October 2011 Commentary: Seventh Fire is Lit: Help Light the Eighth Fire

In 2009 one of world’s leading climatologists, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science at Columbia University in New York City, published Storms of Our Grandchildren:  The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.  In the same year, Daniel Wildcat (Yuchi member of Muscogee Nation) of Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas and convener of the American Indian Alaskan Native Climate Change Working Group, published Red Alert! Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge.  These two books are important reading (think of upcoming birthdays and other gift-giving holiday opportunities) to help enlighten and transform each of us.  These books can expand our sharing circles echoing and connecting us all in a call to action on Climate Change, the most urgent environmental/social/economic issue of our time (of all time?).  Here are some memorable quotes from prominent Climate Change messengers Hansen and Wildcat:

• “Ten thousand years of good weather is over.” –James Hansen (blog posting 5 May 2009 at: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2009/20090505_TempleOfDoom.pdf)
• “Instead governments are retreating to feckless ‘cap-and-trade’, a minor tweak to business as usual.” –James Hansen (blog posting 5 May 2009)
• “Cap-and-trade is the temple of doom.” –James Hansen (blog posting 5 May 2009)
• “What the world needs today is a good dose of Indigenous realism.” –Daniel Wildcat (Red Alert! 2009)
• “We are going to have to have major changes in human cultures, especially the political and economic climates we live in.  We must reconnect our human lifeways or cultures to the places, landscapes and seascapes, where we live. I think Indigenous Peoples can offer good insights on how to develop societies that promote and develop systems of life-enhancement. The good news is the political and economic climates are changing ever so slightly in favor of allowing experiments in Indigenous ingenuity – ‘indigenuity’.” –Daniel Wildcat (Present Magazine, 20 April 2010 at: http://presentmagazine.com/full_content.php?article_id=3011&full=yes&pbr=1)