Weaving reciprocity

on The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

There’s a short bridge in my small town that we have to cross when driving to the city. I used to press my nose on the car window, looking at the water that rippled and stilled around the rusty sluice. “Is there water underneath us, anywhere we go?” I used to ask my parents, almost every time we pass by that bridge. I asked it so relentlessly that it became one of my most distinct childhood memory—that, and my parents’ patience in answering the same question a thousand times over. My mother, looking sideways to the back of the car, would tell me that yes, water does run beneath us all. Little did she know that it did not—at least not until 2014, when scientists reported a new discovery that there is a reservoir of water locked in the earth’s mantle (“an ocean beneath our feet,” read a Smithsonian article). But nevermind the science. It was intuitive for her to assume that all of us across seas and continent stand over the same oasis. How could we not? If water makes up most of our earth; if it exists in soil and air, even if it is in microscopic forms, it is easy—and right—to assume that there is, indeed, water underneath us all. And it was this, not precise sciences, that intrigued me: an entity that unites us all; a common friend in the natural world that knows no border. But it isn’t just water.

Earlier this year, I read David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. He distilled, in a manner efficient and concise, 30 years’ worth of research on the climate crisis. “What cause is there for hope?” he wrote early on his book. We cannot reverse climate change—it will “outrun all of us”, he wrote, citing it as an example of what Timothy Morton called “hyperobject”—conceptual facts so massive and complex that they escape human comprehension. Further, what impact can we small human beings make on an episode as cataclysmic as climate change? “Big things make us feel small, and rather powerless,” Wallace-Wells admitted, “even if we are nominally ‘in-charge’”. For a moment, cutting down on plastic and becoming vegan could make us feel in control, but it is only a matter of time before we realise that mightier powers encapsulate all our lives—powers that are working in direct opposition of climate reparation. “The perceptual size of market capitalism has been a kind of obstacle to [climate change] critics for at least a generation, when it came to seem even to those attuned to its failings to be perhaps too big to fail,” Wallace-Wells wrote, who declared shortly after that climate is not contained within or governed by capitalism—“it is endangered by it”. But what can uproot this behemoth of a system? We can alter the way we consume and produce, certainly, though the amount of climate deniers increases the improbability of large-scale action and government intervention. Clearly, there is no reversing industrial capitalism: this system underpins much of what we call “progress” and has constructed novel forms of conveniences that we could never again separate from modern life. Greed—on all levels, personal and institutional, is unavoidable. It is possible that there is yet another layer to uncover, a transformation even more fundamental than consumption patterns and structures of production. Perhaps what we need is a reconstruction of interspecies relations; a path for us to perceive and regard our natural environment not as resources, but as partners.

This notion is embedded in a concept called bioregionalism, which was first propagated by environmentalist Peter Berg and ecologist Raymond Dasman in the early 1970s. Bioregionalism advocates “living-in-place”: the practice of familiarising with the needs and pleasures of a particular site and evolving ways to safeguard the relationship between and sustainability of all living things that dwell on the site. As Jenny Odell presents in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, bioregionalism requires us to “identify as citizens of the bioregion as much as (if not more than) the state. Our ‘citizenship’ in a bioregion means not only familiarity with the local ecology but a commitment to stewarding it together.” Bioregionalism asks us to become partners with the flora, fauna and planet processes native to our region. Bioregionalism not only recognises indigenous land practices; it also holds settlers responsible for building a tender and sustainable relationship with the land that has welcomed them. What is truly wonderful about this concept is that while it respects the distinctive elements and characteristics of a region and the diverse communities that work alongside them, the emphasis on ecological citizenship also shows just how connected and interdependent we are. Think about it: wind circulates, meets and intersects—wind that blows in one continent affect weather in the other; sand travels—in fact, tonnes of sand from the Saharan desert travels to the Amazon rainforest each year; carrying Phosphorus, an essential nutrient for plant proteins and growth that nourishes the Amazon. It isn’t just water.

As far as bioregionalism is concerned, our borders are porous. But consider that in the face of climate change, this could very well compound destruction, and, by extension, inequality. What travels in a deteriorating ecology? The smoke from Australia’s bushfires made a “full circuit” around the globe, NASA reported. Yet we continue to allow destructive activities, burning a world already inflamed: Singapore, for instance, still experiences haze season each year from slash-and-burn clearings in Malaysia and Indonesia; closing schools, halting daily activities, endangering the health of thousands and bringing endangered species closer to extinction. It is clear that we have, as a global community, abandoned bioregionalism and eased into settler mentality, treating land as nothing more than lot and resource. We have fostered a one-sided relationship; accepting the gifts offered by mother earth yet never exercising allegiance, let alone gratitude.

It is this that Robin Wall Kimmerer wishes to impart onto us in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. “In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources,” she wrote, “But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us.” The land is a gift, she highlighted throughout the book, not a commodity—“it could never be bought or sold”. It was on the tails of this centuries-old wisdom that Bioregionalism was founded. Our problem, she argued, run deeper than capitalist billionaires: the sciences we are taught have long “reduced plants to objects; they were not subjects”. In its rigorous practice of safeguarding objectivity, science (in this case, botany) dismissed questions of our human-nonhuman relations—it would be a gross violation of the interval between the observed and the observer. “I should have been told,” Kimmerer recalled her time in academia, “that my questions were bigger than science could touch”.

One of the central indigenous wisdom Kimmerer presented in the book is the Honourable Harvest: “take only what you need and use everything you take,” no greed, no waste. This is what makes for a sustainable symbiosis, Kimmerer argued, and it is this teaching that will show us the pattern of reciprocity between humans and plants. She gave the example of the symbiosis between black ash trees and basket makers: in communities where the inhabitants have transitioned out of basket-making, the community of black ash trees dwindled. This is because in order to flourish, young black ash seedlings need an opening in the forest canopy for light to come in. Without basket makers, mature black ash trees are not harvested often enough, leaving the seedlings in full shade. “The apparent decline in ash trees might be due not to overharvesting,” Kimmerer wrote, “but to underharvesting”. This is also what one of her graduate students, Laurie, found in the case of sweetgrass. Despite being told by the dean of the school that her research is a waste of time (“Anyone knows that harvesting a plant will damage the population”), Laurie went to find that picking sweetgrass actually stimulated growth. After all, Kimmerer wrote, grasses are “beautifully adapted to disturbance…when we mow them they multiply.” Grasses carry their growing points just beneath the soil surface, Kimmerer explained. When they lose their leaves to a mower, a grazing animal, even a fire, they have the mechanism to quickly recover. This is the lesson of grass, she offered: “Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.”

Elsewhere, she warned that rapid urban development bring us further and further from knowing our gifts and responsibilities. It is easy to observe what ecological scientists call “ecosystem services” when you are, like Kimmerer, surrounded by plants of all kinds: they produce food and oxygen, absorb carbon, heal your ailments. “[Ecosystem services] are the structures and functions of the natural world that make life possible,” Kimmerer wrote. Yet, these services remain unaccounted for in the human economy. There’s value we assign to timber and gallons of sap, but there is no tax or levy system for ecosystem services. This begs the question: what kind of responsibility can we exercise as city dwellers, where much of the mother earth’s gifts are wrapped in single use plastic, where we might know sap as sugar in bottles and never learn its origin? Kimmerer wrote, in one of my favourite passages:

“Cities are like the mitochondria in our animal cells—they are consumers, fed by the autotrophs, the photosynthesis of a distant green landscape. We could lament that urban dwellers have little means of exercising direct reciprocity with the land. Yet while city folks may be separated from the sources of what they consume, they can exercise reciprocity through how they spend their money.”

Kimmerer warned us against shifting the burden of responsibility to coal autocrats or exploitative land developers. “What about me,” she wrote, “the one who buys what they sell who is complicit in the dishonourable harvest?” Kimmerer asked us to think of the honourable harvest as “the mirror by which we judge our purchases,” and consider if our purchases are worthy of the lives consumed. “Dollars become a surrogate,” she concluded, “a proxy for the harvester with hands in the earth.”

It’s hard, Kimmerer admitted. We have built for ourselves an ecosystem inundated with deception; a filtered looking glass that enables us to think that the things we consume “have just fallen off the back of Santa’s sleigh, not been ripped from the earth.” This illusion, Kimmerer wrote, “enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.” We have a choice, I’m certain of it. And if the rise of eco-conscious, ethical and recyclable products is anything to go by, I’d say we are treading down the right path. But we still have a long way to go, and Kimmerer reminded us of this through the story of Nanabozho, the Original Man. Nanabozho, part man, part spirit, is the personification of all life forces in the Anishinaabe culture. He was the last of all beings to be created, and his first task was “to walk through the world that Skywoman had danced into life,” in a manner whereby “each step is a greeting to Mother Earth.” His legacy is that we are still trying, Kimmerer reminded us. We must remember to never act with arrogance, or to assume that the land is a gift that will keep on giving without our reciprocity. “We humans are the newest arrivals on earth,” she wrote, “the youngsters, just learning to find our way.”