Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books that took my breath away. I have Gathering Moss on my to-read list now as well. Kimmerer writes with so much wisdom and respect about our relationship with other living things. Here are some lines from Braiding Sweetgrass that have stuck with me:
Just about everything we use is the result of another’s life, but that simple reality is rarely acknowledged in our society.
The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit—and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it.
I didn’t know that moss was so adaptable. The photos in this article are also stunning, especially the aerial view of Goblin’s gold.
It is moss, she tells me, that keeps up her spirits when it comes to global heating. “It’s going to be 100 degrees upstate today,” she says. “That’s wrong, though these extremes are no longer out of the ordinary. We expect them. Of course I worry that people are not going to do what needs to be done; that we’re already too late. But I have faith in photosynthesis. The plants know what to do. They know how to sequester carbon. They know how to cool the air. They know how to build capacity for ecosystem services and biodiversity. Will the world be different? It will. Will there be tremendous losses? There will. Heartbreaking losses. But the evolutionary creativity of the plant world will renew itself. Plants will figure out how to come back to a homeostatic relationship with the planet.”
Even as she notices the alarming fact that bloom times are arriving ever earlier, she is also increasingly aware of the natural movement of plants: “We’ve fragmented the planet in such a way that their natural migration routes are broken up. So it’s our responsibility now to assist that migration, to essentially help forests to ‘walk’. We have to help them get to where they need to go.” Will we be here to witness a new world, the one that she believes will be regenerated for us by the plants? She hesitates. “I have less faith in that.”
There is so much wisdom here. It is saddening that, as Kimmerer also implied, humanity may not be around long enough see the new world regenerated by plants.
Braiding Sweetgrass is one of those books that took my breath away. I have Gathering Moss on my to-read list now as well. Kimmerer writes with so much wisdom and respect about our relationship with other living things. Here are some lines from Braiding Sweetgrass that have stuck with me:
I didn’t know that moss was so adaptable. The photos in this article are also stunning, especially the aerial view of Goblin’s gold.
There is so much wisdom here. It is saddening that, as Kimmerer also implied, humanity may not be around long enough see the new world regenerated by plants.