blows every day, every day the sun shines, every day the waves
roll against the shore, and the earth is warm below us. We can
understand these renewable sources of energy as given to us,
since they are the sources that have powered life on the planet for
as long as there has been a planet. We need not destroy the earth
to make use of them. Solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy—
the so-called “clean energy” harvests— when they are wisely used
seem to me to be consistent with the ancient rules of the Honorable
Harvest.
And the code might ask of any harvest, including energy, that our
purpose be worthy of the harvest. Oren’s deer made moccasins
and fed three families. What will we use our energy for?
I once gave a lecture titled “Cultures of Gratitude” at a small private
college where tuition ran upwards of $40,000 a year. For the
allocated f ifty-f ive minutes, I talked about the Thanksgiving
Address of the Haudenosaunee, the potlatch tradition of the Pacific
Northwest, and the gift economies of Polynesia. Then I told a
traditional story of the years when the corn harvests were so
plentiful that the caches were full. The fields had been so generous
with the villagers that the people scarcely needed to work. So they
didn’t. Hoes leaned against a tree, idle. The people became so lazy
that they let the time for corn ceremonies go by without a single
song of gratitude. They began to use the corn in ways the Three
Sisters had not intended when they gave the people corn as a
sacred gift of food. They burned it for fuel when they couldn’t be
bothered to cut firewood. The dogs dragged it off from the untidy
heaps the people made instead of storing the harvest in secure
granaries. No one stopped the kids when they kicked ears around