Postscript
While a full treatment of what an ethics of hospitality to nonhuman strangers might entail exceeds the scope of the current project—which has primarily focused on hospitality to the human other—we want to briefly mention how environmental other-than-human issues might be understood through the framework we present here. It seems clear that hospitality can work as a paradigm for ecological action, countering the way so many of us are able to hostilely look the other way in regard to environmental concerns because we are more interested in maintaining self-interested habits—not understanding ourselves as part of a fragile ecological web with the nonhuman world. Leaving nature alone—that is, respecting nature—is itself an act of hospitality that refuses hostile acts of exploitation and manipulation. Welcoming nature into our lives and letting nature welcome us back is another step yet to be taken.