Gratitude for and to nature: insights from emails to urban trees

Abstract

Gratitude goes to the heart of discussions about ethics, care, and responsibility in a more-than-human world. Surprisingly, gratitude remains peripheral to geographical considerations of human-environment interrelations and sustainability. Moving beyond questions about whether gratitude to nature is sensible, we develop an understanding of gratitude that is relational, emotional, and practical (or enacted). We argue that focus on gratitude draws attention to a kind of attachment thus far neglected in geography, as well as enabling a new lens for what people value about their everyday lives, the labour of nonhuman-others in fostering a ‘good life’, and efforts to recognise and reinforce human..