Jordyn’s Reviews > Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants > Status Update

“The market system artificially creates scarcity… Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains
us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings: this is a Windigo economy.”

Conventions for efficiency and precision make reading scientific papers very difficult for the rest of the world... This has serious consequences for public dialogue about the environment... For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring
comes from someplace else

“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power-we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.”

“Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask”

“I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture if science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges”

I love the idea that the earth loves us back. Why couldn’t my garden love me? We can describe things in “non-scientific” ways and have that description still be valid.

“If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “what is our responsibility” is the same as asking “what is our gift?””

I realize the pond story is likely an allegory but the thought of shoveling thousands of pounds of sludge from a pond sounds like actual torture and a serious labor of love

The witch hazel story 🥹🥹🥹 so bittersweet.

Love the coverage of how linguistics shape our worldview.