“The Rubber Trees are Eating our Life.” Said by an Indigenous Elder.
The Hidden Hand of Plastic Civilization over Planet!
People all over the world today are concerned that Earth can no longer support its 8 billion and growing human population, but this is not a problem of the Earth’s capacity to provide, it is a problem of overconsumption driven by capitalist greed. The politics and culture of global capitalism are locked into a desperate cycle of ‘increase production or collapse’. To find an outlet for the resulting overproduction, more and more of the world’s population are being sucked into consuming more than they could ever possibly need. This tragedy is played out daily in every area of human life, including at its most basic level - conflicts over land use.
A conflict between different philosophies of life afflicts land use practices today. On the one hand,
political and business leaders engage together in a violent assault upon nature to extract from it its money-value. On the other hand, small societies of indigenous people, living in the mountains and forests, maintain a nurturing relationship with nature, joyously receiving nature’s gifts of soil, pure air and water for all universal’s livings. They are happy when they perceive nature to be happy. Their sense of inner wellbeing comes from perceiving the wellbeing of surrounding nature. More than over, they express this mutuality of wellbeing in multiple ways, such as when a baby is born its umbilical cord is take and attached to a tree, the message being is that the baby and their tree are spiritually connected. If the baby ever is unhealthy, its parents will go to the tree and express their concern to it. The tree, it is believed, will perceive the message and send its own message of spiritual support to the baby. Throughout their life, people in this society are spiritually connected to trees and will do all that is in their power to protect them and inspired them to be always feel confidently and inter-dependently with their own ecological home surrounding. Hence, their community laws and regulations governing natural resource use are designed
[1] to ensure this protection.
Today, these small societies increasingly find themselves confronted by large corporations, supported by national laws, seeking to destroy their natural forests and replace them with industrial rubber plantations, palm oil, extractive industry, urbanized, modernized without seeing and understanding wisely and egalitarian behavior within and amongst living things. To ease their way, the corporations are supported by powerful state and commercial propaganda machines promising self-sufficient farmers the false benefits of being draw into the destructive cycle of overconsumption of industrial riches. What is tragic is that some indigenous farmers are taken in by this propaganda, abandon their spiritual commitment toward nurturing nature, and adopt the new materialist outlook of exploiting of nature for financial gain. This is creating a new level of resource conflict. One between farmers at the village level; between those who live to maintain a harmonious spiritual relationship with nature voluntarily preserving its enduring material and spiritual values, and those who have abandoned this commitment for a quick cash income from natures’ destruction.
