Review of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants".

That maybe it's too late for my people, confronting climate change and mass extinctions with a selfish, cruel demagogue at the helm -- but the ones in the deep future who survive and start over could land on Braiding Sweetgrass as their founding spiritual guide and weave love, care, reciprocity into the wreckage. And don’t get me started on Kimmerer’s references to Skywoman and Nanabozho as “immigrants,” or her uncomfortable references to the Ojibwe stories about a cannibal monster.The book is relatively heavy on the science (biology) but I think basic high school biology knowledge is enough to understand most of the processes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, a scientist, a decorated professor, and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The author has a flowery, repetitive, overly polished writing style that simply did not appeal to me.In increasingly dark times, we honor the experience that more than two million readers have cherished about the book—gentle, simple, tactile, beautiful, even sacred—and offer an edition that will inspire readers to gift it again and again, spreading the word about scientific knowledge, indigenous wisdom, and the teachings of plants. There are few books that I put down at the end of chapters so that I can take them in and dream around them before going on. Updated with a new introduction from Robin Wall Kimmerer, the special edition of Braiding Sweetgrass, reissued in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Milkweed Editions, celebrates the book as an object of meaning that will last the ages. Professor and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer knows that the answer to all forms of ecological unbalance have long been hidden in plain sight, told in the language of plants and animals, minerals and elements. The idea that plants have a mind of their own has been a prominent feature of some Indigenous narratives, literary works, and philosophical discourses.

A related synthesis is ecosocialism: socialist political economy + Earth Systems Science; after all, Marx's analysis of capitalism's contradictions ("use value"/"exchange value", "commodity fetishism", endless accumulation, etc. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. I give daily thanks for Robin Wall Kimmerer for being a font of endless knowledge, both mental and spiritual. Kimmerer’s book is a beautiful blend of scientific knowledge and traditional wisdom that reads like poetry, testimony and essay, bringing hard facts about our dying natural world to surface, and with a gentle hand, she motivates and stirs something deep within us. She accepts that the leeks are not thriving, puts them back, leaves with thanks, and the gift of replanting and care-giving.Environmental Philosophy says that this progression of headings "signals how Kimmerer's book functions not only as natural history but also as ceremony, the latter of which plays a decisive role in how Kimmerer comes to know the living world. The words "Mighty Ape" and the Ape device are registered trademarks of Mighty Ape Limited in New Zealand and Australia. But science is rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer. The Mind of Plants' offers an accessible account of the idea of 'the plant mind' by bringing together short essays and poems on plants and their interactions with humans. So maybe I just began hearing about Robin Kimmerer when I commissioned an article for the magazine I was working at in 2009: Tracy Basile’s “Saving Sacred Species”.

Recreation is obtained using electronics (destructive mining), cars (more destructing mining, carbon emissions, roadkill, war, land misuse), airplanes (ibid), books (deforestation, chemical runoff) etc. She draws on her own heritage … pairing science with Indigenous principles and storytelling to advocate for a renewed connection between human beings and nature. Somehow, all the pecan trees in a whole state will withhold seeds for years on end, until they all, one year, decide it's time. But the book that has affected her the most, and the one she has mentioned I need to pick up every time we talk, is Braiding Sweetgrass. I didn't deserve a book like this but it wound up in my hands, and now I feel very very small, but with a certain big allegiance to the plants and people like this.

Now it is my responsibility to determine what I can give to one of my species, which now includes all living as well as non-living beings.