RE: Greetings and a response to Steve Curwood

[Rebekah Azen <rebekah@cybermesa.com>]

Thank you Ken Jones:

I have to respond to something you've said which is too often
overlooked and fundamentally important,"The current state of
environmental information is not oriented to telling the story of
the environment and its connections with our lives."

Ken is right. The information supplied is too often disassociated
from our lives and our connections with the earth and all living
beings. Data sets can only tell us so much. It's our relationship
to mother earth and all life that is paramount. The fire at Los
Alamos recently taught us a great deal. Too many of us were chasing
the tail for data that had numerous interpretations, not to mention
the fact that just getting data was problematic, either because it
wasn't available or was far too technical for the average person
to understand. I was just one of those frustrated and horrified
people in NM trying to understand and make sense of what was
happening.  I still don't know and probably never will know just
how contaminated we really are here from that disaster.

Data doesn't tell us about our relationship with the earth and all
living things. It is dead matter. It doesn't inform our under-
standing about our place in the web. We tend as westeners to rely
too heavily on science to supply all the answers. We also need to
think about supplying environmental info to the public that speaks
to us, to our humanity and our place in existence.

I've been working in tribal libraries and with Native communities
for over 10 years and my perspectives have been critically altered
due to this exposure.

I hope that this dialogue can expand to embrace other perspectives
on environmentalism and what it means to supply information about
that to the public, whomever that encompasses.