One of the beautiful aspects of being an Alaska Native is that we have incredibly wise elders. We call certain people “elders” because of their life wisdom that is informed by their life experiences, the traditions they carry that are passed down for countless generations, and stories which may go back perhaps thousands of years. An older person is not necessarily an elder in this context. There are acknowledged elders who are young by most peoples’ standards.

I have been blessed to have such elders in my life. They say we live in an “inside-out” society, or a “reverse” society. We have turned around all the paradigms for living in our modern world, according to them. We used to contemplate the mystery of death and now we contemplate the mystery of life. We used to teach how to live and now we teach how to make a living. We used to have the heart tell the mind what to do and now we have the mind telling the heart what to do. We used to focus on how we “get there”, and now we focus on just “getting there” or the goal. The elders say that if we focus on how to get somewhere in attempts to find solutions to anything, and if the process is put together correctly, the outcome always far exceeds individual expectation. They also say that what we focus on becomes our reality and that nothing is created outside until it is created inside first.

If we choose to focus on the problems, then the problems become the reality. We come from what we perceive to be “the problem” and this “problem” is created inside first. For example, we trash the environment on the outside because we trash the environment on the inside. We are in conflict on the outside because we are in conflict on the inside. We judge others on the outside because we judge ourselves first.

So, if one accepts such wisdom, what does that mean in terms of climate change solutions? I think that it means what the elders always have been saying, and that is that we can’t offer the world that which we do not have. Einstein says something to the effect that we can’t solve problems with the same consciousness that created it. To put it another way, Gandhi says, “We must become the change we wish to see in the world”. Thus far, from these perspectives, much of the solutions we have heard to date about climate change has focused on the “outside” and not on the inside where it originated. What is it inside of us that continue to result in dysfunction in the harmony of the natural world? I agree that we need external solutions quickly, but concurrently we must examine ourselves and what we have wrought in the world. From the indigenous perspective, it is our disconnection from ourselves that creates our disconnection from “all that is”. And the result of this disconnection is to see the world as separate from us. Fish and wildlife become “resources” and “game”. Oil, precious minerals, etc. become “natural resources”. We have created a language of disconnection, symptomatic of our disconnected consciousness. The elders say we are asleep in spirit and to find the answers we must wake up or we will create solutions from this sleeping state that will not solve anything and likely will make it worse because we are not in alignment with the natural world. Knowledge without wisdom is not only useless, but dangerous.

-- Larry Merculieff