Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeff Rich

Three words, and Jeff Rich is already mapping the politics of who gets to matter. "Attribution is power" reads like a field note from an explorer who has learned that the biggest dangers aren’t always cliffs or currents; they’re narratives. To attribute is to name, to frame, to decide what counts as discovery and who gets the credit. In that sense, attribution isn’t etiquette or a footnote fetish. It’s a lever.

The intent is blunt: credit determines authority. The subtext is sharper: power often hides behind the pretense of neutrality. Maps, expedition reports, museum labels, documentary voiceovers, even GPS waypoints all sound objective, but they’re tools of authorship. Whoever gets to say "this is what happened" or "this is what this place is called" effectively owns the story. That ownership converts into funding, prestige, access, and the right to return. It can also erase local expertise, Indigenous names, and prior knowledge with a clean, confident caption: discovered by.

Context matters because exploration has a long history of attribution as conquest by other means. Empires planted flags; institutions planted citations. Rich’s line works because it compresses that entire history into a portable warning for the present: if you care about truth, watch the credit trail. Who is quoted, who is thanked, who is listed as co-author, whose knowledge is treated as "guidance" rather than scholarship? The moral isn’t abstract. Attribution is where ethics meets infrastructure, and where legacies are quietly built or quietly stolen.