the land and the more-than-human world as “natural resources” and commodities to be exploited for financial gain, upholding a human-nature divide. This motivation to accumulate wealth drives the over-exploitation of invaluable resources beyond Earth’s capacity to replenish, creating the illusion that resources are limitless and only for human use.

This exploitative system relies on animal confinement and the industrialization of plants to produce food for ever-expanding populations turned into consumers. Animals slated for food are fed standardized diets, administered antibiotics to keep them alive in unnatural environments, and slaughtered inhumanely to ensure the lowest financial cost. The commodification of animals and the cruelty they endure in industrial food production is concealed by distancing consumers from how their food is produced. This not only reduces empathy for animals but drives individuals further from an ancestral connection to food sourcing.

Industrialized foods are also bio-engineered and ultra-processed. Ultra-processed food causes illness and disease, such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia. This same industrial system will then produce similarly industrialized “cures” to diseases that frequently originate from diets loaded with synthetic chemicals. This system treats the human body as a machine neglecting emotional and psychological well-being that is intrinsically linked with nutrition. 

Consumers do not see the water pollution from the dyeing of textiles later sold as “fast fashion,” or the disproportionate destruction of habitats for raw materials, and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing processes.

These are just a few of the ways in which industrial Western capitalism cultivates a society that is blind to the destructive processes that produce the very things we consume. This socio-economic system and consumption patterns, which many Westerners naturalize as the norm or as a right, are harmful because they distance us from nature and the very life support systems that sustain us. It additionally endangers places and communities that produce the least emissions, such as island nations, many of which are now in danger of disappearing because of incessant industrial emissions.

Indigenous Worldviews  

Indigenous communities practice reverence and reciprocity to ensure ecological balance and equality among all living beings. Traditional means of collecting food, such as hunting, fishing, and gathering, are practiced using ecological knowledge to ensure a species’ long-term health. Similarly, indigenous communities may also perform rituals and ceremonies to honor and respect the animals’ sacrifice and to ensure a hunter’s or fisher’s continued success. Beyond obtaining food, indigenous communities utilize their vast knowledge of plants, herbs, and minerals as well as prayer, song, and dance to treat disease. Family, elders, and traditional healers collaborate to ensure the well-being, healing, and survival of each other and of the Earth that allows for their existence too.

Understanding Ayurveda, an Indigenous Holistic Health System   

Ayurveda is a traditional Indian system of medicine that promotes balance between mind, body, and soul. In Ayurveda, health consists of individual biology and how individuals experience the world. This holistic system encourages mindful interactions with the environment to ensure a healthy balance.

To gain a deeper understanding of how Ayurveda can be applied to our societal and environmental crises, I interviewed Jessie, a NAMA-certified Ayurvedic doctor, LMHC, in Rhode Island. Jessie blends her expertise in Ayurvedic medicine and yogic psychology to guide her clients in reaching optimal mind-body wellness in addressing internal states and external influences.

When I asked Jessie how Ayurveda defines the relationship between humans and nature, she explained, “There is no difference between humans and nature. We are part of this ecological system, such as the blades of grass, the birds, and the ocean. We are all part of the same system.” When I asked her the significance of traditional knowledge in combating the environmental crisis, she replied that “We know how to take care of ourselves. We have instinctual wisdom, the way a tree knows how to send its roots down to the Earth and grow its branches towards the sun. We know how to eat, we know how to sleep, we know the movement we need.”

“We have forgotten it due to all these distractions, but mostly because modern medicine has decided our bodies can be treated as machines and that the mind-body connection is a lie.”

“If we understood, and were in touch with, our instinctual knowledge of how to take care of ourselves, we would NOT distract ourselves the majority of our waking hours with things that not only don’t matter but are harmful to our nervous system.” She continued “Society is abusing our vulnerability and everyone, all of the institutions like healthcare, advertising, drink and food, and clothing companies are preying on us. There seems to be little care about other’s well-being.”

Further, when asking Jessie how she believes we can promote harmony and connections with nature she urged that, “We need to trust ourselves. Our bodies. Which means getting in touch with our own bodies, because our bodies will tell us what we need to survive and thrive. If a butterfly that is hatching from a cocoon in Maine can get to Mexico, I’m pretty sure we know what we should have for breakfast.”

“This is where it begins. If you are not in touch with yourself, you cannot get into touch with nature. As soon as you do that, everything else is right there.” -Jessie

Repairing Our Relationship with Nature 

Western capitalist society has created an anthropocentric, individualistic narrative of humanity. In today’s Western society, individuals are constantly fed media messaging encouraging consumption and are unaware of how food is produced and the origins of the products consumed. Most of all, it keeps individuals disconnected from the natural world through constant digital stimulation. This disconnection has fostered a lack of understanding regarding the material consequences of the everyday decisions of the average American consumer. Decisions that are not felt in their everyday lives but are most certainly felt by those living in climate-vulnerable societies, who do not consume or emit greenhouse gasses at the rate and speed of the average American.  

With this article, I am urging readers to unplug from screens, go outside, and appreciate the intricate tapestry of life that surrounds us: the warmth of the sun, the sound of the wind, and the rustling of the leaves. It is a call to remember that humans are natural and intuitive beings, not machines, and this fundamental understanding may help guide us toward a more sustainable relationship and reverent treatment of our shared home, Earth.