NATURE WRITERS # 2 – ROBIN WALL KIMMERER

ROBIN WALL KIMMERER ( (1953, New York)

We continue with women, and we continue without leaving the USA, the indisputable cradle of a great lineage of writers and nature writers who have drunk from Thoreau, Muir, Burroughs, Emerson and many others. But in this case, our protagonist has also drunk from very different sources. Not of personalities, but of an entire culture rooted in the land, which has not needed a writer to rediscover its environment, because it never ceased to be part of it.

Robin is a graduate botanist, writer, and distinguished professor at SUNY College of Environment Science and Forestry in New York. Of mixed European and Anishinaabe descent, she is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. In collaboration with tribal partners, she has an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural importance to native peoples.

Everything in her gives off a creative energy that calms. There is something kind in her eyes. Warm. And this energy is present in everything she writes.

I discovered her, like most people, through her wonderful and sobering book “Braiding Sweetgrass”. From its first pages, I was absolutely fascinated by the way she weaved (pun intended) together the three different types of knowledge that she treasures: scientific, spiritual and her personal experience as a woman, mother and Indigenous American.

To begin, her position with respect to nature is one of enormous and sincere humility, which dismantles all preconceptions about the usual bombast and superiority of scientific writing. She is full of humility to learn, to respect and empathize with nature. The Indigenous worldview originates from the fact that humans are slightly inferior. We are the little brothers of Creation, and as little brothers, we must learn from our older brothers: the plants, the eagle, the deer or the frog. Isn’t that beautiful, as well as true?

Starting from here, the book does not stop teaching us things, lessons that are hard to forget. All are included within what the author calls the Culture of Gratitude, which is in the marrow of Indigenous life.

One of the ideas that has stuck with me is that of the grammar of animacy. Robin alerts us to the danger of the pronouns we use for nature. We call the tree that, and that makes it easier for us to pick up the saw and cut it down. If the tree was a him instead, maybe we’d think twice.

“Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species, a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.”

A “democracy of species“. What a beautiful and desirable idea. Will we be able to get down from our pedestal and reorganize ourselves from that perspective? I think it’s worth a try.

Another idea: the economy of the gift. A gift, as Robin explains it, is something for nothing, something for the obligations that come with it. In the gift economy, ownership carries with it a list of responsibilities.

A gift relationship with nature is a “formal give-and-take that acknowledges our participation in, and dependence upon, natural increase. We tend to respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange is the commerce of choice, for it is commerce that harmonizes with, or participates in, the process of [nature’s) increase.”

There is so much wisdom and erudition in this book, but perhaps what surprised me the most was the enormous common sense that all of Kimmerer’s words give off. Common sense, which, within the Indigenous culture, her culture, maintains all its meaning.

This idea hurts. In the West, as I once heard from Tom Waits, “common sense is the least common of the senses.” It is as if, in our individualistic society, we have already abandoned the idea that there is a “meeting space,” a “common place” in which we could all agree, without the need to argue or discuss. We have lost the notion of the common.

I will not spoil any more for you. I strongly encourage you to read this book, and practice since then and forever, the culture of gratitude. To reemphasize, this is a book that makes people better, that heals people. We need these books (and their authors!).

I’d love to have breakfast with Robin one day. Look into her eyes, and thank her for how much she has taught me. Offer her, in a gesture, all the love that she has injected into my actions and thoughts. Her book is a gift, and as such she has generated in me a series of responsibilities, which I try to fulfill every day that passes. I would like to make a proposition to her. That we embark on a project together. Her, me and the Indigenous peoples of America. I would like to capture the scents of their rituals, of the plants that are part of their culture. Give them back the aromas of their landscapes and customs, so that, through smell, they can revive the emotion of the common.