Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer – bruggen bouwen tussen traditionele wijsheid en moderne kennis

Dr. Robin Kimmerer marks 50 years of Earth Day with a reading of her Sierra Magazine article "From the Pond to the Streets," reflecting on her participation in the first Earth Day in 1970 and where we are today.

“The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet yielding to a soft green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces, grain by grain bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.”

This is how Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about moss, which she studies as a botanist and bryologist. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she joins science’s ability to “polish the art of seeing” with her personal, civilizational lineage of listening to plant life — heeding the languages of the natural world. This gives her a grammar not of feminine and masculine but of animate and inanimate — a way into the vitality and intelligence of plant life that science is now also seeing. It opens a new way for us to reimagine a natural reciprocity with the world around us as “a generative and creative way to be a human in the world.” (Original Air Date: February 25, 2016)

About the Guest:
Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. She is founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books include “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses” and “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.”

Visit our website to read the transcript, download the episode, or listen to the unedited interview: https://onbeing.org/programs/robin-wall-kimmerer-the-intelligence-in-all-kinds-of-life-jul2018/

Visit our On Being Classics Library, where this episode is featured:
https://onbeing.org/libraries/classics/

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"On the Table: Creating a Healthy Food Future" is a special symposium that explores innovative ways to build a healthier, more resilient food future that provides fresh, nutritious choices while protecting public health and sustaining our environment. In this segment, Robin Kimmerer, award-winning writer, scientist, and professor, speaks on the Native American value system and the importance of creating a culture of gratitude and reciprocity in relation to the earth and the food it provides.

Robin Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi, is a scientist, award-winning writer, and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. Dr. Kimmerer is the founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her research interests include the role of traditional ecological knowledge in ecological restoration and building resilience for climate change. In collaboration with tribal partners, she and her students have an active research program in the ecology and restoration of plants of cultural significance to Native peoples.

This symposium, a part of the annual Living Earth Festival, was recorded in the Rasmuson Theater of the National Museum of the American Indian on July 17, 2015.

Current debates on the future of public lands call for a focus on who is included in the ‘public.’ Who is inside the circle and who is not? Whose voices are heard, and whose are silenced? Indigenous people have largely been excluded from decision-making involving public lands—as has their sophisticated environmental philosophy and practice, derived from traditional ecological knowledge. How might the indigenous concepts of the personhood of non-human beings expand our notion of the public good? This talk explores facets of how respectful engagement with indigenous knowledge might re-draw the boundaries of “We, the People” as we consider our relationship to ancestral ‘public’ lands. This was the 2017-18 Clark Lecture.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Reciprocity

Robin Wall Kimmerer on "Reciprocity" for the 28th Headwaters Conference topic “Science, Story and Justice.” Held by the Center for Environment and Sustainability at Western State Colorado University on October 6, 2017. Includes the slides from her presentation.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

The 28th Headwaters:
This year’s topic is “Science, Story and Justice.” Kimmerer will speak as both a botanist and a native woman who learned plants through the stories of her ancestors and the inquisitive explorations of childhood. Topics will explore how language creates both justice and injustice as it unfolds in diverse ways of knowing—from scientific analysis to multicultural narratives.

The conference will feature tours of the Headwaters region, audience interaction and discussion, as well as exciting speakers like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Devon Peña, Mistinguette Smith (of the Black/Land Project), Aaron Abeyta, Michael Howard (of Chicago's Eden Place Nature Center), and Gavin Van Horn (all of whom are featured in the new anthology Wildness: Relations of People and Place).

Indigenous peoples worldwide honor plants, not only as our sustainers, but as our oldest teachers who share teachings of generosity, creativity, sustainability and joy. By their living examples, plants spur our imaginations of how we might live. By braiding indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with modern tools of botanical science, Robin Kimmerer, professor of Environmental Science and Forestry, of Potawatomi ancestry, explores the question: “If plants are our teachers, what are their lessons, and how might we become better students”?

Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year.

Learn more about the Bioneers Indigenous Knowledge Program at http://www.bioneers.org/pages/indigeneity-program/ and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Produced by the Center for Humans and Nature.
For more on the "Conversations around the Green Fire" visit http://www.humansandnature.org/greenfire.

Connect with the 'Women And The Land" via presentations from leading thinkers at the 2015 Geography of Hope conference in Pt. Reyes, California: http://www.humansandnature.org/--videos--conversations-around-the-green-fire--project-29.php

Opening Keynote Address, Reciprocal Healing: Nature, Health, and Wild Vitality - A National Confluence: November 05, 2019, Sedona, AZ.

Learn more about Reciprocal Healing: A National Confluence on our website: https://naturalhistoryinstitute.org/reciprocal-healing/

(Video by Alan Wartes Media)

Robin is Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology and Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, the author of "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants", and is an enrolled member Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Interview recorded at Reciprocal Healing Confluence, November 07 2019, Sedona, Arizona.
Learn more about Reciprocal Healing: A National Confluence on our website: https://naturalhistoryinstitute.org/reciprocal-healing/

(Video by Alan Wartes Media)