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Showing posts with the label health care

Indigenous Health Perspectives are Needed

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  Robin Wall Kimmerer Increasingly Indigenous perspectives on environmental stewardship is being recognised as the only way all humans will be able to co-exist with Earth. Given that First Nations have thousands of years of experience in the management of plants, soils, water and wildlife, why would they not be able to improve on current trends that are proving destructive of our life-support system? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s popular book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants , powerfully addresses the western scientific blindness to nature-based science. “Western science is a powerful way of knowing, but it isn't the only one,” says Kimmerer. While science is, in theory, open to new ways of understanding the world, it often isn’t. Kimmerer, like most Indigenous peoples in the western world, have had their traditional forms of knowledge ridiculed and dismissed. (See more about this here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/w

My Plan A Response to the Coronavirus

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In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and, (for most) the sense that life is weird, many are anxiously wondering whether they or their loved ones will catch this virus. Governments are bleeding red ink (about a generation’s worth!). Many are out of work, especially smaller businesses are failing, the economy is in deep trouble, and nobody knows when, or even whether, we will ever return to “normal.” We can passively wait around and hope that a vaccine will save the day (maybe, but it might take more than a year, and, as do all pharmaceuticals, i t will have side-effects ). Or we can empower ourselves by building up our body’s natural immune system.  This novel coronavirus has not been the first, nor the last, that will spread through the population. Can we afford to shut down whole societies in an effort to defeat them, or will we instead arm ourselves and thus enjoy healthier, longer, lives -viruses or not? As it turns out worrying or stressing is hard on our immune sy