Today is the winter solstice, an auspicious time for humankind for millennia, long before Christianity, ever since we first learned to keep track of the seasons and the sun.

It’s the turning of the year, when the sun in the northern hemisphere stops trending southwards, stands still, and then turns and heads back north, heralding a new year, spring, a new crop, new animals to add to the flock.

Solstice thus reminds us of our close relationship with and dependence upon nature, which my headline “Peace with the Earth” also emphasizes. It is, of course, a variant of the proclamation of the angels appearing to the shepherds: “on earth peace, goodwill toward men” (Luke 2:14).

My version, however, speaks to a wider ecological perspective, eco-centric rather than anthropocentric.

The idea of making peace with nature has been championed in recent years by the United Nations. And the idea of “all our relations” is a powerful way that Indigenous people think about our place in nature and our links to all the other species in the web of life, to whom we are linked and on whom we depend.

Five years ago, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres gave an........

© Times Colonist