{"id":3503388,"date":"2024-09-13T09:41:59","date_gmt":"2024-09-13T09:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3503388"},"modified":"2024-09-13T09:41:59","modified_gmt":"2024-09-13T09:41:59","slug":"humanity-must-choose-a-new-path-to-avoid-rapid-ecological-breakdown-lakota-spiritual-leader-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2024-09-13\/humanity-must-choose-a-new-path-to-avoid-rapid-ecological-breakdown-lakota-spiritual-leader-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanity Must Choose a New Path to Avoid Rapid Ecological Breakdown, Lakota Spiritual Leader Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed. note: This article<\/a> was originally published at Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal producing original news and analysis responding to our shared ecological, political, and cultural crises.<\/em><\/p>\n

The first tribally hosted World Wilderness Congress that convened the last week of August, 2024, had an ambitious agenda\u2014placing Indigenous knowledge at the center of global resolutions to protect biodiversity.<\/p>\n

RAPID CITY, S.D.\u2014Humanity stands at a crossroads and must come together to realize dramatically different and supportive relationships with one another, the Earth, and all life on the planet, if we are to surmount cascading ecological and social crises now underway.<\/p>\n

That was the message of Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples, who welcomed hundreds of attendees to the 12th World Wilderness Congress convening the last week of August in the Black Hills, or H\u00e9 Sapa<\/em>\u00a0in the Lakota language.<\/p>\n

\u201cEither we face a lot of chaos, global disasters, tears from our relatives\u2019 eyes \u2026 or we come together [and] unite as people of the world,\u201d Looking Horse said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though these gatherings, dedicated to assessing and often resetting global conservation work, date back to the 1970s, this is the first such congress being convened by a tribal authority. The agenda is dedicated heavily to centering Indigenous perspectives in the global struggle to protect wild lands and waters.<\/p>\n

Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and Bundle, is as revered among the original people of this land as the Dalai Lama is by the people of Tibet or the Pope for Catholics around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe warned that some day you would not be able to control what you had created. And that day is here. \u2026 Mother Earth is sick and has a fever,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking Horse told the group assembled from nations, tribes, and communities across the world.<\/p>\n

The chills of that \u201cfever\u201d\u2014the accelerating shocks of climate destabilization caused by centuries of colonial extraction, fossil fuel combustion, and ecological destruction\u2014rocked communities around the world in 2023, with 2024 continuing to break heat records.<\/p>\n

People across the world sweltered in 2023 through the hottest year on planet Earth\u00a0in at least 125,000 years<\/a>. A \u201cState of the Climate<\/a>\u201d report that drew on the work of nearly 600 scientists pointed to unprecedented levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere as the cause of Earth\u2019s overheating. Records were similarly broken for ocean heat, sea-ice loss, and sea-level rise. In all, industrially-driven global warming exposed nearly 80 percent of the people on the planet to at least 31 days of extreme heat,\u00a0another study found<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As temperatures surged, more than 37 million acres\u00a0burned across Canada<\/a>\u2014an area roughly twice the size of Ireland and twice the range of Canada\u2019s previous record-setting fires of 1989. Cities across the United States, including here in San Antonio, have suffered through their hottest years ever, killing\u00a0the poorest<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0sickest<\/a>. This level of heat was virtually impossible if not for the burning of fossil fuels and development-driven deforestation, Climate Central researchers have\u00a0reminded us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Additionally,\u00a0mass bleaching of coral reefs<\/a>\u2014the \u201crainforests of the sea<\/a>\u201d\u2014were reported around the planet, even reaching Garden Banks, a relatively deep and less-spoiled reef off the Texas and Louisiana coast.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have volcanoes. You have hurricanes. You have drought. You have lots of devastating extreme weathers happening and that\u2019s because of what they call global warming,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

said Philimon Two Eagle, the executive director of the Sicangu Lakota Treaty Council, who was critical to bringing WILD12 to Lakota Country.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though we didn\u2019t cause it, now we have to jump up and help,\u201d Two Eagle said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But organizers and attendees at WILD12 aren\u2019t there to haggle over carbon credits or debate the benefits and risks of carbon capture technologies and blue hydrogen, the substance of so many climate gatherings and debates. Instead,\u00a0The WILD Foundation<\/a>, through decades of international gatherings, aims to interrupt one driver of climate crisis that gets far less air time than carbon emissions: the global loss of the planet\u2019s wild spaces, which for millions of years have served as the planet\u2019s lungs and carbon sinks.<\/p>\n

Yet even conservation spaces and agendas have offered a shallow understanding of problems and solutions, overlooking the deeper cultural\u2014and thus colonial\u2014roots of ecological collapse.<\/p>\n

\n