Acknowledging harm openly, not avoiding it, honors small lives

Evidence

Raking a pond provides you with a lot of mental free space for philosophizing. As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse. But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 307

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Recognizing another people’s wounds is a precondition of religious or moral vision — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 371; Acknowledging discomfort around death can provide solace. — Lynch, Thomas, The undertaking-life studies from the…, 14

Broader Connections

• Recognizing another people’s wounds is a precondition of religious or moral vision #corroborates (0.75) — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 371
• Acknowledging discomfort around death can provide solace. #corroborates (0.75) — Lynch, Thomas, The undertaking-life studies from the…, 14