A few thoughts on Braiding Sweetgrass

Abundance ahead?

When I was asked to write down one word that comes to mind as I read the book, my first word was "Native" after only a brief foray into the book. But after more time with it, I land on "gift". The book is a gift to me in a time when I feel at sea with respect to what to do about human caused climate change and climate recklessness. In some sense, the world doesn't need us. It has lived long before us and will live long after us. If we cannot live in harmony with it, perhaps we are a failed experiment as a species. 

In the past, I believed the way out of this situation was a combination of science, abundance and homeostasis. Engineering problems seem to emerge just in time, right when we need them. See for example Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. 

Predictions about the future of the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” were grim. One commentator predicted that by 1930 horse manure would reach the level of Manhattan’s third-story windows. 

The problem seemed insurmountable. 

And it wasn’t limited to New York. In England, The Times newspaper predicted in 1894 that, “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” 

Then, in the early years of the 20th century, hope began to glimmer. A new form of technology, the automobile, began to make its presence felt. Silent, swift, and, most importantly, clean, these machines promised a solution to the problem that had plagued the city for decades.

Recently, however, I have felt less secure about the abundance ahead. The research for Diamandis and Kotler's book, for example, did not unearth the fact that the problem of horse manure piling up in New York City was an urban legend.

Reading Kimmerer's chapter Old-Growth Children, 

Opportunistic or Pioneer species have adaptations to survive after disturbance...Their goal is to grow and reproduce as quickly as possible...The key to success is to get more of everything than your neighbor. 

Later, in a chapter titled Windigo Footprints, Kimmerer explores the diseases of excess and self-destructive practices such such as alcohol and drug addiction, gambling, technology through the lens of the story of the Windigo, "a human whose selfishness has overpowered their self-control to the point that satisfaction is no longer possible." 

Multinational corporations have spawned a new breed of Windigo that insatiable devours the earth's resources not for need but for greed. Extractive capitalism thrives in a mindset of scarcity. However, other books by Rutger Bregman such as Humankind and Utopia for Realists and Stephen Pinker's Enlightment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined help me sleep better and restore my faith in humanity. 

I think there is some benefit in viewing these problems through Stephen Wolfram's lens of computational irreducibility. This concept, if applicable here, would suggest that the predictions that we make about the futures for sufficiently complex systems (e.g. human behavior, technology, climate change, forever weather) are necessarily incomplete. So, for these systems, our only option is to make short term forecasts and if we want to know the outcome, we have to be willing to see the entire experiment through since "no shortcut" (prediction or simulation) can exist, in principle. 

Interestingly, the universe, itself, may abide by this principle on a quantum scale (for more: read about the mathematical success of the path integral formulation—aka "summing over histories"—and the possible connections to Hugh Everett's Many Worlds view). Though you need not commit yourself to Many Worlds to enjoy Feynman's mathematical program. See, for example, Feynman's QED for a great read on how quantum calculations can be done on some beautiful applied problems like how white light reflects as a rainbow, due to the pitting on compact disc surfaces, can be understood with a quantum calculation. To read some more about the Many Worlds view, I would recommend either Brian Greene's Hidden Reality or Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe.

Other things I liked about the book

1. The Thanksgiving Prayer (PDF)
2. The idea of verbs like: "to be a bay", "to be a hill", "to be a Saturday"
3. The lesson of the berry: "All flourishing is mutual"
4. A giveaway economy. What happens when there is a break in at a giveaway. This is what she says is happening via extractive capitalism 
5. "Ceremony is a way to remember"
6. "When Allied Chemical was a gleam in the eye of a smokestack."
7. As a vegan, I began The Honorable Harvest chapter (PDF) with trepidation. After reading it I remain a vegan. And, Kimmerer's point is not about diet but about living according to an ethic. I did really appreciate the entire chapter. Below is a list of principles that Kimmerer identified in case you don't have the time to read the whole chapter:
1. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.
2. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.
3. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.
4. Never take the first. Never take the last.
5. Take only what you need.
6. Take only that which is given.
7. Never take more than half. Leave some for others.
8. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.
9. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.
10. Share.
11. Give thanks for what you have been given.
12. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.
13. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.