Conservation and preservation of culture and resources

I want to share this article I wrote for last sem's subject. It is about water conservation and folklore. Needless to say I am really interested in proactive ways of resource conservation and culture preservation.

Our folklores told us the about the ritual of rain dance where groups of farming people come together to dance for rain and ask for good harvest from the heavens before an audience (perhaps the whole community). This is especially true for the indigenous people who live in dry lands. The rain dance is a ritual showing the importance of rain for the whole community, because as a farming community, no rain means no harvest. It is said that intricate patterns of steps should be studied by man and woman performing the rain dance, thus giving emphasis to the sacredness of this ritual both for the farmers and the community.

This ancient tradition still holds a specific importance even in this modern age, the peoples concern about rainfall. Rainfall is beginning to play an important role in our modern society as we face the effects of climate change. It was said that farmers have in their minds the regular climate pattern through long observation of nature and its ‘clock’. They follow this climate pattern for planting and harvest seasons. But as we are all aware of the climate change happening around the earth, this regular climate pattern become so irregular that farming communities are sounding the bell of alarm to ask for help.

This example of folklore can be very applicable today in such a way that it reminds us that we must put value on our resources that are now being imbalanced due to our consumerist culture. In a nut shell scientists explained climate change as a result of abusing and depletion of our natural resources to provide the population what it think it ‘needs’ without any care as to how to replace or regrow the resources that they kill/took (trees, marine lives, minerals, clean water, forest cover etc.)

In this increasingly interconnected world we can do so much as informed individuals in reversal of climate change that is slowly causing havoc around the world. By adapting the simple wisdom of our ancient folks regarding the value of rain fall not just to select group of people (farmers) but also to the whole population (community) then maybe we can really help in saving the planet from this problem. It is not so much as waiting for rain to fall miraculously right after rain dance, it is actually the values that this ritual carries with it that we the modern people must heed.