Braiding Sweetgrass
In our day-to-day experience in the modern world, it may prove challenging to maintain an awareness of the life that animates nature, or even how inextricably intertwined our lives are with the natural world. With so much of the natural world seemingly crumbling before our very eyes, contemplative ecology is an urgent undertaking. In fact, that so much of the natural world is crumbling not before our very eyes, but behind the guise of economic growth and progress, is among the most pressing issues in need of attention. Too often, we do not directly witness the devastation and destruction that befalls nature, and thus we turn a blind eye to its demise, a deaf ear to its cries...
Here we venture into the contemplative reflections contained in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
While not (yet) a classic, instead published quite recently in 2013, Braiding Sweetgrass is no less illuminating than the others we've addressed. Our emphasis thus far has been on pieces that date back hundreds to thousands of years, which have proven themselves surprisingly relevant today, perhaps even as much as they were to people in vastly different times and contexts. Yet intuitive value imbues recent contemplative undertakings as well. In this case, its recency makes it all the more relevant to contemporary concerns, especially environmental. Like several of our other explorations, Braiding Sweetgrass also traverses the realm of language, a path we invite you to explore with us.
Reflections on Language
Taking the form of a first-person narrative interwoven with contemplative musings and botanical themes, Braiding Sweetgrass includes several poignant reflections on language. For instance, drawing on personal experience, Kimmerer describes her efforts at learning a new language, a task many of us may have also undertaken at some time or another. In the course of this effort, she discovers that the natural world has its own language and is, in essence, “speaking” to us. Too often, we fail to comprehend the message.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer observes that the English language remains a limited starting point for understanding the language of nature, insofar as its words and concepts fail to do justice to the animation that the land itself embodies, the stories it narrates.
Contemplating linguistic trends, Kimmerer notes that English is a noun-based language while only roughly 30 percent of English words are verbs, perhaps suggesting an emphasis on entities to the neglect of processes. Given the structures inherent in English language conventions, privilege is given to a solid perspective of the world. Our attention defaults to objects which we can clearly perceive, firmly grasp, and definitively make-sense-of. Anything else either eludes our awareness or remains in the shadowy background or blurry periphery of conscious experience, the sub-conscious. Further, the English language implies that nouns are inanimate given that they are simply “things” rather than imbued with a life of their own. This comes in stark contrast to the Potawatomi language, wherein both nouns and verbs may be animate and inanimate, Kimmerer reflects.
Interestingly, Kimmerer also reflects that the natural world, both plants and animals (including rocks) are animate, and so are mountains, water, fire... even places. When they are displaced, their living essence is disturbed.
Consider a cave and a museum. When the cave is ransacked and objects are taken from it for installation in a museum exhibit, on one hand those objects are made more widely accessible to the general public, who stand to learn immensely about archaeology, history, and ancient cultures by examining these artifacts. However, something is lost in the process, namely through the objectification of those artifacts, which before entering the museum, perhaps did not even function as objects or artifacts in the same sense that they do upon being branded as such. The cave is a living entity that “speaks” to us, whereas in a museum, the living aspect of language is lost and thus artifacts can only speak indirectly, divorced from context.
We use this example as a rather benign case relative to extreme situations entailing the appropriation of nature and indigenous cultures, situations that unfortunately haunt a great deal of human history, especially recent...
Common Language
Broadening the scope of her contemplations, Kimmerer observes that plants, animals, and humans share a common language that functions to bring individuals together. However, it seems that the manner in which we approach this process of communication can backfire, setting up barriers that prevent us from speaking to one another. Increasingly over time, individuals, especially in non-indigenous contexts, have tended to isolate themselves from the natural world, whether consciously or unconsciously. In light of rapid industrialization, we've been torn, willingly or unwillingly, from the land. The land, in turn, has been razed; animals, confined; forests, burnt to ashes.
In other words, hierarchical language has the potential to divide humans, animals, and the surrounding environment. A language that sees the natural world as populated by mere objects to be used for human pleasure and so-called progress is a language that divides us.
As difficult as it may be to envision, animate and inanimate beings speak a common language and impart wisdom to each other, according to Kimmerer. If we lack the ability to tune in to this shared language, the message is lost on deaf ears. It is not the case that we are utterly incapable of tuning in. Far from it. Rather, we increasingly overlook the value of such communication given an overwhelming societal push toward economic growth at the expense of the natural world, the very ecology we inhabit.
Kimmerer reflects that when we see a maple as a living thing, instead of an object, we hold a moral responsibility to safeguard it, allowing for mutual benefit and interconnection as opposed to exploitation. In fact, when we regard the maple as an object, such a perception imposes an artificial barrier that divides us from the shared world that we inhabit.
Contemplative Ecology
Certainly far more could be said of Kimmerer's work, but we pause here for the time being. Contemplative ecology, an approach to the natural world that entails an ongoing awareness of environmental illness and wellness, as well as our dependency upon its state of health for our very survival, is absolutely essential now more than ever. We intend to follow-up on the theme of contemplative ecology, as well as several practices complementary to or derived from contemplative ecology, in the reflections to come.
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