By Kent Abernethy, Chapter Chair of the Sierra Club, February 22, 2022
On February 24th the National Board of Directors will meet to decide the fate of the Colorado Chapter Executive Committee. I am resigning today before the National Board can render their decision. I do so, in the belief that the dissolution of the Colorado Chapter has been preordained, beginning three years ago. Therefore, I do not want to give the appearance of legitimizing this process by waiting for the National Board’s decision.
More importantly, operating in the current environment as a volunteer has become untenable. I don’t see a path forward that I can be impactful in a meaningful way as a Chapter Leader.
Speaking for myself, I never felt like a partner in the restructuring process. It felt like you had to be on one team or another. The Arapaho and Ute tribes were enemies. But within their respective tribes they valued and honored each other. Cooperation was absolutely key to their survival.
The indigenous people, buffalo, and wolf were all subject to being systematically eradicated here in Colorado. Yet, they all remain.
I sense a turning in our present day culture, ever so slight, back to the reverence that indigenous people felt for the land, waters and the life it holds. As well as a path that shuns internal conflict, valuing cooperation and harmony to best focus the fight outward toward the adversaries and challenges that face us, all of us.
“While explorers, hunters and trappers were often first to make contact with indigenous inhabitants, opening the way for a flood of invaders. Missionaries were particularly intent on transforming entire cultures through conversion, teaching English (primarily through Bible lessons), enforcing 'proper' clothing and overall forcing native people to 'conform, reform, or die.'" Sierra Club/John Muir Exhibit
I hope we do continue to turn down the path that increasingly embraces Native culture’s beliefs in that all life is sacred and we are all connected.
In that spirit, next month the Headwaters Group will be hosting:
CREATING ACTIVE HOPE
“How to stay sane in an insane world” - by Susie Kincade
Once you know something, you can’t unknow it. Those of us working at ground zero in the fight for our planet, wild nature, for the web of life as we know it face each day with the knowledge that we are in a battle for our lives and for all of Life on Earth. We are no longer in an abstract time of “what ifs”. The existential threat to life on earth is real. It is both personal and Mythic in proportion. We know this. We can’t unknow it. So how do we live with it in an empowered way?
Susie Kincade, an environmental activist of 45-years and is a member of the Headwaters Group of the Sierra Club in Colorado. She is a spiritual mentor and earth-based Minister; creator and facilitator of nature reconnection programs, and a trained ceremonialist. She brings Macy’s uplifting Work That Reconnects to activists and organizations striving to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, socially just, spiritually fulfilling human presence on our planet.
This seminar will be in-person.
If your group would like to host this event please contact me by email at: kabern.22@gmail.com
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
- John Muir
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Note: As Chapter Chair, I was not allowed to express this or any other viewpoints that might be deemed contradictory, either in the Peak & Prairie or the Headwaters Group Newsletter.
- Kent Abernethy