Why has Tree-Knowledge been Forgotten?
ARE TREES JUST ANOTHER COMMODITY, HARVESTED BECAUSE THEY ARE FREE, FOR MAN TO MAKE MONEY. HAS MAN MADE A MONEY-TREE THAT IS DEAD?
WHEN DID MAN STOP THINKING ABOUT HIS ACTIONS, AND BLINDLY START TO DESTROY THE LIFE THAT SUSTAINS HIM?
CAN MAN WAKE UP AND TURN THIS SITUATION AROUND?
WHAT WOULD IT COST TO GROW A TREE?
FOREST HUNTER-GATHERERS AND THEIR WORLD (Thesis by Jerome Lewis, 2002)
Jerome went into the heartland of Africa, to the Congo, into the Ndoki Forest to meet the Pigmy Mbendjele tribe and learn from them.
He took his wife, an alternative medical practitioner, and their 5-year-old son.
The first thing he did was learn their language and a protocol to live with them and understand their ways and form a working relationship with them.
They already had a mixed language: their own - of ancient origin - and French and American English learned from foreign timber traders and big-game hunters. Hence there were words that they had adopted to describe things that were previously not in their reality - like, peanuts and guns.
Since the early 1930s, studies done by anthropologists, linguists and ethno-ecologists all agreed that the native people in the Yaka area were in serious decline. The earliest observers were Christian missionaries but their studies were insubstantial and biased, although they did report that the Pigmies were against shedding blood while they themselves were sometimes hunted by outside groups who practiced cannibalism.
As a small group of ethnic Pygmies had survived to the C20th, the modern method of study is more complete; even though the timber trade and logging invasions were rife in other parts of the world by this time, these observations of the Pigmies gives us an insight into what has been irreparably lost.
Although some studies categorically state that Pymies do not have any concept of ancestors, ghosts or spirits and do not believe in life after death, Lewis was told by one tribesman that,
"...there are many, many spirits in the forest; they are not the ancestors; the sorcerers die in their own way but ordinary people die it is nothing and leave for always - they leave joyfully; Komba (God) keeps their spirits and they can fly; many people's spirits are out in the open and at dawn the go back into the forest; they give (living) people great happiness, just great happiness, only joy."
They consider the ancestral spirits troublesome, but the forest spirits, the people spirits - the grandfathers, grandmothers, people-of-before come to help the children-who-come-after to impart knowledge of the forests and their wisdom and advice and guidance in times of crisis and help in rituals, because they 'love them so much'. Komsa, the High God, lives in the sky, the Moon is a super-natural being, ancestors participate in healing medicine and sometimes animals can take on a human appearance.
Essentially the people in this area can be seen as these groups - the Bantu (fisher/farmers); the Yaka (forest hunter/gatherers); white colonial officials and representatives of overseas companies. And the periods of distinction are - prehistory; Period of Bantu expansion; Atlantic colonialism, trade and post-independence era.
This whole article is such fascinating reading I find it hard to extract a few sentences to encapsulate the problem - it is vast. The Ndoki Forest of the Congo heartland is called the last place on Earth, or the last great wilderness. The above quote by a 50 year-old elder demonstrates how the ab-original people don't just live in the forest, the forest and the people are one organism, each part of the other. As the elder said, the forest spirits are the people spirits and they die happy and visit the living because they so love them. In most parts of the world, people have lost this important connection to forests, or to their own Trees on their own land. Trees offer a home for the living spirits of Man.
Every person, animal, bird, insect, plant, flower, fruit, nut, leaf, root, Tree, is in a symbiotic perfection and even one small clearing made to extract a small number of Trees, or 'important Trees' for certain uses, with a narrow road to bring them out by truck, is like a fatal wound in this living organism. Both the life-blood of the forest is leaked out and infestation, infection and injury seeps in. Even this last great forest is criss-crossed with slashes, fatal wounds, for the extraction of its Trees.
The United Forest Management Organisation has government auctions to sell concessions to technological and industrial productive international institutions.
Read the Document:
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/old/pub_lewisthesisfull.pdf
SAD, BUT TRUE VIDEO
WHEN DID MAN STOP THINKING ABOUT HIS ACTIONS, AND BLINDLY START TO DESTROY THE LIFE THAT SUSTAINS HIM?
CAN MAN WAKE UP AND TURN THIS SITUATION AROUND?
WHAT WOULD IT COST TO GROW A TREE?
FOREST HUNTER-GATHERERS AND THEIR WORLD (Thesis by Jerome Lewis, 2002)
Jerome went into the heartland of Africa, to the Congo, into the Ndoki Forest to meet the Pigmy Mbendjele tribe and learn from them.
He took his wife, an alternative medical practitioner, and their 5-year-old son.
The first thing he did was learn their language and a protocol to live with them and understand their ways and form a working relationship with them.
They already had a mixed language: their own - of ancient origin - and French and American English learned from foreign timber traders and big-game hunters. Hence there were words that they had adopted to describe things that were previously not in their reality - like, peanuts and guns.
Since the early 1930s, studies done by anthropologists, linguists and ethno-ecologists all agreed that the native people in the Yaka area were in serious decline. The earliest observers were Christian missionaries but their studies were insubstantial and biased, although they did report that the Pigmies were against shedding blood while they themselves were sometimes hunted by outside groups who practiced cannibalism.
As a small group of ethnic Pygmies had survived to the C20th, the modern method of study is more complete; even though the timber trade and logging invasions were rife in other parts of the world by this time, these observations of the Pigmies gives us an insight into what has been irreparably lost.
Although some studies categorically state that Pymies do not have any concept of ancestors, ghosts or spirits and do not believe in life after death, Lewis was told by one tribesman that,
"...there are many, many spirits in the forest; they are not the ancestors; the sorcerers die in their own way but ordinary people die it is nothing and leave for always - they leave joyfully; Komba (God) keeps their spirits and they can fly; many people's spirits are out in the open and at dawn the go back into the forest; they give (living) people great happiness, just great happiness, only joy."
They consider the ancestral spirits troublesome, but the forest spirits, the people spirits - the grandfathers, grandmothers, people-of-before come to help the children-who-come-after to impart knowledge of the forests and their wisdom and advice and guidance in times of crisis and help in rituals, because they 'love them so much'. Komsa, the High God, lives in the sky, the Moon is a super-natural being, ancestors participate in healing medicine and sometimes animals can take on a human appearance.
Essentially the people in this area can be seen as these groups - the Bantu (fisher/farmers); the Yaka (forest hunter/gatherers); white colonial officials and representatives of overseas companies. And the periods of distinction are - prehistory; Period of Bantu expansion; Atlantic colonialism, trade and post-independence era.
This whole article is such fascinating reading I find it hard to extract a few sentences to encapsulate the problem - it is vast. The Ndoki Forest of the Congo heartland is called the last place on Earth, or the last great wilderness. The above quote by a 50 year-old elder demonstrates how the ab-original people don't just live in the forest, the forest and the people are one organism, each part of the other. As the elder said, the forest spirits are the people spirits and they die happy and visit the living because they so love them. In most parts of the world, people have lost this important connection to forests, or to their own Trees on their own land. Trees offer a home for the living spirits of Man.
Every person, animal, bird, insect, plant, flower, fruit, nut, leaf, root, Tree, is in a symbiotic perfection and even one small clearing made to extract a small number of Trees, or 'important Trees' for certain uses, with a narrow road to bring them out by truck, is like a fatal wound in this living organism. Both the life-blood of the forest is leaked out and infestation, infection and injury seeps in. Even this last great forest is criss-crossed with slashes, fatal wounds, for the extraction of its Trees.
The United Forest Management Organisation has government auctions to sell concessions to technological and industrial productive international institutions.
Read the Document:
http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/old/pub_lewisthesisfull.pdf
SAD, BUT TRUE VIDEO
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by melody on
-
William Randolph Hearst saw that it would be profitable to press sawdust into paper. It was then, that the once beloved
hemp plant was put into taboo. I had read this in the late Jack Herer's Emporer Wears New Clothes The "mudrackers" used demon politics to initiate fear tactics to abolish that which was used (hemp)prior to the years of prohibition (late '30's of the United States History) Today, people are clearing their land for vineyards...I had read a while back that one of the local wineries in my area was preparing to strip 32,000 acres of chaparell habitat for grapes.
Many of the local timber countries in Northern Cali are filing bankruptcy (not enough timber)...wood is being replaced with plastic oriented material for building or steel framing.
For this I am thankful for local, state, and federal parks.
You might have seen this before; only, to the left you would have seen horses :). It is the road to where I plan to retreat...welcome to the road leading to "grandma's" house, located in Cali's coastal hills, approximately 12 miles north of Napa Valley. -
-
Permalink Reply by Tree-Life on
-
I wish you all the very best at 'grandma's house', and I have a very strong feeling some new trees will be appearing when you get there. The Trees will be able to stretch and grow and breathe their happiness into the world.
Bless you,
Tree-Life
-
-
-
I see baby douglas firs already sprouting to about waste high.... :) Thank you so much for this place online to share home... :)
-
-
-
Oh what joy! Baby fir trees! Thank YOU Tree-friend, x (a cedar, too, perhaps?)
-
-
-
http://lakeconews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&am...
I am not familiar with appearance of cedars, but I will do some research and hopefully find some...I found this article and thought you might enjoy...(have not seen the fall in front page image, but last week, I was at the cache creek refuge and happen to capture a personalized view of the rock formations in bottom center of article....)
melody111@multiply.com
trees give so much...they dance and whisper through the wind... :)
off to "grandma's" house i go.... -
-
-
Wonderful! This is really heartening news. Well done all those who toiled to get the Wilderness Bill through.
(there is one small mention of an 'incense cedar')
Have a wonderful time there at Grandma's House. :) -
-
-
There is hope - Man himself can change this around, for the love of Earth...
' />
-
Welcome to
iPeace.us
Latest Activity
© 2023 Created by David Califa. Managed by Eyal Raviv.
Powered by
