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THE LAND CAN SPEAK TO THOSE WHO LISTEN. The stories it tells are about the people- their origins, struggles, values, and beliefs. The songs and histories that it whispers are often profound, ancient, or can take on sacred meaning. Sometimes, the tragic stories are not pretty, in haunting places such as Sand Creek, the Washita River and other massacre sites, or places where injustice took place. The land also tells the sacred stories of the birds, animals, plants, and the natural phenomena that comprise human habitats. The lessons learned from the land are what give us our identity and make us fully human. Mother Earth will continue to shape society and nurture the human spirit, until modern man finally exits the natural world altogether and retreats into man-made environments: and many are already upon the path to that "Brave New World" charted by urban dwellers living in secular industrialized landscapes during the scientific age. Their worldview contrasts sharply with the cosmology of Native peoples who reside in indigenous habitats embedded in the natural world. The indigenous worldviews of the world's surviving hunting, fishing, and gathering cultures have much to offer to nations that are searching for a land ethic in the twenty-first century, but those wisdom traditions have been largely forgotten, dismissed as "primitive," disparaged as "inferior," or demonized by the modern world.
In the United States, the federal government is the largest landowner, followed somewhere near the top by the many indigenous American Indian and Alaska Native nations, who own over sixty million acres. Indian reservation territory often borders federal enclaves; neighboring tribal communities can have sacred sites or cultural resources under federal management, and hold treaty or subsistence rights to the use of public lands and waters for hunting, fishing, or gathering purposes. As landowners and stewards, Indian tribes and federal land managing agencies demonstrate their "land ethic" to the rest of the nation through their land use practices, actions, and policies. In that capacity, they necessarily play important roles in shaping how the American public views the land and how we, as a modern industrialized nation, should comport ourselves with the humans, fish, birds, animals, and plants that inhabit the natural world, and the natural world itself.
A clear "land ethic" is...