"For much of human’s time on the planet, before the great delusion, we lived in cultures that understood us not as “masters of the universe” but as what my Haudenosaunee neighbors call 'the younger brothers of creation.'

"Long before Aristotle placed our species atop the anthropocentric Scale of Nature, long before Western religions declared that only humans were made in the image of God, the peoples of Turtle Island were guided by the kincentric worldview of 'all my relations.' It is a philosophy and set of practices based on knowing that the same life force animates us all and binds us as relatives—tree people, bird people, and human people. This kincentric way of being grew from the understanding that we are linked in webs of reciprocity, where the survival of one depends upon the survival of the other. Simultaneously scientific and spiritual, this way of thinking has evolutionary adaptive value in guiding ecological relationships toward mutual flourishing.

"But a few centuries ago—an eyeblink of time in the lifetime of our species—humans forgot this truth and began an unwitting social experiment in worldview. The Western world seems to have asked the question 'What would happen if we believed in a pyramid of human exceptionalism, the notion that our species stands alone at the top of the biological hierarchy, fundamentally different and superior to all others? What if a single species, out of the millions who inhabit the planet, was somehow more deserving of the richness of the Earth than any other?'" - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Book Excerpt:  Portraits of Earth Justice: Americans Who Tell the Truth