Harvard Kennedy School Peddles Ecomysticism | The American Spectator

The environmental movement is not having a good time.

The Trump administration has moved quickly to dismantle the climate change industrial complex. It has pulled back millions in climate funding from Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act,” blocked California from mandating electric vehicles, and is seeking to roll back the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the legal underpinning for numerous climate change regulations. Those who make their living from climate action money are suffering. (RELATED: Biden EPA’s ‘Gold Bars Off the Titanic’ Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg)

And internationally, the effort to convince the world to transform its economies in the name of decreasing global temperatures is facing major headwinds. As the Paris Agreement reaches its 10-year anniversary, virtually no countries are bothering to comply with all of its onerous requirements. When the formal deadline for countries to file decarbonization plans, as set forward in the Paris Agreement, arrived in February, only 8 percent of signees had sent in their updated plans. Plus, only one of those plans actually complied with the Paris Agreement. (RELATED: EPA Proposes to Drive ‘A Dagger Into the Heart of the Climate Change Religion’)

This comes alongside a general feeling that climate change activists are facing a decline in popular belief that humanity is facing impending doom due to global warming. It is difficult for activists to keep up an ever-present sense of danger, especially given the fact that there are no obvious negative ramifications from one degree of warming. But keep up this sense of doom they must if they wish to continue bringing attention and money to themselves.

And now, just to keep things interesting, they’re throwing out silliness.

This was certainly on display last week at Harvard University’s Climate Action Week, when climate activists sought attention by putting forward indigenous spiritual beliefs about the Earth and treating them as key ideas to promote in academia. An event hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School offered perspectives from “three inspiring Indigenous leaders” on how the “rights” of water should be protected. The speakers tried to push the idea that bodies of water possess an inherent spiritual dignity that rises to the degree that “justice” for them needs to be balanced against justice for humans.

Mathias Risse, the moderator of the discussion and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, began by noting the “limits” of treating the environment “as something external to humanity.” He contrasted this to what he claimed is the indigenous perspective: that water is “among our relations, among the greater nature into which we are all embedded.”

One speaker, Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, told the audience that the movement to recognize “the inherent rights of rivers and waters” is growing. She said, “Justice is not something solely for humans, but justice for all living beings.”

Leonard claimed that, for “millennia,” “Indigenous legal systems” have bestowed such rights on rivers. She claimed that justice is often falsely viewed through “Eurocentric, militaristic, and male-dominated lenses,” which she said are lenses that “ignore centuries of Indigenous experience practicing regenerative ways of healing the planet.” Leonard expressed her support for “Earth law,” which she said is based on the idea that “natural ecosystems should have legally enforceable rights to exist and thrive.” As an example of this, she pointed to legislation in New Zealand that called a river “a spiritual and physical entity” and “an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea.”

Bryan BainBridge, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, claimed that indigenous people have special knowledge about how nature works. “We live in the woods. We live on the water. We know how these things function,” he said.

BainBridge explained that this extends to their knowledge of the fact that things in nature are really “beings” with “rights.” He said, “When we talk about rights of nature, we really speak for the fish, for the wind, for the air, for the rocks. Those are all thought of as beings.”

Charitie Ropati, a youth climate adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General who is of Yup’ik and Samoan descent, said that, in her culture, birds, fish, seals, and whales “are considered our relatives.” She added that “there’s a very close connection between the animal and human worlds.”

The Harvard Kennedy School, in its write-up of the event, bestowed its approval on these ideas: “But as the panelists made clear, securing water as a fundamental right requires more than technical fixes or legal declarations. It requires a transformation in how we see ourselves: not apart from the waters, but as part of them.”

As Wesley J. Smith noted in National Review, this amounts to “neo-pagan mysticism.” Smith wrote that to treat geologic features as “living relatives” “would be to engage in unscientific neo-pagan mysticism, perfectly proper among indigenous cultures, but no basis for environmental public policies capable of furthering modernity.”

The perspective offered at the Harvard Kennedy School is hardly in isolation.

The mindset that it is wrong to only treat human beings as possessing inherent dignity has been growing among environmentalists in recent years. In 2021, Swedish academic Helena Pedersen took issue with “prevailing anthropocentric mindsets” and said that these are “designed to privilege human interests while marginalizing or exploiting other animals and species.” Additionally, a woman wrote in a New York Times op-ed that year that she “wasn’t sure that we humans should be set ‘above and apart’ from other living things.” Of course, these perspectives are trying to raise animals to the level of humans, whereas the talk at Harvard attempted to do the same for rivers.

Also, last year, the U.N. put forward the perspective that indigenous peoples possess a gnostic sense for how to stop climate change. “Indigenous Peoples,” said the U.N. Development Program, “are custodians of unique knowledge and practices that emphasize the balance between humans and the natural world.” The knowledge of indigenous peoples, said the U.N., can “complement scientific data” and is “critical to evaluating climate change scenarios.”

The Harvard Climate Action Week also hosted a talk later in the week titled “Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change: The Keys to Our Resilient Future.” It ended the week with a powwow, followed by a “Tour of Harvard Forest.”

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