Great article about forming a more inclusive conversation about who is invited to the table of environmentalism and our complex (and awful) history of Nature and Culture
Robin Kimmerer, Ph.D., Distinguished Teaching Professor and Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, SUNY ESF
September 2, 5:30 p.m. Call Alumni Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, Cornell University
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer will lecture on topics found in her new book “Braiding Sweetgrass” in which she shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.