I read an essay by Marcia Muelder Eaton from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. (It was also printed in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments which is excerpted as a Google Book.) In it she says that flights of imaginative fancy have a positive role but that to develop “a sound nature aesthetic…(she insists) it must be based upon, tempered by, directed and enriched by solid ecological knowledge.”

That was lovely to read. She talks about Disney’s Bambi, but my personal favourite is the consequence of the cartoon Yogi Bear on the behaviour of people in Yellowstone Park, which she doesn’t mention.

The essay made me think about a couple of other odd “lack of knowledge” moments of human interpretation and their consequence.

One is the non-informed idea of what one is honouring at a sundance. At a sundance there is very often a bison skull that takes a central symbolic role, and what skulls I have seen are stuffed with sweetgrass. It is not the sun. The sundance, which takes place in summer, is “about” the return of life to the plains—it is about the plants which come from the earth. It is about the grass—the green power of resurging life—grass that feeds the bison, which feed the people. The problem with being on top of the food chain is that “top dog “is always dependent on every other life form for its very existence. If humans die, the bison are not going to miss us. If our all food dies, we will die. Who is more important—the grass or the woman piercing as an offering and prayer? In my experience, that is what is being remembered and honoured at a sundance, one’s place in the greater set of relationships that enable a good life on the earth.

Then there is the phrase, “Low man on the totem pole”: Totem poles are constructed so that the most fundamental power of the people—the power that supports the life of the village—is on the bottom. Whatever the image represents, who ever is “low man,” (not a human being usually) is essential to the well being of all who come above and totem poles recognize this power through ritual art.

Lost villages and apocrypha: my favorite story from the witch burning times in southwest Britain, probably true at least in spirit, is the one where, trying to rid their villages of “dark powers” the people rounded up all the cats and burned them alive. The next year the plague rats got out of control and the people—and the village—died.

We live by our fictions and sometimes we die by them. Probably, we’d do more of the living and less of the dying if we routinely checked our fictions for their veracity.

Just saying.