Quotes About Respect

Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world.

The students all demonstrated a deep respect and affection for nature.

beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world.

You wouldn't harm what gives you love.

Saying it makes a living land into "natural resources." If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence?

Skywoman's first people lived by their understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for their world.

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.*

the Honorable Harvest: take only what you need and use everything you take.

we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.

But it is not mine to give, nor yours to take.

The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal. A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences.

But I notice that my eyes and my thoughts pass quickly over the plastic on my desk. I hardly give the computer a second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that's a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object.

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

Slow down— it's thirty years of a tree's life you've got in your hands there. Don't you owe it a few minutes to think about what you'll do with it?

Sweetgrass pickers collect properly and respectfully, for their own use and the needs of their community. They return a gift to the earth and tend to the well-being of the wiingashk.

It was a kind of respect, a kind of thanks. On a beautiful summer morning, I suppose you could call it joy.

The Honorable Harvest asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us.

We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don't have to avert our eyes with shame, wo that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth's beings.

objects . . . will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.

We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation.

When we forget how to live in harmony, they remind us of the way we were instructed to live as people.

This is the grammar of animacy.