The Antidote To Not-Enoughness | Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing? That sense of insufficiency, of lack, of not enoughness that you may feel sometimes or all of the time, it is super common and also super destructive. Speaking personally, it's at the root of so much of my unhappiness and so many of my dumbest decisions.

Part of the problem here is that so many aspects of our culture and our economy are deliberately inculcating us with a scarcity mindset. The idea that we'll finally be happy when we make the next purchase or when we earn as much as our wealthiest neighbor or when we get the abs of our favorite influencer, I could go on. Today, we're going to talk about a deep, but readily available antidote to this sense of lack.

My guest is Robin Wall-Kimber. She's a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is perhaps best known for her best-selling book, Braiding Sweetgrass. She's now written a new book called The Service Berry, which is about a plant whose behavior is a model not only for our individual lives, but potentially for, she argues, rethinking the global economy.

So we talk about that and we also talk about how to reclaim our stolen attention, practices for gratitude, counterintuitive advice on wealth and security, and the fascinating idea of plants as people or the study of plant cognition. Robin Wall Kimmer right after this.

One quick note before we get started here, if you're starting to think about holiday gifts for the meditator in your life, head over to the shop on danharris.com for a limited 15% off site-wide market calendar. The sale runs from November 25th through December 2nd. Meanwhile, over on the Happier app, they've got personalized meditation practices that fit any schedule.

which is especially relevant in the midst of the holidays and all of the stress that comes with it. From quick meditations to mindful cooking videos, happier can help you stay grounded through the season. And now through December 6th, you can get 40% off a yearly subscription. Go to happier.com slash four zero to get your discount. Dr. Robin, while Kim are welcome to the show. Thanks for inviting me and glad to be here.

I'm glad you're here, and congratulations on your new book. Speaking of which, I'm going to open with a very basic, obvious question, which is, what is a service berry?

Service berries are a beautiful native shrub that produces these berries that are across between like a blueberry and an apple. They're really, really delicious. There's all kinds of different service berries depending on where your listeners are. They might have, you know, 10 different species. But the one that the book is really focused on is one called Saskatoon's.

Why did you name a whole book after the Saskatoon service barrier?

Yeah. Well, you know, I've been intrigued with thinking about the way that we create economic systems, which are allegedly to deliver goods and services to people. And so I think about, in the name of the serviceberry, think about all of the ways that it provides for the ecosystem that it's part of, the way it provides for pollinators and birds and soil and people.

So it seemed to me to be a really good living metaphor for thinking about the economy of nature because it's such a generous plant. Can you say more about the generosity of this plant?

Yeah, you know, this is true of almost every element of a habitat. But it's one of the first plants to bloom in the spring when pollen is hard to find. So those early pollinators are fed by this tree. And then the berries start to form after those flowers are pollinated. And they can be so abundant in the right years that they bend the branches low. There are so many berries.

And that notion of generosity of the planet world is really key to thinking about nature as a model for economics, because there's more berries there than that plant needs to reproduce itself. And so it provides an interesting model to think about what do we do with abundance? What is our response to abundance?

But there are all kinds of birds that rely on the service berry for the calories and the nutrition that are there. Contemporary and traditional indigenous peoples have relied on the service berry for cultural foods as well.

in my Potawatomi language, the name for service berry is Bozakman, which means like the superlative, the best of the best. And these plants and the berries that they produce were so abundant that they became a really important element of pemican, of a stored food resource that people relied on and also became part of the indigenous trade economy.

which is another reason that it's an appropriate plant to think about in terms of economic systems. So just to see if I can restate your thesis thus far, this berry, which in the right variety, specifically the Saskatoon variety of the service berry, is really delicious and you like it. And the way the shrub operates in nature is a model for how we could

operate our economies, which the economy sounds a little technical in some ways, but you just mean like, how are we going to interact with each other in terms of providing what we need in order to survive?

precisely at the most basic definition of what we mean by economics of how do we provide for ourselves and for each other. And the way that the service berries do it, as indeed most plants do, is in providing abundance for all in a reciprocal manner. Because those berries that are so delicious for us, or the robins, or the bluebirds, or any of the others who are sitting there filling their bellies,

is there is an exchange involved here. They're getting the delicious carbohydrates and the energy from those berries, but they're also providing a service for the berry, right, of carrying those seeds to new habitats. Plants can't move, so there's an exchange going on here. They say, well, you birds can move, and so we're going to entice you with these delicious, nutritious berries so that your gift of movement

will reciprocate our gift of making berries. Does that make sense? Yeah, the service berry is not self sabotaging in its selflessness. It is getting something out of the berries it is providing to the world.

Yes, yes. And that's the way most natural systems are based is on an exchange of goods and services between different species. Those exchanges are reciprocal, maybe not directly reciprocal, but there are ways in which in return for the gift of those berries, the whole system thrives. In return for those early flowering

shrug branches that are so beautiful, all white against the hillsides in the springtime. The reciprocity there is of course the pollen to the pollinators, but then those pollinators become food for the warblers that are migrating. And so in every step of the ecosystem, there is generally speaking a reciprocal exchange between beings. Nobody's hoarding the berries.

Nobody is keeping the gift and the energy is all in motion. And to me, that's the important thing about the economies of nature is that they're circular and that it's not a matter of accumulation by individuals, but well-being flows from sharing what you have and reciprocating so that the product, if you will, keeps being shared in ecological cycles.

You've already covered this a little bit, but maybe I'll prod you to put a really fine point on it. The balance and reciprocity of natural ecosystems contrasts in your view with the manmade economy that is pushing the earth in some quite unhealthy directions. Am I correct about that? That's the central thesis of the book. Yeah, exactly.

Can you say a little bit more about what is out of whack in your view about the economic system that is prevailing planet wide right now made by humans? Well, there's a number of elements to it, of course. And one of the ones that feels most important is this issue of overconsumption and hoarding of what

economists call resources of wealth, where wealth is understood as an individual accumulating, in many cases, much more than they need. And sometimes that happens in nature, but not so often. It's more a matter of saying that wealth is produced by sharing. Wealth is produced when all beings in the ecosystem have what they need.

And I think that parallel is true for humans, human communities as well. That service berry doesn't keep those berries for themselves. It doesn't keep the sugars and the energy that they've made in that spring sunshine to themselves. They take what they need in order to grow and flourish. And then all the rest of that abundance is shared in the form of berries that then have these ripple effects throughout the system.

So as I'm listening to you and in preparing for this conversation, there are, and please correct me if I'm wrong and I do this, but in my view, there appear to be two levels on which we can have this conversation and they're connected, of course, but there's the structural level.

how we're structuring our economy, which I actually found totally fascinating. And then there's the individual level, how we're operating in the world. That is the primary concern of the show. They're, of course, linked and I want to cover both of them. But let me just stay on the individual level for a moment.

Because while I find your work to be a very interesting critique of global capitalism, I also find it to be a really useful prod for me out of my, and I don't think I'm alone in this pervasive, often subconscious sense of lack, not enoughness, scarcity. And so I want to read in that vein a quote from you to you to get you to say more about it. You say that recognizing enoughness

is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Absolutely. You know, the notion of contentment, the notion of homeostasis and balance is I think one of the things that we seek as human people for our own well-being and the well-being of land and people around us, but a capitalist market economy says that's not good enough. You know, all of the messages that we get is we have to consume more. We have to be more. We have to have more as individuals.

And what this metaphor, this natural metaphor offers us is to say, let's think about enoughness. When we have enoughness,

That also means that all the abundance that which is left over, we have to be able to share. So this idea of contentment and abundance as a radical act in a consumerist economy is really, really important. As we resist those messages to consume more, we then create

justice around us, but I think also we create for ourselves this sense of well-being and security, which after all is what we're craving, that sense of being taken care of.

And I'm going to be all right. And I have enough to be sharing with others and creating justice and abundance all around me. That's what I want as a human. That makes me feel right and in good relationship with the world. And that sense of abundance creates a kind of peacefulness, I think, to say nothing of gratitude for the abundance that the natural world provides.

You said a lot there that I want to unpack. Well, I guess my first question is, I find, and now I'm speaking for myself, the idea of enoughness to be very compelling and attractive, given that I am somebody who's raised in a capitalist context. And I think that sort of that, as I mentioned earlier, that sense of lack, I think made its way into my marrow in ways that I would love to uproot if possible.

And I'm curious what you think the root is to that sense of enoughness. What can we do to feel that? I love that question, Dan. And to me, much of that sense of enoughness and the way that that has been stolen from us by corporate America is the way that our attention has been hijacked. What do we pay attention to?

You know, one of the things that the statistic that I often offer up, which has been that, you know, our ancestors knew the names of hundreds of plants and animals and birds around us. But today, the average American can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than 10 plants.

To me, that's a stunning piece of evidence about our disconnection from the natural world. How can we possibly see the abundance of the natural world if we don't even know the beings who are around us, right? So it seems to me that one of the mechanisms that has promoted this is stealing our attention. Our attention from the things that really do take care of us, really do create beauty and balance and wellness in the world.

and say, well, don't pay attention to those plants in your backyard. Pay attention to this pharmaceutical. Pay attention to this product. You'll feel better. You'll feel happier. Well, I think rarely is that true. But the kind of wellness that happens when you know the trees around you, when you know in one example that I love to use is

There's a little plant that is probably in the backyard of almost all of your listeners in North America anyway, and that little plant is called Heal All. You know, if you learn any plant, how about one called Heal All? There are these plants with all of these gifts that are right there, but we don't pay attention to them anymore.

So I think one of the powerful ways that people can participate in this resistance to consumption is to reclaim your attention. Reclaim your attention from what economic and market forces tell you to pay attention to and instead cultivate an attention to what really sustains us and an attention to gratitude

So I don't draw a line under that because I think it's important. I want people to understand it. And I want to make sure that I understand it for myself. I think what you're saying is if you're looking for that sense of contentment, enoughness, one root is to stop staring at Instagram and instead get to know the natural world around you.

That is a great encapsulation of what I'm saying, absolutely. You know, when you travel and you go someplace where you can't read the street signs or the store signs or hear the language or engage with people because of a language barrier, that always makes me feel uncomfortable. And I feel like I can't create the relationships that I might want. I don't feel as secure and joyful when I don't know who's around me.

or in your apartment building. If you don't know the names of your neighbors, how can you go knock on their door? Either to invite them over for tea or because you need help. And to me, that's the same kind of contentment and security that comes from knowing who are the plants and animals around you.

Is it because, I mean, I can imagine the contentment to arrive from several sources. First of all, if you turned off social media and we're focusing on pretty much anything else, I think that would lead to greater contentment.

But if you make it a one two punch and turn off social media and get in touch with the natural world, I think that is, I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that would be an anti-anxiety pill that would be free and with no side effects. But I'm hearing something else, at least that's probably several other notes that you're sounding. One of them is that, and I think I'm hearing this correctly, but you'll correct me if I'm wrong, is that getting to know the plants and animals around you

It kind of takes you out of the story of you, this, this misapprehension that we walk around with that we're like isolated egos, threatfully navigating a hostile world. Whereas if you actually can create a sense of connection to the nature around you, that story softens somewhat. How does that all go down with you?

Exactly right. First of all, to your first point, yeah, there's tons of biophysical evidence about how nature engagement with the natural world is good for us, right? That's a whole different story about the way it lowers stress hormones, increases attention, betters are immune system lowers blood pressure, all of those things simply by being in a green place. But yes, if you take it one step further,

beyond all those wonderful benefits of breathing forest-breathed air, right? You get to a place of feeling cared for by the living world as well. That's so interesting. A word you've mentioned a couple of times, and it comes up in your book quite a lot, is gratitude. Maybe say a little bit more about that. Yeah, gratitude to me is a really powerful form of attention that grounds me in

my daily life, I have daily gratitude practices that bring me into what feels like a really peaceful and joyful relationship with the living world. But you know, with real gratitude, and I don't mean just like, you know, the polite thank you that we

throw off, you know, 100 times a day without thinking about it. I mean, the kind of gratitude that comes when you recognize that your life is contingent upon the beingness of all these others.

One of my favorite ways to practice that is because I can do it either here, you know, in a rural landscape where I live or when I'm traveling in urban in places and I feel really kind of lost and estranged. What I do is that think about the gratitude in breath to think that when I'm breathing in

to go beyond that I am breathing in and all the goodness that comes from that. They say, well, where did that ear come from? I am breathing in oxygen that just moments ago was breathed out by plants.

And that creates for me this real bond of, oh, my life is completely contingent on the breath of plants. And to me, that is just, it fills me up not only with breath, but with gratitude to think, oh my gosh, I live in a world where photosynthesis keeps everything going, which draws your attention to the sun and to the winds and to the trees who are all around you. And then

in that breathing in, sending gratitude to all the beings who makes that breath possible. But then, of course, there's the exhale. And in the exhale is I'm breathing out carbon dioxide. That carbon dioxide minutes later is taken up by the plants in order for them to live. And so there is very literally

The practice of my breath is your breath.

your breath is my breath. And so creating that sense of reciprocity makes me feel like I belong here. And it engenders this big sense of gratitude for all the other beings who are around me, acknowledging that my very existence is based on them. And so that's to me the kind of gratitude

I'm talking about a really deeply understanding the permeability between the life of a human being and the life of a maple tree or the grasses. I love that. You mentioned that you do several gratitude practices. Is there another one that's worth sharing?

Yeah, you know, I, on a good day, not every day, but on a good day. I love to speak in my mornings with kind of a gratitude inventory. I walk up to the top of the hill behind my house or sometimes if I've got a

meeting coming up, just the tree in my backyard, but to do a gratitude inventory of, to send out my gratitude to that Bluejay who is calling for those warmth of the sun on my face, for the mushroom that's sprouting up from the ground around that tree. It is a kind of

opening to everything around me that takes me out of me and into the world. And to me, that's the gratitude practice that means the most to me is it's an opportunity to remember that I'm not alone here, that we're all connected, you know, the notion of interbeing with all of those beings.

And so rather than being kind of a rote recitation of what I am grateful for, I try to be really alert and attentive to everybody around me so that I give my gratitude to them. And almost always, it's the magic of thinking, oh my gosh, how lucky am I?

how lucky am I to live in a world that has the smell of grass in the morning, and it creates that sense of abundance and contentment. But even more so, I think it is that importance of cultivating what Dan, what I'm going to call a sense of humility.

of recognizing that I'm not alone here. I'm not in charge of all of this. I am the grateful recipient of the gifts of the world, which then opens the questions, what am I going to give back in return for all of this abundance? What am I going to give back?

You brought me exactly where I was hoping to go there with that question you asked at the end. Like, okay, now I'm grateful. Well, how do I give back? And I'm going to read another quote from you to you. And this is a counterintuitive notion, I think, but it certainly lands for me. The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met

And this is me interjecting here. I think this is the counterintuitive part. The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met by sharing what we have. Can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah. You know, I think a lot about why do we consume too much? Why do we accumulate too much? And at root, some of it has to be our sense of security. We want those things in order to know that we'll be safe.

and will, and the people we care about will be safe and will. And that is certainly one way towards security is to get everything that you can and hang on to it. And that is a very Western notion, right? But the other way that you can be secure is in having good relationships.

with people around you. And in this case, I would include the more than human people as well. But that idea that when we share with others, we create these bonds of

of gratitude, we create bonds of belonging and good feeling toward each other so that, you know, I don't necessarily need to own a power drill, right? Not every one of us has to have a garage full of

tools, but we have to have good neighbors that I can, you know, call up my neighbor and say, hey, could I borrow your drill? I can have the wealth of that without owning it. So it's good relationships that I think provide security as well. You know, Dan, it feels to me like we have kind of created an economy which is all about accumulating belongings.

But what we really crave is belonging and that belonging.

can come from those relationships and sharing with each other. And you know, my neighbor might have a power drill, but I make a mean elderberry pie. So I'm going to, you know, bring a pie to him. And it's not a direct exchange, but it's making of relationships that reciprocal kinds of relationships that to me create a

a sense of security, which is more enduring than owning everything for ourselves. Yeah, this is a very different vision of security and contentment and enoughness than the one we're sold by the dominant narrative. I had a guest on a couple of months ago, Mia Birdsong, who points out that

there's an etymological link between the word freedom and the word friendship, which is, I think, incredibly compelling that we're kind of looking for happiness in all the wrong places. And instead of getting more likes for your Instagram post or getting the next promotion or making the next purchase, and I'm not against all of those things, but instead of pinning all our hopes on that stuff,

actually having positive relationships with the humans and non-humans around us. That is, and there's a ton of evidence to support this, is the quick and reliable route.

And the enduring root, the enduring root, right? Because it can take so many different forms in terms of acting on those relationships. What can you and the folks here in relationship with create together? And, you know, back to the notion of the ways in which the living world, that natural world, plant the world, teaches us this. You think about trees, for example. Trees are so long lived.

They can't run away from resource shortage, right? They can't run away from pests. They can't run away from all sorts of negatives. So what does that mean? How do they survive then? It's because they're long lived, they create good relationships.

They thrive when they create a multiplicity of good relationships with a pollinator, with a squirrel who carries the fruit, with the mycorrhizae who are feeding the soil. I think trees in particular are really good teachers of what does it mean to create relationships that sustain us over the long term.

And in that case, it's like the serviceberry how to trees do that by not accumulating everything that they have, but by sharing it. And they create enough good relationships that allow them to have security over time.

Coming up Robin Wall, Kimmerer talks about how to change your relationship to the living world. The argument that competition may not actually be the primary factor of evolutionary success and the science of biomimicry.

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All right, let's bump up to the structural level for a second. This is not an area where I'm an expert at all. But I'm always struck when I have guests on who level critiques against capitalism. It forces me to think about like, what are my attitudes about capitalism? And I'd be interested to explore this with you because I don't think my ideas are fully formed. But I think if forced, I would say capitalism has a lot of flaws.

that are really showing up right now in the various ecological disasters we're looking at, but also in some of the psychological ramifications, hyper-individualism, loneliness, disconnection, division. And I have not seen a system that works better and that there is some brilliance to market forces. So anyway, I say all that just to not, I don't have a pointed question to you, but just an invitation to think about this together.

I would really welcome that, Dan, because this is the moment when I say, I'm a botanist. I'm not an economist. As an ecologist, as an environmentalist, I see the wages, the outcomes of unrestrained extractive capitalism.

But I'm not an economics scholar or even an economic thinker. I'm just asking the question, why have we created an economic system that destroys what sustains life? That doesn't make any sense to me.

And so then I turn to the natural world and say, well, how does the natural world create abundance and sustain life? And what could we learn about shaping an economic system that does that? And so that's really the inquiry to look at economics based on give and take on reciprocity.

on what would an economy look like where the currency of that economy was gratitude. That exchange comes because we have good relationships with other people and we have a responsibility to act on the gratitude that we feel for how they shared with us. And so we share with them.

And I don't have any illusions that this notion is going to topple capitalism anytime soon and not making that argument at all, rather that we ask that same question of why have we created this system? Why do we tolerate a system that destroys the planet? And what could the planet teach us about alternatives in gift economy and in economies based on sharing and cooperation rather than

accumulation and competition. You may or may not be aware of this given your relationship to social media, but this notion of just asking questions has gotten a bad rap recently. I think unfairly, I think just asking questions is a great thing to do. But I think there are some people who have abused

the just asking questions posture to say a bunch of provocative shit that's not very helpful. But I personally think that what you're doing here of asking these questions and then infusing it with an area where you do have genuine expertise, which is botany in the natural world, is really compelling and provocative in a good way. And so just to be clear about what your goal is here,

or kind of to restate what you've already said. You're not trying to say, I know how to fix capitalism. What you're trying to say is, we have a problem clearly. I don't think, I mean, I think we can stipulate to that most reasonable people. We have a problem with some of the excesses of capitalism. Let me look at what I know about a system that I know that does naturally lead to balance and reciprocity and see if I can pose some questions and make some observations that would help change the tone and tenor of this discussion.

That's exactly right. You refer to this vision you have for a different way to do economics as the gift economy. And you're not the only one to talk about this, the gift economy. It's a real thing. And you point out some examples of how this operates in the world world. Can you tell us a little about some of these examples?

Yeah, sure. There's a way in which we can understand that the service berry, for example, provides an exemplar of a gift economy. But in our own daily lives, we have lots of examples of micro gift economies, right, of

The ones I think about are things like the simple example of when you're done with the book, you give it to somebody else. You don't go buy another one. You don't hoard it. You share it, right? That's a micro gift economy.

But there are many examples coming up at the grassroots level, at community level, all around us, of gift economies, of sharing material wealth, of saying, let's have a community tool shed, so that we don't all have to own something, so that everybody in our community has access to what they need, not by owning it individually, but by having neighbors and sometimes infrastructures to do that.

Those are some examples you asked, you know, what is my relationship with social media? Just about zero. But at the same time, you know, I am blessed by being surrounded by students who have a, shall we say, deep relationship with social media.

And they led me to think about social media as a gift economy. I understand sometimes it is monetized, but they say, oh no, it's a gift economy of knowledge. You can learn to do anything out there because of sharing of knowledge. So that's an example. Another familiar one that I love is the little free library that is on many street corners where we live. The gift is ideas and books.

And you don't have to own those books. You put them all in a little place in your neighborhood so that everybody has access to them. Food co-ops, free farm stands. There are just lots of examples out there in our lives of gift economies. And so I ask the question of how and if we should scale those up, what does that look like? And scaling up from

passing a book to a neighbor, to a little free library, to the public library. That is, I think, a continuum of scale, of gift economy. And so then how does our economic and political system provide adequate support for those places where resources are shared, like public libraries, like open space, like clean water, the commons?

I keep leaping back and forth between the structural level of this discussion and the individual level of this discussion. So now I'm going to ask a question that kind of gets us back to the individual. Would it be correct for me to conclude based on all of the foregoing that your argument is that sure this discussion may not topple global capitalism? And I, Dan Harris, I'm not even sure we should or what would come after it. But if you're interested in

taking a few steps toward at least infusing global capitalism with some of the spirit of the natural world and the gift economy. You don't need to try to boil the ocean and get it all done this afternoon. You can just start participating in some of the gift economies around you, or even if there is none around you, if there are none around you, to start one on your own.

Yeah, exactly. Right. You know, when we think about the world as gift, which is really part of my ethos and very much part of our Potawatomi conception of the world is that we humans, as the younger brothers of creation, get to take advantage of all the gifts of all the other beings that are around us,

But in our way of thinking, gifts come with responsibilities. So then when we are the recipient of gifts, we have to ask ourselves, how will I reciprocate? And that our purpose as humans is to figure out what our gifts are and how to give them back in the world. So it creates a sense of agency and purpose that serve the gift economies around us.

bringing your own energy and attention and practice to your community is a gift exchange too. So yeah, it is absolutely an invitation to say what would happen if we did think about the world as gift and that we as individuals can then say, how will I reciprocate that gift?

And there are so many ways that we can answer that question of what do I of as a human being have to give back in return for everything that I've been given and even more so in return for everything that we have taken. If memory serves that word gift is embedded in the indigenous word for Barry.

That's right. And that's one of the reasons I choose a very, a very bearing plant as the standard for talking about this. The word min, M-I-N appears in almost all of our words for for berries from strawberries, raspberries, blackberries. They all have min in it, but min is also the word that means that is the root word of the words for gift.

So it is telling us right there that the plant world, the berries in particular, are giving us a gift. And when you start thinking about the world as gift, I think everything changes as opposed to commodity, right? Capitalism asks us to think about the world as commodity.

One of the examples I'd like to give about that is to think about something that you buy at the store. Let's say it's a nice woolly hat to keep your head warm because winter will be here before we know it. And think about the hat that you just bought at the store. And next to it, you have a hat that your grandma knit you.

do you have different relationships to those two hats, which serve the same purpose of making you look good and keep in your head warm, but the one that's a gift, you're going to take way better care of that, right? You're going to wear it, at least when your grandma's around, you have obligations to that because you're conceiving of that

product, if you will, as a gift. Whereas the hat that you might have bought at the department store, you have no obligation to because you think of it as property. And property doesn't come with relationship. It can, but property is control. You own that. You can decide its fate, really, without any moral jeopardy. But when that is a gift,

you do at the risks of moral jeopardy if you mistreat it. So we take that very simple concept that we can look and say, yeah, I get that gift versus commodity. Our relationship is totally different. So what happens when we take that idea and apply it to the natural world to see that all that we receive from the natural world is a gift, not a commodity. Those relationships are attached

to giftness. And I think that has the power to fundamentally change our relationships to living the world. Can you imagine that ideology taking hold? You know, I struggle a little bit because I agree with what you're saying that it is all, of course, a gift. And given the imperatives of the capitalist system, I don't know that the gift ideology is going to make its way into the boardroom.

It's going to take a while. We're talking about cultural transformation, really, to a different worldview. And to me, the question of does it scale up to the boardroom governed by very different priorities? Is less important to me than the fact that it creates agency

for you and for me and for listeners, to be able to say, you know, I am not going to topple Monsanto. I'm not. But I am going to live as if the world was a gift. And when the world is a gift, to me, that means you consume less.

You love it more. You cherish. You cherish what you have, which creates a sense of abundance. And the sense of abundance has been shown over and over again to limit consumption.

when we feel like, oh, I've got everything I need. When you feel content, you're a little more immune to the messages that say, go buy some more stuff. You really need this new iPhone or you need this. He's like, oh, really? I'm good. I have what I need. My well-being is grounded in a sense of peace with the living world, a sense of belonging. And again, back to that, not rooted in belongings.

And that's something that every one of us can choose. And I think that collectively, when we choose to treat the world as gift, that's how culture changes. And so many of us feel like the way we're powerless, right? We're powerless against the forces, a raid.

fossil fuel industry, for example, but we have absolute agency of what we choose to pay attention to, how we choose to think and relate. And so to me, it's an invitation to live your values and collectively that really matters. Are there arguments against the gift economy?

Sure, I think the places in the world where we see gift economies flourish tend to be in situations where there's a lot of cultural accountability. And that is in small, tightly knit communities.

And in those communities, you know, who's been generous and who hasn't, you know, who helped you out last time, and who you have respect for. So gift economies tend to flourish in small, tightly knit communities where there's accountability.

So the argument can be made that that can never work in the society that we have created where oftentimes we feel anonymous right and powerless. But to me, it's a call to say, well, if we value gift economies, does that mean that we need to create

smaller, mutually accountable communities based on good relations. In order for gift economies to work, that is what needs to happen. And I think that that is in general a really good social goal, again, to support that sense of belonging. You know, and I know on your show, you've talked about this, what has been named the epidemic of loneliness, right? And what we're talking about

all serves the goal to create more connection, more mutual accountability to one another that can be an antidote to loneliness. And you know, ecocycologists have a term

around loneliness too. We know a lot, many of us experience the consequences of human loneliness, but ecocytologists have created this term called species loneliness. The estrangement that we feel from the living world when we don't know the beings who are around us and we're lonely for birdsong and we're lonely for walking through the woods

and looking around and knowing that every medicine, practically every many of the medicines that you need are growing right there at your feet. You know, that kind of intimacy with the living world that makes you feel not only feel, but in a very material, pragmatic way, makes you cared for by the land. We forget that the land cares for us, has the potential to care for us.

And so including this notion of species loneliness in our conversations about human loneliness is I think another really valuable element. One of the questions that comes up every time we talk about community belonging, loneliness on the show.

is, well, how do I find a community? I mean, for example, I recently started an online community. And one of the things I'm hearing in the chat from people is, you know, how do I meet people locally who care about meditation? This seems to be a real issue. I get that I need good relationships in order to be happy, but I don't know how to find them. Yeah. And

of course, showing up, showing up is taking the risk to show up is I think one of the answers, but the investment of attention. And again, I'm thinking here about creating community with the more than human world is showing up with curiosity and attention and humility about the ones who are around you.

You know, again, there are a lot of digital tools that can help people create relationship with the living world, iNaturalist and Merlin, the bird app and the plant identification app. All of those things are ways to begin knowing the ones who are around you.

And, you know, I think one of the really hopeful mechanisms that I've seen of people wanting to create relationship with the living world comes in gardening. And starting a garden is a great way to come into a relationship with soil and seeds and insects and plants, of course. But some of the real joy comes in community gardening.

and coming together with your neighbors in a gift economy. Like, I'm going to grow the tomatoes, you grow the green beans, and let's exchange. We don't each have to do exactly the same thing. And community gardens, whether rural or urban, are wonderful places to create community and are well recognized as hubs for that.

In fact, I know of a number of community gardens who actually have gift economy as an essential piece of participating in those community gardens. So that's an important way that people can both create human community

and develop relationships with the living world that are pragmatic in terms of putting food on your table and creating that sense of gratitude for the green beans and those soils and your neighbors who are going to share how to grow the juiciest tomatoes in the gift economy.

the best possible neighbors. I'm leaping back now to the structural level, and I know you've said that you're not an economist, but you did a non-trivial amount of research. It appears to me in writing this book, and there's a quote here that has to do not only with the economy, but who we are as a species as the constituent part of this economy.

You write that ecologists are reevaluating the assumption that intense competition is the primary force regulating evolutionary success. I'd love to learn more about that.

Yeah, for a long time, we have understood or thought we understood that it is competition which sets the ground rules by which natural communities form. It is competition that shapes evolution of the gifts that different species have.

all true. But there's a bit of social Darwinism that followed from those beliefs in terms of thinking that because competition is important in natural communities and a natural economy, that it is justifiably the right way to structure human communities as well. And there's a lot of merit in that. But the mistake comes when we think it's the only force. It's the only force shaping communities.

And some of the really interesting research that has been done in ecology and evolution tells us that cooperation and indeed mutualism among organisms is often the principle on which communities are grounded. And we kind of overlooked that by having this veneer of human valuing of competition and competitive exclusion.

And now we're coming to appreciate the roles of symbiosis, of mutualism, simply because people are asking different questions and questioning the dominant assumptions of how we thought the world worked. And you know, Dan, it seems particularly relevant right now because in that literature, what we're seeing is when, what are the circumstances under which cooperation and mutualism seem to be most important in the natural world?

And those times, those places are in times of environmental stress.

in times of resource shortage and environmental stress generally, those organisms who can engage in cooperation often have the edge in natural selection. And our past behaviors, our continued degradation of the living world has put all of us humans and more than humans alike in a position of incredible environmental stress.

And so it is, I think, really important to think about what can we learn from the natural world in the embrace of cooperation in those cases and how do we create that cooperation in human societies as well. And this idea is, of course, tied up in the emerging science of biomimicry of saying, what can we learn from the living world about how we might live?

And oftentimes the science of biomimicry brings us products that are modeled after the way nature solves problems. And that's all to the good. But what really interests me is how can we think about the principles of community and economic organization and think about what the living world has to tell us in those cases.

And that too is why the service berry, what does looking at the economy of a generous plant offer us in thinking about how we might organize ourselves for well-being as well?

So interesting, the first part of your last answer that, you know, it's just got me thinking that hyper individualism, hyper competition, the de-emphasis on collaboration led us to the ecological stress that may in turn force us back into collaboration and cooperation. Yes, exactly. There's a kind of reciprocity between those forces, huh? Yep, absolutely.

Coming up, Robin talks about plants as persons or the study of plant cognition and the importance in her view of recognizing both Western science and the indigenous worldview.

Let me ask you before I let you go some a few questions about your sort of general worldview. You are a scientist, a botanist, but you started out interacting with plants from, if I understand it correctly, an indigenous or and maybe animist point of view. And I've heard you say that in science, plants are objects, but in the indigenous worldview, they're subjects. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Oh, happy to. Although you said it very well right there, the notion of personhood and agency that are associated with subjectivity are part of the indigenous worldview, or I would say at least our Potawatomi worldview, but it's more widespread than that.

that the plants are not only providers for us of food, oxygen, etc. They're providers of lessons for us, of models for us, and that all living beings from the plants to animals of all sorts

are understood as our relatives, not as objects. They are understood as persons. And this is, you know, in our language, for example, it's impossible to say it about a plant or an animal. We refer to them with the same grammar that you and I would use for each other.

You know, in English, we talk about that tree over there as it is growing by the fence. But in Potawatomi, you can't say that. You have to refer to them with an animate pronoun. So English, the language of global capitalism.

has a structure which speaks of other members of our species, respectfully, but everyone else is viewed as an object, the living world as thing. I think it's no mistake that English is the language of global capitalism because the language itself gives us permission to objectify the living world.

And that's simply not true in many Indigenous languages. So yes, in Indigenous worldview in general, there is a sense of animacy and respect for the other beings who were here before us.

and have intelligence, gifts and responsibilities of their own. Whereas in my scientific communities, we are instructed to think and interact and research with those beings as if they were just stuff, as if they were solely objective material entities.

So not withstanding your scientific training, is it your sense? And is there any evidence for the idea that plants would have a consciousness and a point of subjectivity?

Yeah, you know, there is right now an emerging science of what has been called plant neurobiology, plant cognition. It's a science in its infancy at this point to recognize the way that plants make choices, the way that plants behave.

It's an emerging discipline within plant physiology, for example, that is so exciting and I think will be really revolutionary. At the same time, I would say that it is in its infancy. There's a wonderful new book out that provides some of this wonderful storytelling about the science that's going on in plant cognition.

It's called The Light Eaters, written by Zoe Schlanger, and it is a wonderful account of the research which is helping point us to understanding the potential for sentient decision-making and indeed intelligence in the planet world.

So just to restate that, having grown up in an indigenous context, actually, that may not be true. Now I'm remembering that your family wasn't living with the Potawatomi tribe, but you had that in your consciousness in some ambient way. I want to make sure I don't mangle your biography here.

Yeah, like many people of the indigenous diaspora, by virtue of the products of the boarding school, removal, et cetera, my family, and indeed many Potawatomi families, don't live on our reservation. But I did live with Potawatomi values.

and stories and teachings. So I'm so grateful for those stories that were past me. So yes, I grew up with that, Dan, but I also had the great good fortune of growing up in the woods and in the field. And as a little kid, I was wandering around, hanging out with plants.

So not only did I have the teachings of my culture to help me think about those plants, I also had the plants themselves. And, you know, I was, I suppose, gifted with this very particular kind of attention to what plants might be teaching me from an earliest age. So that idea of plants as person was something that was not only came from culture, but from lived experience.

But there must be such an interesting relationship between your scientific training and your lived experience and cultural upbringing in a Potawatomi context, to the extent that that was available to you. On the one hand, science refers to plants as its, your lived experience and cultural heritage pushes you toward viewing plants as them, you know, conferring a kind of subjectivity upon them.

And now the science is starting to perhaps embrace the indigenous worldview. I think that's fair to say, yes. You know, there was a time in my life, Dan, when I viewed carrying both of those ways of knowing with me and practicing both of those ways of knowing as a real burden. It made it difficult.

on a pathway to becoming a scientist. But what it forced me to do was to have a very clear understanding of each of those worldviews and what they could and couldn't do and couldn't tell us.

And so for me, it's been really, in a sense, a gift because it has sharpened my understanding of both of those worldviews because I have lived in an environment of academic science, which devalues and historically has dismissed indigenous knowledge. But the way that it comes as a gift is that today, you know, after years in my career of having that dismissed,

We now have the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at an environmental college where both ways of knowing are being embraced in thinking about environmental problem solving. And that kind of intellectual flexibility and cross-cultural fluency gives us more solutions to try to address complex environmental problems than using one of those cultural lenses alone.

Is there any danger to mixing these two? I mean, I'm very intrigued by the mix, but science obviously has limitations and you've talked about and you and others have talked about the risks of scientism, you know, privileging science over every other way of knowing.

As you know, people who are non-scientists can confer more gravity and finality upon science than actually is there. It's really just an ongoing argument taking place in public science to the extent that I understand it as a non-scientist. At the very least, science does deal in allegedly provable, knowable facts, whereas other ways of knowing sometimes

those facts are harder to confirm. And I'm just wondering, is there a slippery slope where you end up co-signing on things like creation science or devaluing evolution, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah, super important questions. And that criticism often comes forward when we try to advance greater recognition for Indigenous science. But I think the real key comes in, I think you began your question then, perhaps appropriately with saying, well, what happens when you mix these things? And I want to be perfectly clear, I'm never talking about mixing them.

I'm talking about recognizing both of them, recognizing both of them as powerful intellectual traditions that are tools for answering different kinds of questions. Western science is, boy, that's going to be my choice for hypothesis testing about the biophysical world every time.

But what if that's not the question? You know, science is super good at asking true false questions. But sometimes the questions aren't true false. They're laden with value. They need emotional intelligence. They need spiritual knowledge to give us a sense of direction as well.

So I, too, get very concerned when people talk about mixing or blending. They are really different from one another. I think it's really important that we have a sharp focus on the strengths, the gifts of each of those, and to not be confused about the kinds of power that they have. Robin, it's been great to talk to you. I've wanted to have you on for a long time, so I'm glad we finally made it happen.

Just two last questions here. One is, is there something you were hoping to talk about today that we didn't get to? I don't think so. I don't think so. Great. And then the final question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and while you're at it, maybe talk a little bit about your previous books and maybe if you have a website, I would love if you would just plug everything to the extent you're comfortable.

That would be about zero. Yes, I'm really excited to see this little slim volume called the service berry about abundance and gratitude in the natural world coming forward on November 19th from Simon and Schuster.

And it is very much a expansion from my book, Breeding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants, which explores many of the ideas that we've been talking about today, Dan, that comes from milkweed additions.

And before that, what got me started in the departure from only writing to a scientific audience, to the embrace of multiple ways of knowing and multiple ways of telling a story, a scientific story, my first book was gathering loss.

which is really embraces what can we learn from these most humble of plants, the mosses beneath our feet. So I'm very excited about sharing these ideas and seeing how they resonate with human communities. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmer, thank you for coming on. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for your thoughtful questions.

Thanks again to Robin Wall, Kimmerer, great to have her on. We'll be talking about this latest episode over in the chat today on DanHarris.com. Also, if you're a subscriber, you will have received in your inbox a summary of the biggest takeaways from today's episode along with time stamped highlights and a full transcript. So sign up at DanHarris.com eight bucks a month. We'd love to have you.

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