A Thousand Suns You won't see Mazge Gazeto in an "I Love New
York" t-shirt anytime soon. When Gazeto, a native of the Gamo
Highlands in Africa’s Rift Valley, soaked in a view of midtown
Manhattan for the first time, he had some critical things to
say: “I can’t see any land or fields. There is nothing. These
people just live on concrete surfaces.” In 2008, Gazeto was part
of a delegation invited to New York City by the United Nations
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. There, they shared their
culture's insights about governing resources and relating to
nature—wisdom fundamentally tied to a worldview in which humans
are deeply interconnected with a larger universe. The Western
cosmology is very different, says Yale Divinity School professor
Mary Evelyn Tucker. Here, "removing God from nature ... has de-
sacrilized the world, and therefore opened it up for
consumption, and our abuse, and for exploitation." "We can say
it is just two different worlds," says Gamo elder Kapo Kansa,
"and we are depending on nature