Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

2026-05-31 Tags: books, books-nonfiction

The book discusses melding science as a process for understanding the world with a Native American culture of respect and sense of reciprocal obligation towards nature. Kimmerer is a botanist and professor.

She discusses science as a process vs our collection of values and expectations we've attached to science, that it is utilitarian and primarily valuable in allowing us to control our environment and better ourselves. She discusses inherent bias in academia towards the accumulated knowledge of native American culture, for instance that sweetgrass is adapted to thrive under human harvesting.

In the face if climate change I found the call to mutual care for nature pretty compelling. In some sense human love and care of nature is self serving, nature is important to our well-being, we benefit spiritually as well as materially from biodiversity and thriving ecosystems.

But balanced ecosystems are not a law of nature, mass extinctions have happened before many times. Animals don't have the same sense of reciprocity towards nature that Native American cultures do, they are kept in balance by feedback loops and a constant arms race of adaptation. In time of plenty, populations grow until there is no longer plenty, and starvation is widespread in nature.

Despite that, I fully buy that we should be grateful for the balance and diversity of our world, and use our own gifts of knowledge and planning and agency to preserve what we can, for our and their sakes, because I think that's a better world to live in.

A big takeaway for me was an understanding of humans as a (potentially) beneficial part of nature, not just interlopers that bring harm. America before European colonization was not pristine nature, it was fully in use by humans, just in a way that wasn't extremely extractive. She isn't arguing for a world in which we fully sequester "nature" to keep it safe from humans.

Kimmerer only briefly touches on what I think is the strongest historical argument for that view - that native Americans regularly burned massive swaths of woods, to clear brush and attract deer, prevent out of control unplanned fires from accumulated fuel, or create farmland or prairie, not just for hunting. See Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart. Many plant species require regular fire to grow. In that regard they were quite willing to radically reshape nature towards their ends, they just knew how to do it in a sustainable way.

Kimmerer talks some about how we (non-native Americans) need to approach becoming indigenous to this place, and accepting the obligations to nature that come with that. She talks about the power of their cultures' stories to teach us how to relate to nature, and that those of us outside of those cultures can learn from those stories while still needing to craft our own.

That's a super interesting "exercise for the reader" to me - I find intellectually valuing and wondering at nature easy, while I find forming an emotional or spiritual connection to nature stilted, like inventing a new religion and pretending to believe in it. Maybe I need to just spend more time outside, and it comes easier.

The book has many sections about her experiences, including many moments of just being a human body in the woods or swamps or streams. Which I liked! I didn't just need a philosophical and sociological argument, I think it strengthens her case that our relationship to nature should be personal and moral.

Reviewing what I thought she put forward as her thesis and where she spent her time, I don't think she actually made a strong case for what science brings to the table in this marriage, potentially because the merits of science are already so obvious and valued in our culture.

She does present a critique about our scientific institutions, and the barriers we put between gathering knowledge and making moral/value claims about the world, as well as snobbery towards traditional ecological knowledge.

I'd be very curious about what has changed in the twenty plus years since she published the book, in areas like interdisciplinary studies, and partially because of the book itself. I ironically was reading How To Do Nothing before, and The Overstory right after, both of which were very inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass.

She also doesn't spend much time on specific indigenous knowledge about nature that science should incorporate, compared to indigenous attitudes towards nature. For example she does discuss indigenous sweetgrass harvesting techniques her grad student studied. I would have liked to hear more.

Questions I had

What does this look like in my own life, as somebody with an excess of free time? I've started picking up trash around town a lot, which feels therapeutic and like a way to connect with and "be from" a place, but it's definitely spending time walking around roads and houses, focused on trash more than plant and animal life, and inspires in me anger at cigarette butt litterers more than awe and gratitude at nature.

I also spent the book wondering what to do with eight billion humans - as I understand it cities are the best way to stash the majority of human lives, we can't all own a little farm on fifteen acres. (Okay, my napkin math says we get 5.8 acres per person in the US, if you leave no land for anything but our farms.) But cities by their nature might make humans feel more separate from nature.

What does "nature" look like when access for most humans is carefully laid out hiking trails with a "don't step off the path" sign?

What would native american land practices have looked like in a world of 342 + 40 million people (us and canada), instead of (per wikipedia) a north american population of 2.5 to 7 million pre-colonization?