'Braiding Sweetgrass': Nature essays

Robin Wall Kimmerer's bestseller focuses on what we owe to the earth.

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“Lucky Day,” announced the sticker. I felt lucky indeed to have spotted Robin Wall Kimmerer’s bestseller “Braiding Sweetgrass” on the library shelf.

I don’t know why I held off for so long on reading Kimmerer’s essays about the natural world from her perspective as a botanist, ecologist, educator and mother who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.. I’d certainly eyed it at the bookstore multiple times. Maybe it was fear — the same fear I have sometimes felt walking into an art gallery or a sports event or a concert, that I don’t know enough to be in that space.

Turns out I needn’t have feared. Kimmerer is a gifted writer; each essay is an immersive, philosophical experience, appealing to each and all of our physical, emotional and moral senses.

Take “Sitting in a Circle,” in which she details a five-week ethnobotany class she led at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station in the Adirondacks. We go along as she teaches the students how to build their shelter, glean nutrition from cattails, mine tree roots to weave into a basket. By the time I finished this essay, my senses were filled with the sensation of wading waist-deep in a marsh, the smell of humus under my fingernails, the sight and sound of a campfire crackling in the night.

Or take “The Sacred and the Superfund,” a heartbreaking history of Onondaga Lake in Syracuse, New York, not far from where I spent my adolescence. When Kimmerer stumbles across a haunted hayfield on the lakeshore, the horrifying displays seem all too apt a metaphor. The lake has been polluted beyond recognition as a body of water by industrial users that only took, never gave back.

We may not be able to restore the Onondaga watershed to its preindustrial condition. The land, plants, animals, and their allies among the human people are making small steps, but ultimately it is the earth that will restore the structure and function, the ecosystem services. We might debate the authenticity of the desired reference ecosystem, but she will decide. We’re not in control. What we are in control of is our relationship to the earth.

That relationship — that we are part of a web that vibrates with our every action and choice — is a key theme of “Braiding Sweetgrass.” Kimmerer muses:

“I am the woman with the basket, and how I fill it is a question that matters. If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?”

A day or two after finishing the book, I took my lunch into the backyard. My eyes fell upon the maple that I planted as a sapling. Well, the workers who built our house planted it first, but I didn’t like the location they chose, so I dug up the maple and moved it. It was tiny then, only a couple of feet tall — I swung my leg over it just because I could. Twenty-one years later, it towers over me; it must be 30 feet tall.

This tree has long served my family: as a play structure for our children, both with and without a tree house; as a provider of shade on hot cloudless days; as the support for one end of a string hammock where we’ve enjoyed lazy hours reading. But only after reading “Braiding Sweetgrass” did it occur to me to give something back. I laid a hand on our maple’s sturdy trunk and said, “Thank you.”