This Spring our Four Winds Journal is focusing on the challenge of sustainability.
Before First Contact—the arrival of Europeans on these once pristine shores—the original human inhabitants of the Americas were careful guardians of the land, waters, and nonhuman others with whom they shared this continent—not through a sense of guilt or the threat of reprisal from some higher power—but because they recognized the extent of human dependence on right relationship with all other life forms. As the First People supported life, life supported them.
Patriarchal traditions, on the other hand, have taught that Man has dominion over all other creatures, and his relationship with the elements of earth, air, and water is, if not outright blasphemous, far too ephemeral to exist. Therefore, ever since First Contact, the symbiotic relationship between humans and our environment has suffered. Now more than ever before—in the widespread, shocking treatment of the environment, vulnerable humans, and nonhuman others—we see the devastating results of such androcentric, hierarchical thinking.
This issue of Four Winds Journal explores some of sustainability’s many facets. We move beyond simplistic definitions and limited attempts at solutions to understand just what this word truly means, and in how many ways we can begin to restore right relationship with our planet.
We are currently accepting Submissions for articles, poetry, and art work in which you share your personal experience of sustainability. Understanding that what we call “sustainability” is actually a state of dynamic balance—with branches that spread much further and roots that go much deeper than you may have previously considered—we invite you to share how your relationship to Spirit, to your own mind and body, to your community, and to the planet itself contributes to a sustainable future.
The Spring issue of the Journal will be released in mid-April. Deadline for Submissions is February 28. Please send your Submissions to journal@orenda-arts.org, Attention: Editors.