Braiding Sweetgrass

 In my To-read list now - “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants” - a book of essays by scientist and SUNY Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer.   The book has sold 1.4 million copies, according to the NY Times article - You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction.  An article that was shared by Dr Ravi Chellam on the MNS group.

Of late, I have been listening to arguments about science vs other modes of enquiry - and how not to slide into what I would call old-fashioned superstition and blind belief, while at the same time being open to older traditions of wisdom and learning. 

She says - "sometimes what we call conventional Western science is in fact scientism. Scientism being this notion that Western science is the only way to truth. It’s a powerful way to truth, but there are other ways, too. Traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous science, is a more holistic way of knowing. In Western science, for often very good reasons, we separate our values and our knowledge. In Indigenous science, knowledge and values are always coupled. It’s an ethically driven science."

I came across a similare dialogue between Amitav Ghosh and Dr Annu Jalais at the Kolkata Literary Festival, '23, and since it was in the context of Sundarbans, it felt very relevant and immediate for me.  So tiger charmers, masks at the back of the head, vaccinations...and I must say I am more in line with Dr Annu in not dissing science.  

 

But the telling point that Amitav Ghosh makes about how all countries seem to be still in a colonial mindset of trying to control and consume, despite the glaring evidence of climate change, finds an echo in Prof Kimmerer's response as well, I felt.

 Q:  I see the success of your book as part of this mostly still hidden but actually huge, hopeful groundswell of people — and I mean regular people, not only activists or scientists — who are thinking deeply and taking action about caring for the earth. But that groundswell isn’t part of the story that we’re usually told about climate change, which tends to be much more about futility. What are the keys to communicating a sense of positivity about climate change and the future that’s counter to the narrative we usually get? 

Ans:  The story that we have to illuminate is that we don’t have to be complicit with destruction. That’s the assumption: that there are these powerful forces around us that we can’t possibly counteract. The refusal to be complicit can be a kind of resistance to dominant paradigms, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative and joyful and say, I can’t topple Monsanto, but I can plant an organic garden; I can’t counter fill-in-the-blank of environmental destruction, but I can create native landscaping that helps pollinators in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides. (Which research has suggested is especially harmful to wild bees and bumblebees.)

 So much of what we think about in environmentalism is finger-wagging and gloom-and-doom, but when you look at a lot of those examples where people are taking things into their hands, they’re joyful. That’s healing not only for land but for our culture as well — it feels good. It’s also good to feel your own agency. We need to feel that satisfaction that can replace the so-called satisfaction of buying something. Our attention has been hijacked by our economy, by marketers saying you should be paying attention to consumption, you should be paying attention to violence, political division. What if we were paying attention to the natural world? I’ve often had this fantasy that we should have Fox News, by which I mean news about foxes. What if we had storytelling mechanisms that said it is important that you know about the well-being of wildlife in your neighborhood? That that’s newsworthy? This beautiful gift of attention that we human beings have is being hijacked to pay attention to products and someone else’s political agenda. Whereas if we can reclaim our attention and pay attention to things that really matter, there a revolution starts.

Being creative and joyful in our interactions with the natural world - something I recall that Garima Bhatia and I spoke about when we met a couple of months ago, and that organisations like NCF and Palluyir Trust, and MNS also are doing.