Heavy metals tainted the landscape. Iron discolored the stream banks in a reddish orange, while much of the water itself looked a cloudy white, evidence of aluminum contamination.
Sparing the details of an at times grueling exercise, two points were highlighted and underlined.
1. Everything Is Sacred - I cannot stress this enough. The trek to get "clean" drinking water, the hours of bow drilling wet wood to get a fire, to the speed of cutting with a saw, the hunt for plant matter and protein - it is easy for us to overlook the conveniences our society provides.
2. Our way of life comes at the detriment to nature. There is a Cree saying, "That only after the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money." What otherwise would have been gorgeous, the area was uninhabitable long term. A solar still is the only water purification method that I am aware of that can remove heavy metals from a water source, but it has little effect on the fish and plant life heavily saturated. Everything society has achieved and accumulated has come from a hole in the ground somewhere, and our children will be tasked with cleaning up this scarification and toxification of the land. Unless we change our way of thinking and living there will be no world left for them to inherit. It is responsibility of the older generations to lay up for and future generations. This is the Sustainable Homestead Institute's mission - to tip the scale away from degradation in favor of regeneration.
