I want to talk about the need for cultural diversity as well as biological diversity, and the need to look holistically at the problem. First, I want to talk about something from our own culture, which is the Anishinabe culture, the Algonquin culture. We have an economic system, a whole value system, and part of that value system—part of our whole way of living—is a concept called reciprocity.
When I go out and I harvest wild rice up on our lakes in
The industrial system is based on capitalism, and essentially the mainstay of capitalism is that you put things like labor and capital and resources together for the purpose of accumulation—you take more than you need. That is the whole essence of capitalism, to accumulate more than you need. In contrast, the essence of our relationship to the creation, the essence of reciprocity, is that we take only what we need.
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Cultural Diversity | Vol. 1 No. 2 | Summer 1990