Braiding Sweetgrass: Main Ideas

The Honorable Harvest

Throughout Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer notes that the ancestral teachings of the Potawatomi (and related nations) do not offer strict “Thou shalt not”-style commandments for dealing with the natural world. Instead, she says, the instructions handed down are guidelines for accepting gifts from nature and giving back in turn. This system of reciprocity is embodied in the ideal of the Honorable Harvest, a term used throughout the book and explained at length in a chapter of the same name. 

Kimmerer’s most sustained discussion of the Honorable Harvest comes halfway through the book. There, she suggests some basic principles and relates them to traditional herb-gathering practices. Herbalists know, she says, not to take the first or the last plant and never to take more than half of the plants they find; this self-restraint will ensure that the plant can continue to flourish. Even within these guidelines, however, people of good conscience can disagree about how to harvest wild plants honorably. The research Kimmerer supervises in “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” tests two conflicting ideas, both traditional, of how to pick sweetgrass so that it thrives and propagates. 

As Kimmerer points out, the Honorable Harvest sometimes raises ethical questions that are not easily resolved. It is easy, she observes, to harvest blueberries or pecans honorably, since the plants rely on their fruit being eaten. It is more challenging to reconcile the Honorable Harvest with practices such as hunting, trapping, or fishing. Kimmerer holds that it is possible to take an animal’s life in a way that is tantamount to accepting a gift; likewise, it is possible to harvest fruits and vegetables in a way that is “dishonorable”—that is, ungrateful and exploitative—even if no plants are killed in the process. 

Communalism

The “more-than-human world,” Kimmerer says, is inescapably communal. Pecan trees fruit all at once, seemingly by consensus, in order to ensure that there are enough nuts to overwhelm predators and seed new trees. Prairie grasses rely on ruminants, such as bison, to graze down the vegetation and fertilize the soil. Even predators play their part—for example, grizzly bears bring fish bones and carcasses into the woods during the annual salmon run, providing the trees and understory plants with valuable nitrogen and minerals.  

For Kimmerer, humanity faces the increasingly urgent task of relearning how to be a part of this natural community. In truth, humans have never truly existed apart from nature, even if technology and material wealth have obscured this fact in some societies. A simple but significant example are the many domesticated plant and animal species that directly rely on humans to manage their habitat by weeding, watering, and so forth. Even seemingly remote wild species, however, are linked to humans and human activity: lichens, in some ways extremely hardy organisms, are highly sensitive to air pollution. Humans, in turn, depend on the ecosystem for food, fresh water, and clean air. The question they face is thus not whether to participate in the ecological community—there is no “opting out”—but how to do so.

Science

Kimmerer argues for the value of scientific inquiry even as she recognizes its limitations. In the first part of the book (Planting Sweetgrass), she tells of her early curiosity about the natural world and her parents’ imparting of respect and reverence for nature. When Kimmerer goes to college and pursues a major in botany (“Asters and Goldenrod”), she is motivated mainly by a desire to understand how the different plants fit together into the landscape. She does not discriminate strictly between scientific questions (e.g., what ecological factors make goldenrod and asters co-occur in certain settings) and “unscientific” questions (why the two plants look so beautiful together). Thus, Kimmerer’s initial experience of science at the college level is something of a shock. She learns to distinguish—and value—questions that can be neutrally posed and empirically tested—questions about how things work. 

As Kimmerer comes into her own as a biologist, she grows increasingly confident that science is not the only “way of knowing,” and she finds that some of the best scientific ideas come from nonacademic sources. Traditional ecological practices often become traditional precisely because their benefits can be sustained over long periods of time; they are “adaptive” behaviors, in biological terms, and this in itself makes them worthy of serious scientific investigation. As a researcher and educator, Kimmerer remains professionally committed to scientific methods of inquiry, and she explains that these have considerable value in assessing the impact humans have on their environment. She points out, too, that scientific inquiry cultivates its own kind of wonder through the close observation and fitting together of details. Yet she observes that science cannot capture everything there is to appreciate about an ecosystem or the species within it. Moreover, scientific findings are often pressed into the service of a worldview that puts humans at the top of the hierarchy and all other species below. Traditional value systems—like the Indigenous teachings Kimmerer presents in Braiding Sweetgrass—provide an ethical “why” that complements the “how” questions of science.