By Angela Hughes

Within the past few years, American popular culture has become more environmentally conscious. From grocery stores banning the use of plastic bags, to celebrities becoming renascent with environmentalist groups, being “green” has origins beyond the love fest of the ‘70s.

Before the European invasion of the African coast and the thievery of our beloved Egypt,  our African ancestors had an awareness that hundreds of years later, we have abandoned. As our ancestors practiced Yoruba, Vodun and Khemetic religions, one commonality was that all of the religions believed that we are all one with not only the earth, but the entire universe and we should treat it as such. In Ancient Khemetic religion (Khemet is the original name for Egypt), there was a list of universal ethical principals known as The 42 Laws of Ma’at.

Ma’at, personified, was a goddess or deity that represented a connection to the entire existence of the universe. She understood how the world functioned, how it had been created, and that we all should seek the same understanding to keep perfect order and harmony with The Creator and the universe. These 42 laws were not stated as obligatory rules but declarative statements. Apart of understanding our connection with the universe, our ancestors particularly followed the 12th (“I will not lay waste to the land”) and 34th (“I will not waste water”) laws. The belief was the we, the plants, trees, animals, wind and water were one, and anything done to taint, harm or waste disrupted the divine order of the universe.

Centuries later, this sense of connection to the universe seems alien to our people. Despite popular culture’s impulsive adoption of the “green” trend, our people have become completely oblivious of their powerful contribution to maintaining harmony and balance in our world. Admittedly, some of our people realize the power of environmentalism and recycle plastic bottles or reuse printing paper, but many others in our community do not. While Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsome, has created a “green initiative”, with hopes of becoming the “greenest city” in the United States, many other cities are not doing the same.

I recently attended a conference in Tennessee where I had the chance to meet brothas and sistas from all over the country, mainly the south. During my week, I noticed that people were throwing water bottles and paper into the trash. Instantly, my heart sank. Why are our own people, who come from an ancient lineage of environmentalists, not recycling? When asked, the reply was, “we never learned to recycle.”

Not matter what our respective religions and spiritual beliefs may be, there is no denying that our earth is a living being and that we must strive to keep it clean and free from harm as we would our own bodies. We are of this universe and through the study of the original environmentalists we can pass our knowledge on to other people in our community and once again successfully make our way back to not only healing the world, but to self-healing.