I wrote to a friend of mine who lives in Moscow, Russia to find out how he was doing with the extreme heat and fires that are creating the worst air pollution event in Moscow’s history.  He told me that he has been able to escape the heat by going to his daughter’s flat and workplace, each of which have air conditioning.  As he said, the combination of heat and smog is terrible.  Temperatures have been above 90 in Moscow for many days, and in combination with fires that have been difficult to control, the atmosphere in Russia’ capitol city is dangerous for all people.  And combine that with the fact that 1/5 of Russia’s wheat harvest has been lost to the raging fires.

In Pakistan more than two weeks of flooding has devastated more than 14 million people, destroying homes, and displacing people.  The floods were triggered by an unusually heavy monsoon season.  According to one report, 1/5 of the nation is under water.

In the eastern part of the United States, millions of people are enduring the hottest July and August in memory, and the forecast is that this severe hot spell will continue into the near future.

Last Winter, many cities in the U.S. experienced snowstorms that set records.  This could possibly happen again.

There are two articles that are pertinent to the extreme heat, smog, floods, and snowstorms that we are experiencing.  In a Science Progress article, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway suggest that the science of climate change has been distorted, and at the same time science is evoked as a defense.  They describe how a handful of scientists obscured the truth, not only about climate change, but issues related to tobacco and to the government’s “star wars” strategic defense system.  As they point out, the climate change deniers use the same “play book” that big tobacco firms used to try and convince the public that smoking tobacco did not cause cancer.

The second article is a piece in the Huffington Post by Ryan Grim and Lucia Graves entitled ‘Global Weirding’: Extreme Climate Events Dominate the Summer.  They quote environmental scientist David Orr suggests that these hottest hots, driest dries, wettest wets, windiest wind conditions are all part of pattern that is expected given the rise in Earth’s temperature.  Orr’s book Down to the Wire confronts climate collapse, offering an analysis of the destabilization of climate, and suggests a call to action.

As I have written in my last two posts, I have been exploring Gregory Cajete’s book Native Science.  Native science provides an understanding of the global events that have been mentioned above.  Cajete’s book is subtitled “natural laws and interdependence” and this in itself gives us a first look at one the key principles of Native science.  In Chapter 6 of Cajete’s book, A Sense of Place, he outlines the science of living in relationship with nature:

Key questions for traditional Native Americans included how individuals and the tribal community could ecologically respect the place in which they lived, and how a direct dialogue among the individual, the community, and the natural world could be established and maintained.  Wherever Indigenous people lived, they found ways to address these questions of survival and sutainability in profoundly elegant ways.  They thought of their environments “richly,” and in each environment, they thought of themselves as truly alive and related.

One of the important things that Cajete does in this chapter is to describe the wide range of advanced technologies that Native peoples developed with an awareness of the Earth as a living organism.  His examples include mining, hydraulics, and transportation systems, and in all of these cases he identifies how these systems were nature-centered, and further advanced than systems developed in the West.  As Orr points out in his book, we have failed to heed ecological and climate trends, and tended to ignore the relationship that humans have with the earth.