§ Quotes from 'Braiding Sweetgrass'

I reserve my time for those who can talk about science, and music,
and literature, and art.

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not
our own

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as “the force which causes mushrooms to
push up from the earth overnight.” As a biologist, I was stunned that such a
word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such
term, no words to hold this mystery. You’d think that biologists, of all
people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology
is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp
remains unnamed.

Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion
is 70 percent. Which means that 70 percent of the words have to be
conjugated, and 70 percent have different tenses and cases to be mastered..

Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to
them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly
retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a
who, but an it, we make that maple an object;

We don’t know their names or their faces, but our fingers rest right where
theirs had been and we know what they too were doing one morning in April
long ago. And we know what they had on their pancakes. Our stories are linked
in this run of sap; our trees knew them as they know us today..

I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that
shade, at least not as a young couple. They must have meant for their people
to stay here. Surely those two were sleeping up on Cemetery Road long before
the shade arched across the road. I am living today in the shady future they
imagined, drinking sap from trees planted with their wedding vows. They could
not have imagined me, many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of
their care. Could they have imagined that when my daughter Linden was
married, she would choose leaves of maple sugar for the wedding giveaway?

You should not be able to walk on a pond. It should be an invitation to
wildlife, not a snare. The likelihood of making the pond swimmable, even for
geese, seemed remote at best. But I am an ecologist, so I was confident that
I could at least improve the situation. The word ecology is derived from
the Greek oikos, the word for home. I could use ecology to make a good home
for goslings and girls.

Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize,
and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have
changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle
alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

In that awareness, looking over the objects on my desk—the basket, the
candle, the paper—I delight in following their origins back to the ground. I
twirl a pencil—a magic wand lathed from incense cedar— between my fingers.
The willow bark in the aspirin. Even the metal of my lamp asks me to consider
its roots in the strata of the earth.

I smile when I hear my colleagues say “I discovered X.” That’s kind of like
Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it’s
just that he didn’t know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about
listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.

It seems counterintuitive, but when a herd of buffalo grazes down a sward of
fresh grass, it actually grows faster in response. This helps the plant
recover, but also invites the buffalo back for dinner later in the season.
It’s even been discovered that there is an enzyme in the saliva of grazing
buffalo that actually stimulates grass growth. To say nothing of the
fertilizer produced by a passing herd. Grass gives to buffalo and buffalo
give to grass.