The Fall and the Death of the Earth

I was led to an interesting observation today by these works of the Native American, Seattle, who was chief of the Suquamish people:

“We know that the White Man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on.”

It seems to me that there is an almost universal common thread in the primordial stories of indigenous cultures by which the earth is characterised as the "mother" of the people and they they had "obligations" to care for and nurture the land - on pain of death.


The western world has been founded on many aspects of the Judeo-Christian world-view and when it came upon the period we call The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, I wonder how much these words from the Judeo-Christian primordial stories have shaped the world-view of the White Man described above:

    He told the Man:
    "Because you listened to your wife
        and ate from the tree
    That I commanded you not to eat from,
        'Don't eat from this tree,'
    The very ground is cursed because of you;
        getting food from the ground
    Will be as painful as having babies is for your wife;
        you'll be working in pain all your life long.
    The ground will sprout thorns and weeds,
        you'll get your food the hard way,
    Planting and tilling and harvesting,
        sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk,
    Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried;
        you started out as dirt, you'll end up dirt."  Genesis 3:17-19

 From these words I think many have developed the view that the earth is a resource to be exploited.  "The earth is not our brother, but our enemy, to be conquered, and when done we move on."

I recognise some of the deep wisdom in "The Fall" story of my faith tradition, but in light of this observation I can't help wondering if the world would have been in better shape today if we had been given a primordial story more akin to those of our indigenous brothers and sisters who try desperately to care for the land on pain of death.

It's worth thinking about!