BioLogos Book Club | Braiding Sweetgrass

Stump:

Hey listeners, Jim Stump here. This is Language of God and this is our second ever BioLogos Book Club episode. This time talking about the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Besides being an author and writer of this very popular book and others, she’s also a botanist and professor, and she’s an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she pulls these threads together in a really unique and compelling way, describing the world scientifically, but also from an indigenous perspective, the results of deep wisdom and connection to the natural world. Kimmerer doesn’t claim to be a person of Christian faith and even has some critique of Christianity, but she also models the limitations of strict scientific materialism and an openness to the world filled with spirit. We, Christians can definitely benefit from her and her writing.

Here’s how this works. We’ve invited three expert guests to join me in talking about the book. I’ll introduce and chat with them in just a bit for the main section of the book club. Then I asked each of them to bring and read a passage and then we have some conversation about it. We could have gone on and on. There’s so much here to talk about and we hope this will only spark the beginning of a conversation that will continue in living rooms and classrooms and forests, maybe also on the BioLogos forum. 

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Well, Carol, Rick, Debra, welcome to this special Book Club episode of Our Language of God podcast. I’m excited that you’ve all joined us and you’ve all had some interaction with BioLogos before, and let me briefly note a little bit of that and then ask you to introduce yourselves just briefly. So Carol Bremer-Bennett is the Executive Director of World Renew, a nonprofit organization that seeks justice for communities, particularly those that need hope and restoration. She’s a member of the Navajo Nation and appeared on a live stream conversation with BioLogos during the pandemic, talking particularly about the way Covid affected indigenous peoples. Carol, how do you describe your work to those who ask what do you do?

Bremer-Bennett:

Well, thank you. I do want to just say [speaking in Diné language], that is the way that we introduce ourselves in the Diné people or the Navajo nation, as you mentioned, and I named my clans, which are the Water Flows Together People and the Bitter Water People. And I also just want to acknowledge that today I’m not on the great Navajo Nation. I come to you from West Michigan, which is the traditional lands of the Three Fires Council, the Ottawa, the Ojibwe, and the Potawatomi people. And it’s important that we always pay respect to our elders both past and present. And as I’m in this beautiful place that we now call Michigan, I just praise our creator for how those people have stewarded this land throughout the generations. And I’m just always aware of the beauty in this place, still visible today because of their care for God’s creation.

And I always do like to pause and consider how your ancestors and my ancestors have intersected with one another where our stories may be sometimes in conflict but also in harmony with one another. And I work to seek harmony reconciling as God has called me to be a reconciler. So I work with World Renew and that is what we do in community development work and in also our disaster response work. We work in about 30 countries around the world. So I spend a lot of my time traveling the world, both virtually and in real physical space, working in encouraging our staff, helping other people to realize how they can be a part of the story to change people’s lives and transform lives from lives of people living in poverty and experiencing hunger into lives where people can flourish.

Stump:

Rick Lindroth was a Professor of Ecology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He’s been involved with BioLogos for quite some time. Most recently on the podcast episode we did on trees, he had a little bit part in there. And Rick has spoken at our events and I’m very pleased to say we’ll be speaking again at the BioLogos Conference next April. Rick, how do you describe your work or your vocation, the things that you have done with your career?

Lindroth:

Thanks, Jim. Yeah, and it’s a delight to be with all of you again today. So even though I recently retired, you can take the man out of professorship, but you can’t take the professorship out of the man. So I was a professor of ecology for 35 years at the University of Wisconsin Madison, did research on climate change, on species diversity, on forest ecology, and also served for a number of years as an Associate Research Dean. And as I mentioned, recently retired but have taken a new part-time position with a new nonprofit in Madison that is dedicated to the study of Christianity and culture. So I’ll be starting that next month.

Stump:

Well, very good, thanks. And Debra Rienstra is Professor of English at Calvin University. It’s always good and maybe a little intimidating to have an actual expert in literature to join your book club, but Deb was our guest on the podcast for an episode about her book, Refugee of Faith Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders in the Healing of the Earth. I also highly recommend her Refugia newsletter on Substack, which comes out every other Saturday morning. So your work defies easy categorization. Deb, how do you attempt to convey what you do to somebody?

Rienstra:

Well, it might just be that I’m confused, but thank you Jim for inviting us and it’s great to be here with Rick and Carol. Carol, thank you for introducing the place where we’re both from and the complex and beautiful and troubled legacy of this place that I love as well. I think of myself as a writer and a professor. I spent most of my career doing early British literature and more and more got involved with creative writing. I’m mostly a nonfiction writer, and in recent years I’ve been challenged to use my abilities such as they are as a writer and a researcher and a teacher to work on the hardest problem that we’re facing as a human race right now, which is climate change and in particular a faith-filled response to climate change. So I think of myself as still a writer and a teacher. I’ve just been shifting my time toward that more and more while still enjoying the privilege of teaching feisty undergraduates.

Stump:

Well, very good, thank you. So we’re talking about this book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which has been out for 10 years now. I first got my hands on it last year at the BioLogos Christmas party. We do a gift exchange of books that’s structured like a white elephant exchange and you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get, but I chose the present that instead of having a ribbon around it had a braid of grass wrapped around it. And of course I saw that and knew immediately that that must have come from Colin, our podcast producer ’cause he does such things.

And so I picked that book and when I opened it was in fact Braiding Sweetgrass. So this was the first time I think I held the book and then got into it here over these last months. And more seriously just the last couple of weeks to prepare with this with all of you. I thought it might be interesting to hear when you first encountered Braiding Sweetgrass. So let’s go around one more time and hear just a little origin story of when you first encountered the book, Carol, Rick and Debra. We’ll go in the same order.

Bremer-Bennett:

Yeah, my eldest daughter brought home the book towards the beginning of the pandemic, so early in 2020, and it sat on the desk and she had brought two books home and I noticed that one right away because in the Navajo culture, of course Sweetgrass is something that we use in our homes. And so I didn’t realize there was a book about it. And then she started traveling and she left it behind. And so I picked it up and started to read it. And I didn’t even realize until about two or three months ago that it had been out for 10 years. I always thought it came out in 2020 ish. Recently I left on the table for a bit, then I heard something about it on the radio, maybe NPR or something, and I thought, that book is down in my living room. I should pick it up. Until that’s when I first encountered the book. So thanks to my daughter, Lashanda for bringing it home.

Stump:

I think it has had something of a resurgence here in the last year or couple of years at least at the circles that I run in. I’ve heard of lots more people reading it just recently. Rick, what’s your story?

Lindroth:

I think we’re going to have a common theme here of daughters Carol. So I have an adult daughter who has immersed herself for many years into nature reading and writing. And a number of years ago, she was telling me about this great book, Braiding Sweetgrass that I just must read, must read. And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to it. After I finished the other 100 books on my must read list”, and literally was walking into my building on campus one afternoon, glanced up and saw this poster, one of many plastered on the outside door, which said Braiding Sweetgrass. And it was a lecture that day by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

And I thought, to be honest, “Huh, is this the same person my daughter’s been talking to me about?” And sure enough it was, I went to her lecture. So I first actually heard her lecture, had coffee with her, met her a number of other things before actually reading her book. And that of course inspired me to do so. And Jim, I’m sorry if I may very quickly, this is very relevant I think. The National Science Foundation this week announced one of several new major multi tens of million dollar centers. This is the Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Sciences.

Stump:

Very good. And Debra, what about you?

Rienstra:

Well, I got there first. Not before everybody, but I happened to have a colleague, Susan Feltch, who had been teaching an environmental literature course at Calvin long ago. And when I took over that course or at least started thinking about it and also reading Nature Writers for the Festival of Faith and writing at Calvin, she recommended the essay Learning the Grammar of Animacy, which I’m actually going to read an excerpt from later. It’s such a gorgeous essay that I started using it in a creative nonfiction class class and probably about 2017 read the whole book and just thought, “Wow, this is life changing.” And since then my science colleagues at Calvin have also gotten ahold of it, and it’s actually a very important book in the Calvin University curriculum now, and I can talk about that later. But as a publishing story, it’s such a great story.

It came out in 2013, it was an unsolicited manuscript that Robin Wall Kimmerer sent to Milkweed, which was her really smart move on her part. Milkweed is a beautiful publisher. They are a nonprofit publisher. Their vision is they want to publish transformative literature, and it was this gigantic manuscript and they accepted it and they helped her whittle it down and published it without a lot of fanfare, and then it became a slow burn, we call it. And that just meant it’s the dream of all authors to have their book become popular by people passing it along. Word of mouth is the holy grail of publishing success.

And it took really almost 10 years. So it was in 2020 that it finally hit the New York Times bestseller list. Absolutely bizarre thing to have happened seven years after publication. So maybe it had something to do with the pandemic. Everybody’s stuck at home reading, but it’s just such a great story and well-deserved. So maybe one of the questions we can consider as we talk today is why? What is it about this book that just hit the moment so accurately that people just felt they needed this book?

Stump:

I’m curious if any of you have listened to the audiobook of it.

Bremer-Bennett:

I was going to say that Jim, speaking of words and the power of words and language, her voice, when you listen to the book, it draws you in in a whole new way. And so if you have only read the book in the hard copy, I would encourage you to find a way to listen to the book. I still listen to it. Sometimes it’s when I feel pretty frazzled and disconnected, I’ll just push my audible.com and start playing it again wherever I left off before. And it grounds me and centers me. So I really encourage you to listen to it as well.

Stump:

And it is available through Hoopla if anybody uses that, which is an audio app through public libraries that you can not even lease it, you borrow it. You borrow it from your public library and can listen to the audio of it. And it’s very well done. Very well done. So. Well for our conversation, what I’ve asked each of you to do is to pick a passage from the book that you’d like to read to us and to discuss a little bit. So starting with Carol, give us a little bit of context and then read us the passage you selected and tell us why you chose it and then we’ll have a bit of discussion about it.

Bremer-Bennett:

Well, I’m going to stick with a theme of daughters and women and sisters. And so I chose the chapter called Three Sisters, and I was drawn into this because World Renew works in so many places in agriculture and in combating climate change and making sure that farmers can adapt to the changing situation that the climate is bringing to them. It’s so important to go back and to listen to some of those traditional methods of farming. Some of the traditional heirloom crops have been lost. There’s been a lie full to people that the way to make it as a small farmer is to plant cash crops and mono crop and use all the herbicides and the fertilizers and so forth. And we see farmers all over the world who are really struggling and can actually go into debt trying to do those modern types of farming. And I was so struck by the Three Sisters chapter that speaks about a different way to listen to the land and to the plants themselves in how you can have this mutual beneficial relationship between plants.

And we teach a lot of ground cover cropping and green cover manure kind of things. We teach composting, we teach this companion planting. We certainly teach that families should not be growing one crop but have kitchen gardens and all of that. And so this is the chapter that just struck me so much. And then there’s so much to learn in the chapter as well. So I thought I would read a couple of parts starting in the hard copy on page 125 where it talks about how the three sisters, which are corn, beans, and squash start to grow to another. It talks about how the corn starts.

“The moisture triggers enzymes under the skin that [inaudible 00:16:33] the starch into sugars, fueling the growth of the embryo that is nestled in the point of the seed, thus corn is the first to emerge from the ground, a slender white spike that greens within hours of finding the light, a single sheath, a single leaf unfurled, and then another. Corn is all alone at first while the others are getting ready. But drinking in the soil water, the bean seeds swell in its burst speckled coat and sends a rooting down deep into the ground. And only after the root is secured as the stem bend to the shape of the hook and elbow, way above the ground. Beans can take their time in finding the light because they’re well provisioned. Their first leaves were already packaged into the two halves of the bean seed. This pair of flushy leaves now breaks the soil to join the corn, which is already six inches tall.

Squash takes its time, it’s a slow sister. It might be weeks before the stem pokes up, still caught out in seed coat until the leaves split it seems and break free. I just love that image of each seed taking its special time planted at the same time, but yet each one growing differently. And it’s so important she goes on to speak about how important it’s for that corn to be strong and first because it’s going to support the bean once it’s figured out its way as it starts to crawl up. And then the squash later is going to shade and cover that ground. And then of course, underneath the soil a whole nother story is happening, which is that beautiful mutual beneficiality that they have and that reciprocity that they have as they nurture and each other.”

And then jumping to page 130 in the chapter where it talks about then what might this mean, and she writes this. “It’s tempting to imagine that these three are deliberate in working together and perhaps they are, but the beauty of the partnership is that each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as that happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole. The way of the three sisters reminds me of one of the basic teachings of our people. The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world.

Individuality is cherished and nurtured because in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we’re and carry our gifts with conviction so that they can be shared with others, be it among the three sisters, provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when its members understand and share their gifts. In reciprocity, we fill our spirits as well as our bellies.”

I love that image because we can sometimes teach that there’s a polarity between being an individual and being a part of community that things are like a zero-sum game all the time, where if we give up something, then that means we’ve given it up. And so in order to help someone else flourish, it means sacrifice on our part. But really there’s a whole different image here about how we can have that reciprocity and working together so that when one flourishes, the whole actually flourishes.

And I love that idea of coexistence and mutual flourishing. It’s one of the values that I live into in my work. And I just think that one of the things she said, if we really listen to the plants, what we’ll hear them say is, “Use your gift. Use your gift to take care of each other. Work together and all will be fed.” As someone who fights hunger every day, it’s just a new vision to see how when we work together, there is so much that we can accomplish. And then towards the end of that chapter, we’re speaking of page 135, she actually talks about how there’s another sister in this story. And so there’s actually a fourth sister, which I love because the Navajo four is one of their sacred numbers that we have. We have the four sacred mountains and the four colors and the four times of day and the four stages of life.

And so we have all these fours that are important, just like in the Bible, having those important numbers that are Biblical, whether they be seven, forty. There’s numbers completion in indigenous wisdom as well. And so adding a fourth sister spoke to me as a Navajo, and she talks about how there’s another partner in this symbiosis and it’s the planter, it’s us. We’re also an essential partner in this whole relationship. And so we also add to that reciprocity and I love that image.

Stump:

Thanks. There’s a couple of levels of this story, these passages here about the three sisters that I think are so interesting and would love to get the others to comment a little bit. One is just the agriculture of it and hearing that the settlers who came tried to say, “Oh, come on to really plant things. You plant one thing and you plant them in rows”, where the indigenous people who’ve been doing this for generations and generations, this really did work better for the mutuality as you’re talking about them. And then the second level, the interpretation of nature that comes all through this of seeing these elements of nature and relating them somehow to what’s good for human beings in general, this mutuality each using their gift, I think is just really interesting and wonder if the others of you had thoughts about that along those lines as well.

Rienstra:

Yeah. I’m curious to hear what Rick would say about the history of ecosystem science and the way that biology too has had this almost social metaphor, system metaphor. So Aldo Leopold, the father of systems thinking and in environmental science from what I understand, but honestly the stuff he said was exactly what the indigenous people were saying all along. We all need to be citizens in a community including human beings, and we can’t think of species as individuals. We have to think of whole systems. And this is what indigenous wisdom was saying all along. And the West had forgotten about it in this way of looking at the world as competitive and a matter of progress and growth. And that was actually something that we’ve had to unlearn and we’re just beginning to unlearn that, partly thanks to indigenous wisdom. So I’m curious what Rick would say about that.

Lindroth:

Yeah, thanks Deb. I’m going to go back to some of the themes that Jim and Colin talked about in the trees’ episode. Western science of ecology has long been dominated by perspectives of competition as being primary over mutualisms and symbiosis. And in recent years, recent decades in particular, we’ve come to better understand how important mutualisms are, how important these symbiosis are. But I don’t think the science is quite to the point where the public perception of some of these things has taken it. I would say that the science still shows that much of what we understand to be responsible for these very tight networks and systems of operation is actually driven by competition and less so by some of these other factors. So you can’t simplify and say what’s more important, what is less important? They’re all important and context, time and location specific. But I do love the allure of thinking about systems operating in harmony. If for no other reason than that’s an antidote to how much we as humans tend to operate in our own social systems.

Rienstra:

Yeah, that’s really helpful. And I think the competition aspect is in service of this bigger balance, if I’m understanding it right, so it’s not just that everything is happy together, but that the competition serves a larger striving toward equilibrium.

Lindroth:

Well, balance and equilibrium are words that ecologists tend to avoid. That would be a topic for another entire podcast.

Rienstra:

Good to know.

Lindroth:

So yes, we generally don’t think of things wanting to be in balance or wanting to be in equilibrium. They are. And when they get become dis-equilibrated, bad things happen. But I think there’s been too much of the Disney-ism of things, nature just wanting to be in balance because nature is constantly changing and constantly in flux. And so I think we take the metaphor of balance probably too seriously with respect to how nature actually operates.

Bremer-Bennett:

That’s interesting because in Navajo balance and especially harmony, which we call hojo, is an incredibly strong theme and it equates, I think, best to the biblical concept of shalom. And when we look at how we want to live and be and exist and coexist in the world, we go back often as both Christians, but also those who might believe in traditional religion, to that original intent of the Creator and how things were created to be. And in this chapter, she does talk about this is a vision of a blueprint for the world, this idea of balance and harmony, and it doesn’t come easily and it fights our own nature often. In fact, that’s a spiritual biblical concept as well, that we’re always fighting even with ourselves and then beyond ourselves to try to have that kind of harmony. And we do what we don’t want to do. We do exactly what is not going to be good for us. And if we can rest and in some other higher balance and harmony, how beautiful that could be for that mutual flourishing.

Stump:

We’re going to be talking more about the language we use to describe nature and what we can and can’t attribute to it, and how much is metaphorical, how much comes from a different worldview. I think these are really interesting questions and how we apply to them. At the moment I have the unenviable task of pushing us forward to make sure we get through in the space of one episode each of you. So I’m going to turn to Rick and ask Rick to read his passage and we’ll keep the conversation going then.

Lindroth:

Sure. Thanks Jim. There are many parts of the book that just spoke very strongly to me that resonated with my own values. I could have chosen any of a dozen to speak about, but the one I chose for this conversation is the Windigo Footprints chapter. It’s not fun, it’s not pretty. It’s deeply disturbing. So why did I choose it? Because it really resonated with many of the values that I and my family have tried to live out for many, many years. We have two daughters, both of whom would be very quick to agree that for their entire lives we tried to model and teach how not to capitulate to a culture of consumption, how to live well below our means. And that is not easy living in a pretty well-to-do city, having pretty good paying jobs in a pretty fancy neighborhood, frankly. And people look to us and look at us and see, “Yeah, they’re kind of odd, they’re unusual.”

A friend once asked my wife, “What is Rick saving his money for?” As if to suggest that the only reason you would not be spending your money was so that you could spend it later on. It floors me. So when I read this chapter, it just so strongly resonated. So picking up on page 305, remember that the Windigo is a legendary spirit monster in Native American lore.

And she writes, “The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want, consumed by consumption it lays waste to humankind. Windigo is the name for that within us, which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.”

And then she goes on, the next page or two to say that the Windigo footprints of insatiable consumption are everywhere around us. She says, “We’re all complicit. We’ve allowed the market to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.” And then later on next page, she writes, “The indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. It is the Windigo way that tricks us into believing that belongings will fill our hunger when it is belonging that we crave.”

I just go, wow. Amen, sister. Preach it. So that just really resonated with me. I love her descriptions. They’re very powerful and I see those temptations in my own life. As we say, it’s not a problem to be fixed, it’s attention to manage. It’s never going to go away. We always have it. But to recognize the monster that lies beneath and to manage our lifestyles in a way that shows reciprocity and honor and care for the earth around us and the others around us. And these passages are not very far removed from what Jesus taught about the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of lifestyle and summed up, I think best when He asks that question for all generations, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

Stump:

This is one of the most challenging parts of this book for me, going through it and hearing it and reflecting as a Christian, as you’ve just done here, Rick, and making me wonder how closely the western capitalist system has become wedded to Christianity, culturally speaking, and how at odds, contentment is with capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t want people to be content with what they have. You always want more. And seeing this then written in this book in such a way that makes you say the indigenous way of looking at property, at goods, at resources seems so much more consistent with contentment than does the way most of us have been inculturated in capitalist systems. The way your neighbors look at you funny because you’re not spending every—

Lindroth:

That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Bremer-Bennett:

I get to travel around the world and be in indigenous communities, and there is such a richness and a beauty and a wealth in those spaces, in those circles. As I sit on the ground underneath mango trees and think, “I don’t even really know if we should engage here. This is a beautiful place where priorities and people and relationships are so intact and in the way they should be.” I would hesitate to think what we as “the developed world” might bring into those spaces. And World Renew is cautious about how we do that work because we could, as we’re trying to fight hunger and malnutrition and systemic poverty and fight injustices, what we could possibly also be planting with all of those things and harvesting and cultivating, is the idea of a different way of viewing success and consumerism and what it really means to make it in the world.

And so there’s these moments where I just hold my breath and wonder what beauty might be lost in this place as we still fight these very important things to fight. Is this mine to introduce, is this mine to change? Because I do think that relationship and that need and desire for belonging is so important. And so it takes some careful thinking and work and co-creating that with communities because sometimes they’ll be also caught up in this idea of, well, the stuff will somehow solve everything and it doesn’t. It usually create more problems and more despair and it alienates people and isolates people.

Lindroth:

Yeah, I agree with that. And Jim, coming back to your comment about capitalism, I agree entirely that is at the root of much of this, but I think also it doesn’t have to be. And I’m thinking now of a number of times that I’ve traveled, especially in Northern Europe, especially in the Scandinavian countries, the country of my heritage, Sweden has a word lagom, L-A-G-O-M, and it typifies their approach to life and it means just enough. And that could be the Swedish motto, having just enough is just enough. It’s an ideal of contentment and satisfaction with just enough. And so it’s a capitalist country, but you don’t have to be extreme, like many of us here feel compelled to be.

Rienstra:

I’m actually teaching this essay tomorrow in a class where we introduce some big theological categories for students and guess what category this one’s coming under? Yep, that’s right. Sin. I think one of the really powerful things about the essay and indeed the tradition that she’s describing is the use of a story and of an image, the image of the monster, to talk about what we would call a sin, the sin of greed, maybe. I mean maybe there’s other aspects to it, but maybe primarily that’s the leading part of this. And as you were suggesting, Jim, the sin of greed is not one we like to talk about in churches because we want to be nice citizens of a capitalist society. But what we’re running into now is that greed is actually in conflict with what the earth itself can sustain. So I’m really interested in these economic models.

Sometimes they’re called degrowth or different growth or donut economics, where the metrics for success are not just GDP, the metrics for success are other things, even squishy things like happiness of citizens, which of course is hard to measure, but. And all the externalities of the capitalist machine basically are actually taken into account, pollution and waste and how much you do or do not damage an ecosystem or you’re taking a resource from, whether you’re acting out of… So anyway, I’m just really interested in that discussion among economists that may be part of the problem with an extreme capitalist system is what we measure. And if we could just think about measuring other things, maybe we can curb some of these extremes and distortions of the capitalist system. But it’s just fascinating to me that sometimes a story and an image like a monster is much more powerful than any number of graphs and charts.

Stump:

And the monster too is not just in capitalist minded people. And so as you’re saying, it doesn’t have to be this way, Rick, that there are ways, so part of her story of telling this is how do we keep the Windigo where it ought to be? How do we keep it from consuming everything that’s in us? I think that those are the stories then that really jumped out at me in thinking about this. One of my worries, so going down that economic route you’re talking there, Deb, is the scalability concern where I find myself wishing that we had not gone down the path that we have gone and then wondering and worrying about, given that we have gone down this path, how do we transform at the scale that it needs to be transformed in order to live in a more sustainable way?

It seems like it would be fairly easy to do that out on small farms, not so much in a city with 25 million people where these systems are so embedded into the population when it’s at that level. Is it? And I’m a philosopher, I’m not an economist, so we just—

Rienstra:

Yeah, who knows? But I do know people are working on it and I’m just—

Stump:

Yeah, how do we scale this from where we are now to move to something that’s better?

Rienstra:

That’s the question.

Stump:

Instead of just wishing we had done it that way centuries ago.

Rienstra:

Yeah, I mean, we are where we are, and there are so many reasons to be grateful for the industrial revolution and medicine and all that. I’m not trying to say capitalism boo-hiss here, but we are living in a world with distortions and extremes, and I think Kimmerer offers us this alternative vision. I mean, this is not a book about solutions. This is not a book about scalability or economic systems or anything. It’s about deep, deep principles and a vision as you were saying, Carol, this vision of harmony, which is so beautifully resonant with the biblical vision of shalom, and that’s valuable to powerfully convey that vision can actually be part of what shifts the people who do that more technological work, which is of course also crucial. So I think we have to take this text for what it is. It’s this beautiful reconceiving of deep values and a vision for what we’re really after here in life and in the world.

Bremer-Bennett:

And we’re not called to disengage. As Christians we’re called to engage. God placed us in a special role in all of this as well. And so we might try to romanticize and go back. And of course, even as an indigenous person, you can get caught up in people thinking of this time before and this paradise that existed and all of those images that might come up pre the introduction of cultures and the collision of cultures that happened here on Turtle Island. But we are called to engage. And I loved the part, I’m not even sure what chapter it’s from, but it’s about how, it might be somewhere after this Windigo chapter actually, where actually when you studied the plot of the sweet grass that was picked in a certain way and cut in a certain way, and then others that were left untouched, it was actually the sweet grass that was harvested in a sustainable way that flourished even more and produced even more.

And so we can do this. We have to figure out how, but we can do this. I think God created it into all of the gifts that he gave to us so that we can do this and do it well. We just have made mistakes along the way, but I’m thankful for science as well, so we can find out ways that we can do it even better.

Stump:

Good. I need to keep us moving here again. Debra, you’re up next.

Rienstra:

Yeah. So I mentioned the essay Learning the Grammar of Intimacy as my introduction, and I still love this essay, especially to offer to writers to think about the language they use. It’s a beautifully constructed essay because she sets it up to create this building sense of frustration. So in the beginning of the essay, she’s going to learn Potawatomi. She doesn’t know any Potawatomi, she’s going to learn it. And she’s very honest about how hard it is. My students are always shocked that at least at the time of this writing, there were nine fluent speakers of Potawatomi in the world. I don’t know if that’s changed in 10 years. But anyway, she sets this up so that she’s more and more frustrated. And then she has this great moment of epiphany about how Potawatomi distributes verbs and nouns in the language. And it just so happens that Potawatomi has a lot more verbs than nouns, whereas English is the other way.

So what she feels when she has that epiphany is aha, this in the language embeds this sense of beingness of the rest of creation, that we are not the only entities that are beings. So here’s the passage. “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for intimacy in English. You are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a non-human being to an it or it must be gendered inappropriately as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being? Where is our Yahweh?” So she has just explained that interesting word that corresponds in Potawatomi as the word for being as well as in Hebrew. Fascinating. My friend Michael Nelson, an ethicist who thinks a great deal about moral inclusion, told me about a woman he knows, a field biologist, whose work is among other than humans.

Most of her companions are not two-legged. And so her language has shifted to accommodate her relationships. She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks saying, “Someone’s already been this way this morning. Someone is in my hat”, she says, “shaking out a deer fly.” Someone, not something.” And then later she describes how her students grapple with this, and they’re good science students. So on the one hand they say, “Wait a minute. So I guess because of our pronoun issues in English, when you devalue something just by using inanimate language for it”, and another one says, “Well, you can’t just use he and she because that’s anthropomorphism. They’re good scientists.” And finally that paragraph concludes, “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern is to be a human.”

And I think this is a wonderful way and my students are so interested in this idea of creating something more than just two categories, even in a theological framework. So it’s not just God, humans and all the other stuff, which is so often how we reduce and simplify. I mean, we might talk about creation. Creation is amazing. God loves it, God created, but it’s all kind of an it. And there’s part of our experience that recognizes that other creatures have a presence of value. I mean, maybe you don’t want to call other things a person. That’s an interesting experiment that’s happening in the legal field now is what if we call Lake Erie a person? Because in our jurisprudence, only persons have rights. So if we just call… What if we decide we’re going to value things that aren’t persons, other beings, trees, creatures, everybody knows that dogs and cats have little personalities, right?

Horses, armadillos, I don’t know, whatever pet you have, you recognize that every creature has a personality. I think probably Kimmerer would argue that plants in their own way have a beingness and it doesn’t have to be human to have this beingness. So my students are just really fascinated by opening up through language, that sense of something having life. And I think we would even say the life of God. It’s sustained by the creative power of God, and that’s a part of our orthodox theology we don’t often talk about. So it just seems to me like students are really hungry for that, and I am too. I am too. So this idea of beingness that in here’s in the very language of Potawatomi is the insight of that essay.

Stump:

This is really fascinating and it keeps popping up in my life all the time recently. So Rick alluded to the trees’ episode we did recently where part of that was me having to grapple with people saying that trees are people too. And trying to understand what you’re saying there, Deb, of there needs to be another category somewhere between just an object versus a human person. I am curious, Carol, if you can speak at all to this in other indigenous cultures and the ways that people understand these other creatures, and as you say Debra, they have personalities and that very quickly turns into personhood.

As a philosopher, I’m pretty concerned about definitions of what we mean by various things. And what I want to be careful of is to not swing so far the other direction where we’re also attributing obligations. Do other creatures have moral… Are there moral implications? And particularly to bring this in conversation with our faith where I think we say that humans are created in the image of God. I believe all creatures glorify God in their own way, and I think we’re the ones that don’t always do it. We’re the ones that can not… Do other creatures, not glorify God. There’s something different there about us, but I’m also groping for that other category somewhere of recognizing agency—

Rienstra:

Ah, yeah.

Stump:

Of recognizing that this is an individual life form and that it shouldn’t just blend into and all the rest of creation besides us, right?

Rienstra:

Yeah. I mean these are fantastic questions and philosophers, as you know, have fussed around with this. I’m just thinking of Richard Power’s book, The Overstory—

Stump:

Yeah. I’ve read it.

Rienstra:

Where it’s really an experiment in what if we think about trees as having character, as characters to an agency without anthropomorphizing them. They’re still trees. They don’t literally talk, but he just experimented with that and it could have been so dumb, but it’s so brilliant what he does with that. That’s another book my students love. I guess, I think we are in danger of leaning too far toward everything else is an it. I’m not too worried about overvaluing other creatures at this point. I think we’ve undervalued them for so long and under respected their beingness.

I mean, my theory, and this is just my amateur pretend theologian theory, is that of all the things that being made in the image of God can mean and has been thought to mean right now, I think, maybe the most important distinction is moral responsibility, which you alluded to, that of all the creatures, we are the ones who are held accountable in ways that other creatures are not. I mean, I would say all of creation is affected by sin, but we are the ones who are held morally accountable in ways that say the cheetah that kills the Impala or whatever. We might think that that’s an icky thing to do, but that’s not sin on the part of the cheetah. So I feel like that’s maybe the most important thing to think about is besides just the dignity of being human, being made in the image of God is really about moral responsibility.

Stump:

Carol, you were going to jump in?

Bremer-Bennett:

Yeah, I’ll jump in. I cannot speak for all indigenous viewpoints and worldview and so forth, but I can say the impact of some of this misunderstanding and harsh judgment of not making space to acknowledge all of creation as being created and having the spirit and breath and the touch of the Creator in it and on it. And so just like philosophers perhaps have thought about this a lot, theologians and then missionaries who marched forward in their strong theologies had the same. And a lot of indigenous people were roundly scolded, punished, put down, told they were called pagans, whatever, because of the belief that the creation also carries the fingerprints of God, the Creator on it.

And I think there are times where there are indigenous cultures where perhaps the inanimate object is worshiped and given something that’s of more value than really what God intended it for it to have. And I see that as a form of elevating the created to be something that can somehow protect you. Today I’m wearing turquoise, and in the Navajo traditional religion, you wear turquoise because it protects you and there’s belief in what turquoise can do for you. And I don’t wear turquoise for that reason. I wear turquoise because it’s beautiful and it honors my culture. And when I see the turquoise, I think of the Creator. I wouldn’t pray or use the turquoise instead of replacing God the Creator.

And I recognize where it lies in the hierarchy of things, if you will, but it’s all a piece of it. And I think it’s been unfair how indigenous cultures have been put to task and called out on this because you can go into the Psalms, I mean throughout the Bible, you’re hearing of trees dancing and things singing in all of creation. In fact, we’re told that if we don’t see who Jesus Christ is as the Son of God, the rocks, the turquoise will cry out in our place. And we know the creation groans. And so even the Bible recognizes there’s a spirit and there’s a life there that could not be there without the presence of God, the Creator within it. And so I think that that’s something that we have to recognize and honor and start to rethink.

Rienstra:

Yeah, I felt a little bit betrayed when I learned that the word in Genesis 1 for God breathing life into the humans and then God breathing life into the creatures, it’s the same word, nefesh, but it’s traditionally been translated soul for the humans and breath or something for the creatures. And I think you cheaters, come on, grapple with what the Hebrew actually says and let’s work out the details, but don’t be cheating like that.

Stump:

Rick, any thoughts on the agency and personhood of creatures or creatureliness?

Lindroth:

Well, you think that as somebody who has been deeply exploring the science of ecology for 40 years, I might have figured this out. And to be honest, in the last 10 years, it’s becoming more and more real for me and more of a challenge. And I think it’s because of reading things like Braiding Sweetgrass and my own contacts with indigenous movements and people in my own family who are nudging me more toward understanding the larger spirit world around us. Exposure to books and writings like the book When God was a Bird, Deb has written about that.

The only thing I can say is I’m in flux, my ideas are maturing. Check back with me in 10 years, I might have some more things figured out, but certainly I love the idea that there is both the Spirit of God throughout the world, but that beings independent of humans have some form of, I don’t know, sentience of spiritness that really separates them from non-life that is perhaps not all that different from humans. It is different, but that gives them certain traits or personalities that we are just beginning to explore. So like I say, my ideas are not very well-developed. The hardcore scientist of me is softening and I’m embracing some of these other ideas.

Stump:

This is a very good transition to the last little bit I’d like to do here. Our time is going very quickly, but let me read one more passage myself and perhaps get each of you to comment or reflect on it or on the book as a whole, just in conclusion if you’d like to. But I’m on page 346, very close to the end where while Kimmerer has been contrasting the practice of science, which brings us into a intimacy with the world and is humbling, and she says even spiritual for many scientists doing this, contrasting that with some of what you were just saying there, Rick. Contrasting that with a scientific worldview which sometimes reinforces a reductionist or a materialist, even political agendas. And it gives us, she says, “The illusion of dominance and control and it separates knowledge from responsibility.”

In response to that, she writes, “I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous worldview. Stories in which matter in spirit are both given voice.” The next paragraph down, “In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We’re referred to as the younger brothers of creation. So like younger brothers, we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water. Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us.

Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify the virtue of generosity, always offering food.” What if Western scientists saw plants as their teachers rather than their subjects? It might sound heretical to some people to say, “We are lesser beings in the democracy of species. We’ve been weaned on the great chain of being that puts us decidedly above other creatures.” But I was really struck all throughout the book with this idea of plants teaching us, and to support that idea, I’ll do something really radical here and the Bible, as you were just doing earlier, Carol.

In the Book of Job, Job responds to his friends in chapter 12 saying, “Ask the animals and they will teach you, the birds of the air and they will tell you. Ask the plants of the earth and they will teach you. And the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know what the Lord has done?” Can the plants be our teachers? How do we understand ourselves as lesser siblings in the democracy of species? Why don’t we go around one more time, you can respond to that or say anything else that comes to your mind in conclusion, what we might take away or any other thoughts you have. Carol.

Bremer-Bennett:

That’s in Job. It’s also something that Jesus teaches. He points us towards the lilies of the field—

Stump:

That’s right.

Bremer-Bennett:

And towards the bird and calms us and puts us in our proper place to say, “What are you so busy about? What are you so worried about? What are you trying to build up here? Look how I’ve created this and look at the beauty that can be here. Look at the safety and the knowledge that you can have as God tends to the sparrow.” And so I think you’re exactly right. We can get so caught up in our ability and our knowledge and in all the things that we think that we can accomplish or what others have labeled as success. And we can forget that Jesus walked humbly with feet very much touching the soil and simply and pointed people towards really an upside down view of the Kingdom and what people thought could build empires and what really this life is about and who we’re supposed to notice and who we’re supposed to serve.

And so if we can walk and talk and see with the eyes of the Lord, we would notice those who are most vulnerable, whether they be the people who’ve been pushed to the margins and forgotten and told to be quiet and not hurt and they don’t have voice or to the creatures and to the plants.

Stump:

Rick, final thoughts?

Lindroth:

Yeah, I really like the passage you read, Jim, and two words leap out at me and they are reverence and humility. A reverence, well, Deb alluded to this earlier, in much of Christian theology, we have this very hierarchical perspective of the relationships of beings and the earth in the created order. And yet I think that is the root of so many of our problems. And if we saw ourselves so deeply, profoundly embedded in the fabric of life around us, we would have more of a reverence for it, better inclinations to care for it the way that we ought to and I think profoundly greater humility in terms of our own importance. So I love thinking of marrying indigenous perspectives and story perspectives to the sciences because it is like a yin yang. They can compliment each other and bring I think a lot of fruit to bear.

Stump:

Deb, the last word?

Rienstra:

Yeah, exactly what you’re saying Rick, and Kimmerer brings that very theme to the fore in the essay Asters and Goldenrod, where she uses Asters and Goldenrod eventually as a metaphor for the convergence of science and indigenous thinking. And I think my theory as to why this book has become so important to so many people is that we have longed for that convergence of wisdom. So Kimmerer is sometimes critical of a scientism, like a scientific worldview that’s entirely materialist. But she loves science and she speaks that language and she also speaks this indigenous language, and it’s been her life story to put those together. And I think we have been thirsty for this convergence of wisdom. Now she doesn’t converge those two wisdoms with Christianity, but I think that’s what Christian readers are trying to do and she offers such important perspective.

And I would even argue corrective, not to Christianity itself, but to our going adrift on things. So that humility. We’ve been so anthropocentric in Western Christianity that humility is so important. The theme of reciprocity throughout the whole book is absolutely central. And we have, I think especially as Western Christians asked, “Well, what can we take from nature? It’s all for us. What can we take?” And that word reciprocity asks the question, what can you give? And that’s not a question we’ve asked ourselves very much, even though I think it’s part of the Christian tradition. And then the other thing is gratitude. And I am just so put to shame as a Christian by the sense of gratitude in how she describes Potawatomi culture and indigenous culture. And I think we’re often plenty grateful for salvation as Christians, but are we grateful for the earth itself? So I just think those correctives are very welcome, at least from my point of view, very welcome and very needed. And I think there’s a convergence of wisdom to be had as Christian readers engage with this book.

Stump:

Yeah, thanks. And I think that is a good parting word to say. Those are the perspectives we at BioLogos are very interested in supporting, being able to advance. So seeing the wisdom of our religious tradition, seeing the insights of science and how they help us to see a better picture of the whole than either of those does on their own. So well, our time is gone. Thank you so much for your insights, for your time of reading this book, for your time of talking to me here today. We like to end by hearing what you’re going to do next, and particularly in the world of books. What books are on your nightstand right now or next in the queue to be read? Carol?

Bremer-Bennett:

Well, I will admit that Deb’s book, Refugia Faith is on my pile, but it’s actually not the next book I’m going to read, so sorry, but it’s there.

Rienstra:

It’s okay.

Bremer-Bennett:

The next book I’m going to be reading is by Amy Edmondson, and it actually has science in the title or subtitle, The Right Kind of Wrong, the Science of Failing Well. I have greatly enjoyed her fearless organization book, and this book looks at a different kind of landscape than the one we’re talking today, but the landscape of failure and how can we take failure and make sure that failure becomes a stepping stone, that we could have success in the future.

Stump:

Rick?

Rienstra:

I generally have a nonfiction and fiction book going at the same time.

Stump:

That’s a good practice.

Rienstra:

I am about to embark on a book titled Awe, A-W-E, and it’s the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. And so I’ve heard couple of podcasts. Dr. Keltner is a scientist who’s done a lot of scientific work on the subject of awe, and I think that would be very interesting. And I’ve just acquired David James Duncan’s new tome, Sun House all 700 pages.

Stump:

I’m ready to get going on that myself.

Rienstra:

Oh my, I love him and I just really am looking forward to diving into that. I’m about 50 pages in.

Stump:

Deb?

Rienstra:

Oh, I’m always reading a million things. Some of it for class, some of it for the Festival of Faith and Writing, which is taking place at Calvin in April of 24. I think next in this area, I’m trying to finish two books. I’m trying to finish Ellen Davis’s, Scripture Culture Agriculture, which she’s an Old Testament scholar. Brilliant. And then just a delightful book that I’m listening to, Ed Yong, Y-O-N-G. It’s Immense World or An Immense World maybe. And it’s about the sensory experience of creatures. And it’s just every two minutes I’m driving along in the car gasping. Like, “What?” It’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. It’s on the science of what we know about how creatures, what their sensory experience is like. And then probably next on the list, sooner or later when I actually have time to think, because it’s a hard book, I want to read this book called Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. It’s an out there philosophical, quasi theological book on creatures and human beings and creatures.

Stump:

Well, very interesting. I think that gives our listeners lots of possibilities of other things that they might find interesting now too. So thanks again. We’re going to wrap things up here and we look very much forward to talking to each of you again sometimes. So thanks so much.

Rienstra:

Thanks, Jim. It’s been great.

Bremer-Bennett:

[thank you in Diné language]

Lindroth:

Thanks all.

Bremer-Bennett:

Thank you.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations who are applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Get involved at fetzer.org and by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. And BioLogos is also supported by individual donors and listeners like you who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find the link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum, or visit our website, biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.