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Kinship
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Animistic sustainability is performative. It always requires a dialogue with a real other, a tree person, a jaguar person, a river person. Sustainable actions cannot be done without the etiquette of relationship, and without enacting the simple rites of reciprocity: Before we can save a place, we need to ask it to receive us in grace and to allow us to get in touch. And we need to express gratitude in words and in actions. Kosmos Journal
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Granting others life as a key command of organising one’s own existence, and of building society, was never a concern of market thinking. To the contrary, it is deemed a hindrance. Reality here is construed as a dog-eats-dog world (according to the “natural state”, described by Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan). Reciprocity with the living world in this thinking is denounced as a naïve dream. — Kosmos Journal
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“These two dimensions — enacting the world as a commons through reciprocity with all beings, and experiencing this sharing relationship as my own and others’ aliveness, and hence the cosmos’ true character — cannot be separated. Only when we understand that the metabolic process through which we participate in the ongoing life is an emotional experience for all who are implied in this, can we proceed from the attempt to efficiently distribute objects to truly engage in an…
