I was reading today and came across this . . .
If you kill off the prairie dogs there will be no one to cry for rain.
- Navajo warning
Amused scientists, knowing that there was no conceivable relationship between prairie dogs and rain, recommended the extermination of all burrowing animals in some desert areas planted to rangelands in the 1950s "in order to protect the sparse desert grasses. Today the area (not far from Chilchinbito, Arizona) has become a virtual wasteland."
- Bill Mollison, PERMACULTURE
Water under the ground has much to do with rain clouds. If you take the water from under the ground, the land will dry up.
- Hopi elder
Burrowing creatures, such as prairie dogs, open millions upon millions of tubes in the soil of Earth. As Mollison notes, these "burrows of spiders, gophers, and worms are to the soil what the alveoli of our lungs are to our body." As the moon passes overhead the underground aquifers rise and fall and Earth breathes out moisture-laden air. This exhalation of negative-ion-charged air through the many fissures and tubes opened by the burrowing creatures helps create rain.
How could indigenous peoples have known this? By all our standards of scientific knowledge they could not. We have neglected to realize that indigenous peoples have always had access to the finest probe ever conceived, one that makes scientific instruments coarse in comparison, one that all human beings in all places and times have had access to: the focused power of human consciousness.
- Stephen Harrod Buhner
www.sulisminerva.org/2009/04/prairie-dogs-cry-for-rain.html
Read more: http://www.sulisminerva.org/2009/04/prairie-dogs-cry-for-rain.html#ixzz0miaHNhrh
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2 comments:
Thanks for posting this. Many years ago I heard the writer Meridel LeSueur tell, in informal conversation, essentially the same story about prairie dogs and rain. I gathered that she had heard of it directly from Hopi people in the southwest, though I was never quite clear about that.
It was maybe 35 years ago that I heard Meridel tell the story, and this is the first time I've come across the same information from another source. I loved finding this.
entirely enjoyed this post, but can't remember how i arrived at your blog. *sheesh*.
where i live there is debate all the time about the prairie dogs and lately about letting the river be a river. some of our rivers seek sedimentary rock and never surface again. farmers "downstream" want to keep that river from going underground where they feel it is "wasted".
your post has given me much to consider. thank you.
sherry
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