← Zero to Well-Read
Zero to Well-Read
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
01:20:43
No one is more surprised than Robin Wall Kimmerer that the book of essays she sent unsolicited to a small nonprofit publisher became one of the biggest word-of-mouth sensations of the 21st century so far.
Loading summary
Transcript182 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode of Zero to well Read is brought to you by Thriftbooks.com today on the show we're talking about Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The phenomenon that is hard to find used, so you're probably gonna need to find a new one. You can do so on thriftbooks.com though you can find a used copy of the original hardback, which I have never seen. It's gonna run you about 30 bucks. I'm kind of thinking about getting one myself. You can also find an addition I've never seen. There's a young adult version of Braiding Sweetgrass. Young adult editions, usually a bit shorter, kind of geared at teens. I don't know all the differences here, but if you've got a teen in your life, you think this might be a good fit for, that's a cool option. As well as always, free shipping on orders of $15 or more in the United States. And each purchase gets you closer to a free reading Reward. Go to ThriftBooks.com to find your copy today or all right, time for the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:05]
B
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're discussing one of the biggest surprise bestsellers of the century so far, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. Before we jump in though, I just want to remind you you can always click the link in the show notes to sign up for our free newsletter or to become a member and get early ad free episodes and access our bonus content. That's at patreon.com americ and if you want to do us a solid because you're enjoying this podcast, please do rate or review it wherever you're listening. Just tap that little five star button if you have any questions or feedback for us directly. You can also always email us@02 well readbookriot.com you know, I was thinking about
- [01:44]
A
Braiding Sweetgrass this morning. Over the last few days I've been reading it and trying to think of something smart to say about a book that defies definitions in all kinds of ways, which of course we're going to get into here. I think the first thing I was thinking of is how we were here for again, it came out in 2013. We'll get into publication history, but it really hit a wave in 2020 and beyond and we were covering books as this was surging. It's not something we'd say about a lot of the books we've talked about, project of mail and some other things. But in terms of an organic slow burn, then to not a slow burn phenomenon. Braiding Sweetgrass stands apart from so many things in so many ways, but a lot. One of those ways is our own experience of it. I think we experienced as a lot of people did, not being an early adopter, so to speak, but getting wind of it, coming, reading it. And then we can talk about our own initial reactions. But I think our reaction was like a lot of people like, what is this? There's something here. I don't know what to do with this. I need to tell some other people about it. Rebecca and that my friend, my co host, my compatriot, is how you get an indie word of mouth hit like this that no one saw.
- [02:47]
B
Just a huge hit. One of the great, often imitated, never duplicated hits of the century so far and of my entire reading career, I think probably also of yours, like this is a pattern that we talk about a lot on the Book Riot podcast, that something surprising seems to come out of nowhere, becomes a hit, and then publishing is like, oh God, people like this thing. Let's make a whole lot more of it. You know, we're seeing it with Romantasy right now and we're seeing it with contemporary rom coms, but this can happen in nonfiction too. It can really happen whenever there is something that publishing just did not see coming. And Braiding Sweetgrass launched just a whole sub genre of follow ons, of attempts to reach the same kind of audience. But Robin Wall Kimmere, I think in a lot of ways is a one of one takes a really particular perspective and set of life experiences to write this book and it's just very, very special.
- [03:43]
A
Yeah, I think you're you. I think you have this down in hot takes, but there are a lot of follow ons. Let's do something like Braiding Sweetgrass. I think part of that, of course, is the huge success. I think also the book, the writing, the style is unusually inviting, accommodating, and it seems deceptively simple. But there is a subterranean. I don't even know that it's subterranean. It may feel to some readers like a subterranean or, or hidden wealth of experience, research, understanding and personality that goes into something like this. This is not something that you can just dash off, right? And there are versions of this that are softer. There are versions of this that are more palatable because we're going to talk about all of these things. But at its core, this is, this is a revolutionary book in more ways than one. And I think it's easy to read and pass on. I think the hard thing is to follow through to its emotional, psychological, ideological ends what Kimmerer is really saying and doing.
- [04:42]
B
Yes, I agree. Yeah. She was, you know, several decades into her career when she wrote this. As we'll get into. She's in her 70s now. She was in her late 50s, early 60s when the book came out in 2013. And this is the kind of book that is an accumulation of decades and decades of thinking and writing and hands on experience in the classroom and out literally in the field.
- [05:05]
A
Yeah. All right, Rebecca, why don't, with all that preamble, what is this book? What is it about? How is it put together?
- [05:10]
B
Yeah, it's 32 interconnected essays. And Kimmerer blends Indigenous American philosophy and practices with scientific knowledge. She is educated as a botanist, she has worked as a botanist and as a professor. So she's exploring how indigenous wisdom can be used to address environmental problems. And it's not just, here's the problem, here's the solution, but how did we arrive at these problems? What's going on in humans relationship to the natural world? And what might indigenous practices especially have to offer us in if we reframe our thinking about the natural world? What kinds of solutions might we arrive at? She's arguing for humans to reshape this relationship away from consumption and really away from hierarchy, away from thinking that humans are at, you know, the top of, say, a food chain or at the top of the natural kingdom, and encouraging us to really think about it rather as being in a reciprocal relationship with the natural world where we bear responsibility, we get the gifts from the natural world, and so we owe a responsibility back to it. Just a really remarkable writing against human exceptionalism and this radical reframing that she's arguing for that through applying like language of personhood to plants and to animals, we can re understand and remember. Remember is a word she uses a lot in the text that we can remember the interconnectedness of all living things. She's presenting science and indigenous wisdom and practices as all complementary to each other, rather than as competing with each other or as being mutually exclusive approaches. And she wants to help us recognize the responsibility that flows between humans and the earth, learn how to keep up our end of the bargain. She says at one point in the text, how in our modern world can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relationships with the World sacred again. And those are really the questions that guide all 32 of these essays, which take pretty different forms throughout. And we'll talk about that. But the deep answer to all of it, as she also repeats through the text, why should we care about this project at all? Is that all flourishing is mutual. So if humans are to flourish, yeah,
- [07:24]
A
the central message is not super complicated, though it is important and like I said, radical. It can really shake you up. And I'll talk about, you know, some of the ways it can and does shake you up. But she's coming at a similar idea from multiple angles, with multiple examples, multiple metaphors, multiple stories. But at its core, we can talk about some of the things like there's a different way of doing this and we already have models for it, and here's what it looks like. Now, again, it's not completely copious, right? There's a lot of talk of sweetgrass and moss and the mother cedar in specific examples, but there's so much territory left to cover in terms of each individual species, each individual place, each individual moment of, I don't know, cultivation or gifting. But her story, her messaging is really about this gift economy, a humility, a being embedded in the world rather than having dominion over it. To go right back into the Old Testament that you and I came up like it's right there in Genesis for all the sort of people of the book and those that come after that the humans were given dominion over the world, this suggests something else. And it seeps into how she puts things together. I think it is also important to our structure is that there is no center to the book. Because this is not, this is not a book about centers, right? There's a, there's a dominant metaphor, but even the braiding sweetgrass metaphor only comes in sort of in and out, right? There is no traditional organizational, as you say, hierarchical structure here. And so our way into this is multi, multifold. There's multiple ways into this understanding. And I think one thing she's trying to do is finding different sort of tributaries to get to the river, right? You can enter in any of these places, but you're flowing into the sort of, the central, the central river of understanding, which is there's a different way of being the world, one that's much more sustainable, but also not using the language of sort of left wing political discourse about sustainability, of being an inversion of, let's do it some other way within this worldview. This is a different worldview that allows you to think about sustainability, sustainability, different it's not using the language, it's not using the fights or the disagreements about, you know, I don't know, abundance or austerity or sustainability in ways that we understand. And it's such. I found the experience reading the first time and again to make so much sense and also hard to wrestle with at the same time. Rebecca, I don't know if you're reading.
- [09:55]
B
Yeah, I think it like that at all. There's just like an immediately apparent emotional truth to it. And it's very hard, like living in the suburbs where I am, to think about what a grounded, practical exercise of that emotional or spiritual truth looks like. But as you were getting at, I think Kimmerer is trying to offer any reader an entry point in. If you're interested mostly in the science, there are some pretty scientific essays. If you're interested in indigenous origin stories and mythology, there are some of those. If you're interested in like her perspective as a mother, which is the first way that she describes herself in her bios, which I have to give credit to an interviewer on the New Yorker's radio.
- [10:41]
A
Yeah, I read that too, with Parul. That's an awesome observation she made.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah. That there are several pieces here about Kimmere's relationship with her daughters and the way that being a mother to her daughters drives her to care for the natural world. There's so many different entry points, but one of the things she said in that same interview is that she's turned to reimagine what science looks like when it is imbued with values. And that as you're saying, she's not just talking about like left wing political values or the place that in popular culture we might locate environmental activism, but that really the earth is for everyone. Whatever your political perspectives, we all have responsibility to take care of this land. And she wants to reach everybody here. So it's not. There's no like slap on the hand about this. There's no like tisk, tisk, humans are bad. And she. I think that's very intentional. This is not like a scoldy fear based approach.
- [11:35]
A
Well, Honeywell might be bad, Rebecca. I don't know. I mean the corporate. If there's a win to go here, an embodied Winigo is Honeywell.
- [11:41]
B
But individuals are not individual readers. Right. She's inviting us into what a like sort of driven by love approach to the earth would look like. And I think that's a really powerful reframe. And I know from a good friend who does conservation writing that this is one of the issues that does bring people from sort of all across the political spectrum that we might not agree on how to solve the problem. But you know, like there are like farmers and fishermen in deep red states who are as concerned with what's happening through climate change because they're seeing the impact, you know, in their communities just as much as people who are coming from more left wing perspectives are concerned about climate change and environmental work. And I think Kimmerer wants to reach as many of us as possible. So it's a really open handed, open hearted writing.
- [12:32]
A
Right. So why are we talking about this show? I mean we talked about a little bit like this has been one of the phenomenons of the last, I mean really six years. But if you extend it back to the original publication, we're coming up on a decade plus. I think there is a positive feedback loop happening with the book where it's resonating with people at a certain level. Like a book like this doesn't sell like this. If most of the readers who encounter it aren't like, oh yeah, I kind of get this right. This is. There's, I think in many of readers who are sympathetic to it, we're already sympathetic to it. I don't know how to put any better than that. So it both is creating the world in which it exists and is being published into, but also reflecting a deep seated dissatisfaction, a sense of things could be otherwise. Also, long, long work that many people in indigenous populations have done to reintroduce, to restore, revive, preserve their editions. Right. I think her own bio, her own biography, we'll get to her own story in a minute. Is actually really interesting in a microcosm to think about how these, you know, how these processes can happen. So, you know, she sent this manuscript to Milkweed Edition, a nonprofit publisher in Minnesota. And the slush pile. I was just talking to Laura McGrath about the slush pile and people making a name for themselves by finding something. There were no mainstream reviews at publication. 8000 copy print run for Milkweed for this is not bad, but it's very small. But really the thing is really no marketing. This is not something they thought was going to sell. And over the course of years and years and years, not, not unlike Moss breaking down a rock. At some point, this book became a thing and then hit critical mass sometime in 2020. Covid TRUMP I think it's all in there, right. I think there's a lot of different factors that contribute to the ecosystem that made this such a winner. Rebecca, how do you understand why this Thing came to be.
- [14:19]
B
Yeah, I think this is one of those snowballs that as it rolls down the hill, it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. First print run of 8,000 copies took a while to sell out, but now more than 3 million copies have been sold. And Milkweed Editions, which, as you said, is this small nonprofit publisher, they took it to Winter Institute the year that it came out. Winter Institute is the annual conference for independent booksellers where publishers pitch them their upcoming titles in hopes of having those booksellers stock the books in their stores, but really in hopes that those booksellers will read the books and champion them through hand selling and recommending them directly to customers. That's exactly what happened for Braiding Sweetgrass. And then Milkweed built on that. They take this book to Winter Institute every year to continue talking about it.
- [15:08]
A
I think that is so interesting. You got that tidbit and I didn't. And I think that's really important. You want to say how unusual that is.
- [15:14]
B
That maybe incredibly unusual. Publishing moves on a season to season and sometimes year to year basis. But Winter Institute is usually held in like late January, early February. By then, the publishers are starting to talk about the big books that they're putting out in the summer and the fall of that year. Fall tends to be the big season. And it's. We want you to read these and be selling them this year because these are the books we're trying to make into bestsellers this year. Like immediacy around the publishing date is what's critical for most publishers most of the time. This might be a thing that Milkweed is more able to do because they're smaller and nonprofit. They can be more reflexive and reactive to. Responsive would be a better term to the things that. That do pick up momentum. But it's really smart that every year they go back to independ booksellers and. And they know that like there are new booksellers in that room every year who maybe they have not encountered Braiding Sweetgrass or maybe they've heard of it, but they don't know why it's so special. And they give folks some more. They give away some more copies in hopes that this momentum continues. And. And it does. Like it's not a manufactured bestseller. You could not manufacture this. Publishers try. This is what the entire publicity apparatus of publishing is trying to do. And you just can't make something like this happen. Yeah, like it had some momentum before 2020. And you mentioned the trump of it all. Like Krista Tippett, who Hosts the On Being podcast, which was airing on public radio at the time. Had Robin Wall kimmerer on in 2016. That starts the boost, really. The book has been out for three years and it had come to Tippett as something that was being passed hand to hand and recommended from reader to reader. But that's really when Robin Wall Kimmerer starts this. And then as we hit 2020 and early Covid, you know, like, people are stuck inside, they're taking up gardening. We're thinking about our relationships to the natural world. And we're also getting all those headlines about like, there are dolphins in the Venice canals, you know?
- [17:14]
A
Right. Yeah, that's totally. That's a great point. I agree with you on that.
- [17:16]
B
Like all the nature is healing kinds of things. Just a whole stew combined so that the book first hits the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, seven years after it was originally published. And it stayed there for. For five years.
- [17:33]
A
I wonder how many books it sells a week right now. I was thinking about this because I think it still is selling. It's not selling like it was when it was on the bestsellers. It fell off for a while. But as we get to have in a minute, it time named her one of the most influential people of 2025. Like, this book is still out there. And I think it's still too early to say, but I think we're looking at some of the great influential nonfiction books of the last hundred years. I'm thinking of, of Silent Spring, which was an influence of this book, or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed or going back further, Upton Sinclair's the Jungle. This is literally and figuratively a muck raking book. Like there's a whole chapter about mucking, mucking, raking muck out of a pond. But this has such a different angle. Those books were more five alarm bells. Like, there's something going on here that we need to do it. This is more fundamentally a five alarm bell, but it's like five alarm gongs of the soul and of the earth and the sky and the moon. Like, it is not going anywhere anytime soon. But I think that's what makes it so fascinating and so nourishing and also I think what makes people want to pass it on because they see something and they feel something that feels true and useful to them, but also hard and also ineluctable and also different. And that can be both scary and exciting at the same time.
- [18:49]
B
Yeah, I think one of the real bits of magic of this book is that it's not prescriptive at all. It's also not proscriptive. There's not a list of do's and don'ts. There's just an invitation to consider this new way of thinking about the world and if you adopt it, what does that mean for changes that you might make in your own life? And Kimmerer just drops the question in and lets us all reckon with that in our own ways. I think that's one of the things that makes it really powerful, something like Silent Spring. For as important as that book is, we'll certainly cover it here at some point. But those books often land as a kind of preaching to the choir. And braiding sweetgrass more than anything I've read in this genre is a successful invitation to join the choir.
- [19:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. So many sales. And yet on on the Goodreads ratings to sales point of view, it's not super reviewed. 180,000 you see here. I think that's indie rather than Internet hit. Is that what that's suggesting to me? But you note here an average of 4.5 stars, which is tremendous for a book of this popularity, right? Usually you get some sort of reversion to the mean. We talked about this project Hail Mary. Like at some point you're going to get down to 4.3, 4.2, 4.5 really means that people read it. I think there's also probably some self selection here, but you know, that's how these things go.
- [20:11]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by 11 reader, an award winning audio app with more than a hundred thousand premium titles plus any PDF article or document you bring. So 11 reader is having us rethink what we know about audiobooks in a good way. The new award winning audiobook app comes with more than a hundred thousand premium titles and the ability to turn any text you want into natural sounding audio. That means eBooks, PDFs, docs, articles, research papers. Anything can become an audiobook. Plus it's cheaper than Audible and gives you more hours. So you can get 20 hours of premium audiobooks for as little as $8.25 a month with the annual membership. There are no cred credits and there's flexibility to switch between books whenever you'd like. You can choose from bestsellers by publishers like HarperCollins, Blackstone and more. There are also hidden gems, niche genres and more. All yours to explore in the app. Start with a free 10 hour trial today and hear the difference. Just visit 11 reader.com that's E L E V E N R E A-E-R.com thanks again to 11 reader for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Caitlin Rosakis, author of Startup hell. Morgan Blackwater McKee is working entry level sales at a tech startup that can't even decide what its product is. And sure, her mom might be a world saving demon slaying shadow council wizard who kicks behind, but with magic dyslexia and a disinclination to kick behind, Morgan is more about sales leads than case leads. You know what I mean? That is, until her boss summons a demon to trade his soul to make his quarterly target, as one does in corporate America, apparently. And then he goes and dies without sending the demon home, which is very rude. I'm sure someone will cc him about that. Now with the second Everyday Enchantments book, Startup Hell, Rosakis exposes the demonic nature of the corporate world. Author Sarah Beth Durst says it's quote, hilarious, clever and insightful. And author C.S. cooney calls it, quote infernally funny and hellishly heartwarming. Which is something you want from a book titled Startup Hell. Pick Up Startup Hell by Caitlin Rosakis. And thanks again to Caitlin Rosakis for sponsoring this episode.
- [22:42]
B
This episode is brought to you by Quints I've been doing a spring reset with my closet. Less stuff, better stuff, and quint has been central to that. I'm particularly obsessed lately with their European linen shirts and dresses. Living in the south, linen season basically starts in March and it doesn't end until October. So I need pieces that really work and that hold up. And these do both of those things. A linen shirt on its own with jeans, or layered under a denim jacket in the morning when it's still cool thrown over a swimsuit. It just goes everywhere. The dresses are the same way. The fabric feels substantial without being heavy and the fits are thoughtful enough that you actually look like you tried. That's the thing about Quince. They use genuinely premium materials, work directly with ethical factories, and cut out the middlemen so the prices don't match how good everything feels. Linen pieces starting around 50 bucks. It shouldn't work, but it does. Go to Quince.com Wellred for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Wellred thanks to them for sponsoring.
- [23:46]
A
Kimmere herself is a fascinating person. She's a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, born and raised in upstate New York, though she she touches on this in the book in some of the Interviews pretty divorced from her indigenous background. Her grandfather was taken to one of these re education schools she writes about in this book. And then her own parents were pretty divorced from the. The native understandings and teachings. Like they knew some of it, but they were scientists. I think it's very important that they were people of ste. They were stem people rather than people of the cedar people of the wrench. Her father a mechanical engineer, her mother was a chemical engineer, which he doesn't talk about that much in the book. Rebecca, didn't you find that interesting?
- [24:27]
B
It is interesting. There's. I mean, there's not that much about her family in the book in general. There's a lot about her daughters and, and even an essay that is written from the perspective of one of her daughters. And then she hits on, you know, some family camping trips when she was young where she watches her father like give thanks for the day and pour coffee onto the ground. But then she later is like, kind of gets that disillusioned because her father's like, oh, that offering actually, like, it wasn't thanks for the day, but it
- [24:52]
A
was also, you were just clearing the grounds because it foamed up initially, getting
- [24:56]
B
the coffee grounds out of the filter. She does return to this story about her grandfather several times and then also about the, you know, wider generations of indigenous Americans who were sent to those re education schools whose mission was pretty explicitly, as they stated it at the time, to take the Indian out of the Indian and teach them ways of Protestant or Protestant or Catholic, really Christian and white approaches to the world. Some of them claim to be well intentioned, obviously very, very harmful. And her grandfather would talk about not knowing what the practices were, not knowing the traditions because they were. He was robbed of them because they were taken from him. And so she later in her life does actively seek to become more engaged with these indigenous practices.
- [25:50]
A
Yeah, I just thought it was interesting in a book that's so interested in motherhood, that's so interested in ancestors and story and science and that I would have expected if I just knew a little bit biography and what the book is about, to get a whole thing about her own mother to relationship to science and her own relationship upgrade. An interesting absence, as we would say in a close reading example, to look at there. She got her bachelor's degree in botany from the State University of New York in 1975. She worked as a microbiologist like she was a working stiff for the man at Bausch and Loan for a couple years before going on to get her master's in Ph.D. at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. Go Badgers. And she's an expert on moss. Is this where you became a moss witch with braiding sweetgrass? Were you already on the moss moss camp or where was this?
- [26:33]
B
I've been on the moss tip for a while, just. I just love a moss. But I certainly feel validated that Robin Wall Kimmerer chose moss as her preferred plant to be associated with. And she got her doctorate in 1983. So she had been working in this area and writing in this area for 30 years by the time the book comes out. She did spend a few years after grad school teaching in Kentucky and we get sections of the book that reflect on that experience as well. But her work and her teaching now are guided by something called the traditional ecological knowledge approach, or tek, which is based on long term observation and relationship. It's a different way of doing the scientific method and of saying these things that indigenous Americans have been practicing are built on centuries of observation about the natural world. Just because they use a different language doesn't make them any less valid or less scientific. I think you hit on that. She got a MacArthur Fellowship, the genius grant in 2022, and then was named to Times list of 100 most influential people last year in 2025 with a citation written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who provided one of the blurbs for the original edition of the book. And that was a huge deal at the time because. Elizabeth Gilbert.
- [27:53]
A
Good job, Elizabeth Gilbert. I mean, I know we've had some fluctuation the Elizabeth Gilbert stock over the last 18 months, but that was a. That was a good get from Gilbert there. I think it's important to think too about her own. She came to a serious re. Engagement with indigenous ending a little later in life, like post during her scientific training. And this book came after, I think after she's tenured. Right. Because I think in one of the interviews she talks about, you know, I did the Bonafides, the CV stuff and once I did enough of that and I had a certain standing, I felt like she could then write this, which is a different kind of engagement with ideas. Right. Which is she narrativizes quite explicitly some of the friction between this way of understanding, the TEK based understanding and sort of traditional scientific understandings and our own apprenticeships and academic research here. But I think one thing that makes this book maybe feel more approachable for people is that Kimmere herself wasn't just in it and growing up in it the whole time because that she came to it later and embraced it later and took it seriously later and found it nourishing later and productive later and coming to it as a almost second language, like a forgotten language, then gives us entrees like maybe we could do that too. You don't have to be a member of a tribe and you know, century and century and grandfather, grandfather, grandfather, godfather. There's something here. You can come to it and take something from it, give something back to it even if you are not a part of it right now. Like this is not. The walls are not closed to this experience though. There's some interesting things about native and indigenous and back and forth philosophically. But she is suggesting like, you know, it's not too late.
- [29:38]
B
Yeah.
- [29:38]
A
This is not, this is not a
- [29:39]
B
closed system that she arrives at understanding that these different ways of viewing the world are interconnected and speak to each other rather than being mutually exclusive and that it comes from a grounded experience of hers. And it's not just theoretical like she writes about. I think when she was applying for graduate school or maybe very early in graduate school they say why do you want to study botany? And she's like because I want to understand why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful next to each other. What is it about the purple and the gold? And she's told that's not a scientific question, that's a question about art and beauty. But she comes in her education to understand a scientific answer that those colors are opposites on the color wheel and they are complementary and they make each other pop. And. And that I think is a microcosm of the story that she's telling widely that she does learn the scientific language. She's also learning the background of indigenous wisdom. And she finds ways to make them speak to each other and to braid them together to pull on the metaphor of the book rather than to see them as intention with each other.
- [30:43]
A
Yeah, and I think I have down here a little bit later. But like she uses this phrase. I don't think it's in his book. I think it's in her interviews around it and subsequently this two eyed seeing to see both with an indigenous understanding and a scientific understanding. And notably she does not eschew the scientific worldview, actually the scientific world, but the scientific method, the language of science. Some of my notable quotes are how she's reincorporating and even re situating science as a way of understanding things I found quite moving to be perfectly honest. Like my. Some of my favorite stuff in the book is how she. She's rehabilitating what science can be and distinguish it from a scientific, capitalist, Western sort of worldview. But she is not replacing what she knows with this. They're augmenting each other in sort of a mutualist discourse. And I think there are some places she's a greater expert than I will be in any of these things. And I'd be curious to hear some of like, where does she more feel the tension now? Certainly in the academic circles there was tension. Is there tension in her heart? Does she move back and forth between that? Does she keep them separate? Is this like Shakespearean negative capability where you hold them together even though they may conflict? I'm very interested in that ability to see with multiple eyes and not give one too much dominance. Right. Not to just be so right handed like I am. Where if I have to write with my left hand, well, let's just say it's going to take a little while and no one's going to understand it. Rebecca, when did you first read this?
- [32:06]
B
I had to consult my reading spreadsheet for this because it feels like I have always had braiding sweetgrass in my brain, in my soul, in. In how I want to be in the world. There's something really aspirational about this book for me, but it turns out that I read it in 2020 along with everybody else. Like when it broke out of just the indie bookstore hand selling and people were talking about it in a big way from I don't have dates in my spreadsheet, but from where it's sitting kind of in the order of the year, it looks like it must have been like May, June so far enough into Covid that we had all realized we were going to be stuck in our houses a lot longer than we expected. And we were looking. I know I was looking for like, how can I feel more connected to the earth and connected to the things that feel like they really matter? Like the desire to be in community with people and in communion with the world was really powerful and potent then.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah, similar. I think I had heard of it and saw that it was moving and then my mom read it and talked to me about it and that kind of pushed me over the My mom's birthday, by the way, today. Happy birthday, Mom.
- [33:10]
B
Happy birthday, Mom.
- [33:11]
A
So I think that was where I was like, you know, sometimes we will. We hear a lot of books, but we need like a specific grain of sand to latch onto to make it into something that also gets to turn the page. I was well, I guess we can move right in what it was like to read this. Maybe I'll start here. I did find myself initially resistant skeptical of the project. I don't exactly know why. Well I do know why I'm a pretty. The world's most reasonable man had some thoughts about this Rebecca. This is a joke I have about myself where. Where one of the hats that I sometimes wear is. The world's most reasonable man is try to think things through. Try to not get my emotions get the better of me. Try to be fair. Right. This is something I care about a lot lot both in the business in the world and with my family and my dealings. But it also can be a bit of a trap. Like you can be a bit of a calculating machine at that point. My father's a doctor. I A person of the West. You know I taught Western civil the great works of Western civilization. I grew up in the church. So many of the things that have contributed to the bad place that that we can find ourselves in is not under the microscope here but being. Being held up and like are there other ways of doing this? And I found myself resistant to like well that's. How do you know that? Or what is that there's no experimental data or that doesn't logically follow and that all the kind of things but and, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug. The thing that was inarguable to me is yeah we've really screwed some things up. This is not. This is not the way to be in the world. Like I'm. I'm also on board with climate change is real and you shouldn't and put all that crap in the lake, you know very simple kinds of things. And there has to be some other kind of way and what are the other kinds of ways that we're doing? Because I don't know if you looked around Rebecca but we're not doing great with climate change right now. And you know, environmental activism in the public sense, in the governmental sense and certainly there was a moment under the Biden administration of the you know, build back better and some of those things like let's really and reinvest in renewable energies. But it seems to have been and I don't know. I don't. We can't get into it now. But I found myself a little bit conflicted about my heart saying there's something here and my head being skeptical resistant and I'm not, I'm not a con. There is no conversion story here. I don't think she's as advocating for zealots but I found the tension to be very pleasant, actually. And one of my straight thoughts is it is so good for us to read about value systems and way of understandings that are different than our own, that are then out, but are also outside of the binary of like the other side of the aisle kind of crap. Right? Like really get out, because that's still in your cultural bubble. That's still in your worldview bubble. Can you get outside of that? Other ways of seeing. And once I kind of got to that place, I felt I was really electrified and energized and my dopamine was firing and all kinds of. Of interesting ways.
- [36:06]
B
That's really interesting. This is like a pitch straight down the middle for what I'm interested in.
- [36:12]
A
Yes. You were into. You were. You were like, can I get a whole tattoo, A whole book tattooed? How do we do this?
- [36:17]
B
Yeah, Like, I am the most receptive ground for a seed or a plant like this. It's like this blend of memoir and science writing that she's using, that she takes her own experiences to ground and frame these bigger conversations. And the thing that really worked for me about it is that I guess two things. Things, it's personal that she's not. She's not trying to offer some big impossible to execute vision for political change or worldwide systemic approaches. She's showing like, you can spend a few years mucking out the pond in your own backyard and make a difference. And that really resonates with me and that it's part of a positive vision for the future. That it's. Here are small ways that we can act rather than just a list of things that we should not be doing or a re. Accounting of the ways that we are bad. We all know what the bad things are at this point. We don't need another book about how the bad things are bad and what the dangerous path looks like, but an invitation to, as she says, intertwine science spirit and story. Really worked for me the first time, and it worked for me on this reading like that. It's meditative and inviting. It's warm. Her voice is so warm, and it's just so obvious that she's delighted to be sharing these things that are deeply held for her and really powerful. And there is an urgency behind. Behind the writing. I think she wants to get this perspective into the world and offer it to us as a new way of approaching these problems. So just so, like, lovingly observed and so detailed and so poetic, like nothing is better than a poet writing a nature memoir. Come on.
- [38:03]
A
That. I mean, that is. I don't know if it's underrated, but I think it's part of this thing here that, again, reading the first time, you may be so electrified and interested in the specific stories or the worldview or the ideas behind it that you may not notice the specificity and the artfulness of the language, but it really matters.
- [38:19]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [38:20]
A
It matters to her. That's one of her points. She says, you know, know, the gift of humans is that of language, and poetry and science are both in the business of observation, specificity, and articulation. And they look at it different. Like indigenous understandings and scientific understandings use language differently, but at their best, they're both working towards a similar end, which of understanding, figuring something out, how to be useful and to the world, and having the world be useful. Back to very, like we said, very formally variegated. And some of that is because different kinds of stories can do different kinds of things. And then there's, you know, in many oral storytelling cultures, the idea of repetition is a part of it, right? It becomes a ceremony of its own kind to tell the same story again so that you can remember it and you can pass it on. But also it kind of becomes inculcated you in a different kind of way than just reading it and moving on and consuming, consuming, consuming. I was even thinking about that from my own point of view as a consumer of stories, right? Like how quickly we move from story to story to story, especially for those of us who keep track of how many books we read. Or there's a. There's a. There's a perverted version of that where I read 300 stories, right? I read 300 books this year. And that's a sign of something. What if you read three? Really? Well, what if you read three stories 100 times this year? It wouldn't be better or worse, but it would certainly unlock a different kind of understanding. So I'm a menace when I get a new retinue of metaphors to work with. And I'm going to apologize to everyone here, here, because there's so. There's so much for me here to analogize and borrow.
- [39:50]
B
Yeah. One thing that I thought about a lot on the reading, and it was just a gift of timing that I just recently sat in on a friend's creative writing class that she was teaching, but she was talking about how repetition is insistence. And I had that phrase running through my mind as I was looking for, what are the things that kimmerer repeats? So she repeats that all flourishing is mutual. She repeats, repeats, like, that's a primary one. But there are several points that she comes back to, several phrases that she locks in on, like, if you're trying to unlock a deeper mode of reading in this book or any other, you could do a whole lot worse than look for. What are the. What are the points that this author comes back to? What is the thing they're insisting on? And I think she's insisting on a love for the world, this sort of positive vision of how do we move through, engaging in a way that is additive and that is nourishing for the world and for us, that real reciprocity. There's also, I think, for a reader who's not Indigenous, which neither of us is, there's like a thin line between being able to appreciate another culture's approach and then to fetishizing or appropriating that approach. And white people, white women especially, are prone to appropriating Native American concepts and practices. And I think I've really noticed on this reading that kimmerer does a beautiful job of modeling for us how to. To study and apply another culture's teachings. Respectfully. She spends a lot of time on this Thanksgiving address that a different Native tribe uses, but that she has found to be very moving. And she notes in the book that she asked their permission before sharing it and asked for guidance about how can I use this teaching in my own life. And I think that's sort of an implicit nudge for us. Like, this book is written for a wide audience. She wants as many people as possible possible to take on these ideas and to run them through this filter. And I think she even gives us the priorities in the subtitle of the book, that it's indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants, and that those are her priorities and the flow that. That we can take as well.
- [41:55]
A
Yeah, I think you could do worse to cut to the heart of the matter than her phrase, or not her phrase, but she. She gives to us. Us a phrase in many Indigenous cultures of the idea of the honorable harvest.
- [42:05]
B
Yes.
- [42:05]
A
Which is. This is a quote I'm reading collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of a life for life is known as the honorable harvest. They are rules of sorts that govern our taking, shaping our relationships with the natural world and reign in our tendency to consume that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as is for our own. The details are highly specific to different cultures and ecosystems, systems, but the fundamental principles are nearly universal among peoples who Live close to the land. And I think that honorable harvest you could think of as a consumer of other cultures. You could think of what does an honorable harvest look like in the reading of this book? What does it look like in our understanding of this book and even how we're going to talk it to each other and sort of pass it on to other readers who may or may not have familiarity with it. Like how can you use, take honor and keep sustainable an idea, a worldview or practice? Much like how can you take the right amount of wild rice or the right number of buffalo or the right number of stalks of sweetgrass? But this idea that it's you always could take more, you always could, then make an Etsy shop out of it. Right. I mean, I'm both being exaggeration, but also true. Right. You could also write your own version of it. That's less difficult for someone shopping at a Barnes and Noble in a suburb to buy. Right. That's probably a dishonorable harvest when you think about this. There's also a dishonorable way of talking about it, which suggests you understand it fully and you're going to judge it based on your own precepts. That's not an honorable way of talking about it either.
- [43:34]
B
I love that reading of this. Good job, Jeff o', Neill.
- [43:37]
A
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [43:38]
B
Yeah, I think she's, she's saying to us, this is how I do this. This is one way of solving these problems or addressing these issues. Take it and run with it for your own interpretation. And, and I just also really love that the writing, she incorporates all of the senses and I think it's teaching us to look for a really embodied connection, not just a spiritual or a theoretical one, but to have your feet in the muck, in the pond, to have your hands in the dirt in the garden, and to pay attention to what and to who is there.
- [44:12]
C
Today's episode is brought to you by Blackstone Publishing and Monica Murphy, author of Wind, Spark, Fly. Now, if you're into a small town romance, with all the trappings of small town romance in a little heiress situation and a fire captain. Okay. Yes, stay tuned. Okay, so an heiress's summer romance goes up in flames. She finds herself in need of a job and a place to stay as a result. The one thing she doesn't need, though, is a failure summer romance again. But we all know where we're going here. Things are heating up quickly with the town's smoldering fire Captain. When Sparks Fly is a swoony small town romance that will melt your heart because it also deals with themes of emotional growth and personal responsibility, community and small town values. And one of the love interests is a single parent, so it's got all those good small town themes things swirling around it. Make sure to pick up when sparks fly By Monica Murphy and thanks again to Blackstone Publishing for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by ONI Press, publisher of Genderqueer. The Annotated Edition by Maya Kobabe Dig deeper into one of the most banned books in America with the annotated edition of Maya Kobab's seminal autobiographical work. Genderqueer started as a way to explain to heir family what it means to be non binary and asexual. Genderqueer is more than a personal story. It is a useful and touching guide on gender identity for advocates, friends and humans everywhere. This special annotated edition calls on voices from academic and creative communities to further shed light on Kobab's work. From exploring the technicalities of comic creation to highlighting personal anecdotes of growing up queer. Maya Kababe's seminal work is presented in its original form alongside the commentary and analysis from a host of voices so you get both the original story and the behind the scenes view. Make sure to pick up Genderqueer the Annotated Edition by Maya Kobabe and thanks again to ONI Press for sponsoring this episode.
- [46:34]
B
This episode is brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session and this summer Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus Elle every year after the Love Hypothesis. Sterling point and more, Slow burns, second chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime.
- [47:03]
A
Yeah, it's funny. We're moving into stray thoughts here. You have the initial one about the creation, but one of the places that I really noticed in the book, again to think along metaphorical or analogical lines is there's this chapter where she takes some students out. I think they go for a few weeks and they get in the muck. Like literally they're getting down in the and they come out transformed. And I can't. I couldn't help but think about baptism stuff. So I'm moving back and forth all over the place. But I think your point here about the origin stories that she shares versus the Genesis story is interesting, so why don't you run with that?
- [47:36]
B
I just. I thought about this so much that there are specific origin stories from Indigenous cultures for all kinds of plants and animals. And Kimberer gives us just a little taste of those. Like we get the story about the, the first woman who came to Earth, we get a story about where strawberries came from, there's a story about sweetgrass, there's a story about pecans. But just the fact that there is a story about where and how each of those pieces of nature, of the natural world arrived here is so different from the three lines in Genesis that Christianity, you know, the traditions that you and I were raised in, use to explain all of creation that like creation happened, nature existed and then man was given dominion over all of it.
- [48:20]
A
And then there's Adam and Eve and Kate and Abel and they got in a fight and here we are today, right. It's kind of amazing when you think
- [48:24]
B
about it like that Level, the level of attention and imagination about how the world began that we see from these indigenous practices has just wider reaching and longer running impact than I've ever thought about before for, you know, the rest of how people engage with the world. But of course you're going to show up differently. If the story you've always been told is this plant has this history, this animal has this meaning to us, then like this was all created and, and man is over all of it. Take it and use it as you will. And that just unwinding the long ranging effects of that and trying to expand them. Because I also don't think that dominion is really intended to be about consumption.
- [49:08]
A
And I'm sure the Greek and the Hebrew and whatever the original word is, someone chose dominion. I mean there's all kinds of things going into that. But that's a really good point.
- [49:15]
B
But I just, I spend a lot of time thinking about that this time around.
- [49:19]
A
I think you said it already, but my first surprise, my first straight thought was it is always the thing that is unlike other things that become surprise hits, which makes sense. And again, I'm going to use the same. I'm going to. I'm so sorry to Robin. Well, Kimmerer and the people understand this, but she, there's these moments where she's talking about, you know, a gap opening up in the forest somehow. Right. And that makes, you know what the order of operations is for plants and who comes first and what they do. But I was thinking about in terms of when we see a book take off, it usually means it found some fallow ground that no one had cultivated or explored for whatever reason. It could be imagination, it could be market, it could be bias. Of different kinds. But there's a hole in the. There's a hole in the forest of the book market and someone put something there and didn't know the amount of life that was going to spring up around at the same time. So the next time. And this makes you. This way, you could do Galaxy Brain as a listener and a sort of a consumer of popular culture, maybe in a bigger sense is do not be surprised when there's a giant hit that people like. How weird is it? This is a huge hit. Notice that it's unlike. That's a feature, not a bug. That it's weird of these things that become cultural phenomenons because they're. It hasn't burnt out. It hasn't used up all the resources in that place. I said this before. I found myself resisting quite a bit on the first reading with like, possibly predictable objections like, how are you going to scale digging for roots? That was my. Like, that was my bad example of this. But at the same time, like so many years, the affirming yet direct observation of so much of how we operate seems broken that I can get on board with. And then that is sort of the carriage that brings me along for the ride.
- [50:55]
B
I have some of this down in quotes, but I can pull it back up here as well. That she talks about America, of course, as a nation of immigrants and that it's important to indigenous perspectives that the first indigenous person to fall to Earth was also they considered her to be an immigrant. That she's arriving in a place that she is not her original home. And what does that understanding do? But what. What would happen if we all considered here in this nation of immigrants that we are indigenous to somewhere or we once were indigenous to somewhere and. And tried to connect to it. You have this note here about the Sabre Whorf hypothesis, which holds that we can only have thoughts for which we already have language.
- [51:36]
A
Yeah.
- [51:37]
B
Or that like language shapes the kinds of thoughts that we can have. And like, it's been kind of debunked. But you're wondering.
- [51:42]
A
Yeah.
- [51:42]
B
Are we sure it isn't sort of true?
- [51:44]
A
Well, and I'll hand it to a specific example where one of my favorite chapters where she's trying to learn. I can't remember which languages. I'm so sorry. You can look it up. One of the indigenous languages that were as part of her family story. Story. And she's struggling with how to understand and the different conjugations, but then she's noticing things. And that in English, I'll speak for that. And I think most Romance languages, we make a distinction between person oriented language and non person oriented language. So example being I'm out with my kids hiking and we see footprints, like something was here. In this language, you say someone was here, which to me blew my mind. I think it was a moose or a deer or something.
- [52:26]
B
Language is Anishinaabe.
- [52:30]
A
And that really struck me because if you. I do think I don't know enough about linguist Siper Wharf hypothesis, a part of a larger branch called linguistic determinism, which suggests a really tight relationship between how a language is structured and its syntax and vocabulary and what that speakers, that language believe and think and feel. Okay, okay. We don't know. Debunked there. It's hard to ab test this. There's a whole bunch of things that go into proving this is true. But in that moment I'm like, are we sure? Because that feels meaningfully. I think it feels to me that if you think and speak like that, you're going to act differently. I just believe that. Rebecca. I don't, I don't have any proof for it, but I just believe that that's totally true.
- [53:11]
B
And I think that's why she spends a lot of time on it. Like she, she goes into, why does this language talk about a plant or an animal? And as a someone, a capital letter proper noun, someone rather than an it. And a grounded example in my life is like, my dog gets spoken to like a person. My dog is a someone, my dog is a he, you know, and for someone just to be like, well, you know, that dog, it's out in the yard does feel depersonalizing in a way that if I think about how to apply the way that I have, the way that I relate to this animal who lives in my home. What if I thought about all of the animals of the world that way, maybe then I would be out moving salamanders across the road, you know, as she is in one of the late chapters of this book. Because they're just trying to get back to their home pond. And doesn't everybody deserve a chance? Yes, I do think that there's something powerful there that the. It's not just the language, but of course the philosophy underneath the language that creatures and plants are beings, they are not objects. And if they're not objects, that means they are subjects and we are co. Subjects with each other.
- [54:21]
A
Yes, yeah, yeah. That we are among them in a way that I do not feel here. I only can try to hear. I can only try. Everyone can see this. So it's really good podcasting, Rebecca. I'm pointing to my head like I can get that in my head, but only does it once it trickle down into an understanding of how the world is a felt understanding of the world world, then you can reckon with in a different way anyway that something was here to someone's here. I really lingered on that for a long time because it really struck me. There's a sentence from Richard Rorty's Irony, Solidarity and Contingency, which is 1990, 1989 work of pragmatic philosophy that I don't know why I read it. I don't think it was for school. I was just doing Jeff things.
- [54:58]
B
This is a real Jeff moment.
- [55:00]
A
And this the sentence is Science is a series of increasingly useful metaphors. It's a critique of reason and logic and other ways of understanding the world world. And that was another helpful way of making it like science itself is true in its own way, but also has been revised to different metaphors. Right? Like the apple and gravity and dark matter. Like there's still stuff we don't understand useful metaphors. And that is what any understanding of the world is. Right? Science is among other ways of understanding and it has particular gifts, in particular drawbacks, much like humans do. Our gift, as she said among the beings of the world, is that we have language. What we can do with language and Kimmerer's answer seems to be we can do science and poetry through these twin. We can, we can yoke the twin oxen of science and poetry to get to interesting places. But that helps. I think that can help you open up if you can think, if you can have humility. And I struggle with this myself to think of your own sets of belief and your own set of worldview, your own principles as a set of useful, merely useful, not true, not enduring, not sort of unchanging metaphor. I think you can think skeptically about what you believe in interesting way. I think you then can take in other things that may lay outside of the meridian of something you think is part of your worldview. But like I I, there's a reason that sentence has stuck with me for 25 years. That is and I don't really understand.
- [56:24]
B
Yeah, that is really useful.
- [56:26]
A
And I think let's see what else
- [56:27]
B
I think into that. Like the the language of someone was here drives us back to what is my responsibility here? What is this other being's responsibility? What is the gift they're giving? What is the gift that I can give? And sometimes the gift I think that Kimmerer is implying here. Sometimes the gift we can give is just not taking it all or just not using it up or just like just cleaning something up a little bit. The leave it better than you found it. It sort of mode of engaging with the world like you could. That's not the summary of this book, but it's also not. Not a summary of her argument.
- [57:02]
A
There's a great scene early when she talks about going campy as a kid with her fan where with her family. And they, you know, they're at the riverbank or the. The lake bank and they're making sure that they clean up all that. But they. They go beyond just cleaning up their stuff. They cut wood for the next camper. They find dry kindling and they put it over. They cover it so that it stays dry. And the. The flash that. The scene that flashed into my mind, I know it's a shared favorite. Ours is Mad Men in an early season. The two main characters go on a picnic.
- [57:33]
B
Yeah.
- [57:33]
A
And they lift up their blanket and they just shake it and like the trash goes everywhere and they just leave like Pepsi. And even at the moment that's. That was foreign to me, but that felt as foreign of like I would do the thing of cleaning up after myself. It would never occur to me to cut the next person's firewood, Rebecca. It just wouldn't.
- [57:51]
B
Yeah.
- [57:51]
A
But this. There's this reading stuff like this allows you me to at least consider it.
- [57:54]
B
Yeah. There's a real.
- [57:55]
A
I don't. What does that say about me and where I come from and could I be different than I am?
- [57:59]
B
Yeah. There's. You've used the word humility a couple of times. And I think there's also a real generosity to this perspective, to this approach to life of generosity in what we give. But also generosity and thinking beyond ourselves, whether it's who's going to be in this space after I'm in it, can I set up camp, you know, firewood for them or generosity for how we speak and think and teach about the resources that are available to us. It also wouldn't have occurred to me, but it seems to me like kind of the existing in nature version of like always taking your shopping cart back. Like, I will die on the hill.
- [58:39]
A
Me too.
- [58:40]
B
That's a really red flag for humans if you don't return your shopping carts. Like don't leave them in the middle of the parking lot. But what is the engaging with nature version of that?
- [58:49]
A
Right. Yeah. Another thought. And then we'll move on to notable quotes like, even in a book like this, which is trying to be respond. The honorable harvest of taking stories and sending forth the word Indigenous has to do a lot of work. There are dozens of tribes and traditions included here, each with their own history, languages, food waste, stories and struggles. Like, what are the limits of grouping under this umbrella term? I did look around for Indigenous critiques or counter stories or other perspectives on this. I didn't find a whole lot. There was. There was some discussion of Kimmerer possibly underrepresenting the complexity of indigenous agricultural practices. Right. She does some of these, but there it seems. It sounds like there are more structures even than what she gives here. Horticultural practices. I don't even call it farming a traditional way, but she's also trying to create, interestingly, out of many, she is creating a one thing, and I don't know how well that holds up. I'd be curious about what other scholars of Indigenous practices in history and anthropology would say, because there are so many things that she takes from to create a fairly consistent worldview. You. Do people think that's fair, representational? I don't know, but that's one straight thought I had at the same time. All right, let's do some notable quotes. What's number one on Goodreads, Rebecca? And how do we feel about it? That's the sub. That's the sub question of every time we do the number one quote.
- [60:14]
B
The number one on Goodreads is in some native languages, the term for plants translates to those who take care of us. This is.
- [60:23]
A
Are we okay with the people bringing this out? I mean, I don't know why we wouldn't.
- [60:27]
B
But fine. It happens really early in the book, which that just raises my eyebrow of, like, sometimes people read the first couple chapters of something and think they've gotten the whole point, and maybe that's where we're coming from here. That's fine. Goodreads has been much more egregious in some of the other titles we've talked about. I talked about this one a little bit. It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. And each of us comes from people who were once Indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our old relationship with the living earth.
- [61:00]
A
Yeah, that's good.
- [61:03]
B
Let's see.
- [61:04]
A
You want to do a couple more, however you want to do it.
- [61:06]
B
It's a little short, powerful one. She notes at one point, everybody lives downstream. Like, she's thinking particularly about something she's doing on her property and how it will impact her neighbors. But she doesn't say, I have to think about the people who live downstream, just of me. She says, everybody lives downstream. And. And how might I do things differently if I remembered that there are people downstream of me Also, in a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving address reminds you that you already have everything you need. That is quietly radical stuff.
- [61:53]
A
Yeah. Yeah. What I mean, of course, is that our relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. A, I like strawberries, but B, this idea that perspective, perceptives, perception and perspectives are things you can choose at a given moment or a given life. And you can choose among things. And in order to choose your perceptive lens, you need to understand your choices and the strengths and weaknesses of all those choices, but also that you can flip the frame. Right. You can move from science Kimmer to farm Khmer to storytelling Kimmer to mother Kimmer. What would a different perspective in a given moment offer me? Right. If you use the metaphor of the world as a gift gift, that implies different things. What other metaphors might there be? How could they unlock other ways of understanding and being in the world? I think that's. That's probably, for me, the most powerful idea is like, you do not have to. A. Not one of them is quote unquote right in a way that you might want there to be the right answer. That's what the world's most reasonable man is always trying to find. What is the right answer here? But they're differently useful. These metaphors and understanding perspectives are differently useful in a different way. So, example, for one example is we have a fire alarm in our kitchen that's extremely sensitive and it's high, so you have to climb up on something to turn off. Super annoying. But we named it Nervous Nelly. We've anthropomorphized it. It's a someone, not a something at this point. And now we just think Nellie's just trying to take care of us, so we're much less annoyed when the thing goes off because she just doesn't want us to die. So you can't get annoyed at the fire alarm when it's just doing its job of protecting.
- [63:36]
B
That's.
- [63:37]
A
Is that true? No. Is it useful? Yes.
- [63:43]
B
I have she has a whole section on becoming indigenous to place and what it means to like, really become connected to the places that we live. And she writes, being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink that build your body and fill your spirit.
- [64:02]
A
It.
- [64:02]
B
To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land, as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it, because they do. And it's important here that when she's talking about all our relatives, she is not just talking about human relatives, she is talking about all of the plants and animals on the world, that in the world that these are all our kin, that we have responsibility to them as well.
- [64:35]
A
Yeah, I'll just run through a few here. The difficulty of digging is an important constraint. Not everything should be convenient. I thought you might like this one. This is the way for many ponds. The bottomly gradually fills in until the pond becomes a marsh and maybe someday a meadow and then a forest. Ponds grow old though. I will too. I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment rather than progressive loss. Yes, here's my favorite. Someone once said that sometimes a fact alone is a poem, just so the people of corn are embedded in a beautiful poem written language of chemistry. The first stanza goes something like this. Carbon dioxide plus water combined in the presence of light in chlorophyll and the beautiful membrane bound machinery of life that yields sugar and oxygen. I mean, that's good shit, right? It is good stuff right there.
- [65:21]
B
I think this is my favorite coming up. And. And it's because this book is such an antidote, an argument against doomerism. She says despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive creative relationship with the more than human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things. And if the environmental leftists of the Internet could get this, that despair is not the thing that's going to get us to solutions, that would be such a win.
- [66:11]
A
We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and a responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories. Words to tell new ones. Stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people.
- [66:27]
B
Made of corn Girl Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders that perfect hang on the patio sundress those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. Ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road D dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummerahead to learn more. See you this summer. Pool days call for cookouts and lots of laundry this Memorial Day at Lowe's. Save $80 on a Char Broil Performance
- [67:35]
A
Series 4 burner gas grill.
- [67:36]
B
Now just $199 plus get up to 45 off. Select major appliances to keep dishes, clothes and food fresh. Having fun in the sun is easy with us in your corner. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's.
- [67:50]
A
Valid to 527.
- [67:51]
B
Wall supplies last selection varies by location. See associate or lowe's.com for details. We could do this all day.
- [67:57]
A
Just just it is about art and writing. I I'll just pre sage there at the same time time. All right. Is it for you, Rebecca? Why might it be for you?
- [68:05]
B
If you've read a lot of Mary Oliver, this is for you. In seriousness, if you're seeking a deep, a deeper and different relationship to the natural world, this is such an interesting invitation for how you might think about it. I think also if you're looking as one of those last quotes got at for an approach to environmental activism and to conservation that is grounded and that's hyperlocal and it feels better than fear. You're gonna get that here because Kimmerer is certainly engaged in big picture capital A activism. But the stories in this book are about mucking out your own pond, tending to your own fields, setting up the firewood for the people who come after you. Like very immediate, very Close things. And if each of us were doing those things and acting that hyperlocally, we would. We would have a world that was transformed.
- [68:55]
A
Yeah. I think if you're interested in the possibilities of creative nonfiction and science writing. Right. If you like either of those, you're definitely going to like this. Here. You have maybe not. If. Yeah. If you're looking to a wholly secular approach to life, at the same token, you have a non secular approach to life that is. How shall I say, all encompassing. You may have a hard time with this at the same time.
- [69:15]
B
And I think if you want prescribed step by step instructions for fixing things, this is not the book that's going to do it for you. This is a philosophy more than a, A, A set of how to's.
- [69:28]
A
The immortal questions that art asks. Which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with a certainty of death? What else might there be? What is the deal with good and evil? Free will. Free will, real or no. And then the shadow one that I sometimes ring in is how did we get here? Boy, Rebecca, there is a lot of corn to pluck in this particular field. Field or. Or a backyard or marsh or whatever. Where do you want to. Which jumped out to you? Maybe let's do this. Which is. Which of these is it unexpectedly to you about. Right. What do I owe my neighbor is sort of obvious from what we talked about. Is there one? Is that unexpectedly applicable?
- [70:08]
B
Or this is like it's sneakily about how do I know what I know in that tension between science and spiritual practices or, you know, mythology. However it is that you want to think about the indigenous wisdom and stories that she's offering. It's so overtly about what is the good life and what do I owe my neighbor. And that the good life is one in which you're doing the things that you owe your neighbor. But maybe the. The sneaky question there is, who is my neighbor? She's really exploding.
- [70:38]
A
Yeah.
- [70:38]
B
That concept. Yeah. What's. What's interesting to you?
- [70:42]
A
The one I found myself drawing to. It's about almost all of them.
- [70:45]
B
Right.
- [70:46]
A
Maybe all of a sudden of them the free will, real or no. And one of the things I kept thinking about his. Her own situation where she moves between worldviews intentionally. Not intentionally. Is she subject to her experience or not subject to her experience? One of the things that Western. The western scientific tradition does. Well, it's not pretty and it doesn't happen smoothly. See, Thomas Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions doesn't always go smoothly. Smoothly is update its priors, update its understanding. Right. We understanding something better now so that our understanding of the world is different. And I was looking at her stories of various cultures. There's. There's not moments where the new understanding is like, we now think this versus this. So how do ideas change? Is what I was thinking about free will in the individual, but the evolution of ideas within an understanding of the world, how does that happen? Is that something where an individual person or group or school of thought can be the thing that intervenes? Or is it more organic? Is it more evolution? Is it more sort of an ecosystem of ideas that change over time? Anyway, I found that very interesting to think about free will in this context, where so much of it is embedded and less interested in individual, where the idea of free will itself is super interested in the idea of the individual. So what happens to free will if the individual, not just as a person, but the individual human species is deprecated in importance? Anyway, thought about that. Are we sure this is about art and writing? I gave my. I entered my exhibits in the record, your honor. What else would you like to say about this?
- [72:19]
B
I think it's. It is. I think it's more about language than art and writing necessarily. And one of the quotes that I pulled out here is that she says the arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be human. And so she has to go outside of English and learn a new language and tap back into those indigenous perspectives, to have a framework for thinking about something that's not human exceptionalism, which is. Is so radical and hard to get our heads around and also, I think, feels true to many people.
- [72:54]
A
Could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation? You could not. Because it doesn't exist. You say you don't think it should. I don't. I don't think that's it. Is there anything that could, like, come close? Like, do we have a. Do we have an example of something that's similar at all?
- [73:07]
B
I don't know. Like, yeah, the closest thing that I could imagine would be like, a whole, like a PBS documentary or something that does snippets of, you know, here we are mucking the pond. Here we are tending the strawberries with, like, voiceovers. Right, right. Voiceovers from Kemmerer would be interesting. But this is. Is just not one that's really meant for an adaptation. I do think that a Muppets version of the essay where she takes the students on that camping trip would be a riot. Just because, like, you have the person who's obsessed with what are they going to do without phone service? You have the people who are super into it by the end of it. They're all like, singing songs and sitting in a hut together. Really. Hat like, they form their own little community. They come to.
- [73:53]
A
Can't you just see animal covered in mud, like ham on a bunch of cattails.
- [73:57]
B
Right? Like, are trying to, like, follow tree roots as far as they can take them. And they're fat. They go. What does she call it? The. The Walmart of the marsh.
- [74:06]
A
Yes, the Wall Marsh.
- [74:07]
B
The Wall Marsh. That's it.
- [74:08]
A
Right?
- [74:09]
B
Where it's like, what do we need while we're. What are all the things that we might need? We might need shoes, we might need shelter. We might need a way to protect ourselves. And can we find all of those things in the marsh? And I think Muppets would be sacrilegious, but very funny.
- [74:23]
A
Yeah, a special guest on the up on the revised Muppet show would be funny. Like Kimmerer doing, like a segment as a guest host. Yeah, the Muppet show would be something interesting here. Miscellaneous trivia adaptation rumors, Mr. Treated misattributed quotes and more. I have here that Kimmere cites Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson as influences. I guess it kind of bleeds into read alikes. I also. I didn't put it here. She writes all of her stuff in long hand on yellow notepads and purple in going back to that yellow purple dynamism you were talking about before.
- [74:53]
B
Richard Powers, who wrote the Overstory, was so moved by the audiobook of Braiding Sweetgrass that he had to pull the car over because he was crying so hard. Something that has only happened to me while listening to the things they carried.
- [75:07]
A
Also muck muck related. It's the muck that gets you, Rebecca.
- [75:10]
B
You're right, it is.
- [75:12]
A
How about Artax and the Sadness Wampum in the never ending story To Die? That's the other muck one I have.
- [75:18]
B
I mean, definitely as a kid. And Powers does credit Braiding Sweetgrass with being a significant influence on the Overstory.
- [75:25]
A
Makes a ton of sense. I wish I would have thought about that totally when I first read Overstory.
- [75:30]
B
And then I mentioned at the top that Elizabeth Gilbert blurbed Breathing Sweetgrass. But she used Kimmerer's first book, which is called Gathering Moss, as research for her own novel. The signature of all things. And that's she had Kimmeri Kimmerer sort of on her radar already. So interesting stuff there.
- [75:45]
A
Yeah. And Kimmerer has used a lot of the money she's gotten from the sales and the MacArthur to fund these initiatives and programs and buy back land and advocate. So she practices what she preaches in terms of gifting and reciprocity and all the things that go into it. Here. What's your hot take? You have one. I don't really have a hot take for this.
- [76:04]
B
I didn't have. Many publishing should apologize to Robin Wall Kimmerer because they have taken the success of this beautiful book and used it to churn out a whole bunch of basic ass yay trees content.
- [76:15]
A
And this is coming from you. I might say this hot take is even hotter coming from you.
- [76:19]
B
I fucking love a tree. I visit the same tree every day and take a picture of it. But like we have gone too far. And I think that what should happen is when you walk into a bookstore and you ask for one of those yea trees books, they should just give you a copy of Raiding Sweetgrass instead.
- [76:35]
A
Yeah, famously I prefer a tree to a bear because you know what you're getting with the tree. So I'm with you on that. And I, I, I fully support this hot take. I, I will merely be accessory to your hot take at this I don't have one of them.
- [76:46]
B
Hop on in that sidecar.
- [76:47]
A
Yeah, I don't mind. Further reading Rex for read alikes books Inspired this one, etc. Etc. We mentioned the overstory. Richard Powers, Sacred Spring, Wendell Berry. What else did you find? What else were you thinking?
- [76:59]
B
I noticed, I think because I had just recently read it, that Terry Tempest Williams's latest book, the Glorians follows a similar structure to Braiding Sweetgrass.
- [77:07]
A
I've looked at that in the bookstore and have yet not. I have yet to pick it up.
- [77:10]
B
And I know that like they know each other. They're in like sort of similar writing circles. But the Glorians is organized in several sections. Each essay is about some piece of the natural world or connection that Williams finds to be grounding and of spiritual significance. I really loved the Glorians. I loved Harry Tempest Williams. If you're looking for something that's more conservation oriented coming out of Robin Wall Kimmerer, you could pick up Williams's book Refuge, which is a few decades old now but is really wonderful. The chapters in Braiding Sweetgrass about how to become indigenous to place reminded me of how to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, which I also read in 2020 when everyone else read it, and there are threads there about she's. She's living in a pretty suburban or urban place. It's not the place that she's from, but she wants to, you know, she wants to know who the people of her neighborhood are and. And like, in terms of the plants and the animals and what is the stream that runs through her neighborhood and which river does it connect to. And so I think you can get some flavors of that from Odell as well.
- [78:18]
A
Yeah, we talked about Richard Powers. I'm just going to say again, and this is a little bit out of left field, but Richard Rorty's Contingent Irony and Solidarity is a pretty thick academic text of practical philosophy, a pragmatic philosophy. But if you're interested in how to. How to live within a Western liberal tradition and also not think that we're just subject to science as being the master discourse at all times is really interesting. It stuck with me for a long time. A little more science based on. But Zoe Schlanger's the Light Eaters, which is about plants and some pretty radical scientists who gave a lot more credence to the animacy and agency of plants than was common and accepted at the time. I think if you're like breeding sweetgrass, you're going to like the Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger. I listen to the audio. It sold quite well a few years ago, and I do think it was an aftershock of the people interested in braiding sweetgrass.
- [79:09]
B
I really. Oh, since you happen to just mention audio, there's there. I think braiding sweetgrass is an excellent contender for an audio.
- [79:16]
A
I haven't done it. Does she narrate it?
- [79:18]
B
She does.
- [79:19]
A
Okay.
- [79:20]
B
And I read in print this time so I could take notes for it. But she has a wonderful reading voice. I can only imagine 32 essays lend themselves so nicely to, like, just do one a day for a while. Like, I did think about that a lot while reading. I should have caught this in Stray thoughts that, like, just reading all of these in a row over the course of a week weekend is like, not the ideal experience with this book. I think I really wanted to linger with it. And you could take your time with like one a day. You could even do one a week. Like what you were getting at with. If we read one book a hundred times. What happens if you read the same essay a couple times over the course of a week or so? But audio would be a good way
- [79:57]
A
to engage with this cocktail party. Crib sheets. Mine. Mine is this is that science is a worldview. Um, and that the scientific, the culture of science is a worldview. It's one among many and it has particular strengths but it also has weaknesses. Remember science, science quote unquote has been wrong about a lot of things and it will be wrong about a lot of things into the future for the foreseeable future. And if you take that as true, there means there's different ways of understanding that can offer different things. That's probably mine. Rebecca, what did you have?
- [80:29]
B
I have that environmental activism that's grounded in gratitude, a love for the land and a positive vision for restoration is more powerful than despair and fear based messaging. And that sustainability doesn't have to mean deprivation or a diminished state of living. That's really remarkable to me across these pages is that this is a really full and rich way of existing in the world. It's not deprived and it's not in a scarcity mindset at all.
- [80:56]
A
Our final beat, a zero to well read score. Each ones gets. Gets a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. Our five vectors of evaluation here are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read, cred and oh damn factor. Historical importance is tough because it's so new we can't judge. It's a tbd. I think a fair incomplete. What do you think?
- [81:18]
B
It's hard to know. Yeah. I think it's really possible that in another 30 years we're talking about this in the same way that we talk about Rachel Carson's Silent Spring now as being a book that galvanized people around a new understanding and conversation. But it's, it's early. So maybe early three or four.
- [81:36]
A
Yeah. Or. Or five asterisks. You know.
- [81:39]
B
Sure.
- [81:40]
A
A grower. I think I would buy stock at the current price of breeding sweetgrass.
- [81:45]
B
Totally. I would buy stock. I agree.
- [81:47]
A
Even at this moment it got a little high for me maybe three years ago ago time 100 MacArthur bestseller list 140 weeks. But I think I got a little better price to earnings multiple. I'm sure Robin Wall Kimmer would love me using the metaphor of the stock market to describe her book. That seems very in. In line with what she's.
- [82:04]
B
Maybe you should just go back and read this one again. Jeff.
- [82:06]
A
Yeah, I really, I really missed the point. I. Yeah. Bad job me readability. Rebecca, what would you like to say about that?
- [82:11]
B
I think this is really high on readability. Eight or nine.
- [82:14]
A
It's you know it's not plot driven like that. You know, the 10 is you're like just whipping through pages and it's beautiful and blah, blah, blah. It doesn't have that bit, but I can definitely go for an eight.
- [82:25]
B
Okay.
- [82:26]
A
Current relevance of central questions has to be a 10. I don't think there's any way around it at this point because it was so widely read. I don't know. That book nerd read credit is super, super high. Having said that, I also think there's a I bought it and didn't read it phenomenon that's pretty huge on this one. Maybe reading maybe once people got into it and it was more sciency, more philosophical. It's not sacred. Yeah. It's not just yay trees and a bunch of facts and stuff.
- [82:55]
B
I think it's also been given as a gift a lot. And we like one of the great questions of publishing is what percentage of gifted books get read? So I think Reed credits, like, did you actually read the thing after you bought it? This is higher than I would maybe on first blush from the sale.
- [83:12]
A
So I'm gonna go seven, six, seven. That sounds right to me too. Oh, damn. Factor can be tricky because you get fooled into things that flow quite naturally, that seem quite simple, that don't show off. And kimmerer is not a show off. But then you have to retroactively get credit for not showing off in the like. It's very difficult. Rebecca. So I'm inclined to, inclined to do eights around the odam factor here.
- [83:38]
B
I think I can go with an eight for sure.
- [83:40]
A
Yeah.
- [83:41]
B
Yeah. Good heights.
- [83:42]
A
There are moments, there are sentences that hit some really high heights. I do think, I think the moving between forms can take away some of the momentum because it takes a few pages of a new vignette or a new story to like, orient yourself where it is. I think that's intentional because then you have to re engage. But I think it hurts the rehability a little bit and also the odam factor because you're kind of constantly resetting.
- [84:06]
B
I think that's also why I would recommend reading one at a time like, yes. And just letting each piece stand on it.
- [84:13]
A
And you can read out of order, don't you think? Yeah, I, I, I had a hard time making sense of. There are like section headings of like different gerunds of sweetgrass. I, I lost track. I wasn't sure where I was. I'm not sure I hold it.
- [84:26]
B
I don't think it matters to the reading experience. Yeah, right.
- [84:30]
A
Amazing, wonderful, terrific. So I'm so glad you we didn't do the why this Right now book, I don't think. But it's one we wanted to talk about.
- [84:39]
B
Yeah, that's if we're not talking specifically about a moment where we're looping the book in. It's just because it was on the long list and it fleshes out the variety of the season. And I'm, I'm in charge of the program here and I happen to love this book.
- [84:53]
A
Yeah, that's. That's enough, man. We're doing it here. If you'd like for detailed show notes, our free newsletter and membership options, you go to patreon.com 0to well read. You can follow us on the socials at 02 well read podcast shoot us an email 02 well read bookriot.com and it doesn't matter if you were just listening to, I don't know, Their Eyes Were Watching God from Last Fall or something else or this one. We, you know, time is a construction and we the inbox itself is not going to delineate or prioritize based on how recent the thing we talked about is. We want to hear your thoughts, stories, reactions, quibbles and more@thezerotowellread bookriot.com email thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of Zero to well Read. And Zero to well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. A real pleasure.
- [85:44]
B
Always a good time with us.
- [85:46]
C
1.