![]() ![]() “In fact, the chapter about lichens was actually written right here at the Blue Mountain Center:’ “There’s an abundance of Umbilicaria americana lichen here ’ she tells me. “You should get out more:’ I took her advice, hiking the grounds of the center, keeping an eye out for plants that play a starring role in Braiding Sweetgrass. I also tell her that, while I love the great outdoors, I’m fundamentally a city kid, one of those alienated denizens of the fabricated world who suffer from “nature deficit disorder:” I tell her I’ve been following with fascination and awe Western science’s late-to-the-game understanding of plant intelligence and the far-more-complex-than-we-ever-imagined way that forests communicate and cooperate. He could have treated them not as extraordinary objects of the forest but as actual beings:’ “He could have given them full personhood. ![]() “He could have gone further ’ she countered. “Some of the trees in that novel have as much presence as some of the human characters living alongside them ’ I gushed. Over the course of our few days together, we read each other’s work and discussed topics ranging from ecological compassion, to the restoration (and “re-story-ation”) of our relationship to the natural world, to Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. The place is like a home away from home for both of us. We’ve both been here several times before, to write, reflect, hike, or to clear brush, patch holes, or pitch in in whatever way we can. We’re at the Blue Mountain Center, an ecology oriented writing center in the middle of the largest state park east of the Mississippi. We met up in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, a far cry from Detroit. What Would Nature Do? Her basic answer: what people have been doing for most of our history and: what most Indigenous people are still doing. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist, ambassador of lndigenous thought, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is one of the most celebrated naturalists in the country. MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE HOPERS AND DOOMERSĭr. Reprinted with permission from I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor, Andrew Boyd (February 2023) New Society Publishers. ![]()
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