Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

In the indigenous worldview, a healthy landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners.  It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected non-human persons to whom we humans have a responsibility.  Restoration requires renewing the capacity not only for "ecosystem services" but for "cultural services" as well.  Restoring relationship means that when the eagles return, it will be safe for them to eat the fish.  People want that for themselves, too.  Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise.  It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.  Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants.  It is medicine for the earth.

It wasn't until the 1970's that the National Parks System here in the United States first began using prescribed burns in national parks to manage the ecosystems there.  Controlled burns, like unplanned burns caused by lightning, clear the landscape of heavy forest canopies and allow grasslands and savannas, to flourish in their place, renewing a cycle of growth that leads back to healthy forests.  Indigenous people in North America knew this, and used fire to keep the lands healthy on which they were living, but white settler colonialism dismissed this knowledge as barbaric, supplanting it with an ideology of the "undisturbed wilderness," as it simultaneously uprooted indigenous people from their homes and relocated them.  It took hundreds of years for settlers to understand what indigenous people always knew: fire is an important part of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the aland.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is both a professor of environmental biology and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation living in upstate New York.  Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is full of narratives like this one, in which indigenous knowledge about the ecosystems of North America have proven to be more accurate and more productive than the ideologies of industry and unfettered capitalism.  Here's another example: while industrial farming practice still grows plants like squash, beans, and corn in careful, individual rows--drive past any plot of farmland in the county and you can see them--Native Americans have always known that these plants prosper when grown together.  Tall corn stalks provide support for bean vines; wide bean leaves provide shade for late-blooming squash; even their roots are placed strategically underground to help each plant prosper.  And yet, the fact that indigenous people were found growing the "three sisters" together was considered proof of their ignorance about agriculture.

Kimmerer speaks with special authority on these topics because she can bridge the gap between two languages: the scientific language of environmental science and horticulture, and the indigenous language of a reciprocal relationship with plants.  Her lucid discussion of petioles and rhizomes leads to a powerful discussion of plant personhood and even love.  For indigenous Americans, Kimmerer explains, plants were thought of not as objects but as subjects, having a personhood of their own and demanding the same kind of reciprocity as other human beings.  As the land gives to humans of itself, so humans must ask what the land demands of them.

Many people probably find that language silly.  Plants don't demand anything, they might say, they're plants, and even if they did, the word love--as in, plants show love by giving themselves to us--is a bridge too far.  Even I found myself a little squeamish about those metaphors.  And they are metaphors, to be sure; but all of the language we use about the word is metaphorical, isn't it?  There's no reason to think that love is any worse a metaphor than mast fruiting to describe the way that pecan trees deliver immense pecan harvests when they are in possession of excess energy, so that the pecans might be collected and saved for lean years.  As a metaphor, love may be even better, because it recognizes that we, too, have an obligation to protect the pecan trees, and the squash, and the cattails.

One thing that really appeals to me about the worldview Kimmerer describes is that it is actually very human.  Kimmerer describes asking hundreds of undergraduates to describe a positive interaction between people and their natural environment and gets no answer.  "How is it possible that in twenty years of education," she writes, "they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?"  But even our most well-meaning environmental ideologies are hopelessly mired in the fantasy that human beings are something separate from their environment, and that the best thing we can do for the land is to leave it alone.  We can't leave it alone, and it doesn't want us to.  The land needs us as we need the land, and only a reciprocal relationship with it will keep us from destroying it through overuse and neglect.

Braiding Sweetgrass is essentially a collection of essays.  The theme of reciprocity and indigenous knowledge informs each one, though the plants themselves are different: in this essay it's pecans, in that one cedar trees or lichens or strawberries.  It can be a bit uneven; it might have been even more impactful if the essays had been more carefully pruned.  (Horticultural pun intended.)  But even still, it's a powerful statement about what our relationship with the land might one day still be like, if we can find the humility to listen to those who have tended it for millennia.