Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Robin Wall Kimmerer. (2013).

By far the most important book I’ve ever picked up, which I knew after the first chapter but suspected after Jessica Hernandez (Fresh Banana Leaves, 2022) recommended it on Science Friday. I started reading it last summer, but I’ve been spacing it out, a chapter or two here or there. Each one changes me in some way, usually several ways, and I’m happy to let the changes happen one by one, slowly, like ribbons of chocolate-covered orange peel.

This is an inspirational book, but it’s also practical. How will we get on together in a world full of so many human beings? Her essay called “The Honorable Harvest” is a set of rules for living right and living well in harmony with the land that sustains us. And before Richard Haass’ The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens, which ultimately relies on nationalism, Kimmerer was arguing eloquently for a citizenship based in obligations and reciprocity not with an abstract and divisive nationhood as our uniting cause, but our obligations to the life around us that depends on us and on whom we depend. I would recommend this for a manual on “good citizens” well ahead of Haass’ newer book, or perhaps I’d recommend Haass after Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass so that the difference in perspectives is clear.

In any case, this book is a gift to our entire species, to each and every one of us. Will you accept the gift given? It is the antidote to what ails us, in a collection of enormously absorbing stories, each of which nearly always has a frame of a personal experience that taught Kimmerer something important about our world with at least one Indigenous narrative (but sometimes the Indigenous narrative is the frame and an experience of hers appears within it), along with an incredible array of scientific knowledge.

I have never said this about any book that wasn’t by José Saramago, but Braiding Sweetgrass is perfect: Kimmerer’s expertise in Western biological science is top-notch. As she says at various points, she came to apply her enthusiasm to her own traditional inheritance eventually. The combination that has resulted within her, produced by these seemingly clashing worldviews, is expressed in a style that exceeds all expectations: Kimmerer’s writing is immediately absorbing—not flashily so, nor dramatically either, but somehow through the lucid regularity of it all, whether she’s picking strawberries, restoring a small pond on her property or even more mundane housework, it is captivating. I can almost taste her strawberries, can almost feel the loamy soils gathering under my nails as she excavates a root, am almost walking with her across her living landscapes. Her style is not grand in any remarkable way, and this is one of its powers. It is exactly what it needs to be to convey what she wants to say to us; and what she has to say is precisely what needs to be said right now.

This is the book I have turned to over the last year or so to interrupt a foul mood—and I’ve been experiencing some of the most destructive disillusionment imaginable lately—and each new chapter manages to reverse a disintegrating day. This book will teach you genuine gratitude. It will teach you about community, heritage, belonging, and reciprocity (a dynamic at the core of our every experience).

Here’s a recent episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour (26 min) featuring Kimmerer, framed as a surprised ‘How did this book get so popular?’

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2003).

I can’t say anything about this yet, other than that it’s by the same author, so I cannot imagine it is anything other than wonderful.

How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Eduardo Kohn. (2013).

I love ethnographies: they’re the perfect combination of reality and positioned narrative, and a good ethnography becomes a window into other ways of thinking about being alive. So I’ve been interested the last ten or so years as people started to talk about non-human anthropology. In the first place ‘anthropology’ is ‘the study (-logy) of humanity (anthropo-)’ so it’s a fascinating contradiction that I can’t say I fully understand yet. But I do know that we have so much to learn from the natural world, whence the seriousness of my interest in non-human anthropology as a means of re-integration.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Donna J. Haraway. (2016).

Donna Haraway wrote a potent article in 1988 (link to pdf, containing the first f@k I encountered in an academic work, props to Haraway!) on the impossibility of escaping one’s own perspective to achieve a disembodied eye-in-the-sky objectivity (which has been popular ever since Thucydides), arguing in favor of a positioned view where a person presents their views from their own position. Our positions are variables in the scientific sense, so we ought to be accounting for them. (‘Positionality,’ as it’s sometimes called, is part of the development of ‘intersectionality,’ i.e. of a person as the cumulative experiences experienced from their unique perspective). So I’m curious what does she have to say about reintegration?

Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City. Ben Wilson (2023).

Featured in a recent review in The Washington Post. Allegedly it is an exploration of urban biodiversity, with the surprise that actually these are not ecological dead zones but extremely rich ecosystems, many of which are thriving where ‘wild’ peers are not.

How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human. Melanie Challenger. (2021).

Featured in an episode of the Ezra Klein Show that I haven’t listened to yet. The title of the book was all it took for me. ‘Animal’ as adjective? Interesting. It is actually an adjective (Latin animalis). ‘What It Means to Be Human’? Deeply into it. But from a historical perspective? PERFECT. Can’t wait!

The Rights of Non-Human Persons

I’ve been thinking about the folly of human law compared to natural realities. Why don’t all trees have recognized legal rights, the bushes and wildflowers? What about the other life around us? Don’t monarchs have a natural right to the milkweed on which they are born? Don’t wolves have a right to their territories? I’ll never get over the intense hubris of giving ourselves ‘rights’ (when we mean ‘responsibilities’) without acknowledging the interests of any other population. So I’m pretty excited by the growing conversation on this:

Should Trees Have Standing: Law, Morality, and the Environment, Third Edition. Christopher D. Stone. (2010).

One of the foundational texts for the environmental rights movement, allegedly. A brief skim suggests that this deals with the legal issues involved from the perspective of a lawyer—important for anyone who wants to take action.

The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World. David R. Boyd. (2017).

This one was written for a general audience. Definitely I’m starting here!

Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders. Maneesha Deckha. (2021).

Interesting to me for the fact that Deckha is pushing us away from anthropomorphizing animals. The focus instead is on a new legal category Deckha calls ‘Beingness’ (which I don’t quite like). I’m puzzled why this book is for animals exclusively and not plantlife; hopefully there’s a defense of this in the book.

A Couple Others

The Story of Gaia: The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of Our Conscious Planet. Jude Currivan. (2022).

A lot about this book is suspicious and, frankly, fringy. But I listened to an interview Currivan did on Planet: Critical called “Understanding Reality” [episode link (54 min)]: she’s not a fringy person; she’s a cosmologist. The major claim appears to be that our universe is not merely conscious, the universe is consciousness itself.

Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. Patty Krawec. (2022).

Marketed on the back cover as “A remarkable primer on settler colonialism from Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec.” She did an interview with Rachel Martin aired on NPR. [link here (16 min)]