ABSTRACT
Western scholars have a hard time overcoming the Eurocentric notion that “all knowledge worth knowing . . . was created in Europe,” and that before their colonization, non-European indigenes had been “sitting on their thumbs waiting for Enlightenment.” Using a variety of indigenous interventions, this chapter explores the reasons for the centuries-old European and Euro-American inability to listen to and take indigenous philosophies and empirical scientific knowledge seriously. Apart from the prevalent European cultural hubris that the achievements of the Enlightenment eclipsed, once and for all, any other forms of scientific insight, the inability to learn also hinges on the way in which such insights are conveyed, and on the ethics they entail. If, as J. Armstrong maintains, “science is nature’s intelligence,” it makes no difference if that intelligence is expressed “through (written) scientific formulae or (spoken) words.” Today, the wisdom of centuries of orally transmitted indigenous epistemologies and environmental knowledges seems to corroborate recent developments in quantum physics and philosophy, thus facilitating a learning process in environmental ethics which the world direly needs.
