‘We are kin to everything’

From the Nature Briefing of March 5, 2025

In her hit 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, made the argument for bringing together knowledge from Western and Indigenous science. In The Serviceberry, she turns her microscope on the damaging disconnects between capitalist economics and the circular economy of nature. “What are the boundaries of the self?” she asks. “If we define the self to be just an individual and their material needs in the world, that’s one kind of economy…

I want to say, “Oh, okay, what would an economy look like if we advanced self-interest when the self is expanded to our natural kinfolk?”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, recently published The Serviceberry, which explores the economies of nature. In an e360 interview, the Native American ecologist discusses reciprocity, gratitude, and aligning human law with ecological law.

“There’s judgment and memory and learning in organisms that we have previously dismissed as really beneath our attention.”

“The language of natural resources suggests we own them, we deserve them, whereas I want to remember that it’s a gift.”