This incredible book was recommended to me by my long-time friend from Laramie, Glen Whipple. Then I saw that Stacy Jacobs-Cookie, a Rapid City friend was reading it as well. Each essay could stand alone as a poetic tribute to some aspect of Creation, the Earth and the Land. Many include Native traditions and beliefs about the sacredness of the Land as well. Taken as a whole, though, the book is a powerful call to action. The call is so strong, in fact, that I couldn't read it straight through. To learn how we are failing as stewards of the Earth was more than I could take, night after night. I had to periodically take breaks of a week or more to return to it. Yet it is not depressing, per se, and there are sparkling moments of hope. The author is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and teaches Botany at the university level. She's a scientist who teaches about living things and continues to be an active learner from the plants themselves.
This fits so well with other reading I've been doing lately. The Overstory opened the possibility of trees as sentient beings. And that each tree has a contribution to make. For example, (Page 455 - )"When you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down."
This author extends that idea to all plant and animal life. She definitely reflects and promotes the Native perspective of humans being a part of the circle of life, on an equal footing (sometimes below) with plants and animals.
It was wonderful to see restoration projects going on all over Minnesota when we were there in August. Lakes, shorelines, trails, and many open areas had signs that indicated and explained why weeds were growing there, for example. There was visible community support for these projects; the signs often listed and explained the partnerships that were responsible for the work. The partners were various combinations of state government and local government entities and local community groups and nonprofit organizations. It was heartening to see the broad spectrum of support for these projects! Every time I paused to read a sign explaining such a project, I thought about this book.
The ideas in this book also made me reflect on the LDS teaching of man having dominion over the plants and animals. Is that wrong? Or have we just not been the stewards we need to be? I think it would be a hard sell to get most Americans behind the ideas in this book. But even considering these ideas and their possible benefit would result in more thoughtful consumption!
Here are some of my highlighted segments:
Page 127 - Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It's a place where if you can't say, "I love you" out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans.
Page 222 - (when she hears her students singing Amazing Grace on one of their field trips)
In their caress of that old hymn, I came to know that it wasn't naming the source of wonder that mattered, it was wonder itself.
...
As an enthusiastic young PhD, colonized by the arrogance of science, I had been fooling myself that I was the only teacher. The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart. My job was just to lead them into presence and ready them to hear. On that smoky afternoon, the mountains taught the students and the students taught the teacher.
Page 183 - Guidelines for the Honorable Harvest
- Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
- Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
- Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
- Never take the first. Never take the last.
- Take only what you need.
- Take only that which is given.
- Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
- Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
- Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
- Share. Give thanks for what you have been given.
- Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
- Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.
Page 219 - This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn't this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?
Page 300 - Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop.
Page 304 - 305 - The Windigo is the legendary monster of our Anishinaabe people.... an increase in Windigo hunger causes an increase in Windigo eating, and that increased eating promotes only more rampant hunger in an eventual frenzy of uncontrolled consumption. In the natural world as well as the built environment, positive feedback leads inexorably to change--sometimes to growth, sometimes to destruction. When growth is unbalanced, however, you can't always tell the difference.
Page 308 - I remember walking a street in Manhattan where the warm light of a lavish home spilled out over the sidewalk on a man picking through the garbage for his dinner. Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.
The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success.
Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf.
Page 332- If you get down on your knees, you'll see anthills, no bigger than a quarter. The granulated soil the ants have mounded around the hole as white as snow. Grain by grain, in their tiny mandibles, they are carrying up waste from below and carrying seeds and bits of leaves down into the soil. Shuttling back and forth. The grasses feed the ants with seeds and the ants feed the grasses with soil. They hand off life to one another. They understand their interconnections; they understand that the life of one is dependent on the life of all. Leaf by leaf, root by root, the trees, the berries, the grasses are joining forces, and so there are birds and deer and bugs that have come to join them. And so the world is made.
Page 333 - More fruit drew more birds, who dropped more seeds, who fed the ants, and so it goes. That same pattern of reciprocity is written all over the landscape. That's one of the things I honor about this place. Here you can see beginnings, the small incremental processes by which an ecological community is built.
The beds are greening over. The land knows what to do when we do not. I hope that the waste beds do not disappear entirely, though--we need them to remind us what we are capable of. We have an opportunity to learn from them, to understand ourselves as students of nature, not the masters. The very best scientists are humble enough to learn.... Human damage has created novel ecosystems, and the plants are slowly adapting and showing us the way toward healing the wounds. This is a testament to the ingenuity and wisdom of plants more than to any action of people. I hope we'll have the wisdom to let them continue their work. Restoration is an opportunity for a partnership, for us to help. Our part of the work is not complete.
Page 334- Mother Nature and Father Time could use someone to push a wheelbarrow, and a few intrepid beings have volunteered.
Page 336 - She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.
Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us. As writer Freeman House cautions, "We will continue to need the insights and methodologies of science, but if we allow the practice of restoration to become the exclusive domain of science, we will ahve lost its greatest promise, which is nothing less than a redefinition of human culture.
We're not in control. What we are in control of is our relationship to the earth. Nature herself is a moving target, especially in an era of rapid climate change. Species composition may change, but relationship endures. It is the most authentic facet of restoration. Here is where our most challenging and most rewarding work lies, in restoring a relationship of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. And love.
Page 338 - Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.
Page 339 - Naturalist E.O. Wilson writes, "There can be no purpose more inspiring than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us." The stories are piling up all around in scraps of land being restored: trout streams reclaimed from siltation, brownfields turned into community gardens, prairies reclaimed from soybeans, wolves howling in their old territories, schoolkids helping salamanders across the road. If your heart isn't raised by the sight of whooping cranes restored to their ancient flyway, you must not have a pulse. It's true that these victories are as small and fragile as origami cranes, but their power moves as inspiration. Your hands itch to pull out invasive species and replant the native flowers. Your finger trembles with a wish to detonate the explosion of an obsolete dam that would restore a salmon run. These are the antidotes to the poison of despair.
Page 340 - As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
Page 344 - The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It's the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world. Isn't that a story worth telling? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity.
The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we should all know?
Who is it that holds them? In long-ago times, it was the elders who carried them. In the twenty-first century, it is often scientists who first hear them. The stories of buffalo and salamanders belong to the land, but scientists are one of their translators and carry a large responsibility for conveying their stories to the world.
And yet scientists mostly convey these stories in a language that excludes readers. Conventions for efficiency and precision make reading scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world, and if the truth be known, for us as well This has serious consequences for real democracy, especially the democracy of all species. For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else. ..... Does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does it bend light in a such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom.
Page 346 - In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers, we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water. Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us. Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify the virtue of generosity, always offering food. What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers, rather than their subjects? What if they told stories with that lens?
Page 358 - Amphibians offer few of the warm fuzzy feelings that fuel our protection of charismatic mammals that look back at us with Bambi's grateful eyes. They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.
Page 359 - Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of creation.
Page 381 - Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.
In a culture of gratitude, everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again. This time you give and next time you receive. Both the honor of giving and the humility of receiving are necessary halves of the equation.
Page 383 - The earth gives away for free the power of wind and sun and water, but instead we break open the earth to take fossil fuels. Had we taken only that which is given to us, had we reciprocated the gift, we would not have to fear our own atmosphere today.
Page 384 - The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibility for all we have been given, fir all that we have taken. It's our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools. The fierce defense of all that has been given. Gifts of mind, hands, hearts, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world.
In return for the privilege of breath.
