Indigenous author, botanist and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer is best known for her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which was published in 2013 and is about the reciprocal relationships between humans and the land. Her first book, “Gathering Moss,” was published a decade earlier by Oregon State University Press. We spoke to Kimmerer on May 17, 2024 when she was in Corvallis to accept Oregon State University’s 2024 Stone Award for Literary Achievement and give a lecture on campus.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of an audience at the brand-new Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at PRAx at Oregon State University. We are spending the hour with the writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer.
[Audience applause]
Robin W. Kimmerer is a mother and a moss ecologist, a poet and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a scientist and a storyteller. She’s written a lot over the years – essays and poems and scientific papers. Her first book, “Gathering Moss,” was published by OSU Press in 2003. But her next book catapulted her into a different world. “Braiding Sweetgrass” came out more than 10 years ago. It is still on the bestseller list. She has described it as a book about colonialism, attempted erasure and attempted genocide, but also resilience, remembering and recovery. In combining Indigenous knowledge with scientific observation, it was an urgent call for a return to reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman beings. That call has lost none of its urgency in the last decade.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is in Corvallis right now because she’ll be accepting OSU’s 2024 Stone Award for Literary Achievement tonight. And she was gracious enough to join us for this radio conversation first. Robin Wall Kimmerer, it is an honor to get to spend an hour with you. Thanks.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Thanks for inviting me. I’m delighted to be back in beautiful Corvallis.
Miller: I wanna start at one of the places where you ground your experience, your interaction with the world, in gratitude. When or where have you felt gratitude today?
Kimmerer: You know, that practice of gratitude that in our language we call migwéchwéndan, the state of gratitude. For me it is a really daily practice. And this morning, I’m waking up in Bend with the river, with the mountains, with lilacs in bloom. It’s that opportunity to just be attentive to everything that’s around you and say to migwéch to be grateful for the opportunity to be here in such a beautiful setting and the opportunity to drive through the mountains with my friend. So, much to be grateful for, but that’s how I try to start every day.
Miller: In a very conscious way, I mean, it’s not just observing the lilac bush but saying to it, “I am thankful for you”?
Kimmerer: Yes, this isn’t generic gratitude. It is greetings and thanks to the beings who are present with you, who are giving those gifts of a fragrance or water or light or a friendship. Yeah.
Miller: What follows from that gratitude?
Kimmerer: Well, I think we all know that when you’re grateful for something, you know that you’ve received a gift, right? And that kind of gift thinking immediately makes most of us say, “I want to give something back to you.” So to me, gratitude is so important as a motivator for a way of being in the world because it makes you want to give your gift back in return for what you’ve [been] given. So it’s tightly linked with this theme of reciprocity.
Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Audience Member: Hi. My name is Jay and I wanted to ask … It’s kind of a silly question. But do you have a favorite invertebrate that lives in mosses?
Kimmerer: What a wonderful question because of course, I do. [Laughter] Oh, I know I’m with my people when someone asks that question. What’s your favorite moss invertebrate? And It’s gonna be hands down tardigrades or water bears. Do you know water bears? Oh, my goodness.
Miller: I wish our radio audience had seen just the excitement. It was like you chose the right team. [Laughter] OK. But why this invertebrate?
Kimmerer: Oh, well, for one, they are darling. They really do look like little stubby-legged bears, and they move very much through the moss forest the way bears move over the landscape, except for they’re the size of a dot. And like mosses dry up when the sun dries them, what do the water bears do? They dry up too. They remind me of those little instant farm animals that you used to have when you were kids. It’s just a little pellet and you put it in water and it expands to full size. That’s the way these tardigrades or water bears are. When the world dries up, they dry up to just a little dust particle and then the rain returns, the dew returns, and they come back to life. They’re resilient, beautiful. Yeah. Thank you for asking that.
Miller: How did you become a moss scientist?
Kimmerer: Truthfully, I have to say it was a bit by accident. I was a botany major and probably you can relate to this, students. I wanted to take every single botany class that was available at my university and I did, except the moss class. I was a forest ecologist. I was super interested in the structure and the function and the webs of relationships in the forest. And then I said, all right, I’ll take a moss class and it was love at first sight.
Having that hand lens, looking at what I thought was just a green film on a rock and to discover that it was a forest, that it was a tiny little forest in miniature. Everything that I knew and admired about big forests, I thought, “oh, is that happening here too?” And so it continues for me to be this endless well of curiosity. Every time I look at mosses, I see something I’ve never seen before. So it was quite by accident. I was resistant to looking at them and now I can’t stop. [Laughter]
Miller: Do you think that, often, literally having to get low to the ground to see these, affected the way you approach the world?
Kimmerer: Absolutely. Because really all that looking at mosses requires is slowing down. You could use a hand lens, you could use a microscope, but you don’t have to. What it really takes is attention, slowing down and openness to being amazed. So that kind of slow inquiry that doesn’t have to be mediated by scientific technology, that all it takes is attention, is for me one of the real appeals.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?
Audience Member: My name is Grace, and my question is, in one of your previous works, you were talking about brainstorming new pronouns for our non-animal companions. And I was wondering if that’s still the vernacular that you use, if you’re still exploring that aspect of connection with non-human relations?
Kimmerer: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I’m gonna talk a fair bit about that tonight in the lecture, but I’m so interested in the way that in English, when we speak of the living world, if we don’t know the names of those organisms – you all know – what do we say about them? We call them “it.” And we would never say that about each other. I would never say “it” is asking such good questions. I’m sorry. But that’s how we speak English, and English gives us permission to objectify nature. So I have been working to try to think about how do we decolonize that?
We don’t need more words that render the living world into material rather into our kinfolk. So the pronouns that I’ve been trying to seed into the world are to say not “he,” “she,” “it” about plants or animals as well. But ki a new pronoun “ki,” simply meaning a living being, you’re not a thing, you’re a living being just like we are. And then the plural being “kin,” so that we speak of the living world as our, as our relatives.
And just last evening, I was sharing this idea with an audience in Bend and a Dene family came up to tell me that in their language, they have this word ki and what it means is “my relatives.” So this sound in other languages also refers to this beingness – like Chi, another pronunciation of Chi of life energy is ki. So I think there’s something magical about this word.
Miller: For the folks who are studying ecology or plant science in our audience, I want to read a short piece of Robin’s book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” And I want to ask you if this is something that you are getting now – so have a listen to this because this gets to what she’s been talking about. She’s written this:
[Reading excerpt from “Braiding Sweetgrass”] “When I’m in the woods with my students, teaching them the gifts of plants and how to call them by name, I try to be mindful of my language to be bilingual between the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. Although they still have to learn scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I’m also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of non-human residents.”
Raise your hand. I’m curious if this is something that you’re being taught today. Who can talk about how animacy is actually a part of your education in science right now? We have a hand right there.
Audience Member: Hi, it’s me again. I’m a biology student. And one of the things that we’ve been taught recently is how biodiversity and ecology is very similar to Buddhism, where everything has a place and, and coexistence is key. The moss, for example, provides sustenance for herbivores and herbivores provide sustenance for carnivores. And if there was an absence in the food chain, then the equilibrium would not be existent and species would go extinct. So that is something that at least I’m being taught in my classes.
Miller: We have another hand over here.
Audience Member: Hi, my name is Zane. I’m a botany student. I’ve noticed in a lot of my discussion-based botany classes that students are really interested in being critical of science and questioning the ways that Western science defines what a species is. Let’s look at broccoli, as an example, or dogs. These are things that have been bred to be in all shapes and sizes, but genetically, they’re considered to be the same species. Likewise, you could look at two plants that are considered to be distinct species, but they almost look identical.
So then the question is, what really is that box? And I think people are coming to understand that it’s just language, it’s just what we want it to be, how we define it. And I think there’s an idea within Western culture to make Western science this ultimate truth. I mean, university, it means “one truth” in Latin. And so this is the idea that like it is real, but they’re just boxes and these beings exist beyond that. And I think a lot of students are interested in talking about that. That comes up in my classes.
Miller: Robin, you’re nodding your head. How much do you think has changed since you joined academia a chunk of time ago?
Kimmerer: A long time ago, yeah. I think that I really celebrate your experience, but for the most part, still being part of the biological botanical education, we still are doing an awful lot of “it-ing” the world, of objectification of the world because there is this notion in biology that I think many of us have heard: you must never personify nature. That would commit the crime of anthropomorphism, right? And I really reject that because what this does is to deny the potential of understanding beings as beings, not as objects, as persons. I’m not saying that they’re behaving like human persons. They’re behaving like moss persons and aspen persons. They are doing what they need to do. I don’t think we have any requirement to deny them personhood. And it’s not anthropomorphism. I think it’s straight up respect.
But one of the things that I like to do is, in teaching my students and teaching my colleagues, I love to see them bristle at this in the woods when I will say something … not “I want to show you this specimen,” [but] “I want to introduce you to a neighbor here.” And they’re like, “oh where, who?” And then we start to talk about a plant. And just setting that frame makes everybody think differently and behave differently. So I think that’s a real entry point, to engage with the living world as if they were your neighbors.
Miller: I want to go back to mosses, which am I right that they were the first plant on earth 450 million years ago? Which is, to me, kind of unfathomable. I literally can’t wrap my brain around that simple fact. Nevertheless, I’ll go on, but they’ve been here for that long and they have been here through unbelievable climatic changes. What can they teach us now about the climate changes that we are experiencing?
Kimmerer: Thank you for that question because, in this way, mosses I think are profound teachers. As the first plants to come onto land, they have experienced every climate change that has ever happened on earth. And when you look at fossil mosses and contemporary mosses, they’re pretty much the same, unlike most species – 99% of all species have gone extinct, right? But the mosses have not.
What’s their formula for success that could guide us in a time of climate change? And they totally redefine what success means. It’s not to be big and powerful and dominate the landscape. Their metric for being successful is longevity and giving more than they take, working within natural law, not trying to overcome natural law. So, to me, the masses are just the guides that we need as we are trying to shape a new future that we can live in balance with nature.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name?
Audience Member: Michelle. I was born here in the Willamette Valley and when I first picked up “Braiding Sweetgrass,” I was really amazed to come across the chapter talking about the Cascade Range and the Douglas firs and Western red cedars here. What originally brought you to this area?
Kimmerer: Well, the short answer is moss. Moss heaven. I did a sabbatical here many years ago, a whole year long sabbatical here at OSU in order to study moss harvesting in the coast range and to be in relation with all those wonderful epiphytic mosses. So of course, I fell in love with the Willamette Valley, with the Cascades and with new eyes. I think that’s one of the reasons that so many of those iconic plants for you really were striking metaphors for me. So, yeah, it was this wonderful opportunity to be here as a researcher. It also inspired and I wrote much of “Gathering Moss” while I was here, not surprisingly.
Miller: It wasn’t just the tiny mosses, it was also huge Doug firs and cedars and the coast, all of which you’ve written about your experiences there. What has Oregon and these varied landscapes come to mean to you?
Kimmerer: I think one of the things that really strikes me about the Oregon landscape is the way it is a very peopled landscape, that oftentimes we think about wild places as places where no humans are. But here, the relationship both harmful and beneficial between people is so stark, between clear cuts and restoration, for example. And I find that to be deeply nourishing in terms of learning and thinking about people’s relationship to a place.
Miller: What’s your process for getting to know a place? How do you do it? Where do you start?
Kimmerer: What a good question. You’re really asking that question of, how do you become at home in a place, right? And for me ...
Miller: I didn’t realize I was.
Kimmerer: Yeah.
Miller: But we can talk about that as well. But for you, it’s in getting to know a place is getting to be at home in a place?
Kimmerer: Here, yes, but not always. Yeah, sometimes I’m just getting to know … but it’s a particular kind of attention that is, for me, really sensory. I really sort of locate people. Some animals echolocate. What’s the word for nose locate? The fragrances of a place help me come to know it really better. So it is sort of a full-bodied attentiveness to what’s going on here. And not surprisingly, it is engagement with the human community and the history of that place, but truthfully, through the ecological communities as well. When I have a sense of what the water is like here, what the forests and plants are like here, I can begin to maybe get a feeling for why the human communities are as they are.
Miller: You have a beautiful, quiet – and maybe that’s not the right word – chapter in “Braiding Sweetgrass” all about methodically, lovingly looking at drops of rain in forests not that far from here. And it’s about scientific observation and hypothesis. Is it possible that different drops of rain and different plants are different sizes? But it’s all based on just sitting in a wet forest in the rain. What’s your advice for how we can become better observers of the world around us? And is it as simple as just sitting in a wet forest?
Kimmerer: Sitting in a wet forest is an invitation not to isolate or buffer yourself from your place. If it’s wet outside, you’re going to be wet. And so often we say, “well, I wanna stay comfortable.” Exactly at what cost when we stay comfortable, but to be truly in place? It also means that you have to slow down and not have any place else that you have to go. That particular essay was written at the Andrews Experimental Forest when I was there as a writer in residence and I literally did not have any place else to go. But I love that deep attentiveness, that flow state that you get into when every bit of your attention is just radiating out into the world to say, “what is going on here?” And in Oregon, it was rain. So I love that practice of deep attentiveness and openness in which time just disappears.
Miller: What’s your suggestion for how people can start, if that doesn’t seem like a way they currently interact with the world? And the commoditized world has so many ways to draw our attention away from what you want us to pay attention to. How do we resist that?
Kimmerer: Yeah. And I really like how you phrased that because our attention has been stolen and hijacked to pay attention to commerce and not to the things that really sustain our lives, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. So a way to get started if this is not your natural inclination to sit in the rain and watch how raindrops splat – one of the things that my students and I use is to take just a little square meter of ground, wherever it is. You don’t have to be out in the faraway woods to do it. You can do this on your lawn and just say, “I am going to spend the next hour looking in this square meter.” And at first, people are really itchy like, “Oh, I can’t do this. I can’t look at the forest floor or at a piece of lawn that long.” But pretty soon you can, because there’s all kinds of things going on in there.
I firmly believe that whatever we pay attention to becomes so lively. It becomes enchanted by our attention for it and it makes you crave more. Once you practice that, you think, “I cannot be looking at this lawn for an hour, I need to go to a meadow.” “Oh, I can’t be looking at a meadow, I need the forest floor. I need the whole, I need all of it.” So cultivating attention ignites this kind of thirst for seeing what’s going on, which I think is like a gateway into wanting more life around you. But it’s as easy as that. Just discipline yourself to say, “I am stuck here for an hour,” and you’re gonna see amazing things.
Miller: Let’s see another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi, I’m Katie. So your writing really vividly evokes this really close and careful attention to place. I think the way that you describe the specificity of raindrops in the essay we were just talking about is a really wonderful example of that. So I’m curious, as a writer, how writing through those observations, once you have done the observing and left the place,
then changes your relationship to it again?
Kimmerer: Changes my relationship to that place?
Audience Member: To the place. Yeah.
Kimmerer: Oh, yes. I become really deeply bonded to that place because I’ve paid so much attention and that the attention isn’t just visual, right? It’s a whole-body sensory experience that comes to live inside me. And as a writer, I can usually be at a desk or on an airplane and I can go to that place because my attention was so deep, that it’s living there. So it’s a well that I can draw on, but the bond that that makes with that place is extraordinary.
Just this week, a good friend took me back to the Andrews where I wrote that piece and said, “there’s a certain log that you might want to see.” And I said, “oh, you know I do.” [Laughter] We walked down the trail just to be there and it brought back all this flood of relationship with that place. So writing one’s way into place, writing one’s way into a relationship is, I think, a really powerful practice for a writer.
Miller: In that scenario, are you writing when you’re in the woods? Is there a part of you that’s already trying to do the metaphor-making, the language-sifting, the meaning-making when you’re there, or do you resist that so you can be more of a, I don’t know – pure observer seems like a notion that you don’t believe in to begin with. We’re always filtering the world in various ways, but are you trying to resist the writerly part of you when you’re taking in the world?
Kimmerer: Exactly. You know, I know many writer friends who always carry a notebook with them everywhere. I am not that person because I don’t want my presence to be interrupted. I just want to be there and I don’t want to intellectualize about it. For me, as soon as I put a pen to paper, I am out of the place, I’m in my head and I’ll do that later. But I want to be so present that I notice everything and remember everything in a way that I don’t need a notebook.
Miller: You have to then be good at the remembering if it’s going to be something like a faithful representation of your original experience. But you have a good enough memory to do that?
Kimmerer: Yeah. And oftentimes I will then go back quite soon afterwards to record some of that. But yeah, it’s a deep kind of listening that I don’t know how to explain, that is there as if it was a text in my brain.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hello. My name is Rachel and reading “Sweetgrass” has really reminded me of why I wanted to study science, of why I wanted to study biology because I found home in the woods, in the natural world. And I’m so grateful for your book. And now I want to ask, are there other books that you would recommend in terms of talking along the lines of reciprocity and indigenous wisdom,
Kimmerer: In terms of thinking about Indigenous wisdom, I’m trying to think about books that will lead us there. Dan Wildcat’s new book, “On Indigenuity,” is probably a good place to begin. He talks a lot about Indigenous science and the way that the values that are embedded in Indigenous science can lead us into a more sustainable future. I think the book “Making Kin” is another really good one that draws on a lot of Anishinaabe knowledge around the living world and our responsibilities as well.
I’m excited to be living in a time when more and more Indigenous writers are bringing these ideas into the world. It’s really exciting.
Miller: Let’s see, another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi, my name is Zane. Robin, we’ve been discussing a couple of times – I’ve heard the word “home” come up. I’m really inspired by your call to naturalize and decolonize. In fact, your work has really inspired me to connect with my Jewish heritage as a pathway and infrastructure to connections with ancestry and with land and plants. What in your work so far have you … what kind of experiences have you had with people, for successes and challenges, to follow and pursue that naturalization in a culture that doesn’t have a lot of tools to equip us for such work?
Kimmerer: Yeah.
Miller: If I could…
Kimmerer: Of course.
Miller: For people who haven’t read the book, they may not be familiar with your notion of what naturalization means. So if you could include that as well in your answer.
Kimmerer: For sure. One of the calls in “Braiding Sweetgrass” is to live in places as if we were not just passing through. When we see the harmful footprints of human people on the landscape, it’s with a frontier, colonizing mentality to say that we’re just going to come here and take and replace, erase, replace and take, because this isn’t really our home. It’s just our warehouse, it’s our warehouse of stuff. And to be an antidote to that kind of thinking, that we really don’t belong here. What if we began to imagine that this was the place where our ancestors came from, where our great grandchildren need to thrive? What if we acted as if the land was sacred, as if that water gave us life? What if we acted as if would we live in the world that we do today? I think we would not.
So the invitation is to imagine one’s way into belonging to land, not land belonging to you. And all of our ancestors all around the world came from land-based people. There have been many, many forces of displacement, of dispossession in what I like to call dismembering, disconnecting us from our places and from each other. So the call to naturalization – I use that word very intentionally because sometimes we say, what is it to become native to a place, to live as if that was true. Settlers can’t become indigenous to a place because indigenous really means these are your origins, right? This is really where you come from. But what do we call plants who have come from someplace else and become integrated into the ecosystem here? What do we call them? We call them naturalized species.
Miller: As opposed to invasive species.
Kimmerer: Oh, absolutely.
Miller: As opposed to ones that aren’t good neighbors.
Kimmerer: That’s right. Right. Exactly. So this naturalization language that you’re talking about is the invitation to be in reciprocity with your place. And that’s how home is made, I think, that we not only celebrate the gifts that we are given from the land, but then we say, “To be at home, I need to give mine back. I need to care for that water that is caring for me.” So that’s the invitation to naturalization, to become a part of the ecosystem not to be a dominator, I should say.
Miller: But the other part of Zane’s question is, what are examples of where this is working?
Kimmerer: I think about very intentional communities, local communities – things like the local food systems, local farming, where people are saying, “I want to have my grandchildren be on this soil. So I need to take care of it.” Like I can’t just get a big cash crop offer and move on. I need to care for this land so that it can care for my family into the future. And the places that I see this in the most lively way are in local food systems, but also in restoration work. There’s so much really interesting work being done and what I call biocultural or reciprocal restoration to say that the places around us have been damaged. And what is my role as a good relative, as a good ancestor of that place? Naturalization is the invitation to be an ancestor to that place. And that is healing to heal that landscape.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi. My name is Isabel. I first read “Braiding Sweetgrass” when I was a senior in high school. And at the same time, I also listened to an interview that Terry Tempest Williams did where she talks a lot about the importance of knowing the names of things, which is also an idea that you engage a lot with. So when I started at OSU, I was really excited as I started taking all these science classes about learning the names of things. And somewhere in all of this Latin and systematics, I knew the names of lots of things and I feel like I lost track of the beingness of the beings that I was interacting with.
So I was wondering as a teacher in formal science education, where do you see opportunities to make sure that that doesn’t get lost within Western scientific structures?
Kimmerer: I love that. Thank you for that question because I find that really deeply problematic in science education. It’s all about naming things. It’s all about naming the parts and getting it right. So often the metrics of evaluation start to dictate what it is that we teach and yes, it’s important to know those scientific names. It’s an important kind of thinking but it’s not the end.
What I try to do with my students now, when we’re walking in the field and I start to introduce them to a plant, their pencils are poised, they want me to tell them the name, they want me to give them the scientific name … but you know what happens when I do? The shutters go down, like “I got what I needed. I know that’s going to be on the test.” So I don’t do it anymore. I don’t tell them the names of the beings until I’ve told them a story and had them taste the needles and to come into relationship with those beings, because that’s what’s important. I want them to know the stories. And in fact, then they’ll press me like, well, “Dr. Kimmerer, what’s the scientific name?” “But what do you think it ought to be called? If you look closely enough, could you come up with a name for this plant?” And of course, they can, and they will never forget that name because they observed, they came up with it and then we can learn that it’s Ptilium crista-castrensis, another name. But to me, that’s the work. And as students, sometimes you simply have to resist what’s being taught you, to say, “OK, fine. I will learn that. But here’s what I really want to know.” And ask those questions.
Miller: The lessons in your work, including in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” are universal. They’re not necessarily place-based. But for me, personally, it was very powerful reading “Braiding Sweetgrass” because I grew up probably 20 minutes from where you live. And you have a whole chapter about a place called Onondaga Lake which was a superfund site, still is. And, as early as I can remember, it was a place – and I don’t think I fully reckoned with this or realized this until I read your book – where the real lesson I got from it was that [as] humans, we can foul our nest to such an extent that places can’t be fixed. And you argue that that’s first of all, that’s not true. And second of all, it’s destructive. And even that way of thinking is a dead end, but I think that’s really a dark lesson that I took growing up in Syracuse. It was sort of embedded in jokes and embedded in just the way people talk about this destroyed lake. You call that the poison of despair.
What’s the antidote to that narrative in our heads? And it’s worth saying there are superfund sites all over the place. There are heavily polluted places all over the place where it’s hard to not think this cannot be fixed.
Kimmerer: And part of that question is, what does it mean to fix a place? What does it mean to heal a place? Can Onondaga Lake ever be made what it was when the glaciers left it behind? Of course not, that’s the myth of restoration and replacement. It’s not possible. What needs to be fixed is our relationship to that place. The PCBs in the mercury that are in the sediments there, they’re going to be there for a long, long time. But what the invitation is to say, well, given that, how can we heal Onondaga Lake or any hurt places that might be in your landscape and in your mind? What is the best that we can do here? And to do it.
Onondaga Lake, in particular, is a wonderful invitation to think about how to use both the tools of scientific restoration and the guidance of Indigenous restoration as well. Because in this particular case, as in so many cases, the land that we’re talking about, the waters of Onondaga Lake, are a sacred lake to the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois of this place. This is the place where the great law of peace came. This is the place where the first American democracy was born. So the relationship of traditional ecological knowledge of values of what that land was, was utterly destroyed as well as the lake being destroyed. The lake was destroyed because they overwrote and replaced that set of values with the values of efficiency, productivity, commerce and treating water like it was a sewer.
This is true in many, many superfund sites, where not only has the land been changed, but it is overwritten another way of being. And so that’s the invitation to say, how do we heal our relationship as well? Not only how can we get plants to grow on industrial waste – and there are ways to do that as plants are incredibly resilient as are our people – but how do we re-engage with a different story? I think that restoration is as much re-story-ation as it is the pragmatic approach to healing the land.
Miller: The other lesson is that it’s hard in some ways to not draw from your own backyard superfund is that humans are necessarily a problem, that we are just not a force for good in the world, which you also point to in saying that we have to be more active, that we can’t paralyze ourselves out of guilt or fear and that we have to actually take part.
How does one start to take part? And how does one stop feeling like humans themselves are a problem?
Kimmerer: Wonderful. I think that begins with saying we made a mistake here. We made a big mistake at (name your superfund) site, right? That notion that humans and nature are a bad mix, that we are always going to ruin sacred lakes is simply not true. It has been true over the last 450 years. But let’s remember that that is an eye blink of time in human history. We made a big mistake in the colonial enterprise, right? And I think that the healing comes when we say “no, we have to fix that.” And that means fixing the lake or the landscape, whatever it is, and fixing ourselves as well, remembering a different way, reclaiming that no, that’s not who we are. It was who we are at this moment. And we have learned from that.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hello. My name is Claudio. I have a question regarding the same topics. So starting from the base that we need to decolonize many spaces like universities and that society at large also needs a change of paradigm, but words like change of paradigm and decolonization or revolution – words like that normally generate resistance. What do you think, as scientists and writers, can we do in our work to incorporate some of this activism to support the change of paradigm that is much needed?
Kimmerer: I think that, so often, students in particular underestimate their power to change pedagogy, to change the orientation of our educational environments. I have seen in so many cases where students who are articulating the kinds of views of needing change, of being able to say, no, this is not the way that’s going to lead us into a just and sustainable future. We ask for it and we point to other examples and we list allies. And in my experience, I would say, like with our Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, that was our enterprise, like how can we decolonize this natural resources kind of environment to invite in other ways of knowing and in other value systems? And it is through imagination. Think, what is the academic environment that we want to live in? How will we create it? At least I could say, we’re not going to create this by taking down everything around us. We’re going to create it right here and we’re going to make it so good and so strong that other people want to be part of that.
I think that is one, not the only, important way to create that change, to make it happen around you. And you’ve probably heard, like in thunderstorms, there’s a condensation nucleus around which those big old raindrops fall to make a storm. So I like to think about how we can create those condensation nuclei that will draw others to the work. But that, at the same time, is an approach. There is also the approach of dismantling in a bigger way, of unlearning and demanding system-wide change as well. So both of those strategies are important.
Miller: We have another question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi there. I’m Jay. In your book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” you mentioned that a first step to building a relationship back with the earth would be to plant a garden. So I did. It’s still pretty new, just like a couple of weeks old. But my six-year-old sister has been super interested in it and she’s very much an iPad kid, she’s into YouTube, she wants to be an influencer when she grows up. But I’m so excited that she’s interested in this garden. I’m wondering how you might recommend bringing in these ideas of like reciprocity into her life and how she can experience the garden as well?
Kimmerer: Well, it sounds to me like you’ve just done it, of inviting her, of creating the opportunity and showing the alternatives. Yeah, there’s time for the iPad, sure. But you want to get your hands dirty and look at worms and press seeds into warm soil. So I think that’s it. It’s the invitation to the full sensory experience of being engaged with the natural world. And I think children, in particular, have that natural affinity. We all do, right? You know, this notion of biophilia, that we feel better, we feel healthier, we’re more whole when we’re in relationship with land.
So I can add nothing more to what you’ve already done. You’ve started a garden and you’ve invited somebody else to be part of that. And the first time your six-year-old sister pulls a carrot out of the ground and eats it, it’s over. [Laughter]
Miller: One of the themes that you turn to is that by doing right with the other beings that we share the world with, – better salmon habitat or helping salamanders across the road – that we’re not just helping those species, but we’re helping our own as well in a deep way. In what way, how does that work? How are we also changing ourselves?
Kimmerer: I think it’s part of the process of remembering who we are, that we are kinfolk with all other beings. I think it is an antidote to what eco psychologists have called species loneliness. That when we’re not in relationship with other organisms, we’re not learning from them, we’re not healed by them, we’re alienated. And so any time we’re in an alien space is not good for us, right? Physiologically, mentally. So being able to be in an honorable relationship with the living world simply gives you more agency, more confidence in the world, to say, “I can be an ally.” I don’t have to kind of lower my eyes in shame at the way I’m relating to the living world because I’m part of this. It contributes to a purpose-driven life to say, “my purpose here isn’t just about caring for myself, but caring about the land around me.” And it reaps tremendous rewards both, as you say, for those species, but for us and the way it ripples into our community,
Miller: I think we have time for one more audience question. Go ahead.
Audience Member: Hi. My name is Nicolette. As both a writer and an ecologist, I was wondering if you could speak to how science and art interact as you’re initially trying to understand the community and world around you?
Kimmerer: Oh, thank you for that. You know, it’s a theme that we’ve been kind of skirting around all morning together and that is the theme of attention. One of the things that unite art and science, I think, is this power of really focused attention – attention and then coupled to meaning-making. In both art and in science, we pay attention, we’re gathering all these stimuli and these observations and then we start to make patterns. Then out of patterns, we say, “Well, what’s the process behind that? Why is it that way? How might it be over there?” And to me, those are the questions that unite art and science. So to me, they’re really in dialogue, they feed each other. And this old dichotomy that you’re either an artist or a scientist is just pure nonsense and I think we need to be both. So thank you for that.
Miller: You said in a New York Times interview last year that you want to see “fox news,” but you literally said news about foxes. It would not be anything but just foxes.
Kimmerer: [Laughter] Well, no, not just foxes, mosses.
Miller: And what effect do you think that would have on us?
Kimmerer: Oh, my goodness. This is my secret desire and I express it to every journalist I know. When in public, in any kind of media, do you ever hear news of the world who is migrating right now? What’s happening? Who’s adapting? All the beauty and the miracles and the threats to the living world are absent in our everyday discourse.
So my wish for fox news is to bring to our attention that we’re not alone here. We live in a world, yes, that we have built, but there’s a whole world out there that we haven’t built, that is invisible to us. And to me, there’s really good medicine, good healing in knowing the stories of others. How could we possibly advance this notion that we are kinfolk to the rest of the world if we don’t even know who they are or what they’re all about? Fox news. [Laughter]
Miller: Robin Wall Kimmerer, thank you very, very much.
Kimmerer: Thanks for having me.
[Audience applause]
Miller: Thanks as well to our awesome students here at Oregon State University and to Tim Jensen who helped make today’s show possible.
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