CANR
WORK TITLE: The Serviceberry
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Syracuse
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 356
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 13, 1953, in NY.
EDUCATION:State University of New York–ESF, B.S., 1975; University of Wisconsin, M.S., 1979, Ph.D., 1983.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic. Bausch & Lomb, microbiologist, 1975-77; Transylvania University, Lexington, KY, instructor; Centre College, Danville, KY, lecturer in biology, botany, and ecology; State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, on staff, beginning 1933, became Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and founding director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Has served as director of Native Earth Environmental Youth Camp and United States Department of Agriculture Multicultural Scholars Program, coprincipal investigator for forest stewardship programs Helping Forests Walk and Learning from the Land; MacArthur Fellow, 2022; Brandeis University, Richman Distinguished Fellow in Public Life, 2024. Has been writer in residence at Andrews Experimental Forest, Blue Mountain Center, Sitka Center, and other institutions; has addressed the United Nations; appeared on National Public Radio.
MEMBER:Ecological Society of America (cofounder and past president of Traditional Ecological Knowledge section).
AWARDS:John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing, 2005, for Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses; John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, 2014, for “The Council of Pecans,” published in Orion; National Humanities Medal, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2023.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration, The Colors of Nature, Culture, Identity and the Natural World, and Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.
Monique Gray Smith adapted Braiding Sweetgrass as Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants with illustrations by Nicole Neidhardt and published it with Zest Books in 2022.
SIDELIGHTS
Robin Wall Kimmerer is an academic with a research focus on environmental biology. She writes frequently about plant life, interweaving her knowledge of this topic with her perspectives as a mother and a Native American; she is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She has been involved with many projects for environmental preservation and restoration, and her writings often emphasize the connections between humanity and the natural world.
Gathering Moss
In the related essays that make up Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Kimmerer surveys the many types of mosses, the conditions in which they thrive, the uses humans have found for them, and her experience observing them. Mosses, she explains, are very simple; they do not have flowers, seeds, roots, and most of the other features associated with plants. Most mosses have no common names, only their scientific ones, and the majority of people know little about them. They grow in conditions that are hostile to other plants, including grasses, and can live even when they lose up to ninety-eight percent of their moisture, and they will flourish again when the moisture is replaced. Different types of mosses can exist in the same environment. Native Americans, Kimmerer notes, utilized mosses in numerous ways, for instance, as a material for diapers and sanitary napkins. Moss can also be an attractive feature of gardens.
Kimmerer shares her knowledge of these prosaic plants in language some critics thought poetic. “Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking,” she writes. “A cursory glance will not do it. Straining to hear a faraway voice or catch a nuance in the quiet subtext of a conversation requires attentiveness, a filtering of all the noise, to catch the music. Mosses are not elevator music; they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet. You can look at mosses the way you can listen deeply to water running over rocks. The soothing sound of a stream has many voices, the soothing green of mosses likewise.” She stresses that mosses are connected with other species and encourages readers to take care of the environment. “Our ancient teachers tell us that the role of human beings is respect and stewardship,” she writes. “Our responsibility is to care for the plants and all the land in a way that honors life. We are taught that using a plant shows respect for its nature, and we use it in a way that allows it to continue bringing its gifts. … We can live in such a way that our thoughts of respect and gratitude are also made visible to the world.”
Some reviewers found Gathering Moss an unexpectedly eloquent treatise on a humble plant. “The author has a beautiful way with words,” remarked a contributor to the Web log Rainy Leaf. In the online Rose City Reader, Gilion Dumas noted: “Kimmerer’s essays turned out to be as inspirational as they are informative.” Marit MacArthur, writing in Library Journal, commented that Kimmerer “deftly interweaves her different viewpoints but avoids sentimentality,” adding that Gathering Moss is a “gem of a book.” Gathering Moss won Kimmerer the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is another essay collection in which Kimmerer discusses the relationship between humans and plant life. She offers Native American folklore, including a creation story, and history, such as the Nechesne people’s stewardship of wild salmon. She delves into the pollution of New York’s Lake Onandaga and efforts to clean it up, and she discusses uses for plants such as ash trees and cattails. On the whole, the book is informed by both her heritage and her scientific studies.
Kimmerer received substantial critical praise with this book as well. “Braiding Sweetgrass has the feel of a bible, and the essays that make up the chapters are like sweet psalms that gently admonish and instruct with practical advice to help us save our environment,” observed Sue Ellis in the online Blue Lyra Review. “That a good many of us haven’t made the connection between the earth’s health and our own is at the heart of the problem Robin Wall Kimmerer addresses.” Kimmerer, Ellis continued, is “uniquely qualified for the job.” Elizabeth Wilkinson, reviewing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, remarked that Kimmerer “provides readers the ability to see a very common world in uncommon ways, or, rather, in ways that have been commonly held but have recently been largely discarded. She puts forth the notion that we ought to be interacting in such a way that the land should be thankful for the people.” In Library Journal, Sue O’Brien called the book’s contents a “beautifully written” mix of “memoir, history, and science,” while a Publishers Weekly contributor described Kimmerer as “a mesmerizing storyteller” who delivers her message “with deep compassion and graceful prose.” Ellis expressed hope that the book “will become required reading in schools, serving as a guide for environmental awareness and the conservation of natural resources.”
The Serviceberry
(open new)In The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Kimmerer focuses on the concept of “enoughness” in the abundance of what the natural world provides. She encourages readers to acknowledge that realizing one has enough can be radical in our society that pushes greater consumption. Kimmerer combines science with philosophy and inherited wisdom from her Potawatomi heritage to better consider societal relationship(s) with the environment. She emphasizes collective well-being, care, and reciprocity as the basis for organizing the economy and social structures, as well as a heightened sense of the world around us.
Writing in BookPage, Monica Teresa Ortiz declared that “The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.” Reviewing the book in Spectator, Caspar Henderson reasoned that “The Serviceberry does not pretend to have all the answers to the questions it poses. Kimmerer does not suggest the market economy can or should be replaced any time soon, though she would surely welcome constraints on actors who behave like the Windigo monster in Potawatomi culture by taking too much and sharing too little. What the book does do is light a candle rather than curse the darkness.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “a welcome meditation on living in harmony with the earth and fostering deeper connections with one another.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Oregon State University Press (Corvallis, OR), 2003.
PERIODICALS
BookPage, December 1, 2024, Monica Teresa Ortiz, review of The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, p. 26.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2024, review of The Serviceberry.
Library Journal, May 15, 2003, Marit MacArthur, review of Gathering Moss, p. 120; August 1, 2013, Sue O’Brien, review of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, p. 115.
New York Times Book Review, December 8, 2024, “Robin Wall Kimmerer,” p. 8; January 26, 2025, Alexandra Alter, “Profile / Robin Wall Kimmerer,” p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, August 19, 2013, review of Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 59.
Spectator, November 30, 2024, Caspar Henderson, review of The Serviceberry, p. 37.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), November 2, 2013, Elizabeth Wilkinson, review of Braiding Sweetgrass.
Week, November 29, 2024, review of The Serviceberry, p. 22.
ONLINE
Blue Lyra Review, http://bluelyrareview.com/ (December 16, 2013), Sue Ellis, review of Braiding Sweetgrass.
Brandeis University website, https://www.brandeis.edu/ (December 12, 2023), Jarret Bencks, “Robin Wall Kimmerer Selected as 2024 Richman Fellow.”
Rainy Leaf, http://rainyleaf.com/ (February 1, 2013), review of Gathering Moss.
Robin Wall Kimmerer website, https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com (February 15, 2025).
Rose City Reader, http://www.rosecityreader.com/ (November 13, 2013), Gilion Dumas, review of Gathering Moss.
State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry Web site, http://www.esf.edu/ (March 2, 2014), brief biography.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
…is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. In 2022, Braiding Sweetgrass was adapted for young adults by Monique Gray Smith. This new edition reinforces how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us.
Robin tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. In 2022 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
Robin Wall Kimmerer selected as 2024 Richman Fellow
Robin Wall Kimmerer stands in the woods
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Photo Credit: Matt Roth, courtesy of Authors Unbound
By Jarret Bencks
December 12, 2023
Celebrated ecologist, educator and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose work unifies science with traditional knowledge in pursuit of a deeper understanding of the natural world, has been selected as the 2024 Richman Distinguished Fellow in Public Life by Brandeis University.
“Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work illuminates the intersections of ecology and indigenous wisdom, inspiring us to reimagine our relationship with the natural world,” said Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz. “I look forward to welcoming her to campus as the Richman Fellow this spring.”
Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is the author of the critically acclaimed “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants,” and “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses,” which was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing in 2005.
In 2015, Kimmerer addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” In 2022, she was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow.
Kimmerer was nominated for the Richman Fellowship by Associate Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies Colleen Hitchcock. In her nomination, Hitchcock said that Kimmerer's selection would be a fitting following act to Brandeis’ Year of Climate Action. Her nomination received broad faculty support across disciplines in the sciences and humanities.
“As we continue to face a world of dramatic biodiversity loss punctuated by the climate catastrophe, the message that Dr. Kimmerer delivers to us - the wisdom of reciprocity and restoration of the Earth, can't help but inspire action and reflection,” Hitchcock said.
The Richman Fellowship recognizes individuals active in public life whose contributions have had a significant impact on improving American society, strengthening democratic institutions, advancing social justice or increasing opportunities for all citizens. The annual award includes a $25,000 prize. Kimmerer will visit campus for a residency that will include an award ceremony and public presentation, and a series of events that will engage the university community, including visits to classes and special small group sessions with students.
The fellowship was created by Dr. Carol Richman Saivetz ’69, along with her children, Michael Saivetz ’97 and Aliza Saivetz Glasser ’01, in honor of her parents, Fred and Rita Richman. Recent winners include newspaper editor Martin Baron; climate scientist Peter C. Frumhoff; disability rights activist Rebecca Cokley; playwright, actor, and educator Anna Deavere Smith; and human rights attorney Vanita Gupta.
Kimmerer will be in residence at Brandeis on February 28-29 2024. An award ceremony followed by a keynote lecture will be held Wednesday, February 28 at 4:30 p.m.
The Richman Fellowship is hosted by The Vic ’63 and Bobbi Samuels ’63 Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT) on behalf of the Office of the President and Office of the Provost.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Appearance hide
Text
Small
Standard
Large
Width
Standard
Wide
Color (beta)
Automatic
Light
Dark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer in 2023
Born September 13, 1953 (age 71)
Nationality Citizen Potawatomi Nation[1] American
Alma mater SUNY-ESF (BS)
University of Wisconsin–Madison (MS, PhD)
Known for Scholarship on traditional ecological knowledge and moss ecology; Outreach to tribal communities; Creative writing
Awards John Burroughs Medal Award, for Gathering Moss
MacArthur Fellowship
Scientific career
Fields Plant ecology, Botany
Institutions SUNY-ESF
Centre College
Transylvania University
Thesis Vegetation Development and Community Dynamics in a Dated Series of Abandoned Lead-Zinc Mines in Southwestern Wisconsin (1983)
Website www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/
Robin Wall Kimmerer (born September 13, 1953) is a Potawatomi botanist, author, and the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF).
As a scientist and a Native American, Kimmerer is informed in her work by both Western science and Indigenous environmental knowledge.[1]
Kimmerer has written numerous scientific articles and the books Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003), and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013). She narrated an audiobook version released in 2016. Braiding Sweetgrass was republished in 2020 with a new introduction.
Early life and education
Robin Wall Kimmerer was born in 1953 in upstate New York to Robert and Patricia Wall. Her enthusiasm for the environment was encouraged by her parents and her time outdoors inspired a deep appreciation for the natural environment. Kimmerer is an enrolled citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.[2]
Kimmerer remained near home for college, attending State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and receiving a bachelor's degree in botany in 1975. She spent two years working for Bausch & Lomb as a microbiologist. Kimmerer then moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning her master's degree in botany there in 1979, followed by her PhD in plant ecology in 1983. It was while studying forest ecology as part of her degree program that she first learnt about mosses, which became the scientific focus of her career.[3]
Career
Rainforest moss
From Wisconsin, Kimmerer moved to Kentucky, where she briefly taught at Transylvania University in Lexington, before moving to Danville, Kentucky, where she taught biology, botany, and ecology at Centre College. Kimmerer received tenure at Centre College. In 1993, Kimmerer returned home to upstate New York and her alma mater, ESF, where she currently teaches.
Kimmerer teaches in the Environmental and Forest Biology Department at ESF. She teaches courses on land and culture, traditional ecological knowledge, ethnobotany, ecology of mosses, disturbance ecology, and general botany. She is the director of the newly established Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at ESF, which is part of her work to provide programs that allow for greater access for Indigenous students to study environmental science, and for science to benefit from the wisdom of Native philosophy to reach the common goal of sustainability.[4]
Kimmerer's grandfather attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Kimmerer is a proponent of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) approach, which she describes as a "way of knowing". TEK is an empirical approach based on long-term observation and relationship. The approach also involves cultural and spiritual considerations, often marginalized by the Western scientific community. As a botanist trained and published in Western science, she has high regard for both worldviews and their distinct practices. "Two-eyed seeing" is how she portrays the utilization of both.[5] She also speaks in favor of communication modes unique to each of the two realms. As a university professor, academic papers were essential in the early part of her career. In her elder years she exemplifies the power of orally presented Indigenous stories for an outcome that science makes no attempt to achieve: conveyance and indirect advocacy of values.[5]
Kimmerer's efforts are motivated in part by her family history. Her paternal grandfather, also a Citizen Potawatomi, received an assimilationist education at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school was one of the first American Indian boarding schools, which set out to "civilize" Native children, forbidding residents from speaking their language and effectively erasing their Native culture. Knowing how important it is to maintain the Potawatomi language, Kimmerer took Potawatomi language classes to learn how to speak it because "when a language dies, so much more than words are lost".[6][7]
Her current work spans traditional ecological knowledge, moss ecology, outreach to Indigenous communities, and creative writing.
Professional service
Kimmerer has helped sponsor the Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) project, which pairs students of color with faculty members in the enviro-bio sciences while they work together to research environmental biology. Kimmerer is also a part of the United States Department of Agriculture's Higher Education Multicultural Scholars Program. The program provides students with real-world experiences that involve complex problem-solving. Kimmerer is also involved in the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), and works with the Onondaga Nation's school doing community outreach. Kimmerer also uses traditional knowledge and science collectively for ecological restoration in research. She has served on the advisory board of the Strategies for Ecology Education, Development and Sustainability (SEEDS) program, a program to increase the number of minority ecologists. Kimmerer is also the former chair of the Ecological Society of America Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section.
In April 2015, Kimmerer was invited to participate as a panelist at a United Nations plenary meeting to discuss how harmony with nature can help to conserve and sustainably use natural resources, titled "Harmony with Nature: Towards achieving sustainable development goals including addressing climate change in the post-2015 Development Agenda".[8][9]
Honors and awards
Kimmerer received the John Burroughs Medal Award for her book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.[10] Her first book, it incorporated her experience as a plant ecologist and her understanding of traditional knowledge about nature. Her second book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, received the 2014 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.[11] Braiding Sweetgrass is about the interdependence of people and the natural world, primarily the plant world. She won a second Burroughs award for an essay, "Council of the Pecans", that appeared in Orion magazine in 2013.[10] Within ten years of its publication, more than two million copies had been sold worldwide.[12] Kimmerer received an honorary M.Phil. degree in Human Ecology from College of the Atlantic on June 6, 2020.[13]
In 2022, Kimmerer was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[14]
Books
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003) ISBN 0-87071-499-6.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Editions, 2013) ISBN 9781571313355.
The Serviceberry (Scribner, November 19, 2024) ISBN 9781668072240
Kimmerer, Robin Wall THE SERVICEBERRY Scribner (NonFiction None) $20.00 11, 19 ISBN: 9781668072240
Learning from the land.
Kimmerer, drawing from her Potawatomi heritage, uses the abundant serviceberry to demonstrate the gifts that the natural world provides, highlighting the "enoughness" of these gifts if we choose to view them as such. For a society consumed by consumption, this portrait is startling in its simplicity. "Recognizing 'enoughness' is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more," Kimmerer writes. While the prose occasionally verges on saccharine, each word is clearly chosen with care and deliberation, resulting in a masterful reflection on ecology and culture. The book seamlessly blends science, inherited wisdom, and philosophy, urging readers to reconsider their relationship with the environment and society. Kimmerer pushes back against the individualism and scarcity mindsets entrenched in our interactions, encouraging us to draw inspiration from the natural world and Indigenous knowledge systems. Rather than the exploitative system of modern capitalism, which can be damaging to both the earth and our relationships, Kimmerer invites readers to envision a life that embraces the gift economy--one built on reciprocity, collective well-being, and care. She writes, "When we speak of [sustenance provided from the land] not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes." Despite the dire repercussions of not living in harmony with nature, her beautiful and hopeful prose leaves readers feeling sated, galvanized, and keenly aware of the world around them.
A welcome meditation on living in harmony with the earth and fostering deeper connections with one another.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Kimmerer, Robin Wall: THE SERVICEBERRY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e1c5bcc2. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Allen Lane, [pounds sterling]14.99, pp. 128
Life on Earth is not a zero-sum affair. Most plants only exist thanks to partnerships with fungal filaments in the soil which mobilise essential nutrients for them and receive sugars made from sunlight in exchange. Without those partnerships, humans and most other land animals which depend on plants either directly or at one or two removes would not exist. Cooperation gives rise to a living world that is vastly more complex, productive and beautiful than the sum of its parts.
An understanding of this reality is one of the key insights of an ecological world-view; and, argues Robin Wall Kimmerer in this short and charming book, it is of vital relevance when thinking about how human societies and individuals might organise, and think differently and more expansively about the future.
For Kimmerer, the serviceberry is an instance and object lesson. This tree (a North American cousin to the rowan that derives its name from Sorbus, the scientific name for the family of which both are members) provides food in superfluity to both humans and other animals. In spring it is a source of pollen for newly emerging insects. In autumn it produces delicious fruits. Bozakmin, the native American name, means 'the best of berries'. 'Imagine,' writes Kimmerer, 'a fruit that tastes like a blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an apple, a touch of rose-water, and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavoured seeds.' The serviceberry thrives in a mutual relation with other life forms which spread its pollen and seeds as well as consume them.
A biographical note describes Kimmerer as a mother, a scientist (she is a botanist), a decorated professor and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, who are one of the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes region. She is probably best known for Braiding Sweetgrass, a collection of essays that marries precise scientific observation with insights that draw on First Nations myth and philosophy in a distinctive and generous voice. The book topped the New York Times bestseller list when it was published in 2013, and continues to be widely read, cited and celebrated. The Serviceberry continues in the spirit of the earlier work, but with a focus on the question of what economics is for.
For the predominant view, Kimmerer turns to the American Economic Association, who have defined economics as 'the study of scarcity... how people use resources and respond to incentives'. The problem with this, she argues, is that 'with scarcity as a main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services'. Instead, she prefers a framing offered by Valeria Luzadis, a past president of the US Society of Ecological Economics, who defines economics as 'how we organise ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It's a way of considering how we provide for ourselves'.
This second approach, Kimmerer argues, provides the most scope for human flourishing. The emphasis is on recognising and celebrating 'enoughness' in a web of connections that increases the reach for a gift economy, 'where wealth is understood as having enough to share'. The currency in this kind of economy, she says, is 'relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity... All flourishing is mutual'.
Kimmerer bolsters her case with the thinking and analysis of European and Euro-American writers and theorists. Lewis Hyde's seminal work The Gift and Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics are marshalled, along with the work of the Nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, which showed that land can sustain resources held in common without either state intervention or market economies, and the 'Doughnut Economics' championed by Kate Raworth, which explores the scope for human flourishing within planetary boundaries. A central place, however, is given to the indigenous philosophy of the 'Honourable Harvest', a set of guidelines intended to limit consumption 'to ensure the dish remains full' with 'protocols of restraint, respect and reciprocity'.
The Serviceberry does not pretend to have all the answers to the questions it poses. Kimmerer does not suggest the market economy can or should be replaced any time soon, though she would surely welcome constraints on actors who behave like the Windigo monster in Potawatomi culture by taking too much and sharing too little. What the book does do is light a candle rather than curse the darkness. Kimmerer asks:
What would it be like to consume with the full awareness that we are
the recipients of earthly gifts, which we have not earned?. Imagine we
create the social and political climate to serve the 'empathic
mutualist human'. I mean, why not?
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Henderson, Caspar. "Tree of life." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10240, 30 Nov. 2024, p. 37. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A818982171/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=003ce5e7. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
The Serviceberry
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
NATURE
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, $20, 9781668072240) is the latest offering from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. This slim but powerful volume continues the work of her previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass. Here, she draws from the traditional Anishinaabe economy for her understanding of reciprocity and gift economies, ones where, she writes, "a system of redistribution of wealth [is] based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing."
Through vivid descriptions of the heartbeats around her--cedar waxwings, bluebirds, neighbors sharing garden-grown zucchini--Kimmerer immerses readers in her kinship and connection to the land. Moving between Western science and her own Potawatomi knowledge, she illustrates an accessible model for building reciprocal relationships with both nonhuman and human life around us through the harvesting and sharing of a fruit known as Amelanchier--or serviceberry, "Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis." Ethnobotanists, she writes, "know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance." Serviceberries are medicinal fruits that also synchronize "the seasonal rounds of traditional Indigenous people, who move in an annual cycle through their homelands to where the foods are ready."
Kimmerer breaks down how an extractive economic system like capitalism, which focuses on individualism, competition and exploitation of resources, impacts our spirits; she does so in a language and tone that is generous, even toward the violence of such a system. Indigenous people, she explains, change themselves to suit the land's changes of harvest, whereas Western methods of farming attempt to make the land suit a population's desires and consumptions. "We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs," Kimmerer notes, "rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time." The Serviceberry is a kind reminder that we would do well to restore the sovereignty and practices of Indigenous peoples for the present and future of our world.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Ortiz, -Monica Teresa. "The Serviceberry." BookPage, Dec. 2024, pp. 26+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815804669/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=146adff4. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Scribner, $20)
Four years ago, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s [I.Braiding Sweetgrass] “struck a chord that was aching to be played,” said Meera Subramanian in [I.Scientific American]. The veteran ecologist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, had written the book several years earlier, but word of mouth suddenly catapulted it onto national best-seller lists, where it’s been a fixture ever since. Kimmerer’s ideas about recognizing plant and animal species as our oldest teachers won her a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and she has now returned with a slimmer book that focuses on how Indigenous wisdom about nature’s gifts might show us how to build an alternative to today’s capitalist economy. But while her suggestions about building a “gift economy” are inspiring, “she seems to struggle the way many of us do with how such ideas would scale.”
“The prose in [I.The Serviceberry] is poetic and also fierce,” said Sophie McBain in [I.The Guardian]. Kimmerer presents the wild native shrub as a model of a species that freely shares its wealth—primarily its nectar and delicious berries—with birds, insects, and humans. Native people recognized the berries as a gift, and responded by considering how to give back to nature. They also imitated nature’s example, sharing abundance instead of hoarding it for individual gain. Kimmerer eventually calls out market capitalism’s idea of self-interest as one of its great delusions, built on an idea of the self that ignores every individual’s symbiotic relationship with other species.
Like [I.Braiding Sweetgrass], this follow-up “uses plain language to demonstrate truths about the way all of us live in the world,” said Chris Hewitt in [I.The Minnesota Star Tribune]. Along the way, Kimmerer “has a little fun,” labeling all of the world’s profit-first despoilers “Darrens,” in honor of Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods. Even so, her message is fundamentally hopeful, suggesting that true gratitude for Earth’s gifts can make us less acquisitive, more generous, and more secure. Though the book may not sow a revolution, “[I.The Serviceberry] is bound to appeal to the readers who made [I.Braiding Sweetgrass] a more-than-2-million-copies-sold phenomenon.” ■
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Week Magazine
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World." The Week Magazine, 29 Nov. 2024, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817188440/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8010952f. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
What books are on your night stand?
The stack is tall and threatening to topple. Right now it has Richard Powers's ''Playground''; ''A Council of Dolls,'' by Mona Susan Power; ''The Lost Journals of Sacajewea,'' by Debra Magpie Earling; and ''The Nutmeg's Curse,'' by Amitav Ghosh.
What's your favorite book that no one else has heard of?
I am devoted to the storytelling of the late Brian Doyle, which is so lyrical and always full of the unexpected. I especially love ''Martin Marten,'' which is the intertwined stories of a human boy and a marten boy.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Perhaps ''Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto,'' by Tricia Hersey. It is an important idea and a serious challenge for me, at which I consistently fail.
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
Some years ago, I was given a copy of ''Freckles,'' by Gene Stratton Porter, my most formative childhood book. It's an old edition, smelling like old books do, and the cover is a bit soft. It features courageous women scientists tromping around in the woods, learning about birds and butterflies and swamps. It was published in 1904 and has some problematic aspects, to be sure, but I was delighted to hold a copy in my hands.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
My family went to the library in our rural town faithfully every two weeks. I would come home with the maximum allowable number, checked out with my tattered library card. I read everything from Nancy Drew to Cherry Ames and the old-time naturalist John Burroughs. I think I read every ''Childhood of Famous Americans'' volume, especially the ones profiling Indigenous leaders -- because otherwise we were invisible in the library.
When did you know that ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' had struck such a chord?
I experienced a flood of stories from folks who took the time to send a handwritten note, a handmade card, send me songs, seeds, salves and poetry. What I hear again and again is a deep longing to be in right relation with the natural world -- and the willingness to act on it.
When did you know that its success would change your life?
The work of ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' in the world has changed my life, but most importantly it has changed readers -- and they are changing the world. I think I felt the biggest awakening to its role when quotes were projected on buildings across the U.K. at COP 26, in Jenny Holzer's art installation ''Hurt Earth.''
A version of ''The Serviceberry'' was first published in a magazine. Why turn it into a book?
''The Serviceberry'' as a slim volume arose at the inspiration of Chris Richards, my editor at Scribner. He had read the essay in Emergence magazine and was convinced that these ideas need to be in public conversation. He was quite persuasive that post-election, regardless of the outcome, we would need a vision of a different way forward. He invited me to add to the existing essay, which I enthusiastically expanded, in a rather short time frame so it could appear right after the election. It's an invitation to question the values that underpin our current exploitative relation to the living world. Why do we tolerate an economy that actively destroys what we love?
I am grieving the deeply painful divide in our country. When I look for any sign of common ground I hope we might find it in the ground itself, in care of the land that sustains us all.
Tell us about a nature writer who deserves to be better known.
The poet-ornithologist J. Drew Lanham is a treasure. His books, ''The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair With Nature'' and ''Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts,'' reflect a sensibility to the natural world that is simultaneously scientific and deeply emotional.
What's the last great book you read?
It's hard to choose one, but Barbara Kingsolver's ''Demon Copperhead'' rises to the top.
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
I was blown away by Zoë Schlanger's ''The Light Eaters,'' about the intelligence of plants. I learned that there are tropical vines who change their shape, color and texture to match whatever plants they are growing with, undergoing camouflage change in real time. Scientists speculate that in some way, the vine could ''see'' its neighbors. Or maybe the change is caused by the chemical signals of microbes? Wild stuff.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Brian Doyle, Walt Whitman and Rachel Carson.
Do you have any books that are guilty pleasures?
Sometimes I just want to retreat to the village of Three Pines in Louise Penny's brilliant series of Inspector Gamache mysteries. I get the thrill of a whodunit, visit the curious lives of beloved characters and the warm lights of the village. For such a peaceful place, there are an awful lot of murders.
An expanded version of this interview is available at nytimes.com/books.
CAPTION(S):
This article appeared in print on page BR8.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Robin Wall Kimmerer." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Dec. 2024, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A819221017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=253f2337. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
The world is a gift, not a giant Amazon warehouse, Robin Wall Kimmerer said. In her new book, ''The Serviceberry,'' she proposes gratitude as an antidote to prevailing views of nature as a commodity.
Every summer, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer takes a group of students on a two-week field trip deep into the woods and bogs of the Adirondacks.
For their final exam, students prepare a feast from foraged plants, dining on a wild menu of boiled cattail kebabs, roasted rhizomes, stir-fried day lily buds, lichen noodles in a gelatinous broth of boiled rock tripe. For dessert there are serviceberry and cattail pollen pancakes, smothered in pine-scented spruce needle syrup.
Before digging in, the group recites the Thanksgiving address -- an invocation within Indigenous Haudenosaunee communities that gives thanks to the earth and its abundance.
''We start the class with a Thanksgiving address to share our sense of gratitude for the plants, and we end the same way,'' said Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. ''So we learn about the gifts of plants and how to receive them.''
Kimmerer often says that plants have been her teachers throughout her life. As a little girl, she stashed shoe boxes of pressed leaves and seeds under her bed. Later, as a young botanist, she studied the mysteries of moss reproduction. Throughout her decades of research and environmental advocacy, as she's pushed to bring Indigenous knowledge into ecological conservation work, she's learned about the delicate web of relationships between plants and their surroundings.
Now, as a renowned plant ecologist and best-selling author, Kimmerer is teaching millions of people how to learn from plants.
With her blockbuster book, ''Braiding Sweetgrass,'' Kimmerer's ideas about how to repair humanity's broken relationship with the natural world have spread far. Published in 2013 by Milkweed Editions, ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' became a sleeper hit and word-of-mouth phenomenon that went on to sell nearly 3 million copies in North America. It has been published in more than 20 languages.
''At this moment of societal anxiety around a growing sense that the way we live on earth needs to change, the book has become kind of a movement book,'' said Daniel Slager, publisher and chief executive of Milkweed Editions.
Part memoir, part manifesto, ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' calls for radically changing our relationship with plants and ecosystems from one of unchecked consumption into one of reciprocity and care. It's also a tender and poignant love letter to Kimmerer's plant teachers -- from the humble mosses that captivated her as a graduate student to majestic western red cedars with trunks that can span 50 feet, which Kimmerer calls by their Salish name, Mother Cedar.
This month, Kimmerer released her first new book in more than a decade, a slim, illustrated volume titled ''The Serviceberry,'' in which she argues that we should abandon an economy and a way of life that built around exploiting the natural world. Instead, Kimmerer proposes a shift toward a gift economy based on mutual flourishing and a sense of gratitude.
She uses the serviceberry tree as a model, describing how the they provide nourishment for birds, which feast on its berries and, in turn, spread serviceberry seeds, and how the serviceberries sustain the bees that pollinate the trees' flowers and the microorganisms that live around its roots.
Kimmerer, who at 71 is soft-spoken and has wavy gray hair, didn't have to look far for inspiration. Just outside her house, there's a thicket of serviceberry trees, which blossom in spring and produce sweet, juicy red berries in the summertime, feeding deer, robins, cedar waxwings, catbirds and Kimmerer herself.
The trees sit on her seven-acre plot of land in central New York, where she lives in a 200-year-old white farmhouse that she bought more than 30 years ago. She was drawn to the house because it's surrounded by seven huge sugar maples, which Kimmerer tapped to make syrup when her two daughters were young. Lately, Kimmerer has begun cultivating what she calls ''a climate change forest'' on her land by planting dozens of trees that can withstand warmer temperatures: a medley of oaks, basswoods, Kentucky coffeetrees and tulip poplars.
These days, her only housemates are her two cats, named Ishkodenhs -- which means little fire in Potawatomi -- and Ziiziibaskwet, which means maple sugar. She writes in a small room upstairs that looks out over her neighbors' corn fields and pastures where alpacas and sheep graze.
Kimmerer was raised about a hundred miles away in Ballston Lake, where her father worked as a mechanical engineer, and her mother, who had a degree in chemical engineering, took care of Kimmerer and her three siblings. Growing up, she knew her ancestors' history and stories; her aunt would often send the children treasures like buckskin dolls and jewelry to remind them of their family's origins. But she felt cut off from her ancestral language and ceremonies.
Her paternal grandfather, who lived on a Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma as a boy, was taken from his family at age 9 and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where students were forced to assimilate. Whenever Kimmerer's father made an offering to the earth, he did so in English.
It took a while for Kimmerer to discover the connections between her Indigenous roots and her interest in plants. When she enrolled in graduate school for botany at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, she was one of the few women in the forestry school, and the only Indigenous person. She went on to get her Ph.D. in plant ecology; in a letter of recommendation, her adviser wrote that she had ''done remarkably well for an Indian girl.''
She later distinguished herself as a bryologist -- an expert on moss. But at times, she was so immersed in gathering data that she almost lost touch with the way plants enchanted her as a child.
As a graduate student in Wisconsin, Kimmerer was invited to a small gathering of Native elders, where she met a Navajo woman who introduced her the native names of the plants in her valley, along with their medicinal properties and origin stories. She realized there was a vast body of traditional knowledge that would deepen her understanding of plants.
Later, she decided to study the language her ancestors spoke. She was astonished to learn that in Potawatomi, a plant or animal is referred to as ''who'' rather than ''it,'' giving them agency and individuality as living beings.
''Braiding Sweetgrass'' began as an essay collection, a way for Kimmerer to outline how Indigenous knowledge could help us understand and address environmental problems. Kimmererwove in her own story about her relationship to plants and to her Indigenous heritage, describing how her ancestors' beliefs and practices have made her a more fluent scientist.
''It was really liberating to write about my relationship with plants and what I've learned from them, not what I've learned about them,'' Kimmerer said.
Kimmerer didn't have a literary agent when she submitted the manuscript to Milkweed Editions, an independent press based in Minneapolis. In a stroke of luck, her manuscript was plucked from the slush pile by a staff member who saw its potential.
When ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' came out in the fall of 2013, it had a print run of 8,000 copies, and wasn't reviewed by any major newspapers or magazines. But booksellers were wildly enthusiastic, and the book sold steadily year after year. In February 2020, seven years after its release, it hit the New York Times best-seller list, where it has spent 241 weeks.
The novelist Richard Powers said ''Braiding Sweetgrass'' moved him -- he had to pull over when he was listening to the audiobook in his car because he was crying so hard. The book profoundly shaped his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ''The Overstory,'' which centers on the lives of trees.
''So much of 'The Overstory' is imbued with Robin's vision of the agency of plants, seeing them as complex creatures that have a kind of intelligence,'' Powers said.
As her profile and influence have grown, Kimmerer has helped turn a lonely pursuit into a growing field of study and research.
Kimmerer now gives 80 to 100 talks a year, addressing universities, environmental groups, and state and federal conservation agencies. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Universities around the country have created programs and centers dedicated to traditional ecological knowledge. Some Indigenous leaders credit her with paving the way for more Indigenous people to pursue careers in science and ecology.
Still, some Indigenous scientists are skeptical of the way she describes Indigenous people's relationship to the natural world.
Rosalyn LaPier, an ethnobotanist and enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, credits Kimmerer with helping to expand what was once an overlooked field. At the same time, LaPier said that in her books, Kimmerer often fails to capture the complexity of Indigenous land management and economic systems, reinforcing stereotypes of native people as unsophisticated and passive.
''She's implying that nature is supplying Indigenous people with this abundance, without recognizing that they changed the land and landscape,'' said LaPier.
At times, Kimmerer has struggled with her role as an ambassador of sorts for Indigenous beliefs and ideas. She has to strike a difficult balance, bringing an Indigenous viewpoint into the mainstream, while at the same time protecting parts of her heritage that are not meant to be widely shared, like sacred stories and beliefs.
''I'm always writing through that filter of what to share and what not to,'' she said. ''I'm not just accountable to my story, I'm accountable to my family, to my nation, to Indigenous people's worldview.''
While writing ''Braiding Sweetgrass,'' Kimmerer wanted to describe the significance of the Haudenosaunee's Thanksgiving address, but wasn't sure she should broadcast those sacred beliefs. So she asked for permission from Oren Lyons, a spiritual leader of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation. Lyons emphatically urged her to write about the Thanksgiving address, and told her the Haudenosaunee had been waiting 500 years for other people to listen.
Kimmerer now often highlights the Thanksgiving address during her classes and talks, and holds up the Haudenosaunee expression of gratitude as an antidote to misguided views of the natural world as a commodity.
It's an attitude that Kimmerer thinks we should adopt more broadly, not just on occasions like Thanksgiving, she said.
''This tendency that we have to think of the world as our property, as if the world was a big old Amazon warehouse and everything is there for us to take, that is not grounded in gratitude for gifts of the land,'' she said. ''The Thanksgiving address is not just used one day a year. It is a worldview.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Robin Wall Kimmerer at home in Fabius, N.Y., in November. (BR16); Kimmerer, an Indigenous botanist and best-selling author, has worked to bring Indigenous knowledge and practices into ecological conservation work. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARANIE RAE STAAB FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) (BR17) This article appeared in print on page BR16, BR17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Alter, Alexandra. "Profile / Robin Wall Kimmerer." The New York Times Book Review, 26 Jan. 2025, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A824812406/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4c024d24. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.