Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

22:31Today'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.E.

23:31Cooney 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. Kimmer herself is a fascinating person. She's a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, born and raised in upstate New York, though she touches on this in the book 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 native understandings and teachings, like they knew some of it.

24:12But they were scientists, I think is very important that 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?

24:26Jeff: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 even an essay that is written from the perspective of one of her daughters. And then she hits on 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 was also clearing the grounds because it foamed up initially. Yeah. Getting the coffee grounds out of the filter.

24:57Jeff:She does return to this story about her grandfather several times. And then also about the 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 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 he was robbed of them because they were taken from him.

25:42Jeff:And so she, later in her life, does actively seek to become more engaged with these indigenous practices. 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 of biography and what the book is about, to get a whole thing about her own mother's relationship to science and her own relationship to upbringing. An interesting absence, as we would say, in a close reading example to look at there. She had her bachelor's degree in botany from the State University of New York in 1975.

26:15She worked as a microbiologist. She was a working stiff for the man at Bausch & Lone for a couple years before going on to get her master's and PhD 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? I mean, no. Were you already on the moss camp? Or where was this in your moss journey?

26:33Jeff:I've been on the moss tip for a while. 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.

27:15Jeff:So it's a different way of doing the scientific method. And I'm 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 is still— Good job, Elizabeth Gilbert.

27:53I mean, I know we've had some fluctuation, the Elizabeth Gilbert stock, over the last 18 months, but 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 Standing 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 bona fides, 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?

28:30which 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 Kimmer 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.

29:12Like maybe we could do that too. You don't have to be a member of a tribe and century and century and grandfather, grandfather, grandfather, grandfather. 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. This is not a closed system.

29:39Jeff: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, 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.

30:12Jeff: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 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. 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 this book.

30:47I think it's the 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 worldview, 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. Some of my favorite stuff in the book is how she's rehabilitating what science can be and distinguish it from a scientific capitalist Western worldview.

31:21But she is not replacing what she knows with this. They're augmenting each other. It's 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 where does she more feel the tension now? Certainly in the academic circles, there was tension. Is there tension in her heart? Does 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?

31:57Not 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 gonna take a little while and no one's gonna understand it. Rebecca, when did you first read this?

32:05Jeff: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 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.

32:42Jeff: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. 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 near my mom's birthday, by the way, today. Happy birthday, mom. Happy birthday, mom. 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 on to, to make it into something that actually gets to turn the page.

33:21I was, well, I guess we can move right into 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 one of the hats that I sometimes wear as 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, both in the business, in the world, with my family and my dealings.

33:57But it also can be a bit of a trap. You can be a bit of a calculating machine at that point. My father's a doctor. I'm a person of the West. I taught 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 we can find ourselves in is not under the microscope here, but 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 kinds of things. But, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug.

34:35The thing that was inarguable to me is, yeah, we've really screwed some things up. This is not the way to be in the world. Like I'm also on board with climate change is real, and you shouldn't 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've looked around, Rebecca, but we're not doing great with climate change right now and environmental agonism in the public sense, in the governmental sense. And certainly there was a moment under the Biden administration of the build back better and some of those things like, let's really reinvest in renewable energies.

35:11But it seems to have been, I don't know, 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 and resistant. And I'm not a con, there's 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?

35:49Like really get out of it. Cause 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 in all kinds of interesting ways.

36:05Jeff:That's really interesting. This is like a pitch straight down the middle for what I'm interested in. Yes. You were like, can I get a whole book tattooed? How do we do this? 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. 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.

36:47Jeff: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 and that it's part of a positive vision for the future that it's here are way like small ways that we can act rather than just a list of things that we should not be doing or or a reaccounting of the ways that we are bad like we all know what the bad things are right 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.

37:26Jeff:And it worked for me this 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 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. It's just so lovingly observed and so detailed and so poetic. Nothing is better than a poet writing a nature memoir. Come on. 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 it the first time, I mean, maybe 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.

38:19Yeah, it's so gorgeous. And it matters to her. That's one of her points. She says, you 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 to the world and having the world be useful back to, like we said, very formally variegated. And some of that is because different kinds of stories can do different kinds of things.

38:52And 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. There's a perverted version of that where I read 300 stories, right?

39:26I 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 a hundred 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 because there's so much for me here to analogize and borrow.

39:49Jeff: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 like I mean 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?

40:28Jeff: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 study and apply another culture's teachings respectfully.

41:13Jeff: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 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 we can take as well.

41:55Yeah. I think you could do worse to cut to the heart of the matter than her phrase, or not her phrase, but she gives to us a phrase in many indigenous cultures of the idea of the honorable harvest. Yes. 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 rein in our tendency to consume that the world might be as rich for the seventh generation as it is for our own. The details are highly specific to different cultures and ecosystems, but the fundamental principles are nearly universal among peoples who live close to the land.

42:33And 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 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 a 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.

43:07You always could then make an Etsy shop out of it, right? I'm both being exaggerating, but also true, right? You could also write your own version of it that's less difficult for someone shopping at a Barnes & Noble in a suburb to buy. 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.

43:34Jeff:I love that reading of this. Good job, Jeff O 'Neill. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, I think 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 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.

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46:33Jeff: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 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 redbull.com slash bright summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer. Yeah. It's funny. We're moving into straight 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.

47:15I think they go for a few weeks and they get in the muck. Literally, they're getting down in the and they come out transformed. 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?

47:32Jeff:Yeah, 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 Kimmerer gives us just a little taste of those like we get the story about 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, used to explain all of creation.

48:11Jeff:But like, creation happened, nature existed, and then man was given dominion over all of it. And there's Adam and Eve and Kate and Abel, and they got in a fight and here we are today, right? It's sort of amazing when you think 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 man is over all of it, take it and use it as you will.

48:55Jeff: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. 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. That's a really good point. But I just, I spent a lot of time thinking about that this time around. 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 Wall Kimmerer and the people understand this, but there's these moments where she's talking about, you know, a gap opening up in the forest somehow, right?

49:34And 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 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 are like, how weird is it this is a huge hit?

50:16Notice that it's unlike, that's a feature, not a bug that it's weird of these things that become cultural phenomenons because 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 possibly predictable objections. How are you going to scale digging for roots. 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.

50:51Jeff: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 is not her original home. And what does that understanding do? But 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 tried to connect to it? You have this note here about the Saper-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that we can only have thoughts for which we already have language.

51:33Jeff:Yeah. 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, are we sure it isn't sort of true? Well, 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. 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 sort of person-oriented language and non-person-oriented language.

52:09So 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.

52:23Jeff:The language is Anishinaabe. Anishinaabe. and that really struck me because if you I do think I don't know enough about linguist Seeper-Whorf hypothesis is 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 its vocabulary and what that speakers of that language believe and think and feel okay we don't know debunked it's hard to A-B test this there's a whole bunch of things that go into proving this through but in that moment I'm like are we sure because that feels meaningful. I think it feels to me that if you think and speak like that, you're going to act differently.

53:02I just believe that, Rebecca. I don't have any proof for it, but I just believe that.

53:06Jeff:That's totally true. And I think that's why she spends a lot of time on it. She goes into, why does this language talk about a plant or an animal 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. And for someone just to be like, well, 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?

53:47Jeff:Maybe then I would be out moving salamanders across the road, 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 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. 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.

54:29Like, 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, 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 a 1989 89 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.

54:55Jeff:This is a real Jeff moment. And 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. 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. And 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 and particular drawbacks, much like humans do.

55:31Our 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 yoke the twin oxen of science and poetry to get to interesting places. But 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 an interesting way.

56:08I 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, there's a reason that census has stuck with me for 25 years. And I don't really understand. Yeah, that is really useful.

56:22Jeff:And I think, let's see. 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 they'll leave it better than you found 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 there's a great scene early when she talks about going campy as a kid with her fan where with her family um and they you know they're the riverbank or the lake bank and they're making sure that they clean up all their, but they go beyond just cleaning up their stuff.

57:11They cut wood for the next camper. They refine dry kindling and they put it over, they cover it so that it stays dry. And the flash that, the scene that flashed into my mind, I know it's a shared favorite of ours, is Mad Men. In an early season, the two main characters go on a picnic and they lift up their blanket and they just shake it and like the trash goes everywhere And they just leave. Just like Pepsi cans. And even at the moment, 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.

57:46It just wouldn't.

57:47Jeff:Yeah. But reading stuff like this allows you to at least consider it. Yeah, there's a real - Why don't? What does that say about me and where I come from? And should I be different than I am? Yeah, 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 in thinking beyond ourselves, whether it's who's going to be in this space after I'm in it. Can I set up firewood for them? Or generosity for how we speak and think and teach about the resources that are available to us.

58:25Jeff: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. That's a 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? Right. Yeah. Another thought, and then we'll move on to notable quotes. Even in a book like this, which is trying to be in the honorable harvest of taking stories and so 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.

59:05Like, 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 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 structured even than what she gives here horticultural practices i don't even call it farming in a traditional way but but she's also trying to create a 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 other 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?

59:59Do 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 question of every time we do the number one quote.

1:00:11Jeff:The number one on Goodreads is, in some native languages, the term for plants translates to those who take care of us. Are we okay with the people bringing this out? I mean, I mean, I don't know why we wouldn't, 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.

1:00:46Jeff: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 relationships with the living earth yeah that's good um let's see you want to do a couple more however you want to do it 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 how might I do things differently if I remembered that there are people downstream of me?

1:01:27Jeff: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. 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.

1:02:05A, I like strawberries, but B, this idea that 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 Kimmer 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, that implies different things? What other metaphors might there be?

1:02:43How could they unlock other ways of understanding and being in the world? I think that's probably, for me, the most powerful idea. It's like, you do not have to, 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 reusable 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 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.

1:03:13Super 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 Nelly'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 you. Is that true? No. Is it useful?

1:03:36Jeff:Yes. 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. 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.

1:04:14Jeff: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 in the world, that these are all our kin, that we have responsibility to them as well. 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.

1:04:56Here'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 in the language of chemistry. The first stanza goes something like this. Carbon dioxide plus water combine in the presence of light in chlorophyll in the beautiful membrane bound machinery of life that yields sugar and oxygen. I mean, that's good shit. It is good shit.

1:05:17Jeff:I think this is my favorite coming up. 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.

1:06:07We 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 made of corn. Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes.

1:06:32Jeff: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. Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come experience the beauty that awaits in Scotland. The sweep of wild coastlines, quiet locks and untamed landscapes. Fresh cuisine that feels rooted in the land.

1:07:12Jeff:come experience the kind of stillness that stays with you long after you leave plan your scottish escape today at expedia.com slash visit scotland pool days call for cookouts and lots of laundry this memorial day at lowes save eighty dollars on a charbroil performance series four burner gas grill now just one hundred ninety nine dollars plus get up to forty five percent 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. Ballot through 527. While supplies last, selection varies by location.

1:07:53See associate or lowes.com for details. We could do this all day. It is about art and writing. I'll just pre-sage there at the same time. All right. Is it for you, Rebecca? Why might it be for you?

1:08:04Jeff:If you've read a lot of Mary Oliver, this is for you. In seriousness, If you're seeking 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 hyper-local and that feels better than fear. You're going to 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.

1:08:46Jeff:And if each of us were doing those things and acting that hyperlocally, we would have a world that was transformed. 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, on 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. 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.

1:09:21Jeff:This is a philosophy more than a set of how-tos. 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 the certainty of death? What else might there be? What is the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or no? And then the shadow one that I sometimes bring in is, how did we get here? Boy, Rebecca, there is a lot of corn to pluck in this particular field or backyard or marsh or whatever. Where do you want to, which jumped out to you? Maybe let's do this. Which of these is it unexpectedly to you about, right?

1:10:01What do I owe my neighbor is sort of obvious from what we talked about. Is there one of these that's unexpectedly applicable or inapplicable?

1:10:08Jeff:I mean, 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 sneakiest question there is, who is my neighbor? She's really exploding that concept. Yeah. What's interesting to you here? The one I found myself drawing to, it's about almost all of them, right?

1:10:45Maybe all of them. The free will, real or no. And one of the things I kept thinking about is 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 the Western scientific tradition does well, it's not pretty, and it doesn't happen smoothly. See, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Resolutions doesn't always go smoothly, is update its priors, update its understanding. We understanding something better now so that our understanding of the world is different. And I was looking at her stories of various cultures.

1:11:26There'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 an individual where the idea of free will itself is super interested in the idea of the individual.

1:12:02So 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 entered my exhibits in the record, Your Honor. What else would you like to say about this?

1:12:18Jeff: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 so radical and hard to get our heads around and also I think feels true to many people. Could you get the most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation?

1:12:56You could not because it doesn't exist. You say you don't think it should. I don't think that's it. Is there anything that could come close? Do we have an example of something that's similar at all?

1:13:06Jeff: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 tapping the maples. Right. Right. Voiceovers from Kemmerer would be interesting. But this 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.

1:13:45Jeff:By the end of it, they're all like singing songs and sitting in a hut together. Really like they form their own little community. They come to. Can't you just see animal covered in mud like ham on a bunch of cattails? Right, like 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 Walmart of the marsh. Yes, the Walmart. The Walmart, that's it. Right. Where it's like, what do we need? 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?

1:14:17Jeff:And I think Muppets would be sacrilegious, but very funny. Yeah. A special guest on the revised Muppet show would be funny. Like Kimmerer doing like a segment as a guest host of The Muppet Show would be something interesting here. Miscellaneous trivia adaptation rumors, misattributed quotes, and more. I have here that Kimmerer cites Wendell Berry and Rachel Carson as influences. I guess that kind of bleeds into read-alikes. I also, I didn't put it here. She writes all of her stuff in longhand on yellow notepads and purple ink. Going back to that yellow-purple dynamism you were talking about before.

1:14:52Jeff: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. Also muck. Muck related. It's a muck that gets you, Rebecca. You're right, it is. How about Artax and the Sadness Swamp and the Neverending Story to Die and Get You Too? That's the other muck one I have. I mean, definitely as a kid. and Powers does credit Braiding Sweetgrass with being a significant influence on the Overstory. Makes a ton of sense. I wish I would have thought about that when I first read Overstory.

1:15:29Jeff:And then I mentioned at the top that Elizabeth Gilbert blurbed Braiding 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 she had Kimmerer sort of on her radar already. So interesting stuff there. 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.

1:16:02I don't really have a hot take for this.

1:16:03Jeff: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. And this is coming from you, I might say. This hot take is even hotter coming from you. Listen, I fucking love a tree. I visit the same tree every day and take a picture of it. But 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 Yay Trees books, they should just give you a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass instead. Yeah. Famously, I prefer a tree to a bear because you know what you're getting with a tree.

1:16:38So I'm with you on that. And I fully support this hot take. I will merely be accessory to your hot take at this. I don't have one of them.

1:16:45Jeff:Hop on in that sidecar. Yeah, I don't mind. Further reading, Rex for read-alikes, books inspired this one, et cetera, et cetera. We mentioned the Overstory, Richard Powers, Sacred Spring, Wendell Berry. What else did you find? What else were you thinking? I noticed, I think because I had just recently read it, that Terry Tempest Williams' latest book, The Glorians, follows a similar structure to Braiding Sweetgrass. I've looked at that in the bookstore and have yet to pick it up. And I know that they know each other. They're in sort of similar writing circles. But The Glorians is organized in several sections.

1:17:18Jeff: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' 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 O'Dell, which I also read in 2020 when everyone else read it. And there are threads there about she's living in a pretty suburban or urban place.

1:17:59Jeff:It's not the place that she's from, but she wants to know who the people of her neighborhood are 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. Yeah. We talked about Richard Powers. I'm just going to say again, this is a little bit out of left field, but Richard Rorty's Contingent Irony and Solidarity is a pretty thick academic text of pragmatic philosophy. But if you're interested in 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.

1:18:42It stuck with me for a long time. A little more science-based, 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 braiding sweetgrass, you're going to like the light eaters by Zoe Schlanger. I listened on the audio feed. It sold quite well a few years ago. And I do think it was an aftershock of the people interested in braiding sweetgrass. I really do believe that.

1:19:10Jeff:Oh, since you happened to just mention audio there, I think braiding sweetgrass is an excellent contender for an audio. I haven't She's done it. Does she narrate it? She does. Okay. 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. And these 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 weekend is like not the ideal experience with this book.

1:19:41Jeff: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 to engage with this uh 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, 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.

1:20:21And if you take that as true, that means there's different ways of understanding that can offer different things. That's probably mine. Rebecca, what did you have?

1:20:28Jeff: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 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. Our final beat, a zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one 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, an oh damn factor.

1:21:12Historical importance is tough because it's so new. We can't judge. It's a TBD, I think I'm fair, incomplete. What do you think? It's hard to know.

1:21:18Jeff: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 early, So maybe three or four? Yeah, or five asterisks, you know, a grower. I think I would buy stock at the current price of Braiding Sweetgrass. Totally. Yeah, I would buy stock. I agree. Even at this moment. It got a little high for me maybe three years ago. Time 100, MacArthur, bestseller list, 140 weeks. But I think I got a little better price to earnings multiple.

1:21:55I'm sure Robin Wall Kimmer would love me using the metaphor of the stock market to describe her book. That seems very in line with what she's...

1:22:03Jeff:Maybe you should just go back and read this one again, Jeff. Yeah, I really missed the point. Bad job me. Readability, Rebecca, what would you like to say about that? I think this is really high on readability. Eight or nine. 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. Okay. Current relevance of central questions has to be a 10. And 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 cred is super, super high.

1:22:37Having said that, I also think there's a I bought it and didn't read it phenomenon that's pretty huge on this one. I do too. Maybe once people got into it and it was more science-y, more philosophically sacred. Yeah, it's not just the eight trees and a bunch of facts and stuff. I think it's also been given as a gift a lot.

1:22:58Jeff:And one of the great questions of publishing is what percentage of gifted books get read. So I think read credits, like, did you actually read the thing after you bought it? This is higher than I would maybe on first blush from the sales. So I'm going to go with a seven. Seven, that sounds right to me too. O'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 and you know like it's very difficult Rebecca so I'm inclined to do eights around the O'Dam factor here I think I can go with an eight for sure yeah yeah good high 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.

1:23:58I think that's intentional because then you have to re-engage, but I think it hurts the readability a little bit and also the oh damn factor because you're kind of constantly resetting.

1:24:06Jeff:I think that's also why I would recommend reading one at a time and just letting each piece stand on its own. And you can read out of order, don't you think? You totally could. Yeah, 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. I don't think it matters to the reading experience. Yeah, right. 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. Yeah, that's if we're not talking specifically about a moment where we're looping the book and it's just because it was on the long list and it fleshes out the variety of the season.

1:24:48Jeff:Yes, absolutely. And I'm in charge of the program here and I happen to love this book. Yeah, 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 slash zero to well read. You can follow us on the socials at zero to well read podcast. Shoot us an email, zero to well read at book riot.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 construct. And the inbox itself is not going to delineate or prioritize based on how recent the thing we talked about is.

1:25:26We want to hear your thoughts, stories, reactions, quibbles, and more at the zerotowellread at 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.

1:25:44Jeff:Always a good time with this one.