At some point, intellectual historians will have to reckon with the phenomenal success of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. When they do, they may place it among the most important works of its kind, up there with Walden, say, or Silent Spring. Now is probably not the time. First published in 2013, it is at this writing number two on the New York Times bestseller list of non-fiction books in paperback, a list it has appeared on now for 119 weeks.
What accounts for the book’s success? Certainly, a genre exists for lyrical nature writing. But it appears that Braiding Sweetgrass has crossed over to a wider audience. In the midst of this era of multiplying, accelerating crises, there is something emotionally stabilizing about Kimmerer’s book, and I think that can be attributed to her central concept: reciprocity.
Kimmerer is a professor of botany, trained in universities and mainstream science. But her concept of reciprocity comes from her background as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and her training in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). In the creation story with which she begins the book, Skywoman falls from above in a beam of light. The creatures in the darkness catch her, care for her, make for her a home of mud, and she reciprocates with the bundle of seeds she carries in her hand. In this way the earth was made, “not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude” (4). An alchemy of reciprocal gifting, in other words—you receive a gift, you’re grateful, and you give a gift, and that creates a bond. Kimmerer later gives this a more systems science description: new arrangements are created, old ones transformed, by a joining of “obligate symbiosis” (343).
Indeed, Kimmerer is braiding together a kind of intellectual symbiosis between TEK and a systems science-informed biology that pushes back against conceptions that have long persisted in popular thinking about life and how it works. We are used to the idea of human life as essentially a struggle against a hostile environment. We are used to the idea that what is exceptional about human beings is that they are inherently ‘out of balance’ with their environment, that some sort of parasitic selfishness is the essence of human nature. In contrast to this, Kimmerer encourages readers to imagine what “beneficial relations” between humans and their environment “might look like” (6). What she describes is less a struggle than a kind of letting go. “A gift comes to you,” Kimmerer writes,
through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. (23-24)
This passage comes from a chapter that draws on Lewis Hyde’s 1979 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. But I’ve heard the theological concept of grace similarly described. Certainly, the familiar transfer of religious ideas to ecological thinking is present in Kimmerer’s language. From the Indigenous perspective, of course, there was never a division between the two. Her TEK is as spiritual as it is empirical.
My father-in-law, wholly secular, a mathematician, used to say that for him a walk in the forest was a sufficient substitute for church. That’s not an unusual sentiment. Familiar too are claims, expressed by many, that they ‘love’ nature, that they love the natural world. The idea of reciprocity provides for the rarer situation; it provides a way to conceive of nature as, in Kimmerer’s words, receiving people’s love and loving people back (122). If you’re going to think of yourself in a reciprocal relationship with an ecosystem in the way Kimmerer means it, you’re going to have to allow yourself to think about ecosystems as having spirits—or minds—of their own. You’re going to have to partake of some animism.
That’s asking a lot. For many secularists and religious folk alike, that’s taking a step onto uncomfortable ground. “How, in our modern world,” Kimmerer asks, “can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?” (31).
She answers by telling stories. Some are personal stories about her experiences with her children in the garden or with her students in the woods. Others, like the story of Skywoman, are Indigenous myths, repurposed for the present day. For Kimmerer, these myths are important and relevant to our moment because they come from a time when people could still hear and interpret the teachings of “other species,” especially plants. The wisdom of plants, she writes, is
apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then give it away.
Plants know, in other words, how to live reciprocally, and “we need to learn to listen.”
Behind this prescription is a direct case for narrative as the primary method of conveying the foundational ideas that shape a society’s imaginary. Drawing on Gary Nabhan’s construction, Kimmerer describes her project of ecological restoration as “re-story-ation.” Our relationship with the land we live on is “broken” because the dominant story we tell about it is in error. That story was brought by the immigrants from Europe to justify their domination, and it continues to inform our institutional structures and shape our responses to crisis (9-10, 31).
Kimmerer is not alone in this viewpoint. Agreement about the source and the time of the wrong- turning is widespread among those scholars concerned with ecological breakdown, mass extinctions, global warming—those scholars who see these matters as the meta-crisis, the broader habitat, so to speak, in which our political and social ills are nested, nurtured, and grow.
Writing these words brings to mind a video clip presented at one of the recent hearing on the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. This clip showed long-time, right-wing Republican Party operative Roger Stone taking the official oath for some militant organization. “I am a Western chauvinist,” Stone vowed, “and I refuse to apologize for creating the Modern World.” The way this militant group has chosen to articulate and perform the debate is crude, narrow, and toxic. Still, the group’s general reading of the history aligns, at least in broad terms, with those scholars who associate the de-legitimization of animist belief systems and the advancement and institutionalization of an extreme dualism with the rise of the modern world and the philosophies of the West.
Kimmerer, for her part, defends the practice of Western science. She defends its practitioners, for whom the actual work of science—of “revealing the world through rational inquiry”—is an “often humbling” and “deeply spiritual pursuit.” But Kimmerer makes a distinction between scientific practice and “the scientific worldview.” The latter uses the products of science and technology “to reinforce reductionist, materialist, economic and political agendas.” The scientific worldview is destructive because it sustains “the illusion of control” and “the separation of knowledge and responsibility.” Kimmerer’s “dream” is that “the revelations of science framed with an Indigenous worldview” will lead to “stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice” (345-46).
Who will tell these stories, Kimmerer asks (9). For me, someone who has invested so much time and much of his living in hearing, reading, and thinking about stories, that’s the intriguing question. What are these stories and where are they? Who will tell them? Who is telling them?
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First things first, Dr. Chaney: Thanks for making me aware of this book. I don’t frequent the NYT bestseller lists as often as I should—despite my subscription.
It’s so interesting to see a comparatively old book currently on the bestseller list. I mean, we really are a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately society, even in terms of books and readership. Also, it’s not very often that we review the works of botany professors here!
As a Catholic socialist-Marxist, and as a follower of the Catholic Worker Movement, a side theological note: the notion of reciprocal giving is as natural as a practiced solidarity with the poor and oppressed. The notion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge also fits nicely with Peter Maurin’s ideas about “agronomic universities”—letting the “cultivation” and fruits of the land ground us in nature and ecology, which helps us all understand and practice reciprocity. I concur that a form of grace is present in Kimmerer’s philosophy of our climate.
Abiding by the wisdom, or spirits, of plants and animals—animism, as you say—is no more a reenchantment of nature and everyday life than the current neoliberal enchantment of markets, innovation, and “raw materials.” Ultra-conservatives and neoliberals have mythologized so much of the economy that animism feels like a relatively innocent alternative. The creative destruction of those myths make Indigenous myths positively attractive. I’d rather be a plant, potted or otherwise, or absorb their wisdom, than be some kind of Rod Serling-esque deformed and distorted Venus fly trap.
I love the idea of “re-story-ation.” We are creatures of stories, living in those we create or seeing ourselves in the stories of others. If re-story-ation fosters some agency in the process of absorbing an ethic of ecological reciprocity, the Kimmerer deserves a wide reading—as you think, clearly. Any reimagining of the human narrative that helps head off our looming climate disaster needs a close and attentive hearing.
On Stone and his band of haters, if accepting modernity necessitates an acceptance of the creative destruction of capitalism, colonialism, and an extractive mentality, then color me something of an anti-modernists. Some of my ultra-con Catholic would love hearing me say this, though they would reject my premises.
Kimmerer’s discussion of science brings to mind the big theme of Andrew Jewett’s award-winning book. He covers the science-scientism distinction that Kimmerer is working around. While science is clearly devalued by our current ultra-con scene, earlier mid-century conservatives shared the concerns about scientism articulated by mid-century left-liberals and post-1960s counter-culturalists. So maybe there’s a cross-culture wars, cross-political appeal in Kimmerer’s book the explains why it’s a resurgent bestseller?
Again, Dr. Chaney, thank you for this review and for the opportunity to converse with you here. – TL
I just noticed that you wrote about Kimmerer in December 2021, but I clearly did not attend. – TL
Thanks, Tim, for reading this and for the thought-provoking response. I appreciate the mention of your religious-political affiliation and the connection of reciprocity to agronomic universities. I brought up “grace” but certain descriptions of the Tao and of Heidegger’s “releasement” also came to mind when I looked at Kimmerer’s definition of a gift.
So many of these various articulations seem to be transformations of the same idea in different contexts. Many have argued that the notion of a giving environment is deeply rooted in tens of thousands of years of human existence, and maybe that’s partly why these ideas are so familiar and are, apparently, so welcomed in Kimmerer’s book by a multitude of readers. I think it’s the animist component that’s most radical to modern people and the hardest to swallow.
You put your finger on an additional difficulty: the reasonable association of anti-modernism with right-wing reaction and fascism. That ecological thought has a wide fascist strain only increases the confusion. In the midst of widespread collapse of the material foundation on which our lives are built, here is this nutty group of insurrectionists taking ownership of and vowing allegiance to “the modern world.” I can imagine them making a list of animists to line up against a wall.
Is animism the right word? I don’t know. Jason Hickel was very comfortable using it in his book on degrowth, Less Is More. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh uses the term vitalism. But I think he means the same thing Kimmerer means when she writes about listening to the teachings and spirits of non-human life. Whatever you call it, it’s definitive to the reciprocity concept, and it’s definitive, too—though again, in different articulations—to the ecological imagination, the systems view.
I really enjoy your posts Anthony!
Given the complicated relationship that humans have with the earth, exploiting it, overpopulating it, generally using it as a depository of human detritus, it seems reasonable that we would develop some ethic that would re-exam and reform our behavior. There exists a criticism of modernism/secularism that society is without an anchor or source for moral behavior if religion is abandoned but it seems to me in a material and survival sense that a morality can be formed that attends to both environmental and social conflicts. I suspect it would remove the centrality of the human and replace it with nature (for lack of a better term). I’m not suggesting some sort of pantheism but a sort of what’s good for the earth is good for people ethic. The source would be the planet and what makes it flourish and not human ambition. This would require humans to think about the planet in broader terms outside of ourselves. Our notions of freedom would have to be redefined and confined. Conformity, at least in what we determine is good for the planet, might change how we see ourselves. I don’t see this as a panacea but as a humble adaptation to reality.
Paul, great to hear from you. I think there is a huge consensus for the ethical system that you propose and that extensive work is being done on it … but in different disciplines, guises, and idioms, that are mostly disconnected from each other. We may be lacking the kind of stories Kimmerer calls for to shine a light on the common ground.
Your comments made me think of a quote from Gregory Bateson, the interdisciplinarian and systems theorist of the mid-20th century. It was 1966, and Bateson was beginning to sense how various strains of 20th century science were coming together for a major shift from the old paradigms. We can see a lot better now what Bateson was sensing and attempting to articulate–an ecological imagination, a systems view–see Fritjof Capra’s and Pier Luigi Luisi’s *The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision* (Cambridge, 2014). Anywaty, the quote comes from a talk he gave to a group of students in Sacramento, and he was trying to convey to them this new way of seeing and knowing:
“The ethics can now be looked at with formality, rigor, logic, mathematics, and all that, and stands on a different sort of basis from mere invocational preachments. We do not have to feel our way; we can sometimes know right from wrong.”