Quotes About Interdependence

Not every problem in the world belongs to you alone, Badgerlock. Let others have their share.

You and I, we are like buds grafted onto a tree. We can grow true to ourselves, but only so much as our roots will allow us

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.

Not every problem in the world belongs to you, Tom Badgerlock. Let others have their share.

I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do.

I feel you are woven of the same strand as I, that we are but extensions of a segmented life, and that together we complete one another. I feel a joy in your presence, because I feel my own life wax greater when we are close to one another.

They need other people to make them think they're alive. They only feel like they're important if someone else tells them they are.

They all need the others to say, yes, yes, this is what we should be doing, it's worth the risk. And now that they've decided it, the decision is bigger than all of them. Not one of them could turn back on their own.

The word ecology is derived from the Greek oikos , the word for home.

There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage. For those, we need each other.

We spill over into the world and the world spills over into us.

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? No declarations of political loyalty are required, just a response to a repeated question: "Can we agree to be grateful for all that is given?

Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.

we all live downstream

We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.

Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people.

But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation...If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

Linked by sweetgrass, there is reciprocity between you, linked by sweetgrass, the holder as vital as the braider.

When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. 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.

They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.

If you didn't know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective.

As the temperature drops, single voices—clear and hollow—replace the keening chorus: the ancient speech of frogs. One word becomes clear, as if spoken in English. "Hear! Hear! Hear! The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family . Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.