Environmental activists also understand that in siding with Indigenous people, they are siding with those who will protect the clean drinking water that we all need to survive. They presume – probably correctly – that while today’s battles are over resources like gold and oil and diamonds, tomorrow’s battles will be for the aquifers and watersheds that fuel not only our economy, but our own bodies.
Science, too, is increasingly coming to terms with the web of relations. Pollution is no longer framed as a regional problem; it is a global issue. Global warming is not caused by any one nation: the effects of a warming planet will be felt by all of us as sea levels rise, and the seas themselves begin failing to support the aquatic biodiversity upon which so many people around the world depend for basic sustenance. Indigenous people have long understood that we are, quite literally, all in this together. The environment, on this logic, is not some external element; rather, it is something of which we are all a part. We are all in the web of relations.
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