Maybe you remember how that fragment of Lakota Sioux language became popular among the hippies after the showing of Dances with Wolves. It means “We are all related,” or “We are all connected,” and threw an interesting side light on the movie that gave some people their first awareness of the inhumanity of the genocide carried out by their army and government on the original native Americans.

When the Apollo crew sent back to Earth that famous picture of the blue planet with no national boundaries anywhere on it some people also had their first awareness that Earth’s problems, like those boundaries are man made.

We are all connected by the air, water and earth of the planet. This fact is ignored by those made insane by greed, and 2009 may be a bit too late in the life cycle of the planet to do much about it. But certainly nothing will be done until many more people rate the health and cycles of the planet as important as their own.

In 1988 some Canadian scientists collected samples of a brown snow that fell on their camp near the Hudson Bay. They sent it for analysis and asked meteorologists where the air mass came from that dumped it on them.

It came from the Gobi Desert, just north of China.

Norwegian scientists found huge amounts of the pesticide lindane in the air over a group of islands in Norway’s Arctic Circle. It came from various Asian deserts.

It has been established for years that the Arctic air is a trap for air borne pollutants from temperate places. Those pollutants include many long banned here such as DDT and toxaphene and lead, mercury and radioactive waste.

Toxaphene is banned in all eight circumpolar nations. That doesn’t prevent it being made and sold to nations other than those eight. Profit matters more than anything else. It is sold to India and Guatemala to use on their cotton crops.

This very volatile pesticide sits out on the baking hot soil of those places and some of it vaporizes and floats up into the atmosphere. It can stay aloft for years. A world wide ban today would make no difference to the stuff already in the atmosphere. Air currents gradually move it northwards. As the air cools the pollutant comes down in the rain and the cycle begins again until it reaches the Arctic.

Get a grip on history here. Your life may depend on it. Rome was founded around 500 B.C. Romans in those days and for centuries after used a lot of lead that had to be smelted from ore. The fumes from those ancient furnaces went up. Greenland has deposits of that ancient lead in its glaciers. The glaciers are melting.

A more recent example is from the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl. That released cesium 137 into the atmosphere. It is now found all over the Canadian Arctic. Nature does not respect human boundaries. This is no longer a bright point to be made in a debate. It is something that must be integrated into everyone’s consciousness as a survival item.

When Alice met the Mad Hatter in the famous tea party every Victorian reader of Lewis Carroll knew what it meant. Top hats then were made from beaver pelts and to make the pelts workable mercury was involved in their manufacture. People who worked with mercury had brain damage. They still do. King Charles died of mercury poisoning because of his mercury experiments in alchemy. Kids nowadays are given vaccines that contain mercury compounds.

So what? So this: Gold mining, garbage incineration and coal fires all send mercury into the air. This ends up in the food chain of Arctic animals and peoples and causes terrible birth defects and brain damage in Inuit children.

And now, Nature has ignored the lies of the current administration and is producing climate changes that may alter significantly the areas of the world in which air borne pollutants congregate. The pollutants held in cold storage for centuries are being released as the ice caps melt. Will Congress pass a law forbidding Nature to do this?

Isn’t it time that humans, even rich humans, realized that they are not really in charge of this planet? We learned to fly by obeying the laws of Nature. Unless we know the laws by which It works and obey them we can’t do anything but cause damage.

It has taken a dangerously long time for the people in the chemical industry to realize that Nature has no waste products. Everything in the cycles of Nature is eventually recycled and used over.

Unless we apply our amazing human ingenuity to make all human products follow the same rule we must inevitably end up poisoning ourselves. Executives who approve the manufacture of products that they know are poisonous or cannot be recycled are guilty of crimes against humanity. Plastic is killing fish and sea mammals all over the world. That is because DuPont crushed the hemp industry by political chicanery. Everything made from petroleum products can be better made from hemp, including fuel. Because of the greed of DuPont our forests have been felled to make paper, which can be made more efficiently from hemp. Those felled trees don’t produce the oxygen that has kept mammals alive for millions of years. That single company has put the world at risk because of corporate greed.

Maybe it’s not entirely their fault. Maybe the executives of the chemical companies are all aliens who don’t breathe air or drink water like the rest of us. Or are they already crazy with greed?

Planet Earth is our space ship. There isn’t anywhere safe to throw away unsafe stuff.

The deadly sprays banned here after years of legal delays are still produced and sold to other countries. Big profits. Then those countries send us fruits and vegetables that have been sprayed with the chemicals and the fruits and vegetables are sold to make more profits. It’s an insane system.

The only ways that always work are those that imitate the processes of Nature.

People in the East have cultivated the same rice terraces for 2000 years without damaging the soil or affecting productivity. They gave back to the soil what they took out of it. Organic agriculture. Nature’s way.

We in this country are so smart that we destroyed the soil of Kansas and Oklahoma in 200 years or less, and now we have the gall to tell the real farmers how they should be farming. And thousands of farmers are committing suicide in India because of the effects of our smart methods on their way of life.

What we do is looting or mining. We take from the ground every kind of material and put nothing back except chemical poisons, radioactive toxins with a life of thousands of years, or un-recyclable plastic. Our forestry is mining. Our oil industry is mining. Our coal industry is mining. Even the toys we buy our kids originate in some kind of mining. What is put back? Where is the closed cycle that is everywhere else in Nature. Blessings to all those who are part of Nature in 2009. Mitakuye Oyasin! Oh yes, and Happy New Year!