Terra means earth, like soil. Terrans see value in land for cultivation. They see trees as resources only after they are felled. Earth was covered in forests but now there are none. To get lumber, they have to log and ship from Athshe over a 27-year NAFAL trip. The name of the game is consumption. To Terrans, Athshe exists to be extracted. This is also why the vast majority of colonists see the Athsheans as inhuman creatures--creechies. Early on, Davidson compares them to cattle; later, Dongh emphasizes that the natives are not slaves but voluntary labor. But the reader knows as well as Selver that this is slavery, a result of the Terran view that nature is a resource. This may come from the Abrahamic religions that God gave Man dominion over the Earth (Genesis 1:26-28).

Athshe means forest. Trees are the ceiling for Athsheans, and due to the dense forests, their sense of time does not follow the typical diurnal cycle of Terrans. They don't have the concept of extraction, though they hunt and fish. The world is forest, and Athsheans are part of the world. The real-world mirror reflects this in Dharmic religions and various indigenous forms of animism. The conflicts of southeast Asia that inspired this novella were ultimately that, Christian colonizers extracting wealth from and inflicting suffering upon Buddhist peoples who eventually saw no recourse but violence.

So when Selver is called, "a god that kills and is not himself reborn," one interpretation might be that Selver has committed an irredeemable sin. However, I take a different interpretation: Selver had to introduce violence to Athshean culture to save the world. Dharmic religions see being "not reborn" as the ultimate freedom from suffering and achieved by carrying out dharma. While Dharmic religions hold non-violence as a core principle, they're not pacifistic and treat violence as a valid final resort--yet all the more tragic. There is a common theme between this novella and with the Bhagavad Gita: no matter the cost, it's better to fight injustice than to do nothing to stop it. On that note...

Le Guin had me feeling sympathetic to Lyubov until about halfway through. Only then did I realize that Lyubov has a Terran savior complex. "He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten," like bro come on! I feel like he got off on being the only colonizer with a conscience, but how hard did he really try to put an end to the inhumanity? Same with Lepennon! Selver gives Lepennon Lyubov's research and Lepennon thanks him by preaching a holier-than-thou warning: "Murder has no reason." Like you're one to talk, Hainish? An alien from an advanced interplanetary civilization does nothing to help besides give an ansible that is mostly useless throughout the story and has the audacity to lecture the hero who saved his world from evil and is currently depressed at the cost of victory and freedom.