The Antidote To Not-Enoughness | Robin Wall Kimmerer

New episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for free, with 1-week early access for Wondery+ subscribers. --- Radical strategies for the scarcity mindset. Robin Wall Kimmerer https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/ is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her other work has appeared in Orion, Whole Terrain, and numerous scientific journals. Her new book, The Serviceberry, is about a plant whose behavior is a model not only for our individual lives, but potentially for rethinking the global economy. In this episode we talk about: Nature as a model for the economy How to reclaim our stolen attention Practices of gratitude Counterintuitive advice on wealth and security How to change your relationship to the living world The science of biomimicry Plants as persons, and the study of plant cognition And the importance of recognizing both Western science and the indigenous worldview Related Episodes: #546. This Scientist Says One Emotion Might Be the Key to Happiness. Can You Guess What It Is? | Dacher Keltner https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/dacher-keltner-546 We Know Nature Is Good for Us. Here's How To Make Time for It, Scandinavian Style | Linda Åkeson McGurk https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/linda-akeson-mcgurk #505. The 5 Things That Are Ruining Your Meditation (and Your Life) – And How to Handle Them | Bonnie Duran https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/bonnie-duran-505 Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Full Shownotes: https://happierapp.com/podcast/tph/robin-wall-kimmerer-861 Additional Resources: Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/download

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:20Dan Harris?

  Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are 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.

• 1:01Dan Harris?

  Today, we're going to talk about a deep, but readily-available antidote to this sense of lack. My guest is Robin Wall Kimmerer. She's a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is perhaps best known for her bestselling 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.

• 1:46Dan Harris?

  Robin Wall Kimmerer, right after this.

• 1:50Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media, and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy, and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox. At the beginning of a busy week, the second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting

• 2:32Dan Harris?

  me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity and an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps.

• 3:14Dan Harris?

  Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit. And not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Kitesworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence and opportunity where it is needed most.

• 3:59Dan Harris?

  On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 4:20Dan Harris?

  Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, welcome to the show.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Thanks for inviting me. I'm glad to be here.

• 4:25Dan Harris?

  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?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Oh, service berries are a beautiful native shrub that produces these berries that are a cross 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 Saskatoons.

• 5:03Dan Harris?

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

• 5:10Speaker 01

  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 service berry, 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.

• 5:50Dan Harris?

  Can you say more about the generosity of this plant?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  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 plant 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.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  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 Pato-Armi language, the name for service berry is Bozakmen, 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

• 7:17Speaker 01

  a really important element of pemmican, 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.

• 7:33Dan Harris?

  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?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Precisely, yeah. 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, you know, 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.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  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?

• 9:09Dan Harris?

  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.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  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 shrub 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.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And so in every step of the ecosystem, there is, generally speaking, a reciprocal exchange between beings. Nobody's hoarding the berries. Nobody's keeping the gift and the energies 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.

• 10:43Dan Harris?

  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.

• 10:58Dan Harris?

  Economy that is pushing the earth in some quite unhealthy directions. Am I correct about that?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  That's the central thesis of the book. Yeah, exactly.

• 11:10Dan Harris?

  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?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  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, right? Of 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.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:30Dan Harris?

  So as I'm listening to you and in preparing for this conversation, there are, and please correct me if I'm wrong on any of 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 this 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.

• 13:12Dan Harris?

  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?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, the notion of contentment, the notion of homeostasis and balance is, I think, one of the things that we seek as, 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,

• 14:27Speaker 01

  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, right? 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.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:32Dan Harris?

  You said a lot there that I want to unpack. But 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 was 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?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  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, oh, 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.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  But the kind of wellness that happens when you know the trees around you, when you know, you know, an 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,

• 18:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:29Dan Harris?

  So I want to 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 route is to stop staring at Instagram and instead get to know the natural world around you.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  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

• 19:35Speaker 01

  that comes from knowing who are the plants and animals around you.

• 19:42Dan Harris?

  Is it because, I mean, I can imagine the contentment derives from several sources. First of all, If you turned off social media and were 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 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

• 20:22Dan Harris?

  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?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  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 our 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.

• 21:35Dan Harris?

  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?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  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

• 22:28Speaker 01

  practice that is because I can do it either here, you know, in the, 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, to say, well, where did that air come from? I am breathing in oxygen that just moments ago was breathed

• 23:04Speaker 01

  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

• 23:43Speaker 01

  that breath possible. But then, of course, there's the exhale. And in the exhale, as I'm breathing out carbon dioxide,

• 23:53Speaker 01

  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 you, 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, that my very existence is based on them.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And so that's, to me, the kind of gratitude I'm talking about, of really deeply understanding the permeability between the life of a human being and, and the life of a maple tree, or, or the grasses in the lawn.

• 24:51Dan Harris?

  I love that. You mentioned that you do several gratitude practices. Are, is there another one that's worth sharing?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I, on a good day, not every day, but on a good day, I love to begin 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 blue jay who is calling for those warm, warmth of the sun on my face, for the mushroom that's sprouting up from the ground around that tree.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  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?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  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 then what I'm gonna 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 gonna give back in return for all of this abundance? What am I gonna give back?

• 27:06Dan Harris?

  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 gonna 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.

• 27:28Dan Harris?

  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?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  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 well, and the people we care about will be safe and well. 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,

• 28:23Speaker 01

  we create these bonds 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

• 29:06Speaker 01

  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 gonna, 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 sense of security which is more enduring than owning everything for ourselves.

• 29:52Dan Harris?

  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

• 30:31Dan Harris?

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

• 30:42Speaker 01

  And the enduring route, the enduring route, right? Because it can take so many different forms in terms of acting on those relationships, what can you and the folks you're in relationship with create together? And, you know, back to the notion of the ways in which the living world, the 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

• 31:26Speaker 01

  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 service berry. How do 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.

• 32:13Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Robin Wall, Kim Ror 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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• 34:35Dan Harris?

  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 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.

• 35:16Dan Harris?

  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.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  I would really welcome that, Dan, because this is the moment when I say, I'm a botanist. I'm not an economist. You know, 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

• 36:15Speaker 01

  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, of unreciprocity, 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.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  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. 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?

• 37:28Dan Harris?

  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, and 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

• 38:12Dan Harris?

  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.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 38:38Dan Harris?

  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, that's, it's a real thing. And you point out some examples of how this operates in the real world. Can you tell us a little about some of these examples?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  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 a 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,

• 39:34Speaker 01

  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 with social media? Just about zero. But at the same time, you know, I am blessed by being surrounded by students who have, 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,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  What does that look like? And scaling up from

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Passing a book to a neighbor, to a little free library, to the public library. You know, 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?

• 41:34Dan Harris?

  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, am 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.

• 42:16Dan Harris?

  You can just start participating in some of the gift economies around you, or even if there isn't none around you, if there are none around you, to start one on your own.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, when we think about the world as gift, which is really part of my ethos and very much part of our potwadome 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.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  So it creates a sense of agency and purpose that serve the gift economies around us.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 43:58Dan Harris?

  If memory serves, that word "gift" is embedded in the indigenous word for berry.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  That's right. And that's one of the reasons I choose a berry, a berry-bearing plant, as the standard for talking about this. The word "min," M-I-N, appears in almost all of our words 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.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  As opposed to commodity, right? Capitalism asks us to think about the world as commodity. One of the examples I 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 keeping your head warm? But the one that's a gift, you're going to take way better care of that, right?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  You're going to wear it at least when your grandma's around. You have obligations to that because you're conceiving of that.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Product, if you will, as a gift. Whereas the hat that you, you know, 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 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, 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?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  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 world.

• 46:42Dan Harris?

  Can you imagine that ideology taking hold? You know, I 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.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  It's gonna take a while. We're talking about cultural transformation, really, to a to a different worldview. And to me, it, 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.

• 47:28Dan Harris?

  Right.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  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 a 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. You say, oh, really, I'm good.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  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, wait, 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.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And so to me, it's an invitation to live your values. And collectively, that really matters.

• 49:05Dan Harris?

  Are there arguments against the gift economy?

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Sure, I think the places in the world where we see gift economies flourish tend to be in situations where there is 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?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  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, eco psychologists have a term around loneliness, too. We know a lot, many of us experience the consequences of human loneliness, but eco psychologists have created this term called species loneliness.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  And so, including this notion of species loneliness in our conversations about human loneliness is, I think, another really valuable element.

• 51:57Dan Harris?

  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.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  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

• 53:14Speaker 01

  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 to come into 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 gonna 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

• 53:57Speaker 01

  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 those green beans and those soils and your neighbors who are gonna share how to grow the juiciest tomatoes in a gift economy.

• 54:41Dan Harris?

  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 nontrivial 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 like who we are as a species, you know, as the constituent parts 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.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  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

• 56:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  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

• 57:46Speaker 01

  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 is, 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

• 58:27Speaker 01

  tell us in those cases? And that, too, is why the service bearing. 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?

• 58:43Dan Harris?

  It's so interesting, the first part of your last answer, that, you know, it 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.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. There's a kind of reciprocity between those forces, huh? Yep, absolutely.

• 59:13Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Robyn 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.

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• 1:01:01Dan Harris?

  Let me ask you, before I let you go, a few questions about your general worldview. You are a scientist, a botanist, but you started out interacting with plants from, if I understand it correctly, an indigenous 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?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  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 is more widespread than that, that the plants are not only providers for us of food, oxygen, et cetera, 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,

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  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." 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

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  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

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  were just stuff, as if they were solely objective material entities.

• 1:03:43Dan Harris?

  So, notwithstanding 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?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  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 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 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,

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  written by Zoe Schlangen, and it is a wonderful account of the research, which is helping point us to understanding the potential for sentience, decision making, and indeed, intelligence in the plant world.

• 1:04:59Dan Harris?

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

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  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 passed to 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, you know, 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,

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:26Dan Harris?

  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?

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  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 the 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 could and couldn't tell us. And so for me, it's been really, in a sense, a gift because it has sharpened my understanding

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  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

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  solutions to try to address complex environmental problems than using one of those cultural lenses alone.

• 1:08:28Dan Harris?

  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, you and others have talked about the risks of scientism, privileging science over every other way of knowing. And 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. So at the very least, science does deal in allegedly provable, knowable facts. Whereas other ways of knowing, sometimes those facts are harder to confirm.

• 1:09:10Dan Harris?

  And I'm just wondering, is there a slippery slope where you end up cosigning on things like creation science or devaluing evolution, et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  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, Dan, 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?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  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. I'm, mm-mm. 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.

• 1:10:40Dan Harris?

  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?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I don't think so.

• 1:10:58Dan Harris?

  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, just, I would love if you would just plug everything to the extent you're comfortable.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  To the extent I'm comfortable. That would be about zero.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  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, Braiding 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 Editions. And before that, what got me started in the departure from only writing to a scientific audience

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  to the embrace of multiple ways of knowing and multiple ways of telling a story, a scientific story. My first book was Gathering Moss, 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.

• 1:12:23Dan Harris?

  Dr. Robin Wall, Kimmerer, thank you for coming on.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Thank you, Dan. Thanks for your thoughtful questions.

• 1:12:33Dan Harris?

  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. Before I go, I want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Cara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.