Braiding Sweetgrass

In this chapter Kimmerer returns to her time living in Kentucky, where she moved because of her husband’s job at the time. Here she is teaching in an environment that is unfamiliar to her: her students are primarily Christian premed students whose interest in biology only extends to human beings. They seem to have no interest in ecology; they mostly just see her class as a requirement for graduation. Robin can’t understand how someone could be a biologist and be so uninterested in the rich diversity of life: “the earth is so richly endowed that the least we can do in return is pay attention.” Hoping to convert her students to a broader worldview, Robin decides to take them on a camping trip.

Robin plans meticulously for the outing, knowing that she is under a large amount of scrutiny from the school, which is a small but prestigious college for wealthy Southerners that’s known for its high success rate of students going on to medical school. The dean even wears a lab coat to work to highlight the medical mission of the college. Robin manages to convince the dean that the trip is necessary for medical students here in coal country, as they should see the environmental factors that will be affecting their future patients. She is hoping to broaden her students’ perspectives by immersing them in the world of ecology—ecology makes us consider other species as valuable. Robin wants to distract them from Homo sapiens for at least a few days.

Having received permission from the dean, Robin takes her students out into the beautiful Smoky Mountains, noting the contrast between the land’s living beauty and the charts and graphs of a classroom. Walking up a mountain after their first night camping, they experience different climates and environments as the elevation changes. Robin teaches while they walk, and the students write down the scientific names of things that she mentions, but they don’t seem enthralled by nature in the way that she had hoped. Knowing that the school already disapproved of this trip, Robin finds herself trying to justify it by making sure that the students’ notebooks are filled with facts and figures.

After a few days of this, Robin and the class come to a cold strip of spruce and fir tree habitat, which feels to Robin like the Northeast home that she has been missing. Overcome with longing, she lies down on the forest floor and delivers her lecture from there, finally loosening her self-imposed restrictions of scientific rigor. She discusses the endangered spruce-fir moss spider that lives in this environment, challenging her students to consider the spiders’ perspectives and to question our right to take their home from them. One student then awkwardly asks her if this is “like her religion or something.” Robin answers vaguely and then changes the subject, having learned to “tread lightly on these matters” among these devout Christians.

On the last day of the trip, Robin and the students hike back to the parking lot through a beautiful grove of silverbells. She feels that she has failed in her goals for the venture, that she wasn’t able to teach “a science deeper than data” and instead focused only on “how it works and nothing of what it meant.” She remembers her own younger self wanting to study ecology to discover the secrets of Asters and Goldenrod, and she feels that she has let that younger woman down. She has obscured deeper truths with surface-level information, as if she had worn a lab coat into the forest like the dean at the university.

As they walk through late-afternoon light on their last day, one student starts singing “Amazing Grace,” and soon they all join in and sing together. Robin feels humbled, like her students are offering a gift of love and gratitude in their own way, expressing wonder in a manner that goes beyond checklists of scientific names. They hadn’t really been tuned out the entire time, she realizes, and her job wasn’t to teach them everything or even to be the teacher at all. Her job was just to lead them to the true teacher—the land itself—and to make sure that they paid attention to it. “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart,” she writes. We just need to be quiet to accept these gifts.