Energy for Indigenous People



Energy for Indigenous People

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Article

Social

Economic

Environmental

Technical

Article 1:

ABORIGINAL PRINCIPLES

FOR

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The Australian Aborigines sustained their societies on their island continent into our days for at least 40,000

years, possibly as long as 60,000 years. This makes their society model both one of the earliest we know and their

sustainability record possibly the longest that we have evidence of.

Insights into

how one of the Aboriginal peoples organised their societies to survive on a naturally fragile continent therefore

has a value - also for societies today, because the Australian continent can be seen as a bellwether for the planet

as a whole, which arguably is rapidly becoming more fragile.

A turbid stream filled with opaque

silt, which allows no fish to breed and no light to penetrate to the plant life. Invisible poisonous run-offs from

fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides fill the river.

The photosynthetic

activity of the plants is the main source of food in the food chain, but it is now so severely disrupted that ecological experts regard the river as doomed.

As the graziers were first to discover, Australian soils lose their organic and microbiological components very easily.

The farms in the area had been flushing their soil into the Darling for a hundred years when synthesised nitrogen arrived on the scene in the 1960s; the result was to increase the rate of erosion even further. The land, degraded and meagre to start with, rapidly lost its biodiversity when synthetically fertilised; the soil became acid, unproductive and a large proportion of the fertilisers and chemicals ended up in the river system.

It promised to have identified a type of

sustainable development that promoted both ecological sustainability and international justice, but it has fuelled

debate ever since.

The

fragmented view is still typical for main stream natural science and dominant among corporations and many governments. This is of concern due to the current dominance of the economic sector over both society and nature.

Article 2:

AN ABORIGINAL MODEL FOR SUSTAINABILITY

The Aboriginal people were therefore from the first encounter with the Western world defined from a deficiency

perspective - they were (compared to the Western world) lacking technology, lacking agriculture, lacking

housing, lacking clothing etc.[1]

Indigenous people are, however, generally disregarded by management/organisational scholars and what little

there is tends to be applications of theories with a Western perspective

The Nhunggabarra had three main forms of life to serve: the animals (totems), the plants and the land. They also knew what they had to do: keep them all alive or the people and the community would collapse. The Nhunggabarra, as individuals, had to learn everything worth knowing about their 'constituency', otherwise they could not fulfill their needs.

Environmental damage and ecology disaster issues dominate the sustainability discourse and this is where

indigenous knowledge is treated increasingly with respect also by scientists.

Today the original Nhunggabarra people have disappeared almost entirely from their home country - their

language is not spoken, and not even the name of their country remains in official records.

They had three collections of resources at their disposal: the ...