Robin Wall Kimmerer: A commodity is really just a thing. It’s an object. But when we move to the notion that the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, that wonderful drink of cold water, um, is a gift from Segmekwe, from Mother Earth—it’s a relationship and a reciprocal relationship.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends, in this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin is a scientist and a brilliant writer, best known as the author of the widely acclaimed book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and The Teaching of Plants.
She’s a mother. A decorated professor, an enrolled member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation. She’s a tremendously gifted storyteller and educator who is currently 72 years old and living in a farmhouse in upstate New York—writing, speaking, teaching, and tending gardens, both cultivated and wild. In 2022, Robin Wall Kimmerer was named a MacArthur Fellow. And then in 2023, she received the National Humanities Medal. In 2025, she launched a new movement. It’s called Plant Baby Plant, A way for individuals to be involved in loving the natural world around us. And we’re gonna talk about that Plant, Baby, Plant. Robin, welcome.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Thank you so much for that warm introduction and for the invitation to chat today.
Tami Simon: I am tremendously thrilled to talk to you, and the reason I’m just gonna say it right here at the beginning is that I found myself when immersed in your writing and speaking, moving to a different channel of perception. I’m not quite sure how else to say it.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Mm-hmm.
Tami Simon: The food in my bowl started looking different and tasting different, the world outside my window.
The plants that I see growing here in British Columbia where I live, they started looking different too. And I wanna begin by asking you about this change in worldview and your understanding of that as the person communicating it through your writing and teaching.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: What a beautiful backdrop for that question because if there’s anything that I hope that stories can do, it is to help us see the world in a different way in, in this rich and simultaneously intimate. Expansive, um, way. And so I’m, I’m delighted to hear that there’s been, that, that transformation for you and for me.
What you’re really talking about is the. Gateway or the path that is open by paying deep attention. Um, when you start to see the world, not as things, as beings, as as relatives who are around you, you walk through the woods in a different way. You walk through the city in a different way. I think you go to the supermarket a different way. Um, and so that change in perception is, is um, to me, so. Exciting and can take us out of the sort of mechanistic worldview in which we live. Yeah. That, that dualism, you know, the, like the old dualism between matter and spirit, you know, to me I wanna erase that and, and have them, you know, dance together.
Tami Simon: Part of what I think you opened up for me that was fresh and that I want to. Give as a gift, if you will, to our listeners, is this deep sense of gratitude for what the plant world is already giving to me that I haven’t been in touch with, and you communicate that. As someone bringing together indigenous wisdom with science, and I think some of the teachings, I mean I’ve heard of course for many years, as many people have, you know, all, all of us are related, all my relations and the interconnected web of life.
But after reading your work and listening to you teach, I started feeling what I’m receiving. All the time that I’m not aware of, and I wonder if you can speak to that.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Yeah. Um, I think what feels like it’s surfacing for me this difference between, an object, a commodity, if you will, and a gift. Because a commodity is really just a thing. It’s an object. But when we move to the notion that the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, that wonderful drink of cold water, um, is a gift from Segmekwe from Mother Earth. There’s so much intention there. You feel like. me, um, that gift is, is for me, it comes with relationship. Um, it’s no longer a thing, it’s a, it’s a relationship and a reciprocal relationship. Where in return for those gifts, as we well know, someone gives us a gift, what do we want to do? We wanna say thank you.
Um, we are moved to gratitude and the kind of gratitude that we’re talking about is, is not. You know, just sort of a polite thank you, isn’t it? That doesn’t really change you. But the kind of deep gratitude, which I think of as existential gratitude to know that without you. would not be here.
Um, and um, that is I think an illuminating enlivening kind of gratitude that makes you, know, I’m trying to think of whose word that is that I don’t remember, but that it ree chance the world. Um, and it becomes full of, of, of relationship, not full of things, you know? Can I give you one example of that?
Tami Simon: Please.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: I was once giving a talk at a big university’s college of natural resources, I, I did my spiel. What, I don’t remember what the talk was about, but, um, I do remember that that College of Natural Resources was trying to change their name when we think about what natural resources means, it means materials. That we will take from nature and convert into something that we value. That is what it means, right? And there they were the College of Natural Resources. And as they were trying to think about what to rename themselves, of cheekily offered, you should call yourselves the College of Earthly Gifts. And the whole room sort of fell silent. And then there was like this. Exhalation this, this sigh, and this look on people’s face in the audience was like, oh, I want to work for the College of Earthly Gifts in a way. That the College of Natural Resources doesn’t call you. And, and I think it’s exactly what you’re talking about in that transformed feeling about your home place.
When you realize that you’re walking through a landscape of gifts, um, you, you are in a completely different relationship to that place than if you’re walking through a warehouse of natural resources.
Tami Simon: Well, and that I wouldn’t be here without the oxygen. I wouldn’t be alive, like literally. My very life is being sustained. It is a gift from the earth itself, and having that in awareness all the time.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: And you know, Tami, I think another element of it that your example of oxygen brought forth for me is that not only are you receiving that gift of oxygen that the plants have generated for you, every one of you are exhalations of carbon dioxide is what they need. To thrive. So you’re not just taking from the living world, you are giving back.
And that’s why I say you’re in relationship. Um, and it is that giving back. I think it’s that reciprocity that makes us feel, uh, that we belong in the natural world as opposed from to feeling alienated. So I think those are some of the elements of the feelings that you’re naming.
Tami Simon: Now I wanna bring us right into the time that we’re in here in the beginning of 2026, because here I’m talking about this tremendous sense of. Loving mutuality, and many of us are deeply concerned that we’re either on the precipice of climate catastrophe, or we’ve already gone over. The precipice depending on which climate scientists you talk to.
And I wonder how you view this particular time from your vantage point combining science and indigenous wisdom.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: You know, feel that precipice and, and your, um, the way you navigated that of are we over the precipice? Are we just on the brink of it? Are we approaching it? Um, are often questions. That are asked, but I wanna push back on that because a precipice means you’re going to fall off and tumble to the bottom and that will be the end of things. That’s not how nature works. It is all a continuum. we past a, a tipping point with the parts per million in the atmosphere? I don’t know. I’m not a climate modeler, but we’re darn close, right? We’re in trouble. We are in big, big trouble. But that doesn’t mean that we’re falling off the cliff. That means that things are gonna be different, that we’re gonna have to live differently than our plant and animal relatives. going to, we’re all going to suffer, but it doesn’t mean that we are smashing at the bottom of the cliff. And the reason I say this is because we don’t give up hope. We don’t give up pushing back just because we have crossed a threshold that says, oh. This is bad news. It is bad news, but we can make it less bad news if we continue to strive and, and, and push for, um, the, the climate adaptation strategies.
Um, so that’s why I wanna push back against it because that can be, um, really defeatist to say, you know, we’re over the edge. Um. Well, I think we are always approaching an edge. We’re always approaching a, a cliff and we need to step back from it and reach out a hand to the per to the one who’s dangling below us.
Um, and that, that we, we have, we still have work to do.
Tami Simon: So what would you say, like if you have a metaphor or description of this time that, oh, here’s how I see it, Tami. I mean, forget the precipice thing. Let’s leave that alone. Here’s how you see how. Humans have gotten to this point. What’s happening now? Right now in time? Yeah.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Yeah. Um. There’s so many ways to think about this, but of the ways that I’ve been, that I find helpful is, you know, I, I, I call it like the age of remembering. I think about Joanna Macy’s teachings of the great turning, um, uh, Joanna’s words are probably more, more familiar. So I would say we are in the time of the great. Turning where we understand that our actions have, in some cases, incrementally and unintentionally, and in other devastating cases, quite intentionally pushed us to this situation, that we. If we value plant and animal relatives, if we value this beautiful planet that was given to us, we have to do the work.
We have to do the work of healing. Um, and so that’s the great turning, isn’t it? The great turning of turning away from those actions, behaviors, and world. That poison the earth and turning toward regeneration, um, and, and, and healing. why I call it the great remembering because as an indigenous woman, am full of the stories and the knowledge of the way that for most of human histories. People interacted with the living world in a way that was grounded in gratitude and reciprocity. Um, this extractive worldview, which we are living with now is quite honestly, it, it’s what, 400 years worth? And you think, well, that’s a long time. It’s an odd blink of time in human history. We are in an era of, of a profound error and we are, I think, collectively remembering who we want to be in the world and the world that we wanna live in. And, um, so that’s.
Tami Simon: Awesome.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: the moment that I feel like we are in. We could call it the great turning, the age of, of remembering that we have to turn away from those things which have brought us to this point and, and do the work of healing.
Tami Simon: I’m gonna share a very brief little story with you, which is, I only read braiding Sweetgrass recently, and I had the book in my hand And. I read this little section about connecting to a spirit of place and what that is like.
And you were talking about someone who was a friend of yours that you were dating at the time, and you said, do you have a sense of a spirit of place? And this person said, well, I love being in my car when there’s internet and being able to. Be on, on my phone when I’m in my car and I thought I can relate to that.
I love being in my car and being with, and then you proceeded to talk about how, uh, this person in you didn’t, uh, stay intimately connected for long and at, at over the course of this person’s life, they actually. Were so, um, depressed that they, and you said it in just a very factual way, killed themselves in their car, their favorite place, their car.
And I thought, wow, I love this woman. I love the way she writes. I love the way she just said that right there in a few paragraphs about how far we are away from an age of remembering that our favorite place could be sitting. On the internet, you know, on the internet.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Mm-hmm.
Tami Simon: I’m sharing that with you ’cause it really stuck with me as sort of how where we’ve come to.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Right. And think that’s a, it’s a very potent story that, that you’re sharing because it opens this door to saying, well, what if your favorite place. Is legitimately your car as you’re, as you’re saying, because I’m comfortable, I’m safe, I have all these conveniences around me. Um, and shouldn’t that then fill you with vitality and satisfaction and fullness if this is your favorite place? Um, but that, I think creates the, the question of, of how do our places. Feed us and care for us. Um, and in, in that particular example, I think one would argue that, there was a deficiency of sense of belonging. Um, of, is that all there is? It’s, you know, the ease of my push buttons without going into that. person’s story. That’s not the point really. It’s that how we think about creating and being in places that, that, that care for us, um, care for us in an expanded sense of, of self. You know, your, your comments, you know, pushed me to think about the way that, much of the environment that we’ve. Designed as opposed to the, the environment that was designed by nature, um, caters to individual needs. In the case of a car, I can pre-program my seat, my whatever, right? This, this sort of. Deadly convenience because we have this sense of self, which is so unitary. It is me, just my body, my mind that is me.
That’s, that’s what self-interest looks like and so much of our designed environment is built for that person. But what if your sense of self is a distributed, permeable self that you know, I am not really me. Um. I’m actually looking at deer out my window right now. You know, um, we are, we’re sharing this same habitat, we’re sharing breath. Um, the water that I’m drinking comes from this place. It’s not me. Um, I am in relationship to the food that I eat, which is in relationship to the groundwater, which is in relationship to those deer. So I feel like. we can help to cultivate an expanded permeable sense of self, which really moves into the we, not the I, then we come to cherish places of self-interest for a much bigger self. Does that make sense?
Tami Simon: It does, and I, I wonder when it comes to connecting with a spirit of place, if. Your sense of your own selfhood is, oh, this is the, this is the space I occupy. It’s this, this ecosystem. Or is it bigger than that? Are you, are you living right now in a universal sense of being, or does it depend, depend where you are in the moment.
Like right now, you shared before we started recording, you’re in a cabin someplace, is your sense of place. You know, X number of miles from where you, you, and I’m understand that for you, it’s probably very.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: That’s a fascinating question, um, of what is the scale of sense of place, and I suppose that’s different for everybody. Um, but for me, I feel myself and describe myself very deeply as a citizen of Maple Nation. Um, my sense of place is this forest. Um, and because I know. Most everyone here, and those, everyone’s being the more than human, everyone’s, um, and they know me. Um, we are in reciprocal relationship with one another. I feel, you know, embedded in the history of this place, hopefully in the future of this place. So that’s what creates sense of place for me. It’s a biome, I guess it’s a kind of bio regionalism. Um, I know. Uh. There are folks I know who describe their sense of place as planetary or continental, or indeed urban.
You know, I am a, I am a Manhattanite, or I am from Chicago. Um, those are, those are, you know, the right scale for that person. Um.
Tami Simon: H how, how do you know that Maple Nation knows you? How do you experience its knowing of you?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Wow. is, you know, so deeply intuitive, I guess. I think I know it. I’m just experimenting here. Tami. I don’t know that this is true. Um, it goes back to the gifts. That we talked about at the outset, I feel like. place Maple Nation knows me because of what? The way that it cares for me. When we think about does a human know us well?
If, if they’ve really got your number about what you need, what, what you like, um, what’s going to make you feel safe and comfortable? Um, I get that from the forest that I live in, um, the food. The, the medicines, the teachings from the land, the smell of the air, um, it’s as if, my interior landscape and my exterior landscape are like this.
Um, that’s how I feel known in this landscape. And I wonder whether somebody who has their sense of place in a, in a, an urban block, do they have that same sense of this is a place that cares for me, um, and therefore that I can care for too. Fascinating question.
Tami Simon: You contributed an essay to a collection called The Mind of Plants, and the question that was being addressed is one of the questions being addressed is, what is intelligence and. How might we understand plant intelligence? And you talked about something called brain chauvinism, and I’d never heard that phrase before, but it’s something I’ve been really curious about because I can sense intelligence in all kinds of beings that don’t have brains, but I never know how to talk about it with people without sounding like.
I don’t know a fruitcake, but yet I, I feel the in intelligence of non brainin beings. So I, I wonder if you could help me understand how to talk about that intelligence.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: You are so right that we need a vocabulary for that. Um.
Tami Simon: I.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: that term, brain chauvinism is certainly not my own. There’s this wonderful community of, of folks who are thinking about, um, some people call it the neurobiology, the cognitive science associated with the more than living world, including of course now, um, revolutionary work being done in, in, in plants. And so. For the longest time, people have dismissed those feelings that they might have, that you’re describing that, oh, I, there’s something going on here. Um, but be, but brain chauvinism really is that, well, they’re not intelligent the way I’m intelligent, so therefore they’re not intelligent or they’re not intelligent the way animals are intelligent. So therefore they’re not intelligent. Um, so a lot of the beautiful work that’s being done in, in, in, in plant, um, cognition, I guess plant intelligence you would call it, is to think about the way that plants are so different from us and that they have this distributed intelligence. Um, you know, single. But on a plant is capable of making decisions about what it’s gonna do. Um, it’s not a brain. It’s lots and lots. So it’s a whole different way to think about how we sense the environment make, um, uh, dynamic decisions about how to. But you’re so right. We don’t have a vocabulary for it. although it’s being invented as we speak, so exciting. Um, a book that I really um, by Zoe Schlanger is called The Light Eater. And Zoe is a journalist, um, a science journalist has put together stories around the scientists who are doing this revolutionary work, um, and including the way that they have been dismissed by many colleagues. Well, this isn’t possible. We just have to. But when I say imagine, I don’t mean that this is imaginary. We have to get outside of our own brain chauvinism to say, what would intelligence look like So it’s, it’s, it’s so, so exciting.
Tami Simon: I, I like this phrase, distributed intelligence. I can. I can feel that and sense that, and think of the root systems in trees, that kind of thing. And in the article you talk about one way of thinking of intelligence is adaptively variable behavior. And I thought, well, that, that we can think of, uh. Plants, uh, adapt as as needed.
But, okay. Here’s my question. You ready, Robin? And it’s a little odd, but you know, I don’t get the chance to talk to someone like you very often, and it’s a question I’ve had for a long time. How do you talk about the intelligence? We’re gonna go beyond. Plants now and talk about rocks and minerals, because I also sense the intelligence.
I mean, I’m not trying to turn myself into anything. I just, I like rocks and minerals and I, they’re my friends and I relate with them, and I sense that they’re giving something to me and that if I touch or hold them, I’m giving something to them. So I sense that, but once again, I don’t know how to talk about an intelligent rock.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Yeah. Um, and I, I would love hear more how you’re experiencing that because I have, I don’t have a lot of that direct experience. Rocks. Um, and I know people who talk about that. And in, um, my own culture are rocks, particularly. Big Boulder rocks are understood as elders. They’re understood as storytellers because they have been here for so long.
They have seen it all. Um, but they experience those changes and transformations in ways that, um, opaque to me. so I, I wish I could answer your question, but I can’t because it’s
Tami Simon: e even just using that phrase of elders, that’s powerful. That’s a pow, that changes the entire, uh, view,
Robin Wall Kimmerer: mm-hmm.
Tami Simon: know, not something I take a hammer to and destroy an elder. And I, I read in your writing. Once again, from the perspective of indigenous wisdom talking about human beings as the younger. Brother in creation versus our human exceptionalism where, you know, we’re the apex creature or something like that.
And you know, but it’s interesting thinking of us in this different part of the map, you know, younger to our elders of like the rocks. And I wanted to talk about this because I think I hear a lot from people, oh, humans are the problem. If only we could get rid of humans. The earth would flourish. And it seems to me in your work, you have a very different response and I, I wanna bring that forward, that it’s not about erasing humans, it’s about shifting how we are and creating a reciprocal way of being a positive contributor, which in many ways we’re not right now, but it’s not about getting rid of us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Right. It’s, it’s about we’re back to that age of remembering, um, you know, of how, uh. I, I, I don’t think that humans inherently are the problem. Humans who have adopted a worldview of human exceptionalism are the problem. People who think the world is their property that belongs to them, that all the rest of the world is lesser than them, um, that’s a problem. So to me, it’s the worldview. That is, is at the root of this very negative, um, way of thinking about human people, but a worldview is malleable, a worldview changes. For most of human history, people have lived in a balanced, reciprocal relationship. With the living world, that has magnified human wellbeing and the wellbeing of the land. again, you know, we have to recognize that we are, we are in this time of, of, of error and we can change our ways. And to me that is very. Uh, hopeful. Um, it, we, we can, we can heal from this, but we have to change ourselves. And so much of environmental discourses, well, we have to change policy. We have to change light bulbs with a. Okay. All of those things are true. We have to change ourselves. We have to change the stories that we are adopting as our purpose here on the planet. Um, and if we stick with the story that it all belongs to us, that we’re living in a big old warehouse of commodities. That’s self-destructive. But if we say, oh no, we are living in a garden and a garden needs gardeners, um, to take care of it, um, to harvest all the gifts, not all the gifts ’cause all the gifts are not for us. Um, but that we also give back. Um, and that that’s consistent with the way ecosystems work, um, and indigenous. Ways of being have shown us that, um, a way that you can, uh, live in what, in we say mano and the living imbalance in a, in a good, imbalanced way.
Tami Simon: The experiment that you describe in breeding sweet grass with Lori and the sweet experiment of the different. Plots of sweetgrass growing. That story blew my mind, and I wonder if you can share it here.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: It’s so, um, coherent with, with the philosophy of your question, right? Um, yeah. Here’s story and again, thinking of how it is grounded in indigenous practice and philosophy. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try to be. you a quick version of that for your listeners. But this, the, the story is that one of my graduate students and I were planning to do research around the threats to Sweetgrass because Sweetgrass basket makers were telling us that it was, um, uh, seemed to be dwindling.
And so we were doing a lot of research to try to understand the problem, and we needed to evaluate what was the relationship between Sweetgrass harvesters and. Sweetgrass because some people say, well, you know, if people are picking it, that’s the problem in that mindset that you just articulated, oh, people are bad.
We’re always gonna mess things up. So, um, Lori and I had a hard time getting her research even approved because our fellow conservation biologist said, why would you do this experiment? Um, anybody knows that the harvested plants are gonna decline. Um. W why? Why are you going to do this for graduate research? We did it anyway. were embedded in this Western worldview that humans are bad for nature that we’re just gonna take and are taking is bad. So we did the experiment. In Sweetgrass Meadows, we imposed different levels harvest mimicking, traditional harvesting prac practices, which are respectful and and restrained, and, um. So we had some plots that were harvested by various ways, and we had one plot that was our control. Of course, the plots where there was no harvesting at all, and my conservation biology colleagues would have predicted as they did predict, well, of course that plot that no one harvests that’s gonna thrive. Well, guess what the plants told us? Um, that plot that nobody picked, away. And was out competed by other plants. Um, the plant, the patches that were harvested using these respectful traditional techniques, doubled in size. The plants were stimulated by harvest, by the right kind of harvest. They, they would’ve declined by, you know, uh, aggressive harvest, but the people could meet their needs. And the plants responded by saying, oh, we’ve been harvested. We need to grow back. Um, it’s a phenomenon known as compensatory growth. A lot of plants do it. Um, a lot of plants don’t, too. And those you don’t harvest in, in that way. It, it, it all depends on. nature of the relationship. But it was, it was an empirical, experimental way of demonstrating that in this case, people were good for sweet grass harvesting, stimulated sweet grass.
It didn’t cause it to decline. And this is what native people sort of have folded into this, this of ethics of the honorable harvest and the teachings that were shared with me of if we, um. Accept the gifts of the plants and use them respectfully. They will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore them, they will go away, and that is exactly what our experiment showed, that human beings were not a plague on sweet grass.
Human beings were a partner to sweet.
Tami Simon: This notion of reciprocity, of giving and receiving. I actually think it’s very intuitively obvious to people that we wanna be in a balance of giving and receiving. At least I feel that. I mean that to me’s, that’s just like the nature of my heart. You know? If somebody gives something to me, I wanna give something back to them, and I know.
To people if they wanna give something back to me. It’s just, you know, the way it goes. It’s that that’s the way it’s, and yet I think a lot of us, and I’ll speak for myself, I feel I’ve been given so much in so many ways, and when I was reading your writing about the unpaid debt that we have. To plants and animals.
I thought, I have an unpaid debt. I gotta work on that. And then I thought, what about the unpaid debt that I have to the indigenous people of North America? And then I thought, wow. And I, I felt really kind of heavy and down and I thought, I have to ask Robin. About that and her view of how we balance giving and receiving with indigenous people today as a contemporary person, how?
How I express my love and gratitude in a way that will pay this debt.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Hmm. Yeah. How are we in reciprocity with our history? a history of land taking, right, with a history of erasure, with a history of intentional, um, assimilation and, and, and degradation of a culture. And I say those things because we need to name the wound order to heal it. Right? Um, and so how are we in reciprocity?
Let’s take one little piece of that. How are we in reciprocity with illegal land taking? I, how can you ever heal that to words back? That’s how you do it. Um. We say this was, this was unjust. When I look at public lands, the, all the so-called public lands are indigenous homelands. their federal lands, their state lands, their municipal lands, um, that never belonged to those entities. In the first place, need to be returned. Um, and in some cases there are ways that people are thinking about land back. Um, in some cases absolutely direct land return. There are some brilliant, brilliant. of work where, where communities have gotten together motivated by the very question you’re asking Tami and say, how can we give land back? Um, how can we repatriate land? And they’re doing it, um, all over the country in other places.
Um, land back or repatriation looks like, um, shared access. Um, when you think about. Privately conserved lands, land trusts, let’s say, or nature reserves, broadly speaking. Um, those are, again, indigenous homelands, which are being protected for the citizenry. But native people, for the most part, cannot go there and pick basket materials or, or, or harvest medicines ’cause these are protected lands. A way of healing that wound is to create access native peoples to their own original homelands, which are now owned by somebody else who probably doesn’t even know or care. They have important traditional medicines on their land or foods. Um, but we can design mechanisms by which we have access, um, for, for people.
Um, so those, those are, are, are just two small examples, but there’s many more. You know, we, we repay the, the debt associated with erasure of indigenous history by demanding that it be taught in our schools. Um, we pay the debt for, um, cultural degradation, um, intentionally taken place by, um, supporting language revitalization, supporting tribal sovereignty. Um, so there are, we have to name those wounds and then say, okay, how do I, out of the what I have to give, how do I heal that wound?
Tami Simon: And just to also track back in terms of repaying the debt that we feel to the. The, uh, gifting earth as you called it to that department.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Mm-hmm.
Tami Simon: if you were to give anybody some suggestions for when they’re in nature, they’re on a walk, they’re in a park, they’re with a tree at the corner of their block, and they want to offer some gesture of reciprocity from.
They’re hard or in words or what, what, what might you suggest? Oh, this is, this would be meaningful. Tami,
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Mm. That’s a hard question. To answer because, uh, I’m sorry. As a scientist, my answer is always, it depends.
Tami Simon: I, that’s, I, I think that’s a smart answer often to a lot of these questions.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Yeah. It depends. But I mean, one of the first things that you can do is are there, there trash around that tree? Pick it up, you know, help, help. In that very simple way, people often think, well, I ought to leave something.
And certainly you can leave your gratitude and your, and your, and and your good wishes. Um, but you can also think about how can I make this place better? Um, and one of the ways that, that you can do that in a very direct, immediate. I’m gonna pick up this can right out, out of the park or, or, or whatever. Um, but I’m also going to be sure that make a donation to my local land trust. I’m going to be sure that the gifts of having trees in your neighborhood are. Available to all of us. I’m gonna join the tree equity movement. Um, to be sure that municipal policies in my city are, are, are toward having walkable nature within 10 minutes of every person. The city. You look at the disparities in the canopy tree canopy, for example, um, between affluent and, and, and struggling neighborhoods. know what that looks like. Where are the tree lined streets? Where are the benefits of nature? Um, we have to plant. We have to plant and we have to insist on, on, on, on that equity. question that you’re, you’re asking kind of moves us toward this new movement that we’re, trying to create out of a, uh, as a counter narrative to the words that drill into my soul, which is drill, baby drill. You know, notion, that mantra that says, we don’t care about the climate, we’re gonna keep pumping carbon dioxide in anyway. Um, we don’t care about the sacredness of Mother Earth. Drill into her anyway. And so the notion is, well, we have to resist that politically, right? We have to resist that economically. But we can also resist it with a counter narrative that says, no, I’m not a drill baby, drill person. I’m a plant baby, plant person. Meaning that here we are in this climate crisis, who knows what to do about. dioxide in the atmosphere. First of all, we don’t add anymore, right? And plants, you know, with every breath that they take, are turning carbon dioxide outta the atmosphere, into soil, into leaves, into birds, into berries. So plant, baby plant is to say. Let’s do that collectively. Let’s do that. This is something that you and I can do. I, I am not going to be able to, you know, stop drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. I can write all the letters I want. I can’t do that, I can plant as many trees as I can encourage my neighbors to do that. I can create pollinator gardens. I can ally myself plants who will do the work of these nature-based climate solutions. From the tiniest micro action in your own yard, um, to parks, to public lands, to landscape scale work. um, that is something that it feels like in this moment of the great turning we are called to do, not only. To me it is, I guess, to come full circle in our di in our discussion today. It is restoration, it’s healing the land, it’s also restoration, um, to say no, we are going to embrace the story that we, human people are givers We can plant, uh, we are not just takers. And you, you don’t just say that. You do it and you do it with your neighbors, and that’s what Plant, baby Plant is, is meant to do, is to be a, a call to that action and support for both healing the earth and healing our relationship to earth.
Tami Simon: I was looking at some of the examples of actions on the plant, baby plant website of people who are writing in saying, here’s what I’ve done. I’ve created this community garden and I’ve commute, created this rooftop garden, and. I think a part of me had this reaction like, these are really small things. Do they really make a difference?
Question mark, like part of me is with you and you know, small is all and do something and be a giver. But then I also have this voice in my head that says, you know, wow, drop in the bucket and it’s a big bucket. And really that’s what I got.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Yeah. Um, I have the same reaction. The same reaction. You know, is this enough? Is this enough given the scale, um, of what we are facing? No way. No way, nor do we claim that it is, um, you know, but it is, it is a drop in the bucket, but we know the power of those collective drops as, as well. Um, one of the other things that I feel confident in is if you encourage people to take an action. No matter how small that prepares them to take a bigger action, it cultivates a sense of agency and participation in something bigger than yourself. And so maybe you start with converting your carbon emitting camelon to a native plant garden, which creates biodiversity habitat for insects and songbirds and sequesters carbon. Okay, it’s just your front yard. But what, what about your neighbor and their neighbor and their neighbor? Collectively, matters Collectively, we start to build a different story and a different relationship. We story at the same time as we restore, but no, no, no claims that this is gonna solve the problem, the the scale of, of, of, of. Carbon in the atmosphere and the decarbonization that needs to happen far exceeds our our small efforts. is why we have a dual mantra at At Plant, baby Plant, which is Raise a garden. raise a ruckus, um, of holding our so-called leaders, um, accountable. Um, um, so yeah, it is, it is meant to, to support grassroots work, but also meant to enlist people for system change.
Tami Simon: This is maybe an odd question, but I am curious about it, which is your own emotional landscape, if you will, which I know changes and it depends and all of that. But how much time do you spend in outrage and despair versus. Enjoying and celebrating the beauty of the world we’re in. When you’re looking at deer out your window, having this conversation with a, a nice person like me, uh, how do you, how, how do you, how does that bal, what does that balance look like in the inner world of Robin Wall Kimmerer?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Well, given the times that we are living in, how can you not be outraged? Right. Um. Not only outraged, but in deep grief for what we have done and what we continue, we, um, continue to, um, to practice. Um, I’m often deeply sad. I’m often deeply sad and enraged. Um, I don’t think you would be sane if you weren’t enraged in this moment.
Um, but. I also know deeply that we have to turn those. Emotions to the work. Um, we have to feel them. I think, you know, we, in this country especially, we, um, we tried to shy away from those negative emotions that we feel, especially grief and sadness and what has been called. So nostalgia, what a beautiful word.
By Glen Albrecht, he gave us that word of, of related to the grief that we feel around the destruction of our places. Um, but to me. All of those negative, they’re not negative emotions. They are what they are. Those emotions, are a pathway. we feel them because we love the land so much for me, I am aware. I was gonna say every day, probably every day, um, of that balance of grief and love, um, and despair is not me an option. Um, I have to do the work and the be, and it just comes from, from love. Um, when, you. Love someone or some place when they’re hurt, when they’re sick, as our lands are right now, you don’t turn away from them, you turn toward them, right? And care for them all the harder, love them, all the harder. So that’s my landscape.
Tami Simon: That’s very helpful. Thank you for sharing that. And I wanna ask you this other question too, because I’ve. Been trying on in our conversation, this notion of the age of remembering. And I’m like, huh, that’s so interesting. And I can, you know, using my imagination, this poetic imagination function, kind of put myself into a different place and a different time, imagining a different era.
And then I think, well wait a second, you’re gonna go somewhere and you’re gonna get on a plane, Tami, and you’re gonna be in this. 21st century world, but remembering this different ethos, but encountering all of the contradictions of your life every day. How do you put that together?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Well, it’s absolutely true. Um, I think we all that and I think the way that I navigate that is to to be. First of all, to constrain my own consumption as best I can, um, to try to live those, those, those principles. But to also say that we, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good to use that, that old adage, um, that we can’t. Practically do everything all of the time, but we can do our best and push ourselves beyond our best to push ourselves into a new relationship. Um, um, again, you know, it’s, it’s sort of like that notion of we’re gonna fall off the climate. Cliff game over. Um, well, I, I’m burning fossil fuels. I mean, yes, I have, I have a heat pump, I have solar panels on my head.
I on my head and on my roof, on my head. That’d be great. Um, I, you know, recycle, I compost, you know, la la I support my local economies. I’m doing the best that I can. And then I get on a plane it undoes. A lot of, you know, my carbon balance. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s But I, but I’m very mindful in trying to balance that out, um, and, and to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Tami Simon: In this. Honoring of reciprocity here as we end our conversation. First of, I wanna acknowledge and thank you for giving Sounds true and insights at the edge of your time today. And I wanna give something back to you. I’d love to know here are listeners who are listening and their feeling in their hearts, the desire to make an offering that you’d be, you know, you would think to yourself.
Wow. I’m so glad I went on that show because I got to ask X, Y, Z from all of these people who listened and a whole lot of them followed through on it. What would it be?
Robin Wall Kimmerer: You know, to me, one of the most important things that every single person can do is, is to honor the fact that each one of us, I truly believe, was given a gift. And the responsibility to use that gift. My gift is different than yours is different than every one of your listeners, the call that I would. Issue is to say, what is your gift? And exercise the responsibility to give that gift more than human world. We’re pretty good at giving gifts to each other in our human communities, to ask yourself, what does the earth ask of me? Today. Um, it asks you to give your gift, and it might be that you’re an artist and so you can do transformative work that calls people to, to action. You know, maybe you’re a, a wonderful chef and a cook. How do you the gifts of the land in the way that you. Serve your community in, in that way. So to me, there’s, there’s never a one size fits all except to say, what’s your gift? And give it. Don’t keep it to yourself. We are in a time, boy are we in a time when we have to remember that old mantra of our silence will not save us. of our gifts is our voices. Our stories are, are standing up for one another um, that’s a gift and we are called to give it.
Tami Simon: Robin Wall Kimmerer, thank you so much. Thank you so much for, uh, bringing your gifts forward relentlessly. As you do, you inspire me. Thank you so much.
Robin Wall Kimmerer: Mm-hmm. you, Tami. What a good conversation.
