Selections: Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Bio from robinwallkimmerer.com:
“Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals.
As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.”
'People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how'
James Yeh | The Guardian | May 23, 2020 | No paywall
biophilia: our innate love for living things.
“'It’s as if people remember in some kind of early, ancestral place within them. They’re remembering what it might be like to live somewhere you felt companionship with the living world, not estrangement. Though the flip side to loving the world so much,'” [Kimmerer] points out, citing the influential conservationist Aldo Leopold, is that to have an ecological education is to 'live alone in a world of wounds.'
“'We tend to shy away from that grief,' she explains. 'But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world. You know, I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.'” (1,918 words)
The Serviceberry
Robin Wall Kimmerer | Emergence Magazine | December 10, 2020 | No paywall
🎧 Highly recommend listening to the narration by Kimmerer herself.
“As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?” (5,854 words)
🎙️Podcast: The Intelligence of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer | Krista Tippett | On Being | Updated August 20, 2020 | No paywall
Why is our world beautiful?
How do we respond to the living world, instead of putting up barriers around us? (50:55 minutes)
🎥 Watch: Questions for a Resilient Future
Robin Wall Kimmerer | Center for Humans and Nature | January 14, 2014 | No paywall
“We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.
Though the Earth provides us with all that we need, we have created a consumption-driven economy that asks, “What more can we take from the Earth?” and almost never “What does the Earth ask of us in return?”
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Renee Hunt, Founding Editor