"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Every part of this earth is sacred to my people.
Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.
The white man\'s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man."

These words have been romanticized as being said by Chief Seattle to the Governor of the Washington territory when asked about buying his land.
It is a beautiful speech. The only problem is that Chief Seattle never made it. The whole speech was written by a white screen writer and professor of film, Ted Perry, for the 1971 ABC TV drama "Home". It was fiction, this is the origin of the myth of Native Americans respect for the environment.

The myth that Native Americans are protective of the environment was further fortified by the "Keep America beautiful" series of public announcements that aired in 1971, the same year that "Home" aired.

The Indian witnesses white people littering and polluting the environment, and quietly weeps for mother earth and the abuse she must go through at the hands of white people. The message of the public announcement is that we must all be as protective of the environment as the Native Americans were

Here is the commercial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1QQWJK_OUk&feature=fvw

The crying Indian was actually Espera Oscar DeCorti, a son of two Italian immigrants

Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans were no more or less protective of the environment than were any other groups on earth. A large majority of plant and animal species that ever existed on the American continents had been driven extinct by Native Americans long before Columbus set foot in the west indies.


These are just but a few of the ways we have been duped into believing a falsehood and thus changing our behavior. It is further implied that those that don\'t follow in step with the new changes should be seen as outcasts.
It\'s called social engineering, where one group (those in the films, radio, advertising, news business) influences the masses with emotional leverage to get society to change their long held customs and beliefs for the story tellers new ideas of how things were or should be. I selected the myth of the native American as being the guardian of the environment, well because I relied heavily on excerpts from the book "Why beautiful people have more daughters" but there are so many other examples that can be given if one looks at how we are easily instructed how to think, react, wear, live, throw away, what we should buy, who we should vote for etc.
Social engineering has been used to great effect on us as a society. Political correctness and a host of social norms have been altered.
If you look at America in 1950 and compare it with today you can see the radical transformation social engineering has done to us.
The left has mastered this form of manipulation and use it on a daily basis. A common new tactic is to say "the debate over global warming is over, we all realize there is a problem and now we have to only discuss how to fix it" The same technique is used on the health care debate.

The only counter to this is to cut the puppet strings through educating our fellow citizens and showing them how they have been manipulated on so many levels and areas of their lives but so few. Free men aren’t guided but follow their own path of righteousness.