Hydroelectric power isn't clean or renewable
In our creation story, the Winnemem Wintu bubbled out of our sacred spring on Mt. Shasta, and we're a water people who tend to view water differently.
The water in our rivers is the blood running through the world's veins, and water can hold goodness just like the human heart can. We believe if we sing to water and pray to water that will make it healthier and cleaner.
When water is churned through a hydro-project's turbines or grows stale in a reservoir, it hurts the water's spirit and makes it "mad water." How is that water going to be good to drink?
But you don't have to be Winnemem to understand that hydropower and dams are anything but clean and renewable and that dams actually contribute to climate change.
http://www.redding.com/news/2012/feb/06/caleen-sisk-hydroelectic-power-isnt-clean-or/
(Caleen Sisk is chief of the Winnemem Wintu tribe.)
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Last edited Tue Feb 7, 2012, 07:42 PM - Edit history (1)
Should we accept aboriginal beliefs that protect the environment and have no impact on your life? Why on Earth not?
The same goes for Deep Ecology. Why on Earth not?
What we're doing to the planet today is based on clear-headed, rational thinking, and it's still insane.
We face two core problems: our assumptions about our place in the web of life on this planet are dysfunctional, and our motivation to change our behaviour is almost non-existent.
Reason alone will not address either of those problems. As long as people don't perceive an immediate existential threat, as long as the problems can be argued intellectually off into the future, people opt for living as they always have.
Cortically-derived reason does not carry the same sense of urgency as the emotions mediated by our limbic system. If we want to motivate urgent, immediate action then our emotions need to be engaged. thinking doesn't do that, feeling does.
Edited to add: Advertisers have known this little factoid for decades, and politicians have known it for centuries.
One of the remarkable qualities of Deep Ecology is that it attacks both of those pathways simultaneously. It changes our cultural narrative by elevating other life to a level closer to Man; it promotes a transfer of value from the human to the non-human; it promotes a sense of human moral responsibility; and in doing all that it makes our impact on other life a matter of emotional urgency.
Propose your own solutions - if you think rational thought will help, by all means promote it. But try not to let your emotions get in the way of your rational thought and try to block others' efforts to do the same. We don't know what will work at this point, so we need to try a bit of everything. Reason is a useful tool, but it might not end up being the key tool in this struggle to change human behaviour.
No human baggage is as odious as the extinction of defenseless species, the destruction of their means of subsistence, the razing and poisoning of their homes. And that's a clear-headed, rational fact! 
