There’s a Haida proverb of which I am quite fond. In its simplest form it is this: Asi tlagaay xhan dii qinggasang: “The ground might see me” or “the earth might see me.” You could say, in Haida, I won’t do this or I won’t do that because the ground might see me. Or you could say, If I did this or that, taajaay xhan dii qingghayaagasang, “the beach sand would be able to see me.” If that’s what you say and you mean what you say, the earth is more than just a place to go hunting and fishing and drilling for oil. It’s a moral and ethical benchmark. A benchmark with eyes. Other people may be good ethical reference points as well, but the basic moral reference is the ground beneath your feet. You don’t exit the moral domain when you leave the house and go into the forest or put out to sea or walk down the beach. You enter a larger, possibly stricter, moral sphere—and when you return to the house, you bring that heightened sense of morality with you. Doing so won’t enable you to save the world, but you might just manage to save your self-respect.

Robert Bringhurst, “The Mind of the Wild”, in Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky, Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis