Transcript: ENRIQUE SALMÓN on Moral Landscapes Amidst Changing Ecologies /225
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Enrique Salmón.
Enrique Salmón And the knowledge will reemerge when it needs to reemerge through this natural process.
Ayana Young Enrique Salmón is Rarámuri. He is head of the American Indian Studies Program at Cal State University–East Bay. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Arizona State University and has published many articles on Indigenous ethnobotany, agriculture, nutrition, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. He is the author of Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity and Resilience and Iwígara.
Hello, Enrique, welcome to For The Wild. So lovely to be speaking with you today.
Enrique Salmón Good morning. Nice to be here with you.
Ayana Young Yeah, it is a good morning. It's sunny here at Cougar Mountain. The woodstove is crackling, keeping me toasty this winter. This dry but chilly winter. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to speaking with you about kincentricty and I’d love to give listeners some background on the idea of kincentricity, as it’s an idea that courses through much of your work. How is kincentricity articulated in our lives?
Enrique Salmón It's really about getting people to see how we as humans are directly related to all the natural world around us to the plants, the animals, even the stones, and so on that they are our direct relatives. And if we can get more of us to start to recognize that reality, then it can have a huge impact on the practices and the choices we make with regards to our interactions with the natural world and our relationship building that we can do with this larger community.
Ayana Young In Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship you write; “It is an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The kin, or relatives, include all the natural elements of an ecosystem. Indigenous people are affected by and, in turn, affect the life around them. The interactions that result from this "kincentric ecology" enhance and preserve the ecosystem...Without human recognition of their role in the complexities of life in a place, the life suffers and loses its sustainability.” And I think about how many feel that the teachings of ecology remain mired in the paradigms of environmentalists and scientists who have historically disavowed the human as a way to sanitize and exalt their respective fields. And, so I’m curious to hear what you’d say to those who are adamant that the Earth, especially now, would be better off without humans having any role in it?
Enrique Salmón Well, unfortunately, I think they would be sadly mistaken. To borrow terminology from ecology I, and other Native researchers and scholars like myself, we view humans as keystone species, in environments all around the world, meaning that like Saguaro in the Sonoran Desert, those tall cactus that grow up being 40 to 50 feet tall, if those cacti were removed from the Sonoran Desert that would have a detrimental effect on the entire ecosystem. That's how important a role that those cactuses play in that desert that makes them keystone species. Well, humans are, have been the same way, in ecosystems around the world.
And here in North America, when Europeans first showed up, they perceived this “pristine landscape”, but in reality, what they were looking at was this carefully managed garden that spread across an entire continent. And it was a garden managed by Native peoples. There was hardly any place in North American continent, in this case, that was not untouched by human hands, you know, only the highest mountain peaks, and maybe, you know, a few areas of Death Valley, where they're not really much going on with regards to Native peoples interacting with and sustainably managing these landscapes, and we can demonstrate this, I guess, again, to borrow from, you know, this ecological terminology on an empirical scale and using empirical evidence when, for example, and the desert, the Mojave Desert, in Southern California, I was part of a meeting years and years ago, with Park Service folks and some Paiute and Chemehuevi people there, and the Park Service people were trying to explain to the Native folks why it was important to leave some of the landscape, the desert landscape untouched, so that it can, it can regenerate itself. And I'll never forget this elder woman who got angry with the Park Service people telling them, “You're just letting the desert go to trash. You're destroying the desert.”, She said, “You're making it a waste.”
And she went on to explain how, by allowing Native peoples, in this case of the Mojave Desert, to come and to collect the pods from mesquite trees, that it had a positive effect on the biodiversity of the landscape because the pruning of the trees or the collection of the pods was good for the people because there was an important part of their food source. But also by collecting the pods, it actually caused the mesquite trees to grow more pods. And part of the process of collecting was to have controlled burns to do some pruning and coppicing below the mesquite groves and that created more space for small mammals to move in the mesquite groves. And it decreased competition for the mesquite trees and other useful herbaceous plants. And so in other words, when Native peoples, in this situation, were using the desert in a sustainable way, it actually creates more diversity, not just for the people, but it's a positive thing for the animals, the insects in your plants.
Ayana Young Thank you for sharing that story. I was imagining the mesquite pods and yeah, just that sacred relationship that we've been conditioned out of, some of us beaten out of and, yeah, it feels so important to speak about this reconnection. And I understand that this notion of kincentric ecology was something that you created in order to address the lack of Indigenous perspective in Western paradigm, and I do think it’s interesting how captivated and attached Westerners have become to certain concepts like ecology and cosmology, but it feels as if many get stuck in the abstract/cultural realm...what are the challenges of cross-cultural approaches to knowledge?
Enrique Salmón I think the biggest challenge is our languages and the meanings that we connect to certain words, you know, for example, I have difficulty with this notion, this concept. of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. It's been around for a few decades, but because of this, the words traditional and ecological, it reframes Native knowledge automatically, when we use this phrase, into a Western model of describing and trying to interpret how Indigenous peoples view our relationship to our landscapes. Ecology is, as your listeners will know, it is just a disciplinary study of interactions in particular habitats and ecosystems and so on. But it's a Western frame, it's a Western frame that detaches the observer from what is being observed. And so it becomes this objectified approach to the natural world, as if it's a thing. And for Native peoples, those of us who still see ourselves as practicing our ancestral connections and relationships to the natural world. It is not just a thing, it's a being, it's a relative, it's a part of us, we are a part of it.
I remember standing on the Hopi mesas one day during a basket dance and one of my friends there was with me, we're watching these rains, these pods of rain coming across the Colorado Plateau coming from the south where Flagstaff is, and you can see these pods of rains this movement across the desert. And I remember him saying, you know, we're looking at ourselves, that rain is us, we are that rain. And this is an exact way of how native peoples around the world perceive our relationship to these landscapes around us. It's not something that can be objectified. And so I come back to some of this language, Traditional Ecological Knowledge becomes this static, objectified way of trying to describe this very complex and sophisticated relationship that Indigenous people have.
I do a lot of work with American Indian foodways in agriculture. And there's been this newer idea of what's known as regenerative agriculture. But again, it's this Western frame of trying to explain how Indigenous people grow food. And, again objectifies the practice, when in reality for Native peoples, it is something that we do that emerges from, you know, a millennia of connecting ourselves to the landscape through our food, it is an identity. And that, that traces its origins to our clan histories. And I can just keep going on, that it's not something that can just be described in one way. It's several things. It's this overlapping complex of identity and worldview, and spiritual connections. And these were to keep coming back to this relationship, that implies a responsibility that we have to the natural world, because it is so directly related to us.
Ayana Young Yeah, this isn't the first time that I've heard critique on terms like Traditional Ecological Knowledge and regenerative agriculture. I feel like this challenge against these words that have, you know, now been co-opted and used by a lot of non-Indigenous people to get funding or attract attention. And yeah, it's very problematic, and TEK or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, has become very popular in the lexicon of environmentalism and it often feels as if everyone needs to publicly translate their understanding of these concepts for show, but I know you’ve urged caution at the practice of transforming knowledge and taking it out of context for the sake of preservation. Why is it that you think dominant society has become so obsessed with memory banking, and what advice would you offer on moving into a kincentric practice of practicing living knowledge?
Enrique Salmón I think there's this effort to create these memory banks, partly because we, as a larger society, are observing the disappearance of libraries of knowledge as a result of language disappearing around the world among Native peoples and then the elders disappeared, who are the ones who have been holding on to the last vestiges of these libraries. This pandemic has sped up this process. Unfortunately, I was very saddened recently, watching an interview with a younger Navajo woman on the reservation explaining how the pandemic has disproportionately hit the elderly. And she was describing how everyone, every time one of these elders dies, all that knowledge goes with them, and this is just increasing exponentially around the world.
So I can understand people wanting to develop these memory banks to try to hang on to some of this knowledge. Unfortunately, again, from an Indigenous perspective, in a lot of ways that kills the knowledge, when we create memory banks. This kind of knowledge that we're talking about, is alive. It is an entity of its own, it has a spirit, has a breath that we share with it, like we share the same breath with all the natural world around us. And it is not something that can be stored and pickled like when we pickle chili peppers or cucumbers and that sort of thing, and then we put it on a shelf to look at us later on. This is a kind of knowledge that needs to be kept alive through language and through practice, through actually living it.
I'll never forget, when I used to teach ethnobotany field school and my students and I were visiting a Hopi elder in between Third and Second Mesa, near the community of Kiqotsmovi and my students were hoeing his field of weeds and and then he would, you know, stop and explain some, you know, important ecological Hopi knowledge to my students, and those are great exchanges. I remember at one point, one of the students asked the elder “Why don't you just record what you know?” Because he was the last member of his clan, he was explaining now when he passes away, all his knowledge will go with him because he doesn't have any female children. The Hopi, like a lot of Native communities are matrilineal societies, and so knowledge passes down through the female side, the matrilineal side. And so the students were concerned and he said, “Well, you know when I leave this knowledge leaves with me because that is just the way it has to be. It's a part of the natural process. The knowledge will reemerge when it needs to reemerge through this natural process.” Memory banking, as I said earlier, I understand why people want to do it, but it just creates this static again, objectified kind of knowledge. That is as soon as it's recorded. It's taken out of context already.
Ayana Young I’d like to ask about what a kincentric approach to something like invasive and natives species looks like...Data suggests that “at least 25% and perhaps as much as 85% of Earth’s estimated 8.7 million species are already shifting ranges in response to climate change”, and these sort of migrations are complex, because on the one hand invasive species have been flagged as a key driver of Earth’s biodiversity crisis, but I also hear perhaps a more kincentric approach would view this change as a natural migration...kin are doing what they have to do. So, I’d like to ask your thoughts on this and how you think kincentrity needs to be applied to traditional ideas about native and invasive species and how we define desirable environments?
Enrique Salmón You kind of answered the question already. Remember that, I like to use this example here again in North America, where American Indians have been, if if we if we take the most conservative estimates of the populations here in North America of Indigenous peoples, and how long we've been here, some anthropologists suggest 20,000 years, I think it's a lot longer, I think we've been here for at least 40,000, maybe even 100,000 years, and even if we assume that we weren't always here, as our are legends in our cultural histories described. But even if we take the most conservative estimate of 20,000 years, that means that Native peoples have been observing and interacting with this continent, and it's natural workings for 20,000 years. European biologists and so on, have only been looking seriously at North America for maybe 200 years. That's quite a difference in the degree of understanding of the natural world in North America and South America that Native peoples have compared to that of European science. And so therefore, our stories, our cultural histories, our songs, our ceremony, our rituals, these are all reflections of this deep understanding of these complex workings that happen in ecosystems. And part of that understanding is change, that things are constant flux. And our ceremonies recognize it, our songs, our stories recognize these complex changes.
This is the reason why most Native peoples around the world tell trickster stories. It's this recognition of that grey part of the universe, that part of the universe that we don't quite understand, but we know is there. And that's trickster. And here in North America trickster is often personified as a coyote, sometimes a rabbit or a skunk. But these trickster tales, and legends and myths, whatever we want to call them are reflections of that recognition of constant flux and dynamic change in the universe. And so, it's a long winded way of answering your question that for Native peoples, when we have new plants, invasive species show up, we don't think of them in a negative way we think of is part of a natural process. And then we come up with ways to incorporate them and adapt to them in our practices and in our stories. We even connect them to our languages.
There is a classification of plants in my peoples language, I’m Rarámuri, in case your listeners didn't get that yet. And in our language, we have words for certain plants that arrived more recently, that came with the European contact. And so it's just this linguistic and and as a result, this metaphorical and world view approach towards accepting and adapting to these new things that have entered into our lives.
Ayana Young That was so beautiful and relieving. I have been really sitting with these Western, thinking back to language and thinking about words like apocalypse and collapse and the Anthropocene. And how I've heard a lot of my Indigenous friends and allies say like, you know, we've been through apocalypse, we've been through collapse before this is because you know, so many people are talking about that with climate collapse, and just where the world's going at this point and the sixth mass extinction, and the way you're bringing up trickster and speaking to these huge shifts in the way that you are is, yeah, it just feels really potent. In your recent book, Iwígara, you write; “Through Trickster, we learn to embrace nonpolarity. Color blindness is assumed as well as every variation of gender. Therefore Trickster expands the Indigenous consciousness by freeing all constraints and creating an opening and threshold for flexibility and change. Through this kind of consciousness, culture and society are in a better frame for resilient thinking and adaptation.” and I really think about trickster energy in terms of ushering us through moments of collapse and apocalypse, because it feels as if many are becoming snarled in the polarity of our projected futures...Can I ask you to elaborate on trickster in terms of resilient thinking and adaptation?
Enrique Salmón Yeah. I often sign my emails to my colleagues in my department “el coyote”, the trickster. You know trickster, or if we were to focus on coyote as a trickster figure, coyote would never get his coffee from a Starbucks, coyote would never shop at a Walmart, he probably wouldn't even have cable TV or Direct TV. Coyote doesn't want to be stuck in this one polarized perception of itself. And I intentionally use the word “it” because coyote does not have a specific gender. Coyote is just coyote or trickster is just trickster.
And you lead me to another approach I've taken to my work, all my work as an Indigenous scholar has been about trying to help non-Native peoples better understand an Indigenous approach to, to everything, not just the natural world. And a few years ago, I adopted this approach to studying natural systems through what's known as Resilience Theory. And in short, it's this idea that systems, any kind of system that is resilient, is resilient only because it was able to withstand and adapt to and learn from and reshape itself as a result of shocks to its systems. And in the case of Native peoples, the shock would be European contact. And a lot of Native communities resisted, unfortunately to their own detriment, resisted and went extinct. And some communities like mine, we figured out quickly how to absorb to, and adapt to, and learn from these new things that came as a result of contact. And it's those Indigenous communities that are so resilient, that it really adopted the trickster approach to everything, to recognizing that change is constant. And that we have to allow our inner tricksters to emerge to come to the surface so that we can survive. And we can learn from and adapt to these changes and these new ways of doing things.
We therefore increased the emergence of tricksters in our ceremonies to remind people about constant change. You know, we see more Koshare, the clown figures at Pueblo dances. See more of the Grey One in the Mountain Spirit dancers, with the Western Apache. In my people, we’re seeing more of the trickster Pascol dancers, this is in our spring ceremony, our planting ceremonies and so we're telling the rest of our society, we have to continue to recognize this increasing and speeding up of change so that we can survive.
We as Native peoples, we're like juniper trees in the Southwest. Juniper trees aren't that tall, they’re sometimes kind of scraggly looking on a surface, but the roots grow very deep and spread out. And I will never forget an elder at Taos Pueblo who told me this story about how European people you know, Americans, for the most part, are like aspen trees, they’re tall and beautiful and showy in the fall, but their roots are really shallow. And next big wind that comes along, those a lot of those aspen trees will fall over. But us Native peoples were the junipers, the big wind comes, we're still gonna be here afterwards.
Ayana Young I was getting lost in the metaphors of the trees, I was right there with those trees. And yeah, I'd like to ask about exploring kincentricity in places that the Western paradigm has unequivocally denied as being a part of nature or the wild. How can we work to disrupt the nature/city binary, and for listeners, how can one begin to incorporate kincentric approaches amongst the wealth of natural ecosystems in urban areas?
Enrique Salmón You remind me of another chapter I wrote in another book, and the book was about wildness, and my chapter was about how in my language and in most Indigenous languages, there's no word for wild. And this is because Euro-americans, the language, again, coming back to language, how important it is, perpetuates this idea of the separation between us as humans, and everything else, and so we have this category of wild and wilderness, places that we're not supposed to visit or if we do we leave only no footprints, this notion of wilderness, something that is totally separate from us as modern day human beings, that we are, the things that are wild or untamed, that they're, they're out of control, and so on. And so there's this sort of negative connotation with these notions of wild and wilderness, and I think it expands into notions of nature and increases this urban versus non-urban sort of schism, when for Indigenous people if there is no word for wild, then there’s no categories nor mental space for seeing a such a division. Even for Indigenous peoples living in an urban environment, we still recognize that everything around us is a part of the natural process, even the urban stuff, we're still directly related to it, it is still a part of us, we are a part of it. And even if we want to hang on a little bit to this, this urban versus non urban division, we can still find and celebrate the natural that is around us in this urban environment, we can still celebrate the natural process of climate, we can still see insects and birds and you know, listen to birds and pay attention to the stories that they're giving to us.
Even as my mother got older and living in this little apartment sort of complex this assisted living place, she still found ways to grow her favorite little herbs and chili peppers and so on outside of her front door and celebrated those little tiny connections to nature and never forgot the importance of singing songs to these things, and would go out even at night and sing songs to the stars, because even in an urban situation, we can still see the stars up, our relatives in the sky, and we can still sing songs to them and it's just, it's a mental game I invite urban dwellers to play to not focus so much on the separation between the urban environment and the so called natural world, but to celebrate what is still there with us, and to invite more of it, to join us in places like the Bay Area, like Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and to find ways to work, to bring in more of the so called natural world into these spaces. And we're seeing this happening more and more with I guess it would be sustainable architecture, people wanting to create rooftop gardens, to create more green spaces in urban areas, you know we can work to do more of that.
Ayana Young Yeah, I feel so connected to what you're saying in terms of the frame of mind, of being connected or disconnected or a part of nature or separate from nature, and yeah, to play, to get into our mental games, because, my gosh, our minds are so complex, but also I think our needs, and our desires are actually quite simple. But somehow this complex web in our heads make things so hard. And yeah, I really appreciate that invitation. And-
Enrique Salmón Can I speak to that?
Ayana Young Please.
Enrique Salmón Because I want to add to that, the importance of story. You know, we, as human beings, we wake up to our stories every day, and we live our stories every day, sometimes there are several stories we're living every day, you know, in, in European Western society, and we think of stories as like, you know, the beauty and the beast, Hansel and Gretel, that sort of thing, and once upon a time, and then they all lived happily ever after sort of thing. But if we stretch this notion of stories, story is all that we are. We are stories. And we enjoy telling stories, we enjoy hearing stories, because it's a way for humans to find commonality.
You've probably noticed already in this interview, I've accentuated things that I'm saying with stories, because it's a way to help the listeners in this case to find their own space within these topics that we're talking about, and to connect to it in some way to relate to it, develop a relationship with it, that’s the power of story. And so I think we as a society here in the West especially need to find a way to change our story. What if the American story was not the one connected to manifest destiny of this ongoing desire to conquer and control the entire continent, this need to be the rugged individual frontiersman and frontierswoman and that sort of thing?
What if our story was more, say, you know, to borrow from American history, what if our story was not Paul Bunyan, but the Lewis and Clark Expedition? What if we borrow from how the core of discovery left from what we call the shores of Missouri along the Mississippi River, traveled up to the Missouri River, interacted with countless Native communities, made it all the way to the Pacific Ocean, made salt ate a bunch of salmon and elk and then came back and the whole time. They only lost one member of their party and that was only because of appendicitis. They accidentally killed a couple of Blackfoot Indians because of a misunderstanding over some horses. But it wasn't because of hatred or so on, or this racism, it was more of an accident. So the whole time, there was a story of collaboration. And what if we made that our story of finding ways to interact peacefully and to collaborate as opposed to the larger, unfortunately, American story today of individualism and conquering, and then we would, we could slowly create a different society.
Ayana Young In Restoring Indigenous History and Culture to Nature, which is a part of the Original Instructions Anthology, you write “The landscape becomes a moral landscape. As we move across the landscape, it’s not like we go across thinking of these stories all the time, we are remembering this story and that story and so on, but it’s just a sort of automatic, subconscious connection to all these things in our environment, to the plants, to the animals, to geographic or geologic formations, and so on. As a result, our morality is directive, or comes directly from a landscape. Consequently, we find a way to interact in a kind way with our landscape.” And so, I’d like to hear more about how the moral landscape functions, and whether or not this will take on new meaning as we find ourselves in an age of migration and changing ecologies?
Enrique Salmón The land is a living entity, and it is constantly in conversation with those of us who know how to listen to it. And through those conversations, there were lessons and this an example of how our histories, our stories are encoded and embedded in the land itself, our stories always took place on the land, and include things that come from the land; natural entities, animals, and plants, and insects and so on all emerge from the landscapes and we find ourselves as Indigenous peoples emerging into this kind of mental space. And, therefore, our languages are actually voices of the land. So when we speak our native languages, we're actually speaking the voice of our specific landscapes, across the continent and around the world and so our morals are not human made. We didn't develop ways or values of ideas of rights of right and wrong and so on, from human constructs. We develop them from our experiences on our specific landscapes. And so that's what I mean by the emergence of the moral or the idea of moral landscapes.
You know, the land itself or this is the source of our values or our morals. These values and morals are encoded in the stories about our connections to the land. And in our modern day society where we are in constant movement and where a lot of us are so disconnected from anything from the natural world, it's increasingly difficult to recognize those morals, it's increasingly difficult to even hear what the land is telling us. I want to go back to my example of the student exercise where I had them watch sunset and sunrise. And there were more than just a couple of students who never realized that, as seasons changed the path of the sun changes, that it would set or rise in different parts of the horizon, they had been so disconnected from the movement of the sun, that it took that awareness, that kind of practice to see that “ Oh, that's right, the days do get shorter as the year gets closer to October, November, December, and so on”. And so that's how disconnected our modern society is. And it's even increasingly disconnected as we are having to do things more online, we're sitting in front of our computers, and hardly spend any time outside and it's, for people like me, it's creating this increasing sense of dread that our generations, as we move more and more into the 21st century, are less understanding the need for us to be connected to even simple things like the sun and the moon, to understand the importance of this be able to hear birdsong. And so yeah, this is one of the responses that I don't have much of a positive reaction to, because it's just kind of getting worse, especially in this pandemic is making things worse, as we are increasingly forced to have less contact, not just with the natural world, but with each other. As human beings. It's such an important source of wellness to just be able to do something as see a person's smile, that we're standing a few feet away from, we need that connection. And it's, it's, it's gone from us right now.
Ayana Young Yeah, it's a really challenging time for connection. And I hear you in that grief. Well, going back to your book Iwígara, you cover the plants that are most important to native North American Peoples, I wonder if you could speak about how you define importance when you look at something like that?
Enrique Salmón Well, you know, when I was invited to write the book, by Timber Press, they originally wanted me to write a larger sort of, I guess, like a dictionary sort of thing of Indigenous ethnobotany. And you know,I sat with that for a little while, and then I realized, you know, I really can't, I don't really want to do that, because there's been a lot of books about American Indian plant knowledge and they're really just sort of dictionaries, like, here's the name of the plant, here's what its name is inShoshone or Lakota. And then here's what it's used for. And I wanted to do something deeper, I wanted to be able to tell the stories of the plants so that the readers can understand the plants more than just a sort of static dictionary kind of approach to ethnobotany. And so I proposed to Timber Press, why don't I do fewer plants, but larger, longer descriptions of them and they liked the idea. And then what I did is I contacted my network of plant knowledge holders across the continent, because I've been doing this for several decades. And so I asked them, can you give me a list of, in your mind, the top 10 most important plants, to your people and to where you live. And so I got those lists back and from that list, I came up with the 80 plants that are in the book. These are the plants that are most important in the minds of Indigenous peoples across North America. And the word importance is aligned with ideas of spiritual importance, culturally important, sometimes in the case of place, in the natural ecosystem where it resides. And as a result of that I could tell the stories of each one of those plants, so that people who read the book, don't just have the name of the plant, and what is used for they have been introduced to the plant as a living entity. So that's, that's the importance of the book, I think.
Ayana Young One of our greatest challenges remains the inability to recognize the sovereignty of land, to be able to ask what does the land want? And I think about wildlife restoration, and land management, and it too is devoid of honoring land’s role, no doubt in my mind because to do so would be incompatible with the profit driven world...Can you speak to the practice of asking what does the land want and how does one begin to listen to this?
Enrique Salmón Well, we first have to begin with honoring and recognizing the speaking of the land as, as an entity, as a being in itself. And as a result of that, recognizing that it has rights, watersheds have rights, mountain ranges have rights, you know, desertscapes, prairiescapes have certain rights, and oceanscapes have rights. And if we recognize them, recognize the rights of these particular natural systems, then we can work to first listen to what its needs are, we’ve got to start first recognizing that this is not a human centered relationship.
And unfortunately that's the perspective and a vantage point that most of the world has been working from, or for the longest time. And if we turn that around, then we can start to leave these landscapes alone for a little while so that would allow us to see what its needs are, and then work towards developing those needs. And in a way where we can work in concert as human beings with these natural worlds, and it'd be amazing what we can learn from it from being able to stop and pay attention and stop looking at the land in terms of dollar signs, you know, we see these dollar signs for the most part when we see landscapes, and start to look in terms of what are, I guess the possibilities from working in concert with what the land can give us. What are the things that we can celebrate from such a relationship?
And this is a difficult thing, because we see this every day happening, you know, different landscapes around the world, where it's all about profit. And we're increasingly destroying our relationship in these specific landscapes. And somehow, leaders around the world need to recognize these living entities and that's where it needs to start. But until that happens, the destruction of natural systems is not gonna end. Fortunately, maybe unfortunately in the minds of some people, the Earth is going to take over at some point and tell those of us who are destroying it in very harsh ways, that is time to stop. I think, you know, I started thinking this way back in January and February we first started getting word of the COVID-19 that this is this the opening salvo from the Earth, telling those of us who have been destroying it. You know, you guys might want to stop. It's time maybe, you know, in the Hopi way for the fifth world to come about, the Hopi believe we are in the Fourth World, the previous three worlds were destroyed, and we emerged into this fourth world and maybe the Earth is telling us with this virus, you know, this, this world might be ending pretty soon. It's time to start over again. Yeah, so anyway, it's a long winded way of trying to answer your difficult question.
Ayana Young Oh, Enrique, this has been such a meaningful, deep, and beautiful conversation and it was personally very moving to me. So thank you for your time and for the devotion you've put into your life and the way that you have walked with it.
Enrique Salmón My pleasure. I enjoyed it.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Justin Crawmer, Katie Gray, and Sara Serpa. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.