I would like to share with you a story.
One day, walking home from class, a boy notices a dandelion flower growing from the middle of a concrete sidewalk, desolate of any other vegetation, covered with cigarette butts and pancaked bubble gum.
With its yellow head pointed to the sun and its green-leaf arms stretched up to the sky, it looks like it is thanking the sun and sky.
The boy takes a deep breath and thinks of how amazing it is that this flower was able to penetrate through concrete, giving the concrete a sense of life he has never felt before.
This dandelion flower, he thinks, busting through concrete, is an amazing and vigorous act of beauty.
Miraculous. Peaceful. Revolutionary. He smiles and then walks home.
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After inhaling a bowl of cereal in front of an episode of cartoons, the boy looks out the front window to check out the flower again.
The next-door neighbor is bent low to the ground, putting on garden gloves, next to a garden trowel. The neighbor gets on all fours, grabs the trowel and with a jabbing motion, scrapes the dandelion flower from the concrete.
The boy cannot believe what he has just seen. He knows that something is not right with this picture.
Why did the neighbor do this? Why was the neighbor not amazed with this flower's ability to overcome its condition to claim a home, fresh air and sunlight?
The boy carried this image throughout his life.
As for the flower, not only did it come back the next week, several more also made their way through the cracks in the concrete.
Because we are slowly entering the winter season, I hope sharing this story helps some people stay warm. This story expresses many deep sentiments in our society.
On the one hand, there are feelings of honoring life around us, celebrating memory and renewal, and on the other hand there are feelings of separation from humans and nature, the mentality that places human beings superior to everything we live with, including other human beings.
There is much to be said about these two life perspectives especially reflecting on how we are living today and the paths we want to travel in our future.
This question becomes monumental when we look at how the mentality that propelled European countries to colonize the "New World" in the name of God is still with us but on a much more global and destructive stage.
As the eloquent writer and ecologist Vandana Shiva writes, "the colonies have now been extended to the interior spaces, the "genetic codes" of life-forms from microbes and plants to animals, including women."
Vandana illuminates on how the theft and commodification of nature, from plant to human genes, to produce wealth for the very few is directly related to the way of thinking that came over with Columbus.
This mentality is rooted in a perspective that sees wealth only in material terms and reduces human cultures and landscapes to how much monetary gain they can produce.
Barry Lopez, another amazing writer and ecologist, said it best when he wrote, "the only wealth they (Spanish conquistadors) could imagine was what they took."
Things are of course much "better" now than in colonial days, but the philosophy that reduces life to money, placing profit over the health of the environment and people, is as present as ever.
Take, for example, the incredulous memo that was leaked to reporters from then-chief economist of the World Bank, now the president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers: "Shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less developed countries?"
Mr. Summers' reasoning was that it is cost effective and people in "less developed countries" were more likely to die before being harmed by increasing the already rampant toxic dumping in those countries anyway.
It would do Mr. Summers, and all of us, some good to learn from stories that do not always reduce the lives of "other" people and the environment because it is cost effective.
And cost effective for whom and for how long?
Questions, comments or suggestions can be sent to Maceo Carrillo Martinet at conunco8@unm.edu.
They can also be addressed to the New Mexico Daily Lobo at lobonews@unm.edu, online at www.dailylobo.com or in Room 138 of Marron Hall.
