Literacy analysis paper - Essay Example

I never knew what the bible was, to me, Mt Kenya was a holy place in which God dwells. I place I went to pray to God as was taught by my parent and grand parents. But when the missionaries came, be it to their knowledge or lack of it, they taught me and the others that “God doesn’t dwell in the trees, he dwells in heaven.” Men and women have been looking for this heaven for a long time but nobody has found anything. Scientists have even gone to the moon and come back and they didn’t see the heaven.

So it dawned on me, heaven is not above us, heaven is around us. Heaven is in Mt Kenya, heaven is along the river banks and on top of trees. So I thought I should involve people in conserving the environment by telling them that they were right when they said that God dwells in Mt Kenya. And as such, they should protect the trees in Mt Kenya since it is the habitat of God. Come to think of it, culture is a very important part of human beings and so it should be to environmentalists like you and me.

If we can use culture to cultivate a habit of protecting the environment and preserving of its trees and rivers then as environmental aficionados we would have succeeded. The environment has shaped how people think, how they see and perceive the world, how they interact with one another and our views on religion and value. In short, the environment has shaped our cultures. Until the arrival of the Europeans, communities in Africa had looked to Nature for inspiration, food, beauty and spirituality.

They pursued a lifestyle that was sustainable and that gave them a good quality of life. It was a life without salt, soap, cooking fat, spices, soft drinks, daily meat, and other acquisitions that have accompanied a rise in the ‘diseases of the affluent’. Communities that have not yet undergone industrialization have a close connection with the physical environment, which they often treat with reverence. Because they have not yet commercialized their lifestyle and their relation with natural resources, their habitats are rich with local biological diversity, both plant and animal.

It is such a pity that these same communities are being taught to look at the environment as an impediment to development and a destruction to urbanization. They are taught to cut trees to give ways for industries which eventually lead to low rainfall and dispose-off their wastes to their clean rivers. It is with a heavy heart that I write to you to hold up your mirror and look at who you are, tell the others to look in the mirror and find themselves. As human beings we are part of the environment, we are the environment and destroying part of it in trees and dirty rivers is killing us all.

Let’s all hold the mirror to in front of us and discover who we truly are (Maathai). Yours sincerely, Wangari Maathai. Dear Wangari Maathai, Hi, my friend I hope you are doing fine too, am well too. I received your letter and am touched. I learnt a lot from you. I would also wish to share with you my thoughts on the same concepts and concerns you highlighted in your letter. “What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native people was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the culture's knowledge and language don't go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned.

We live, I see now, by different stories, the