Environmentalists From The United States

"Doing science with awe and humility is a powerful act of reciprocity with the more-than-human world."

"Mohawk language and culture didn’t disappear on their own. , the government policy to deal with the so-called Indian problem, shipped Mohawk children to the barracks at , where the school's avowed mission was "Kill the Indian to Save the Man." [...] Despite Carlisle, despite exile, despite a siege four hundred years long, there is something, some heart of living stone, that will not surrender. I don't know just what sustained the people, but I believe it was carried in words. Pockets of the language survived among those who stayed rooted to place. Among those remaining, the Thanksgiving Address was spoken to greet the day: "Let us put our minds together as one and send greetings and thanks to our Mother Earth, who sustains our lives with her many gifts." Grateful reciprocity with the world, as solid as a stone, sustained them when all else was stripped away."

"A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit."

"It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart."

"Black against the golden grass and many inches deep into prairie earth, the trail follows the natural contours as if centuries of footfalls have preceded my own. It’s just me, the grass, and the sky, and two bald eagles riding the thermals. Cresting the ridge releases me into an explosion of light and space and wind. My head catches fire at the sight. I cannot tell you more of that high and holy place. Words blow away. Even thought dissipates like wisps of cloud sailing up the headland. There is only being."

"Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community, it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life."

"Far out beyond the surf they felt it. Beyond the reach of any canoe, half a sea away, something stirred inside them, an ancient clock of bone and blood that said, "It’s time." Silver-scaled body its own sort of compass needle spinning in the sea, the floating arrow turned toward home. From all directions they came, the sea a funnel of fish, narrowing their path as they gathered closer and closer, until their silver bodies lit up the water, redd-mates sent to sea, prodigal salmon coming home."

"In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart."

"So he walks the path at nightfall with a bundle in his hand. Into a nest of cedar bark and twisted grass he lays the coal and feeds it with his breath. It dances and then subsides. Smoke pools darkly as the grasses melt to black and then erupt into flame, climbing one stem and then another. All around the meadow, others do the same, setting in the grass a crackling ring of fire that quickens and gathers, white smoke curling upward in the fading light, breathing into itself, panting across the slope until its convective gasp sets the night alight. A beacon to bring their brothers home."

"This is what we field biologists live for: the chance to be outside in the vital presence of other species, who are generally way more interesting than we are. We get to sit at their feet and listen."

"Losing a plant can threaten a culture in much the same way as losing a language. [...] The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation."

"A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear."

"The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart."

"In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us.""

"The earth is so richly endowed that the least we can do in return is to pay attention."

"Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do."

"The composer Aaron Copland got it right. An n spring is music for dancing. The woods dance with the colors of wildflowers, nodding sprays of white dogwood and the pink froth of redbuds, rushing streams and the embroidered solemnity of dark mountains."

"In the , the root word for land is the same as the word for mind. Gathering roots holds up a mirror between the map in the earth and the map of our minds. This is what happens, I think, in the silence and the singing and with hands in the earth. At a certain angle of that mirror, the routes converge and we find our way back home."

"A path scented with sweetgrass leads to a landscape of forgiveness and healing for all who need it."

"All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation."

"The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old."

"The plants are our oldest teachers."

"Caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack."

"For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken. The fragments, like ash splints, can be rewoven into a new whole."

"Naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see."

"In an essay describing peoples with few possessions as the original affluent society, anthropologist reminds us that, "modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples." The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a economy."

"As we give thanks for the Earth, will we live in such a way that the Earth can be grateful for us? (2015)"

"In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy."

"The earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon. This is the vision of the economy of the commons, wherein resources fundamental to our well-being, like water and land and forests, are commonly held rather than commodified. Properly managed, the commons approach maintains abundance, not scarcity. These contemporary economic alternatives strongly echo the indigenous worldview in which the earth exists not as private property, but as a commons, to be tended with respect and reciprocity for the benefit of all. And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance."

"Even a wounded world is feeding us," writes the Indigenous plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. "Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

"Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. She’s written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing; Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss, a bryologist, she describes mosses as “the coral reefs of the forest.” She opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life that we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate."

"Behind her, on the wooden bookshelves, are birch bark baskets and sewn boxes, mukluks, and books by the environmentalist Winona LaDuke and Leslie Marmon Silko"

"Robin Wall Kimmerer shows how the factual, objective approach of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people. It is the way she captures beauty that I love the most-the images of giant cedars and wild strawberries, a forest in the rain and a meadow of fragrant sweetgrass will stay with you long after you read the last page."

"a lot of the problems that we face in terms of sustainability and environment lie at the juncture of nature and culture. So we can’t just rely on a single way of knowing that explicitly excludes values and ethics. That’s not going to move us forward."

"we can’t have an awareness of the beauty of the world without also a tremendous awareness of the wounds; that we see the old-growth forest, and we also see the clear cut. We see the beautiful mountain, and we see it torn open for mountaintop removal. So one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love, and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn."

"Robert Macfarlane told me he finds her work “grounding, calming, and quietly revolutionary”."

"Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world the same way after having seen it through her eyes."

"The idea of reciprocity, of recognizing that we humans do have gifts that we can give in return for all that has been given to us, is I think a really generative and creative way to be a human in the world. And some of our oldest teachings are saying that what does it mean to be an educated person? It means that you know what your gift is and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people, just like every single species has its own gift."

"Why is the world so beautiful? is a question that we all ought to be embracing."

"In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its.”"

"science asks us to learn about organisms, traditional knowledge asks us to learn from them."

"I think that’s really important to recognize, that for most of human history, I think, the evidence suggests that we have lived well and in balance with the living world. And it’s, to my way of thinking, almost an eyeblink of time in human history that we have had a truly adversarial relationship with nature."

"Just as it would be disrespectful to try and put plants in the same category, through the lens of anthropomorphism, I think it’s also deeply disrespectful to say that they have no consciousness, no awareness, no being-ness at all. And this denial of personhood to all other beings is increasingly being refuted by science itself."

"what is the story that that being might share with us, if we knew how to listen as well as we know how to see?"

"I think we need to re-member these ancient ways of living that are already there and reimagine ourselves in them. (Orion Magazine, 2021)"

"Most people don’t really see plants or understand plants or what they give us...People can’t understand the world as a gift unless someone shows them how it’s a gift.” (The Guardian, 2020)"

"We tend to shy away from that grief,” she explains. “But I think that that’s the role of art: to help us into grief, and through grief, for each other, for our values, for the living world. You know, I think about grief as a measure of our love, that grief compels us to do something, to love more.” (The Guardian, 2020)"

"the English language is a language of objectification of the living world, right? When we see that beautiful moon, we say “it” is shining; those swallows, “it” is chittering as “it” flies overhead. In English, we “it” the living world, whereas in Potawatomi that’s not possible. We use the same grammar for each other as we do for our plant and animal relatives. (Orion Magazine, 2021)"

"There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents."

"it’s really love more than hope…We hear so much of: ‘Well, do you have hope?’ Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again. We know as people the power we have when we really recognise our love for someone or something. Hmm! – there’s nothing that’s going to stand in our way. (The Guardian, 2024)"