Conversations in the Rainforest: Culture, Values, and the Environment in Central Africa

Rating:
Summary: We are part of nature not set apart from it.
Review: Professor Peterson believes that:
1)The commercialized use, more than indigenous peoples' use of the forest lies at the root of Africa's environmental problems.
2)Central African traditional ecological knowledge suggests that we would do better to try to control the market forces that lead to overexploitation of the environment rather than unjustly restrict the subsistence practices of people who have lived in these forests much longer than ourselves.
3)The environmental wisdom of Central African forest peoples stems from the knowledge and belief that nature and humans are never separate entities but parts of one system.
4)We are part of nature not set apart from it.
5)Nature and culture, humans and environment, social ethics and environmental ethics, ecology and justice go hand in hand.
6)It is not humans or nature that are central; rather it is life that is primary, and that includes the entire community of life, for all of life is important, all of life is bonded, all of life is sacred.