We're all a little worried, right? I walk out to my backyard every morning in early July and notice that, yet again, an entire day and night has passed without rain. Yet again, the heat index is approaching 110 degrees. Yet again, we've broken another global high temperature record. My grass is already dead. Are my tomatoes going to make it?
Am I?
It sounds dramatic, perhaps, but my mind really does go there. If it's as bad as the meteorologists are predicting, and even their predictions keep getting surpassed by reality, it's hard not to spiral about how much longer we have before the wells dry up, or the sidewalks melt, or our children starve. My generation and those that come after walk in fear every day of the life we've been given here on Earth. The future does not feel like a guarantee as much as it feels like a bottleneck that many of us will get trapped in, smothered in, unable to crawl our way out.
We did this to ourselves, I often think. So this is the fate we deserve. We humans have exploited, raped, destroyed, neglected and abandoned the land for so long that this is just how we're going to repay the debts we owe her - with our lives and livelihoods. This is karma. There is no way out now. It's too late.
But there is a voice that calls from behind me, far in the distance, in an attempt to get me out of this place. She says, "Perhaps all you can do is love."
And perhaps she is right. Like a cool breeze with an unknown origin amidst this suffocating heatwave, she reminds me that my idea of repayment is not the same as hers. I think only in terms of capital, of property, of material - that's all I understand as a human under capitalism. Her vision is something I can't quite conceptualize yet. I haven't been taught how to. She seeks reverence, appreciation, attention, and mutual dependence. She's not interested in currency, or in too much meddling, in too much thinking or talking. Her only request is reciprocity.
The "she" I refer to, of course, is Mother Earth. Few people know how to decode her language anymore, but one person who does is Robin Wall Kimmerer: the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, also a botanist, also a mother, also a citizen of the native Potawatomi nation. Kimmerer has done through this book what so few have yet attempted in our world of looming environmental collapse, and that is to not only to transcribe Mother Earth's lessons, but even more importantly, showcase the hope within them.
The Earth has a funny way of trying to communicate with us. Many of us know this but have a very hard time deciphering it. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer's largest mission, I believe, is to instill those of us who have never learned this language with the skills we need to start listening, understanding, and responding. In a way, reading it is like taking a foreign language course. The difference is that this is a course for what is actually our most native language - we've just lost touch with it over the course of many generations and hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
Kimmerer is the perfect person to intercept and teach these lessons back to us - to take them from deep within our bones and out into the light again - because she is painfully familiar with the process of losing her home base. The tragedy and trauma of being forced from her native land and separated from her tribe and larger community is fresh, as it is for most Native Americans alive today. Most tribal nations have gone extinct since the "Manifest Destiny" period of American colonialism, and with them, practices of land conservation, sustainable agriculture, and cultural reverence for the natural world have all but disappeared. Manifest Destiny in and of itself describes a mindset that many American settlers had; one that ensured their way of life was superior, that they knew what cultural and political structures were best for humanity.
In many chapters throughout the book, Kimmerer details what happened to her people when removing them from their lands didn't stop them from their "savage" practices: "Throughout Indian Territory there are records of Indian agents being paid a bounty for rounding up kids to ship to the government boarding schools. Later, in a pretense of choice, the parents had to sign papers to let their children go “legally.” Parents who refused could go to jail. Some may have hoped it would give their children a better future than a dust-bowl farm. Sometimes federal rations—weevilly flour and rancid lard that were supposed to replace the buffalo—would be withheld until the children were signed over" (17). No matter which direction it came from, the blight of settler colonialism was unavoidable. If simply taking ownership of the land wasn't enough, the children had to be conditioned to believe that ownership was more important than stewardship. And so the old traditions were forgotten. Almost.
Enough of the tribesmen survived to come back together once it was safe - largely wounded, but still armed with the wisdom and hope of the trees - to patch up all that they could, relearn the languages themselves, and begin to tell the stories that stuck around. Kimmerer gathers these stories from the plants she has come to know well: pecan trees, wild strawberry, asters and goldenrod, black ash, alder, corn, and of course, sweetgrass. They each express themselves as offerings to us humans, happy to give themselves for us, so long as we understand that in order to receive them and continue the relationship, we must care for them. Beyond that, we must make our gratitude known. There must be mutual respect; the understanding that we rely on one another for survival. Reciprocity.
The problem is that we have terrible difficulty seeing these species as equal to us, as worthy of mutual respect. How does one show gratitude to a pecan tree? Why would we, when we value the pecan forest's square acreage more than the commodity it produces when left alone? We need a gas station more than green space, more than a harvest, more than a homemade pie surrounded by loved ones. That is the superior way of life as we've been taught by the many generations before us.
What I love so much about this book is how Kimmerer is able to point out this great, glaring misjudgment in our cultural advancement, but refuses to ever give in to despair. Why would she, when there are still so many pecan trees, wild strawberries, asters and goldenrod to extend our gratitude toward? While many of us - especially those who haven't lived the generational traumas of Native Americans and other displaced peoples of color - have already settled into the graves we've been digging, Kimmerer and her wise posse of friends, family and students featured in this book shout down to us: "NO! There is still time! There is still so much beauty! There are still so many gifts! We are not too late! Get back up and help fill in these holes!"
When our effort feels fruitless, a chapter like "The Council of Pecans" reminds us that even where the scars run deep and damage flattens the landscape as far as the eye can see, time and care will heal it. Here, she demonstrates her incredible ability to weave story and science - telling of the newfound evidence that trees can indeed "speak" to one another through pheromones in order to warn those downwind of dangerous parasites. Her people knew this long ago, but scientists brushed it off as spiritual nonsense. It turns out that trees, and likely all plants, do have the ability to communicate; not only that, but they have a wonderful sense of "Robin Hood" ethics in their redistribution of resources from healthier specimen to the ones who need a little more help. The plants understand reciprocity better than we humans ever have.
In "Burning Cascade Head," a similar pattern appears: a tragically true story of disease and destruction that swept over the Oregon Coast as settlers arrived there in the mid-nineteenth century, wiping out native villages and biodiverse estuaries in the name of claiming ownership of the land. Salmon runs were repurposed into dikes for the sake of building farmland, effectively replacing fish with cattle. They almost went extinct like the pecans and the Potawatomi.
Almost.
But survival is so likely, as we've seen, so long as someone cares. And if that person can get just a few more people to care, the work can begin toward restoration. Those dikes were eventually repurposed back again into their original form. The salmon remembered where to go. The people remembered to celebrate their return, and suddenly the tragedy has an upswing - maybe not a happy ending, but at least a glimmer of hope.
There's one more piece of the reciprocity puzzle that Kimmerer sheds light on in this book, and it's very little to do with plants. It's everything to do with humanity. In "Sitting In A Circle," she puts on her professor hat and takes her disconnected students out into the forests of the southeastern US for field study. They learn how to "shop" for their needs among the environment that surrounds them. They discover the difference between "dirt" and "soil" (there's a very, very big difference). They begin to sing while they work. They no longer care that they don't have internet access. Something changes within them and between them. They begin to understand that we all need one another. We to the trees, we to the soil, the cattails to us, the mice to the cattails. We all need one another.
Toward the end, "The Sacred and the Superfund" drives this idea home with a few demonstrations of what happens to the land when at first we view it as capital, then as property, then as machine - all the initial ways in which settlers used and disposed of precious pieces of this Earth without a second thought. What does happen? Lakes that were once sacred to a village are used as dumping grounds for factory waste. The soil and mud disappears under artificial white sludge, which poisons the water and kills all the life within it. What was once a place to gather, to forage, to swim and celebrate became a literal wasteland - a place that no one would ever want to return to. Still, it is not too late.
Someone noticed. Someone cared. And so this wasteland got just a little bit of help by way of some planted natives; even though not much would stand a chance to grow there, someone did.
The land can do its own work from there, Kimmerer shows us. Hardy species survive the sludgy underground. Ants dig deeper into the original soil and bring it back to the surface. Berries can soon grow. Birds can soon return. The ruffage and the feces and the slow churning of Earth seeps back into the water supply day by day until the oils dissipate and a few species of fish find their way back again. We set this in motion. We can continue to tend to the work so long as we're not too busy mourning over what we think we've completely destroyed. We're not quite that powerful.
And so maybe we pick up this book, and maybe we utilize the power that we do have. Maybe we can open our hearts just wide enough to eke out a few thank you's to the garden we planted this summer. We slow down on our walks and take a little more time to notice the new fluorescent shoots of grass and clover that spring up even in early August, even after many months without rain. We harvest the tomatoes that survived, we slice them up delicately, and we pair them with toast and mayo and a slice of swiss cheese. We take a bite and wonder for a fleeting moment why we feel like crying - but instead of sending that feeling away, we stay there, and we realize that it's because it wasn't Mother Earth on her own who produced that tomato; it was our mutual love and care for one another. We had a part in it, too. We are not hopeless. We are not too late.
I really think that if we allowed ourselves to be penetrated by the pain of this world, even for a minute, we would fall to our knees and weep in grief and sorrow. Likewise, if we were open and receptive to the beauty of this world for that minute, we would collapse in thanks, in gratitude, in reverence, in overwhelming, ecstatic love. Our relationship to our true Mother is all of these things - it is equal parts pain and fear, love and beauty. We can't get lost in the former if we want to experience the latter, but we do have to accept some sort of balance of both. That's just the way it is.
Braiding Sweetgrass, if nothing else, is a reminder of relationship above all. It is a reminder that alone, nothing survives; but together - with presence, respect, and care - we all thrive. That is the true superior way of living because it is the only way we actually survive, and when I say "we" I mean much more than humanity.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Interested in reading? Here is some additional info you might want to know:
Pages | 384 |
Difficulty | 🔴🔴🔴⚫⚫ Though there are frequent references to scientific plant names and native Potawatomi language, actual descriptions and explanations are straightforward. The imagery used throughout the text helps readers to visualize the landscapes Kimmerer speaks about, and though passages can get lengthy, they are broken up into relatively short sections and chapters. Each chapter covers a different topic or event, but the entire book demonstrates a clear thesis. |
Average Ratings | 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌗 This is the highest overall rated book I've ever logged on Goodreads, with an average of 4.53 stars coming from over 125,000 reviews. People widely praise Kimmerer's eloquent writing style and beautiful descriptions of the land, as well as her ability to capture a message nearly all of us desperately needed to hear. The only routine complaint is disorganization of the book's timeline, which makes her message less clear for some. |
About the Author | Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, 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. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild. |
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