From the creation story, which tells of Sky woman falling from the sky, we can learn about mutual aid. From cedars we can learn generosity (because of all they provide, from canoes to capes). For Braiding Sweetgrass, she broadened her scope with an array of object lessons braced by indigenous wisdom and culture. In her debut collection of essays, Gathering Moss, she blended, with deep attentiveness and musicality, science and personal insights to tell the overlooked story of the planet’s oldest plants. People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.” “Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us,” Kimmerer explains, “so my act of reciprocity is, having been shown plants as gifts, as intelligences other than our own, as these amazing, creative beings – good lord, they can photosynthesise, that still blows my mind! – I want to help them become visible to people. Moss in the forest around the Bennachie hills, near Inverurie. To collect the samples, one student used the glass from a picture frame like the mosses, we too are adapting. For one such class, on the ecology of moss, she sent her students out to locate the ancient, interconnected plants, even if it was in an urban park or a cemetery. It’s going well, all things considered still, not every lesson translates to the digital classroom. A distinguished professor in environmental biology at the State University of New York, she has shifted her courses online. Our original, pre-pandemic plan had been meeting at the Clark Reservation State Park, a spectacular mossy woodland near her home, but here we are, staying 250 miles apart. “Sitting at a computer is not my favourite thing,” admits the 66-year-old native of upstate New York. Behind her, on the wooden bookshelves, are birch bark baskets and sewn boxes, mukluks, and books by the environmentalist Winona LaDuke and Leslie Marmon Silko, a writer of the Native American Renaissance. Today she has her long greyish-brown hair pulled loosely back and spilling out on to her shoulders, and she wears circular, woven, patterned earrings. Her delivery is measured, lyrical, and, when necessary (and perhaps it’s always necessary), impassioned and forceful. In January, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list, seven years after its original release from the independent press Milkweed Editions – no small feat.Ī mother of two daughters, and a grandmother, Kimmerer’s voice is mellifluous over the video call, animated with warmth and wonderment. The occasion is the UK publication of her second book, the remarkable, wise and potentially paradigm-shifting Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which has become a surprise word-of-mouth sensation, selling nearly 400,000 copies across North America (and nearly 500,000 worldwide). It’s the end of March and, observing the new social distancing protocol, we’re speaking over Zoom – Kimmerer, from her home office outside Syracuse, New York me from shuttered South Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where the constant wail of sirens are a sobering reminder of the pandemic. All the ways that they live I just feel are really poignant teachings for us right now.” “What is it that has enabled them to persist for 350m years, through every kind of catastrophe, every climate change that’s ever happened on this planet, and what might we learn from that?” She lists the lessons “of being small, of giving more than you take, of working with natural law, sticking together. She grins as if thinking of a dogged old friend or mentor. Her first book, published in 2003, was the natural and cultural history book Gathering Moss. “This is a time to take a lesson from mosses,” says Robin Wall Kimmerer, celebrated writer and botanist.
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