Reciprocity Over Sustainability
“Sustainable.”
The word gets printed on tote bags, slapped on corporate mission statements, and whispered like a spell meant to absolve us of harm. Buy this “sustainable” thing and you’re a good person. Eat that “sustainable” food and you’re doing your part. Recycle enough, and maybe the oceans will forgive us.
But let’s be honest: Sustainability has become the PR gloss on a machine still chewing through the world.
It doesn’t challenge consumption — it accessorizes it. It doesn’t ask us to change — it asks us to purchase differently. It keeps the human at the center, and the rest of the living world as backdrop, resource, and raw material.
Sustainability, as it’s marketed, is simply the art of doing less harm while still maintaining the same extractive worldview. And the Earth deserves so much more than our “less harm.” The Earth deserves relationship.
The Lie of the “Sustainable Consumer”
The idea that we can shop our way into planetary healing is one of the great seductions of modern capitalism. It’s tidy. Painless. Convenient. It lets us feel righteous without interrupting a single habit.
But buying “sustainable” goods inside an unsustainable story still reinforces the same myth:
That humans are separate from the living world.
That we are entitled to take without giving back.
That the Earth’s role is to endure our appetites.
Even the word “sustain” betrays its underlying premise: to sustain our lifestyle, our systems, our comforts — as if they are non-negotiable.
But who is sustaining whom? Who is exhausted? Who is holding the weight? It’s not us.
The planet is not asking us for sustainability.
The planet is asking us to remember the contract we broke.
Reciprocity: The Old Way That Never Stopped Being True
Before “sustainability” became a marketing category, humans lived by something much older, wilder, and wiser:
Reciprocity is not a trend. It’s not a certification. It’s a worldview that understands:
Every gift requires a return gesture.
Every harvest requires gratitude and restraint.
Every creature, river, forest, and stone has its own dignity.
Taking is always paired with giving.
Life thrives when relationships are tended — not when resources are optimized
Reciprocity doesn’t ask, “How do we minimize harm?” It asks, “How do we give back more than we take?”
This is the difference between staying alive on the planet and staying alive with the planet.
Regeneration: The Earth’s Native Language
Sustainability aims for neutral. Reciprocity aims for sacred. Regeneration aims for abundance.
Regeneration is not staying the same — it’s becoming more whole.
It’s the forest growing back thicker after a well-tended burn.
It’s the soil becoming richer because the herd returned.
It’s the river healing after the dams come down.
It’s humans no longer positioning ourselves as managers of nature, but participants in the great metabolic dance of death and renewal.
Regeneration requires humility, slowing down, and relinquishing the fantasy that we can “fix” the planet from outside it.
Regeneration invites us back into membership in the living world.
Reverence: The Missing Ingredient in Modern Environmentalism
You can recycle with efficiency and still have no reverence.
You can buy carbon offsets and still feel nothing for the river.
You can consume “eco-friendly” products and never once ask the Earth what she wants.
Reverence is the antidote to extraction.
Reverence reanimates the world we’ve been taught to treat as inert.
Reverence reminds us:
The forest has feelings.
The water has memory.
The land dreams.
The animals watch us.
The world is not scenery — it is kin.
Without reverence, sustainability becomes math.
With reverence, reciprocity becomes devotion.
Beyond Sustainability: A New (Ancient) Ethic of Belonging
We don’t need more sustainable brands. We need more people in relationship with place.
We don’t need more green marketing. We need more humans who remember how to kneel at a riverbank and listen.
We don’t need “eco-friendly lifestyles.” We need a culture whose deepest instinct is care.
This shift is not about perfection. It’s not about purity. It’s about re-entering the conversation with the living world we have ignored.
A reciprocal life is one built on:
asking permission
listening deeply
taking only what’s needed
tending what tends us
honoring limits
giving thanks
restoring what we’ve harmed
creating conditions for more life
It’s not about being “good.” It’s about being in relationship.
The Call: Become a Participant Again
The Earth doesn’t want your guilt.
She wants your participation. She wants your hands in the soil. Your breath in the wind. Your body in the cycle of give and take. Your remembering.
Sustainability asks: How do we keep going?
Reciprocity asks: How do we become worthy of the world that keeps us alive?
It’s time to stop performing environmentalism and start practicing kinship.
It’s time to move from “less harm” to more life.
It’s time, finally, to return to reciprocity.
If this stirred something awake in you, explore what happens when grief becomes a doorway:
Read: Ecological Grief: Mourning the Earth as a Path to Healing — a deeper descent into how sorrow for the planet can become fuel for connection, courage, and collective repair.