Most environmental thinking is ripping off or erasing Indigenous and/or non-western peoples and cosmologies in one way or another and it’s tiring to watch this be so normalized in western scholarship. If you don’t have Indigenous people on your environmental panel, it is violence

Indigenous peoples represent 5% of earth’s human population but protect 80% of earth’s biodiversity (UN). Indigenous environmental defenders are frequently murdered for work protecting lands/waters/atmospheres. Indigenous cosmologies/onto-epistemologies are vital, radical.
Indigenous peoples exist in every human inhabited continent. Indigenous peoples represent what Mbuto Milando called ‘the 4th world’ (of non-dominant cosmologies) which Secwepemc thinker George Manuel theorized about. This UN definition is helpful (& inclusive, not exclusive):
The focus on dominance is helpful in identifying local+international power structures — Indigenous groups represent non-dominant cosmologies, onto-epistemologies that relate to lands/waters/atmospheres. But remember that Indigenous peoples dispossessed carry cosmologies with them
So also remember that work that @MaiaLButler does with Edwidge Danticat’s concept of ‘floating homelands’ is important node of thinking about Indigenous cosmologies, the 4th world. Non-dominant knowledge about being in/relating to the earth includes those dispossessed from
home.
In summary: if environmental work doesn’t consider intersections of power, white supremacy, imperialism, capital, colonialism, patriarchy — & if it recreates Indigenous/4th world/non-dominant cosmologies without credit, it’s eco-fascism & furthers genocide of Indigenous societies
For further thinking, please check out the work of Yvonne Sherwood, who works with Milando and Manuel’s concept of the 4th world. And check out Indigenous scholars/activists working in global south, too!

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.