Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than-human world. Trying to understand the life of another being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit.”

“The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are story makers, not just storytellers.”

“Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.”

“Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care-giving and world-renewal.”

“Native spirituality is the 'heart' that guides the head and hands. Cultural survival depends on healthy land and a healthy, responsible relationship between humans and the land. The traditional care-giving responsibilities which maintained healthy land need to be expanded to include restoration.”

“That familiar fragrance was tugging at my sleeve again. I raised my eyes to meet the brightest green in the place, shiny blades gleaming in the sun, smiling up at me like a long lost friend. There she was—sweetgrass—growing in one of the last places I might ever have expected. But I should have known better. Tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, ...sweetgrass is a teacher of healing...”

“Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships. How we approach restoration of land depends, of course, on what we believe that land means. If land is just real estate, then restoration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home. Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity.”

“We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It's time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth's kitchen.”

“Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things.”

“Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it- grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.”

“Philosopher Joanna Macy...quotes R. J. Clifton: "Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time. The refusal to acknowledge these responses causes a dangerous splitting. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological embeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise."”

“Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation. There were no threats, no extenuating circumstances to force their hands, just business as usual. And the people of the city allowed it to happen. Interviews with Solvay workers tell the typical story: "I was just doing my job. I had a family to feed and I wasn't going to worry about what happened out there on the waste beds."”

“The executioner's face is hidden, but its names are known: Solvay Process, Allied Chemical and Dye, Allied Chemical, Allied Signal, and now Honeywell. More frightening to me... is the mind-set that allowed it to happen, that thought it was okay to fill a lake with toxic stew. Whatever the companies are called, individual people were sitting behind those desks... who made the decision to fill the lake with sludge.”

“The people have endured the pain of being bystanders to the degradation of their lands, but they never surrendered their caregiving responsibilities. They have continued the ceremonies that honor the land and their connection to it. The Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law, and still believe that, in return for the gifts of Mother Earth, have responsibility for...stewardship of the land.”

“When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year. Afterward, every single treaty was broken. Illegal takings of land by the state of New York diminished the aboriginal Onondaga territories to a reservation of only forty-three hundred acres.”

“governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law.”

“Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.”

“As Johnston suggests, multinational corporations have spawned a new breed of Windigo that insatiably devours the earth's resources "not for need but for greed." ”

“more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want. Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind. But the Windigo is more than just a mythic monster intended to frighten children. Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people... Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.”

“A sweetgrass braid is burned to create a ceremonial smudge that washes the recipient in kindness and compassion to heal the body and the spirit.”

“Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets—swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. ... Pioneer human communities, just like pioneer plant communities, have an important role in regeneration, but they are not sustainable in the long run.”

“The pioneers produce a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wresting land from others through competition, and then moving on. When resources begin to run short, as they always will, cooperation and strategies that promote stability—strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems—will be favored by evolution.”

“But pioneer species, not unlike pioneer humans, require cleared land, hard work, individual initiative, and numerous children. In other words, the window of opportunity for opportunistic species is short.”

“Wise use and care for a huge variety of marine and forest resources, allowed them to avoid overexploiting any one of them while extraordinary art, science, and architecture flowered in their midst. Rather than to greed, prosperity here gave rise to the great potlatch tradition in which material goods were ritually given away, a direct reflection of the generosity of the land to the people.”

“For millennia, these lichens have held the responsibility of building up life and in an eyeblink of earth's history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barreness of our own making. I suspect that lichens will endure. We could, too, if we listen to their teachings.”

“These ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live. They remind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism, from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species. Balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions. Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them”

“When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens.”

“But all things come in twos, white peach stones and black, destruction and creation. ,,, For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole. And so we are here along the river, kneeling in the earth with the smell of sweetgrass on our hands.”

“The numbers we use...recall the Creation Story. Én:ska—one. This word invokes the fall of Skywoman...All alone, én:ska, she fell [to] earth. But she was not alone, for in her...a second life was growing. Tékeni—...two. Skywoman gave birth to a daughter, who bore twin sons and so then there were three—áhsen. Every time the Haudenosaunee count to three in their own language, they reaffirm their bond to Creation.”

“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story.”