Women Authors From The United States

"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.”"

"Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. 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."

"We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action. The participatory role of people in the well-being of the land has been lost, our reciprocal relations reduced to a Keep Out sign. [...] People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet. So quiet that protection of the environment that enables them to eat and breathe and imagine a future for their children doesn’t even make it onto a list of their top ten concerns. The Haunted Hayride of dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair. Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth."

"Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things."

"Generations of grief, generations of loss, but also strength—the people did not surrender. They had spirit on their side. They had their traditional teachings. And they also had the law. Onondaga is a rarity in the United States, a Native nation that has never surrendered its traditional government, never given up its identity nor compromised its status as a sovereign nation. Federal laws were ignored by their own authors, but the Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law."

"The fish that survive, you may not eat. Fishing was banned in 1970 due to high concentrations of mercury. It is estimated that one hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds of mercury were discharged into Onondaga Lake between 1946 and 1970. Allied Chemical used the mercury cell process to produce industrial chlorine from the native salt brines. The mercury waste, which we know to be extremely toxic, was handled freely on its way to disposal in the lake. Local people recall that a kid could make good pocket money on "reclaimed" mercury. One old-timer told me that you could go out to the waste beds with a kitchen spoon and pick up the small glistening spheres of mercury that lay on the ground. A kid could fill an old canning jar with mercury and sell it back to the company for the price of a movie ticket. Inputs of mercury were sharply curtailed in the 1970s, but the mercury remains trapped in the sediments where, when methylated, it can circulate through the aquatic food chain. It is estimated that seven million cubic yards of lake sediments are today contaminated with mercury."

"Swimming was banned in 1940. Beautiful Onondaga Lake. People spoke of it with pride. Now they barely speak of it at all, as if it were a family member whose demise was so shameful that the name never comes up."

"Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way."

"When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year. Afterward, every single treaty was broken. Illegal takings of land by the state of New York diminished the aboriginal Onondaga territories to a reservation of only forty-three hundred acres. The Onondaga Nation territory today is not much bigger than the Solvay waste beds. Assaults on Onondaga culture continued. Parents tried to hide their children from Indian agents, but they were taken and sent to boarding schools like . The language that framed the was forbidden. Missionaries were dispatched to the matrilineal communities—in which men and women were equals—to show them the error of their ways. Longhouse ceremonies of thanksgiving, ceremonies meant to keep the world in balance, were banned by law. The people have endured the pain of being bystanders to the degradation of their lands, but they never surrendered their caregiving responsibilities. They have continued the ceremonies that honor the land and their connection to it."

"Ecological economists argue for reforms that would ground economics in ecological principles and the constraints of thermodynamics. They urge the embrace of the radical notion that we must sustain natural capital and ecosystem services if we are to maintain quality of life. But governments still cling to the neoclassical fallacy that human consumption has no consequences. We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law. [...] Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct."

"Nine sites line the shore of Onondaga Lake, around which the present-day city of , has grown. Thanks to more than a century of industrial development, the lake known as one of North America's most sacred sites is now known as one of the most polluted lakes in the United States. Drawn by abundant resources and the coming of the , the captains of industry brought their innovations to Onondaga territory. Early journals record that smokestacks made the air "a choking miasma." The manufacturers were happy to have Onondaga Lake so close at hand, to use as a dumping ground. Millions of tons of were slurried onto the lake bottom. The growing city followed suit, adding sewage to the suffering of the waters. It is as if the newcomers to Onondaga Lake had declared war, not on each other, but with the land."

"It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for. I remember walking a street in Manhattan, where the warm light of a lavish home spilled out over the sidewalk on a man picking through the garbage for his dinner. Maybe we've all been banished to lonely corners by our obsession with private property. We've accepted banishment even from ourselves when we spend our beautiful, utterly singular lives on making more money, to buy more things that feed but never satisfy."

"The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as "quality of life" but eats us from within. It is as if we've been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster."

"From across the water, the western shore stands out in sharp relief. Bright white bluffs gleam in the summer sun like the White Cliffs of Dover. But when you approach by water, you’ll see that the cliffs are not rock at all, but sheer walls of Solvay waste. While your boat bobs on the waves, you can see erosion gullies in the wall, the weather conspiring to mix the waste into the lake: summer sun dries out the pasty surface until it blows, and subzero winter temperatures fracture it off in plates that fall to the water. A beach beckons around the point but there are no swimmers, no docks. This bright white expanse is a flat plain of waste that slumped into the water when a retaining wall collapsed many years ago. A white pavement of settled waste extends far out from shore, barely under water. The smooth shelf is punctuated by cobble-sized rocks, ghostly beneath the water, unlike any rock you know. These are s, accretions of , that pepper the lake bottom. Oncolites—tumorous rocks."

"Sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion."

"Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story."

"The waste beds continue to leach tons of salt into the lake every year. Before the Allied Chemical Company, successor to Solvay Process, ceased operation, the salinity of Onondaga Lake was ten times the salinity of the headwaters of Nine Mile Creek. The salt, the oncolites, and the waste impede the growth of rooted aquatic plants. Lakes rely on their submerged plants to generate oxygen by photosynthesis. Without plants, the depths of Onondaga Lake are oxygen-poor, and without swaying beds of vegetation, fish, frogs, insects, herons—the whole food chain—are left without habitat. While rooted water plants have a hard time, floating algae flourish in Onondaga Lake. For decades high quantities of nitrogen and phosphorous from municipal sewage fertilized the lake and fueled their growth. Algae blooms cover the surface of the water, then die and sink to the bottom. Their decay depletes what little oxygen is in the water and the lake begins to smell of the dead fish that wash up on shore on hot summer days."

"Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn."

"To plant trees is an act of faith."

"If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are."

"Old-growth cultures, like , have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people."

"When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival."

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

"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."

"Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop."

"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."

"Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us."

"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."

"The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people."

"Traditional Mohawks speak the words of thanksgiving to the land, but these days the lands along the have little to be grateful for. When parts of the reserve were flooded by power dams, heavy industry moved in to take advantage of the cheap electricity and easy shipping routes. , , and don’t view the world through the prism of the Thanksgiving Address, and became one of the most contaminated communities in the country. The families of fishermen can no longer eat what they catch. Mother's milk at Akwesasne carries a heavy burden of PCBs and dioxin. Industrial pollution made following traditional lifeways unsafe, threatening the bond between people and the land. Industrial toxins were poised to finish what was started at Carlisle."

"Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people, of how they understand themselves, their place in the world, and the ideals to which they aspire. Likewise, the collective fears and deepest values of a people are also seen in the visage of the monsters they create."

"One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another."

"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."