A quote for December 2025.
Bears never find themselves unemployed or in need of career counsel[l]ing. Moose don’t take over beavers’ means of production. Robins don’t hire other birds to get worms for them in the morning. Cardinals don’t have nannies looking after their young and cleaning their nests so that their lives are more comfortable. Caribou don’t have armies guarding their territory. Salmon don’t stockpile food in the riverbed.
The exception is always human: we are always trying to make life more, and this leads to the diminishment of life, it leads to less life ... We are no more important—and many would say we are less important—than the other beings and systems making up the universe. We have no more “rights” than any other living thing in that web. We are not special, extra or exceptional. We are not owed the lives of other living things.
We are not owed the planet.
We are not owed comfortable lives ...
Who are we to place ourselves above all other living things.
—Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg)
From Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2025.
Photography by Ardiss Hutaff.
