Quotes About Responsibility

In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold.

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.

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.

While city folks may be separated from the sources of what they consume, they can exercise reciprocity through how they spend their money. While the digging of the leeks and the digging of the coal may be too far removed to see, we consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets. We can use our dollars as the indirect current of reciprocity.

These berries belong to me," she said, "not to you. I don't want to see you kids eating my berries." I knew the difference: In the fields behind my house, the berries belonged to themselves. At this lady's roadside stand, she sold them for sixty cents a quart.

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

It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music.

You don't show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved.

In return for the privilege of breath

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.

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

A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them

In moving from a childhood in the woods to the university I had unknowingly shifted between worldviews, from a natural history of experience, in which I knew plants as teachers and companions to whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science.

Everybody lives downstream.

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

Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage.

we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

but there's fire you must tend to every day. The hardest one to take care of is the one right here," he says, tapping his finger against his chest. "Your own fire, your spirit. We all carry a piece of that sacred fire within us. We have to honor it and care for it. You are the firekeeper.

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

But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

Be the person you were so I can be the person you made me.

Baby caca is like Kryptonite to a father. Even the dog says, "You don't rub his face in it."

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.

Dad turned to Kurt. "You must be the boy I keep hearing about." "I guess so," Kurt said. "Well, Kurt," Dad said, "just remember that I specialize in tying things to rockets and sending them into space. And sometimes they accidentally blow up." "Dad." "You'll have no reason to kill me, sir." "Kurt. You make sure she doesn't cry, okay?" Dad smiled happily at Kurt and then sagely at me.