When you visit another culture, try to reach beyond the mere exoticism. If you sit and talk with a child in Peru, for example, who believes that the mountain is a deity, an Apu spirit that will direct his destiny, consider for a moment what he is really saying. Think about what that really means, and how different that is from being raised in America and believing that a mountain is just a pile of rocks. Now, forget who's right. After all, who is to say? The interesting observation is how the belief system changes with the relationship to the land.

I was raised in British Columbia to believe that the vast temperate rain forests existed to be cut. That was the foundation of the ideology of scientific forestry that I was taught in school and that I practiced as a logger in the woods. It made me totally different from my friends among the Kwakiutl, who believed that those same forests were the abode of the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits who dwell at the north end of the world, spirits that young men had to confront during the Hamatsa initiation. Was that forest mere cellulose or was it the domain of the spirits? Those who believed the latter had lived with a very light ecological footprint for several thousand years. My worldview had laid waste to the landscape in less than two generations.

In Australia, people frequently travel to Uluru, or Ayers Rock. They have heard that it is sacred and invariably are impressed by its scale and beauty. Perhaps they buy some Aboriginal art or music, spend a little time with an Aboriginal tour guide. They've had a cultural experience of a sort. But if they had a chance to go to a deeper reality, they might understand what the Aboriginal worldview teaches us about the very nature of existence.

When the British first arrived on the shores of Australia, they encountered a people with a rudimentary material culture, with no knowledge of ceramics or agriculture—an entire island continent where nobody had ever attempted, or so it appeared, to improve upon their lot. The British, by contrast, had made a cult of progress. Everything about the Aboriginal people offended them.

The British, of course, had no way of appreciating the subtlety of the Aboriginal mind, which exists in two parallel universes—the phenomenalist realm and the world of the Dreaming. These were and remain a people with no notion of linear time. Theirs is one of the great experiments in human thought. Whereas the entire ethos of the British was the pursuit of change, the essence of the Aboriginal civilization was the notion that the world exists as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity is to maintain the land, through ritual activity, precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation. The Logos of the Dreaming was constancy, balance, symmetry. In the moment, there is deductive reasoning—on a hunt, for instance, when the men pay attention to signs with a perspicacity that would put Sherlock Holmes to shame. But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, is inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning. Had humanity followed this track in the human imagination, it is true that we would never have put a man on the moon. But we would certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life supports of the planet. I have never in all my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born 55,000 years ago.