Practical Reverence – A Conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer

Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm a manual von Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the coast meawalk people in present-day Marine County. Each week we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. You may have heard me use the phrase "practical reverence" in the seasons themed talks we shared on the podcast last month. I was struck when I first heard it used by Patawantimi botanist Rob Mwankimera when I spoke with her last year about her latest book and the possibilities of a new economic system. For me, practical reverence gets at the heart of the urgent need to engage with the earth with a reciprocal love and care that is not abstract but grounded and lived. I now find myself asking regularly, "What does it look like to live in practical reverence? How can I integrate this way of being into my daily life?" This week we returned to this conversation I had with Robin, where she talks about the book "The Service Barry," which builds on an essay she wrote for us several years ago about the potential of a gift economy to restore what's been broken by an extracted economic model and recognize the sacred nature of earth. And while such a transition may feel impossible amid the churning machine of capitalism, Robin describes how a gift economy is not foreign to us but in fact deeply intuitive. For her, the responsibilities inherent in the gift economy, the sharing of abundance, not taking more than you need, acknowledging the gifts you're given, are deeply tied to our spiritual responsibilities. And when we honor these spiritual responsibilities, she says, "We can learn to live a practical reverence that is rooted in our gratitude and love for the earth." Robin, it's such a pleasure to be in conversation with you today. Welcome. Thanks for inviting me. I've just finished your new book, "The Service Barry," which grew from an essay you wrote for emergency a couple of years ago that was the most red essay we've ever published, which I think points to the court, it struck with people, and this new book expands on this essay and is not only a wonderful celebration of the generosity of the land, but is a really powerful manifesto on abundance and reciprocity as models for a new economy that operates in right relationship with the earth. But before delving deeper into that, I wondered if you could introduce us to the book's namesake, "The Service Barry." Who is this plant and what kind of relationships do we have with it? I'd love to start there. The Service Barry is a plant with so many different names. Juneberry, Saskatoon, Sarvis, Shadblow, Shadflower. It has so many names because it has so many relationships. And if you were to meet a service berry that would likely be along a woods edge near water, it's a small tree, a little bit shrubby in nature, and in a way quite unremarkable looking, just oval leaves, smooth gray bark, you might just walk by it without thinking too much about it, unless it was brain time. In which case there's just this explosion of bloom before anything else in the woods is in flower. So some of its relationships are associated with those early spring pollinators in July or June, depending on where you live. There are these heavy clusters of delicious berries that hang from the branches. And then it surely draws your attention. And even then if you missed it the Cedar Wax Wings in the Robbins would let you know because they're just calling and chattering and saying, "Berry's, berries, berries, everybody come feast." So your attention would be drawn when it's in fruit. In the book you share in the Potawatomi language the word for service berry is a revelation because it is also the root word for gift. Yes, that little word "men" means "Berry" in my language, but it is also the root word around gift giving and around a gift. And I love the poetry of that because of course berries feel like a gift, don't they? There they are just presenting themselves, hanging their all red and blue and sweet and juicy. And we didn't earn them, we don't deserve them, we don't own them, and yet there they are, like an offering from the tree. And so I love that that's present in our language as well. "Berry picking is a hugely seasonal act and it is for many a ritual of the warmer months that embodies the gift of summer. And across your work and particularly in the service berry you write about abundance. And the summer proliferation of berries and flowers, fruit and vegetables leads us to characterize this season as one of deep abundance of plentifulness. Although this notion of abundance can be found and felt across all seasons in different ways. And in the service berry you reorient us to look at this seasonal abundance differently, introducing us to how it can be pivotal in reimagining an economy that is currently based on scarcity. I wonder if you could speak to this." You know, in fact, back to the language our word for summer, "need" means the time of plenty, it means the time of abundance. And the notion of abundance being provided by the plants is to me I think about it not only in berries but in medicines for us, in materials for us basket plants, all the kinds of things that the plants by virtue of the ways that they live and the surplus that they create creates abundance for us if we know them, if we know their gifts, if we are paying attention to them. And I like what you said that it's not just in the summer time, even in deep mid-winter the plants are offering us medicines and teachings and materials. In the book you point towards and need to shift our ideas on consumption, we need to learn to see that most of the time you already have what we need. And you write that recognizing "enoughness" is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Yeah, for sure. Think of all the messages that we get relentlessly from media, from advertising, saying, "Well, if you only bought this then you'd be happy." You need to consume this. In fact, our very measures of successful economy is one that is always growing, which means always consuming more. Whereas the notion of "enoughness" doesn't it just make you feel content to think about that of "enoughness" to say, "I have what I need? I have everything that I need provided for me by the land." And to me that just awakens gratitude and a sense of sharing of saying, "I have enough." And so that means if I have enough, the rest the surplus can be shared. And that notion of "enoughness" as a radical act really can put the breaks on consumption. And we know that it is hyper-consumption that has us poised at the brink of climate catastrophe, right? And so it's not only a radical act in an economy, it's a real act of healing for the land and for people as well. To say, "I have enough. I don't need to take any more," which then liberates that abundance for others so that they can flourish too. While what you're talking about is radical, particularly in the framework of the capitalist economy that we operate in, it also isn't in many ways because this way of living in accordance with abundance and an ethic of sharing has been around for millennia, practiced by cultures that live in close relationship with the land, the world over, and in both the service barrier and breeding sweet grass. You talk about a canon of principles that govern this practice in many indigenous cultures, including your own, called the Honorable Harvest. Could you talk about this? The Honorable Harvest is, well, I want to back up and say thank you for recognizing that this isn't new and radical. This is in fact the fundamental principles of how one lives sustainably in place, which we have forgotten, which we have been made to forget by an economy that doesn't want us to have enough that always wants us to consume more. And in order to talk about the honorable harvest, what I also have to talk about is that the stuff that the Western extractive economy wants us to consume is understood as material. It's just stuff, right? It's objects. And so if we're just consuming objects, and if those objects belong to us, if there are property, we don't really need any ethical guidelines about consumption because it's just stuff. But in the indigenous world, you that views those plants, those animals, mother earth, as are relatives, right? As are kinfolk, we are now talking about in order to live, we have to eat our relatives, right? Now that opens up not natural resources, but our relatives are kinfolk, and who are giving us gifts. And so that creates a both a pragmatic and an ethical imperative to have guidelines that regulate how we consume. And so those are what are known collectively as the honorable harvest. And the honorable harvest guidelines begin, they were taught to me in picking berries and digging medicine routes, et cetera, you know, sort of piece by piece where always taught responsibility before we're taught the taking, right? And the honorable harvest begins with the fact that we never take the first one, whether it's berries or firewood or basket plants, you never take the first one. And this self-restraint means that you're never going to take the last one. So it has an inherent conservation ethic. And you know, different cultures have different ways of thinking about it, but sometimes the rule is you don't harvest until you see four or you see seven or you see ten, whatever your family's guidelines might be. And then you never take more than half because you always have to leave some for the thriving of the plant, but for the other ones who, the other beings who want a need, berries or medicines too. And when we see the fourth one, let's say, we also ask permission of that plant. I will quite literally introduce myself and say, you know, in fact, I was just doing this the other day harvesting some mosses for my upcoming ecology of mosses class. And I had to talk to those mosses and tell them, you know, would you come into my lab and teach my students with that wood. Is that okay? And that step of asking permission recognizes the sovereignty, the, they recognize it's that the plants don't belong to us. They belong to themselves. So if we're going to ask permission, we have to listen for the answer as well. And there are a lot of ways to do that. We can use Western science to do that and look at the demographics of the population. Look at its health, look at its vigor, look at the soil quality. Is it thriving? And if it is, you say, well, yeah, I think they have enough to spare. But if it's if it's weak, if it's chlorotic, if there aren't any young ones, you would say, no, I can't harvest here because this, this population doesn't have enough to give. But if it does, then as I said, you take only half and less than you take only what you need and you take it in such a way that you do a little harm as possible. Don't, don't disturb the whole place in order to get what you need. It's a long protocol for picking berries, for picking for taking from the earth as opposed to the Western mode of going in and just grabbing what you need, right? Well, when you're when you harvest, you again take only what you need and give thanks. You stop and pay gratitude to those plants because after all they've just given you their bodies. In some cases they're offspring. You're taking home in your basket. And so you you really pay gratitude, not just in that sort of flip thank you, but a real recognition that that your life is inextricably tied to theirs. So a deep kind of gratitude. And then I'm told that we never go home with our basket without reciprocating the gift of giving back to those plants. We've taken something they've given us something. So how will we pay them back? Sometimes it's with a spiritual gift. In fact, it's always with a spiritual gift, but also a material gift of maybe they need a little more sun. Maybe you should weed around them. Maybe you should sprinkle some fertilizer there if they're looking like they need it. So you need to know the plants, you need to know what they want and to help them out. And and and then you know you have done right by the plants. It is an honorable harvest because you have been given what you need. You haven't done serious damage. And in fact some of the ways that were taught to harvest actually helps the plants to multiply. If that reciprocated gift is I'm going to carry some of these roots to another place where that plant could flourish. Well, then I've just used my gift of mobility to complement the gift of the plant making medicine. So oftentimes the ways that we harvest actually multiply abundance. You've previously written that this knowledge is continued forward in stories and that these stories help us to restore balance and locate us once again in the circle. Can you speak a bit about this circle? The circle that I'm referring to is a circle of mutual flourishing with our kinfolk. These stories remind us that the earth doesn't belong to us that we are blessed to receive the gifts of the earth. And then we have to give our gifts back in return. That's the circle, right? That it's a circle of giving and receiving that recognizes that everybody in the circle has a gift. And it's our responsibility to use whatever our gift is to support the flourishing of our kinfolk, leafy ones, the feathered ones, the ferd ones. Throughout the service bury, you refer to a concept or way of thinking that understands the currency of the gift economy to be relationship, which you express perhaps most directly in the line, which is repeated throughout the book. I store my meat in the belly of my brother. And I love this line. It is the heart of the book and of the essay, isn't it? It comes from the explorations of a linguist who was working in Amazonia with Native peoples there. And in his reports, he tells this story that a hunter and his family were really successful on a hunt. And they brought back some big game. And as they were preparing it, the anthropologist and the linguist who were observing said, "Well, what will you do with the surplus? How will you store it?" Because clearly it was way more meat than the family could consume. And so the hunter said, "Store my meat." He didn't quite understand it. And the interviewer said, "Well, you know, dry it or smoke it or put it away for a time when you need it." And the hunter said, "I store my meat in the belly of my brother." Meaning he had a surplus, he had abundance of food, and so he was holding a feast. And all of the village, all of his family and friends and neighbors were all invited to come partake of that feast. So the storage of that meat was in good relationships in the feast. feasting in the storytelling and singing that accompanied his sharing the gift of the forest with the people. And this notion of "I store my surplus in the belly of my brother" means, of course, that you're creating relationships of reciprocity. And that those reciprocal relations manifest themselves in food security down the line because they're going to be a time, there are always abundance isn't guaranteed, right? They're going to be scarce times too. And in those scarce times, you then have the sense that the people who came to your feast will share with you. When they have a big net full of fish, you're going to be invited to their feast. And so the food security comes from good relationships with your neighbors and a trust that abundance will always be shared. You write about how our current economic model is rooted in projects of colonization and how the dispossession of indigenous people was designed to eradicate the notion of land as a source of belonging. And to replace it with the idea that land is nothing more than a source of belongings which you pointed to a little bit earlier. And that this in turn narrow the definition of well-being from commonwealth to individual wealth and from abundance to scarcity which really gets the heart of the crises that we're experiencing. You know, the idea that the land is a gift, that we can only harvest honorably, that we hold land in common, not as individuals, runs completely counter to the Western notion of property law and prosperity, right? Where the gifts of the land go to make individuals prosperous and wealthy as opposed to the whole community. And in this country, that was a very dangerous notion. In a notion of colonizers, particularly colonists who came to North America expressly for land. That's what they wanted. So the notion that land should be held in common held as sacred was a dangerous notion. And so we look at the projects of violent assimilation through the boarding schools for example and other tools of cultural erasure. Much of that, including the erasure of our language, attempted erasure of our language, that was in large part to replace in this imperialistic way the notion of common land with the notion of private land and private property. This enables the commoditization of land, the commoditization of forests and water and wildlife so that the benefits all accrue to individuals. And now of course corporations are viewed as persons as well. So that falls under that umbrella as well. But yeah, basically what we're talking about is the replacement of the indigenous view of common wealth with the notion of private wealth. You talk about how the equations we use to measure economic value like GDP, only account for that which can be bought and sold. And there is a great line in the book that speaks to this. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with bird song. Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered from millennia and lives nowhere else on the planet? There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories. I was very moved by that line and especially the last sentence. You know economists, particularly ecological economists, are trying to quantify the values of clean water, air quality, forests, etc. Through this language of ecosystem services, and the idea is that if you could put a monetary value on ecosystem services, then you could factor them into that equation. And so there's absolutely merit in that way of thinking. But the problem is when we try to put economic valuation on bird song and water, it converts the gift to commodity. By monetizing it, it takes away from its inherent value. It says that the value becomes the dollars associated with it, not its intrinsic indeed sacred nature. And so there's quite a bit of resistance to valuation of ecosystem services on philosophical grounds. But it's also true that it is an attempt to put those things back in the equation. I want to talk a little bit more about the notion of gift, which we've touched on already, because this model of harvesting only what you need to live is really an example of a gift economy. And I wonder if you can talk a bit about the sorts of ethical constraints a gift economy encourages around the accumulation and distribution of things. So the ethical constraint around not converting a gift to a commodity, to me is best exemplified in thinking about water. You know, if maybe when you turn your faucet on, you just think it's this fluid that's coming to you from public works. And if you focus on really understanding what's coming out of your faucet, you know, that beautiful water, finite in quantity, right? We will never have any more than we do today that falls freely from the sky. And waters our gardens and makes food grow and makes flowers bloom. It's water that can be do, it can be clouds, it can be snow, this long traveling molecule that animates life all over the planet without which life simply would not exist. Oh, now you start looking at water and saying, it's a lot more than this clear substance flowing out of my faucet. It's not an object anymore, it is a gift. And so when you think about this gift of water, it belongs to all of us. The rain falls on all of our heads, right? So why does a corporation have the right to say this freely distributed gift? I am going to filter and put into plastic bottles and sell at a price more that's higher than gasoline, that they're going to make all kinds of money over a freely given gift. That seems an ethical travesty. And of course, think of all of the environmental damage that is done by privatization of water and single use plastics, etc. But to me, the real crux of that is that water should be a common good and not privatized. So that's just one example of thinking about what feels to me like the ethical jeopardy of privatizing a freely given gift. You're right that to name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity, which really challenges what you just described as the way we currently perceive water, for example. Yeah, exactly. You look at the service-based plant itself as a model of gift exchange, looking at how it participates in hundreds of gift exchanges. Before you even put a berry in your mouth, the plant is accepting things from different parts of the ecosystem so that it can grow and giving many other parts of the ecosystem what they need in return. And you speak about how this is a big part of the gift economy ethos, keeping the gift in motion so that it does not stagnate. Yeah, when we look at the economy, if you will, of the service berry, it's a circular economy. It's an economy in which the, let's call it the production of that wonderful plant is in circulation. It's not hoarded. It's given away from the pollen on those beautiful frothy white flowers in the springtime that feed those early seasons. bees, right? It's given away. When we think about the foliage, that is those beautiful solar panels of the leaves that are fueling the growth of that tree, that are the soul food for certain kinds of caterpillars that that production is being given away as it were released to those caterpillars when it comes time for the ripening berries. Everybody shows up all the birds, right? All the small mammals and the people too to share in this abundance. So the plant is making these baskets full of berries and they're all heading out in all kinds of other directions not to be accumulated but to become part of of life. To fuel, make more birds and more bird songs and more meadow voils and jumping mice and everything up and down the food chain. And then when fall time comes, you know, the leaves fall to the ground and feed that whole web of the detritivores that make the soil that allows more service berries to grow. And so it's a circular economy. Everything that is made is given away, is sent off to support other lives, but then those lives support the service berry. And so it is a model of circulation and circularity. And we know that these circular regenerative economies are the ways that nature provides abundance and for the most part our industrial economies are quite the opposite. They're just these short industrial pipelines that go from production to waste with amazing efficiency. But in a natural economy, there's no such thing as waste. Waste product becomes a resource for someone else's life. And in that way, I mean the whole point of the book, right, is this idea of biomimicry. Could we look at how nature delivers goods and services in this regenerative way? And why is it that we don't create our human economies to emulate nature rather than to recognize nature? You say that in response to gifts, our first intuitive response should be gratitude. And it's not quite as surface level as manners. It's not a simple, vocalized thank you that we are often accustomed to. It's more about a recognition of indebtedness that brings you into the realization that your life is nurtured from the body of Mother Earth. Can you speak a little bit more about the recognition of indebtedness that lies at the heart of gratitude? Yeah. And that's what converts it from just this ritual of nice manners to say thank you. It is the recognition that our lives are intertwined. That our physical lives are intertwined. If not for you, I would not live. And so that's a powerful kind of gratitude, right, to say, you know, without you, I could not be. And really what it takes is that attention and a kind of humility. The beautiful kind of humility, not, you know, oftentimes in the Western world, that idea of humility comes to mean a kind of meekness or self-effacement. But in the teachings that I've been given humility in Parwadami language, the word is Ed Basenduin, means the recognition that I am not more important than you. Which doesn't mean that you're not important, that I'm not important. It means that you're important too, that we are important to each other. So it's a way of lifting up all lives to say we are all important to each other. Without each other, we would not be. And that's a really deep kind of gratitude that makes you feel so fortunate, right? And it creates a really different orientation to the world. Not that I'm going to try to take more, but that I'm going to respect what has been given to me. You echo this thought in "Brighting Sweet Grass," writing that the expression of gratitude for what the earth gives us is revolutionary in a consumer society. That contentment is radical. Gratitude creates an ethical fullness and we live in an economy that thrives on emptiness. Yeah, exactly. And that's why the notion of gratitude, enoughness and abundance feel so important as an antidote to the endless need to consume the idea of contentment and we're back to the notion of "enoughness," aren't we? That just makes you say, "I have everything that I need." You also say we need to go beyond gratitude and we need to become a culture of reciprocity. What do you mean by that? You know, gratitude feels like we are expressing our thankfulness for our lives, etc. But then when someone gives you a gift, you want to give them something. You are in their debt in a way and you want to honor them and respect them in the way that you've been respected. And so that opens the door to reciprocity to say, "Well, what is the gift that I could give? You in return for water or berries or birdsong or whatever it is that we're talking about." And that requires that deep self-examination to say, "Well, what is my gift?" And which of my gifts are what the world deans in this moment? And now we're talking about a purpose-driven life, right? To say, "Oh, I matter too. I matter too. My participation, my gifts need to be in the world in order for the world to thrive." And then that converts our sense of ourselves far beyond just a consumer, right? We've been sold this narrative that we humans are just takers, so that we are just consumers. That's all that we do. But in reciprocity we can reclaim our sense of ourselves as givers as well, as full participants in the flourishing of the world. And that's joyful. It gives you a sense of kinship and purpose and agency that rivals that the sense of agency and purpose that the birds in the trees have. As the currency of the gift exchange, gratitude and reciprocity are a truly renewable resource, and you write every time gifts are given their energy concentrates as they pass from hand to hand. Can you speak a little bit more about what you mean by this and what is in live and within both the giver and the recipient in this exchange? There's some beautiful writing around this in Lewis Hyde's beautiful book The Gift and and and other philosophers and anthropologists who talk about this. But let's take the example of a gift like supposing I wanted to just give you a teacup. I could you know go down to the local store and get by a teacup and and give it to you. But what if the teacup that I gave you was my great-grandmas that she brought with her, you know from a long journey that she had told stories and had tea parties and they're both vessels for holding hot water. But one of them that has been exchanged so many times has so much more resonance, so much more meaning, so much value and honor. And that's the way that relationships kind of burnish the gift and make it even more valuable. And if you then took that gift and gave it said this was given to me by Robin in honor of our friendship and she gave me this one that was in honor of her grandmother all of that story keeps going, right? And so the gift as it is passed on in the sense of a material gift, gathers the non-material value and stories that go with it. In an ecological sense, gifts also get in a sense more concentrated when they go up the food chain. Right. And that's the other element of thinking about ecological gifts that you think about perhaps say plants that are harvesting abundant sunshine, but when they make berries that are then eaten by the birds, the birds are only concentrating about 10% of the energy that the tree produced in those fruits. And so the birds are more concentrated form of that energy. And whoever eats the bird, the fox that just picked that robin off the ground is getting 10% only of that. So now it's a hundredth of what the plant produced. And so as you go up the food chain, energy also becomes much more concentrated. And that's another way to think about the way that as gifts are passed on, they become more valuable. I mean, it's why there are fewer birds in the world than grasshoppers because that energy is concentrated. That gift becomes, in a sense, more valuable as it is passed up the food chain. So it's both cultural and ecological. Yeah. I liked what you said about how the material gift holds the story as it is exchanged when given to others. And it makes me think about also the spiritual exchange, the energy that's present within the story that is allowed to become more concentrated as it is used and in live and as the exchange is passed on and that when we stop it by saying, now it's mine, it's like we stop the flow of everything that's happened until that point. Absolutely, right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. One of the main questions now being asked in relation to the gift of climbing model is how do we take it and scale it up so it can be feasible within societies at large. So you challenge this notion and you say that you're not sure that's the right question because it is the small scale and the community context that makes the flow of gifts meaningful. Yeah. A lot of the scholarship around gift economies all over the world and they curl all over the world. They occur in small, close-knit communities and there's a very good reason for that. Gift economies rely on trust, they rely on being known, they rely on saying that you invited me to your feast so I'm going to invite you to mine. In a society which is too big and too complex, you can be anonymous within the society, right? And anonymity creates the opportunity for cheating in the system but where everybody is known and related through gift exchange, there's a high level of trust so this diffuse reciprocity can work. So it could be said, well gift economies then can never prevail in a society like in the United States today but I don't think that's true because what we as individuals crave is community and a sense of belonging. So gift economies are not going to replace extractive capitalism, right? But I think they can exist within it as we create and value these small scale communities. And we saw that happen during the pandemic as mutual aid societies in neighborhoods grew as community gardens grew. All found ways to create the small, very local webs of reciprocity and care. And that I think is the invitation is to do those things that allow us to honor a currency of relationship rather than a currency of money. So when I say, well I don't think we should scale them up, I really mean they probably wouldn't work at a scale of 500 to 1,000 people but they work really well, 200 people. And so how do we again invest in our neighborhoods and in our communities to create opportunities for things like tool sharing and community gardening and food sharing and I think about the buy nothing networks for example that are deeply community based. Those are gift economies and we get the benefits of I suppose the goods and services that come through those exchanges but we also get the benefit of human relationships and mutual respect and the sense that you matter, that network needs you and what you bring. And in a society where I think people are longing not only for community but for purpose. Oh, those are pretty good benefits. I want to talk a little bit about the deeper spiritual values that are present in this book and of course your work overall and that your exploration of the gift economy seems to be pointing towards. There is this crisis of a lack of respect of the earth as a spiritual being one might say and that we don't value her and all she brings because of the systems that have removed us sometimes very very violently and you know your work is very much about inviting people to transform this and to want to change the bleak future that is now often being promised to us and to mend this relationship. So I wonder if you might speak a little bit about the deeper spiritual values that a gift economy could really lead us towards and help us learn to re-embodied. Yeah, this is of course work that transcends human communities and the exchange of goods and services. What it means is that we are investing again in communities of care and compassion not only for one another but for the earth. I think what we're really leaning toward is a kind of interspecies justice to say that this mutual responsibility that we have for one another is our primary spiritual responsibility not just pragmatic but it is I also love the term you know practical reverence because it's deeply practical but it has sacred dimensions doesn't it? Of caring for one another and honoring the gifts that come to us to me the gift economy and our responsibilities to participate in it are very much tied to our spiritual responsibilities which in teachings that have been shared with me are and that guide me are are those notions that in return for this life in this beautiful complicated place we were given a gift to bring here each of us is to bring that gift and to not give the gift is a betrayal of a kind of spiritual responsibility a spiritual equation in a way and so gift economies offer an opportunity for individuals to say here is is the gift that I carry and and I'm going to share it with you to in live in our community to in live in life around us and that deep sense of of purpose is is is a spiritual one as well. You know to me the immense popularity in both breeding sweet gas and the service bury essay speaks to a deep rooted hunger people have for this way of being rooted in reciprocity for this sense of practical reverence for being in caring mutual relationship with all that's alive around us and that we are creating models and pathways into once again living in spiritual connection. with the earth. I wonder if you could speak a little to this hunger that is apparent, this innate desire that remains, although often buried in us, to be in conversation with this earth. Oh yes. You know, one of the joys of the work that Braiding Sweetgrass, in particular, has done in the world is an almost daily flow of messages from readers who convey just what you're talking about, of longing, of longing to be in right relationship with the earth and all the stories that are around us, that divert us from that. To say, well, no, that doesn't really matter. That's not what being, that's not what you're here for. Braiding Sweetgrass has given permission, I think, to many of us to feel that longing and the idea of being in right relationship with land, you know, given the way that our species, particularly in this country, in industrial economies, have inflicted so much harm on the marvelous creation around us, can also create this sense of shame and dishonor that you're thinking, that's not who I am, that's not who I want to be. And practical reverence offers almost a notion of redemption to say, you know, no, you're not just a taker, you're not a dispoiler, you can be medicine, you can be medicine for the earth, you can be a healer, you can participate in regenerative economies, you can participate in ecological restoration, you can contribute to justice within our own species and inner species justice. People are longing for a kind of permission to really be their authentic selves in right relationship to land. And I've been so gratified to see the ways in which people are taking this on, of saying feeling liberated to, oh, I could be a giver. Well, here's what I want to do. You know, somebody who said, I'm going to this education system that teaches us just to be consumers, I don't want to participate in that, I'm starting a school, right? Or I'm writing curriculum, or the man who wrote me who said, I've been in finance on Wall Street for most of my professional life, and now I can't do it anymore. And I'm going to take my wealth and go create a regenerative farm. You know, there's just so many stories of people feeling liberated to be in right relationship with the land, which for some reason they had just felt like wasn't even possible. And that's the power of collective storytelling, isn't it? Because when one person said, here's how I'm looking at this, it's contagious and gives people agency and permission to take those steps so that we're not complicit in destruction. Because that complicity weighs on us, doesn't it? You know, it weighs on us heavily and to be able to take those steps in a gift economy, in regenerative economies, to step outside of that complicity and resist it in any way really gives a sense of power and agency and rightness. You offer a lovely example in the book of how intuitive and innate a gift economy is to us as humans, that gift giving is a primal element of human relationships. And you point to the maternal gift economy here, the giving of milk from a mother to a baby, which really is pure gift. Mothers don't sell their milk to their babies. The currency of this economy, this exchange is the gratitude and love in support of continued life. Isn't that a powerful idea? Genovi Vaughn was the first to talk about this and I've only scraped the surface of trying to understand the work that's being done around maternal gift economies. I want to learn more and I plant that as a seed for readers to learn more as well to say, well, what would that look like to live in such a way that honored these exchanges of life? What those thinkers, those wonderful feminist thinkers are arguing is that gift economies are a biological imperative. If we didn't do this, we simply wouldn't be. So how could that translate into means of social and economic organization based on blurring the boundary between me and we? That's part of the beauty of the maternal gift economy is the boundary between mother and child is so porous. It really is an exemplar of this idea of all flourishing is mutual. Our lives are so linked but truthfully all of our lives are linked and when we start to think about the ultimate mother from whose body we are fed of mother earth, what does a maternal gift economy look like in that realm? It's really exciting arenas of thought. In hand and hand with what's shown by the maternal gift economy, you go on to suggest that like the sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, perhaps the source that replenishes the flow of gifts and the human gift economy is love. In the maternal gift economy, I think that there's no argument about that, right? But it's a kind of again practical reverence of love and milk. We need both love alone is not going to nourish that infant. And it's again, when we think about the story of the hunter who says, "I store my meat in the belly of my brother." Isn't that love? Isn't that love for your people? And they're the boundary between me and we is also plurred that the gifts of the earth, that that that hunted food don't just belong to me, they belong to all of us. And I can be in agents of distributing that abundance to the we. And I think all of this really leads us to that acknowledgement that we live in this society that is so hyper individualistic, that we think that all of the benefits are to accrue to individuals and their tight circles, whereas what would it be to think about as in an ecological system where the benefits flow to the whole community? Robin, it's been an absolute privilege getting a chance to speak with you today. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for a good conversation. A Merchants magazine is an initiative of Caliapaya Foundation. Our original essays, in-depth interviews, films and rich multimedia, explore the threads connecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Our theme music is composed by Logan Stalley and H. Scott Selenis. This podcast is edited by Erica Nyanger and produced by Shauna Quinn and a manual of only, with writing by Lucy Warwald. You can subscribe to our podcast wherever podcasts are found. 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