Abstract
Giving earth reason to act with its own strategy is still a new and foreign concept for the western science, which otherwise argues there on ‘lack of evidence’. People who ‘can feel the environment’, earth’s pulse, or who are hypersensitive, are out of luck. However, the fact that ‘Mother Earth’ is part of the wider cosmos and that it ‘responds’ and that signals can be detected is already known to virtually all indigenous people for millennia; the western world is also increasingly picking up on it. Such dire connections with ‘Mother Earth’ are certainly well known for the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region and its religions: ‘Mother Earth’ can be angry and strike a revenge, e.g. earth quakes, tsunamis, floods and fire outbreaks. Here I introduce and review those concepts and the failure of the western science-based policy model to acknowledge and to learn from deep -so called primitive- knowledge about ‘Mother Earth’ and its harmony. While many research signals are pretty strong and in support of this ‘Mother Earth’ concept – including many from the Deep Ecology and GAIA theories – the current scheme of globalization still ignores those views for a modern more sustainable environmental and conservation policy that allows to live in a better and more holistic and sustainable harmony with ‘Mother Earth’ and all its beings -biotic and abiotic ones.
The Earth is crying and I cry with her
Polly Higgins, lawyer who fought for recognition of ‘ecocide’
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Notes
- 1.
It should be expressed here that ‘random’ is a rather odd concept to use. It’s meant to mean ‘no pattern’ and thus unbiased occurrence. Instead, ‘random’ is virtually not repeatable and thus hard to prove either way, statistically. And earth events are virtually never random, but instead poorly understand. Further, earth events are not probalistic neither and cannot get well expressed that way. It’s not really possible. A second, deeper look will show it.
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Acknowledgements
This work and its thoughts would not be possible without many very innovative investigators, in academia and outside. I credit them and their life-contributions, namely, H. Daly, B. Czech, L. Breiman, P. Wohlleben, D. Pauly, J. Ausubel, F. Shtilmark, and my colleagues in Russia, Nepal, China, and Papua New Guinea, namely A. Antonov, G. Yumin, D. Karmacharya, G. Regmi and R. Lama and T. Ghale, as well as the many unnamed farmers, herders, and people I ran into while ‘in the bush’ (mountains that is)! They are all thanked for their kindness and mind-opening insights from a life and world that is not yet industrialized and hardly commercialized even! This is EWHALE lab # 201.
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Huettmann, F. (2020). “The Gods Are Angry”: A First-Hand Environmental Account and an Experience of the 2015 Nepal Earthquake in Hindsight towards a New Culture on How to Approach and Live Well with Mother Earth. In: Regmi, G., Huettmann, F. (eds) Hindu Kush-Himalaya Watersheds Downhill: Landscape Ecology and Conservation Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36275-1_30
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