Quotes About Stewardship

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

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.

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.

Are all the pieces of the ecosystem still here and doing their duty?

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

How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity...We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels.

Traditional Onondaga understand a world in which all beings were given a gift, a gift that simultaneously engenders a responsibility to the world.

Had the new people learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals—never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being—the eagle would look down on a different world. The salmon would be crowding up the rivers, and passenger pigeons would darken the sky. Wolves, cranes, Nehalem, cougars, Lenape, old-growth forests would still be here, each fulfilling their sacred purpose.

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants.

Perhaps we can think of the Honorable Harvest as a mirror by which we judge our purchases. What do we see in the mirror? A purchase worthy of the lives consumed? Dollars become a surrogate, a proxy for the harvester with hands in the earth, and they can be used in support of the Honorable Harvest—or not.

The Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law and still believe that, in return for the gifts of Mother Earth, human people have responsibility for caring for the nonhuman people, for stewardship of the land.

We might look to the Thanksgiving Address for guidance on weaving the two. We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people.

Leave this place better than you found it," she admonished. And so we did. We also had to leave wood for the next person's fire, with tinder and kindling carefully sheltered from rain by a sheet of birch bark. I liked to imagine their pleasure, those other paddlers, arriving after dark to find a ready pile of fuel to warm their evening meal.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place nears living as if your children's future mattered

not 'What can we take?' but 'What can we give to Mother Earth?' That's how it's supposed to be

to be indigenous is to protect life on earth

It is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.

Restoring a habitat, no matter how good intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves us as arborators of what is good, when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests. By what we want.

leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.

If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking "What is our responsibility?" is the same as asking "What is our gift?

It is our duty to be keepers and managers of the sea. If we protect our wet fields, they will continue to provide for us.