The Great Life I . The Cherokee beliefs regarding the environment and conservation —human beings are a part of the Great Life

The Great Life
   Good morning, everyone. I’m David Winston. Today I’d like to say something about the Cherokee beliefs regarding the environment and conservation. We believe that we’re a part of what we call the Great Life. And we feel that within the Great Life, (1) there are three great laws of nature, and those are the laws that tell us how we have to live in harmony with everything else.
   The first law of nature is that you don’t take any life without a real reason. (2) And a real reason would be for food, for medicine, and for protection. But basically, life is sacred. (3) So we shouldn’t kill needlessly. That would absolutely include plants. And so to us, taking the life of a plant is just as grave a responsibility as taking the life of an animal. So for instance, when you go to gather a plant, you don’t want to go and say, "Wow, here’s a whole patch of plants," and go and gather them all. (4) You gather a few, and then you gather a few from another spot, leaving the majority of the plants so that they can grow and continue to provide not only for themselves, but for us, and for our children, and for their children.
   The second law is that everything we do should serve the Great Life. Well, what we mean is that we believe that there’s one spirit that fills all things, humans, plants, rocks, whatever. And the sum of all of that is what we call the Great Life. And so we all are part of this same Great Life. (5) And everything we do affects the Great Life, and everything that happens within the Great Life affects us. So it’s very, very important that within the second law of nature, that what we do will not harm other parts of the Great Life. Well, I could give a lot of examples. And on a very personal, simple level, an example could be, for instance, lots of people might go out and get an electric toothbrush. Uh, maybe it works a little bit better. It’s certainly easier. The toothbrush does all the work for you. But to use the electricity necessary to power that electric toothbrush requires coal or nuclear power that harms the air, the water, it harms the Great Life.
   The third law basically is that we don’t pollute where we live. (6) And where we live is not just our home. It’s not just our intimate, small community. It’s not just our country. It’s this planet, this sacred planet we call the Earth. (7) We don’t pour chemical wastes down the drain because they all wind up in the water. So basically we don’t pollute the Earth.
   Well, it might seem a little bit difficult to live by those three laws today in this industrialized society. But we still have a lot of options. (8) There’re small things that each one of us can do, things like recycling, things like choosing what we buy and buying things carefully. There are other things we can do. (9) Instead of using the car for every short trip to the store, save them up so we use the car as little as possible. (10) We can do things like organic gardening. There are a lot of things that we can do to bring these laws into our lives. And ultimately, our lives really depend on these. The Great Life can live without us, but we can’t live without the Great Life.
   OK, this brings us to the end of today’s lecture, thank you for your attention.