Braiding Sweetgrass

Summary

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, braids two kinds of knowledge: science’s questions and an Indigenous understanding of plants and animals as teachers. Through essays on sweetgrass, strawberries, salamanders and more, she argues that a wider ecological consciousness starts with honouring our reciprocal relationship with the living world, and answering the earth’s generosity in kind.

Rationale

Few books make the case for interbeing as warmly. Her reciprocity, gifts answered with gifts, is the opposite of the extraction that a disposition of separation makes feel normal.