Ep 239 | Robin Wall Kimmerer
Earth’s Oldest Teachers: How to Live Well on Earth
Description
Many of us question the core principles of individualism, competition, and transaction our current civilization is founded on. But with an entire culture steeped in these ideals, we don’t know where to look for a different way forward. Thankfully, against all odds, there are pockets of cultures who have preserved their knowledge and are able to share both what they know and who their greatest teachers are.
In this episode, Nate is joined by Robin Wall Kimmerer to explore what we can learn from some of Earth’s oldest and smallest beings: plants. Robin weaves together her experience as a botanist and a Citizen Potawatomi Nation member to offer what she’s learned about living well within nature’s limits, including practices such as the Honorable Harvest and the importance of restraint and reciprocity. She also shares the Potawatomi prophecy of the Seventh Fire, in which humanity stands at a fork between a scorched path and a green one, and can only move forward by walking back to recover what was lost along the way. Robin frames this moment as the age of remembering – an invitation to restore the land and our relationship with it.
What can we learn from the long-term persistence of mosses, and how might it change our own definition of success? How might our relationship with the living world shift if our language treated plants and animals as fellow beings and kin rather than “it”? Lastly, if we reframed our ideas of abundance to be more focused on ‘enoughness,’ how would it change our choices and expectations for generations to come?
About Robin Wall Kimmerer
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist, bryologist, writer, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director emeritus of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her research examines moss ecology, ecological restoration, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and the restoration of culturally significant plants in partnership with Indigenous communities.
Kimmerer holds a BS in botany from SUNY ESF and an MS and PhD in botany from the University of Wisconsin. Her honors include a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2023 National Humanities Medal. Across her scientific and literary work, she seeks to braid Indigenous knowledge with Western science and to restore not only ecosystems, but the human relationships with land that determine how those ecosystems are treated. Official biography · SUNY ESF profile
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
Download transcriptGuest:
- Plant ecologist and writer
- Bryologist, studying mosses, liverworts and hornworts
- Enrolled member, Citizen Potawatomi Nation
- SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, SUNY ESF
- Founder and Director Emeritus, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment
- Founder and President, Plant Baby Plant
Books: Gathering Moss, Braiding Sweetgrass (Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults), The Serviceberry, Bud Finds Her Gift
Grab-and-Go Resources:
New? Start here:
– The Great Simplification (32-minute film)
– Why the World Feels Like It’s Falling Apart: The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes
From the Archive:
– Ep 146: Bill Plotkin, Ecological Awakening: A Path Toward Holistic Adulthood
– Reality Roundtable 2: William Rees, Nora Bateson & Rex Weyler, Deep(er) Ecology
– Directional Advice for the (More Than) Human Predicament (Frankly 114)
Episode Foundations:
– The Honorable Harvest by Robin
– The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance by Robin
– Speaking of Nature by Robin
Next Steps:
– How to Plant the Three Sisters
Resources by Timestamp:
02:54 – Citizen Potawatomi Nation
03:33 – Plants as elders and teachers, Two-Eyed Seeing: bringing together Indigenous and mainstream knowledges
03:52 – Biomimicry (The Great Simplification episode on such)
04:24 – Traditional ecological knowledge
04:29 – Three Sisters polyculture of corn, beans and squash, Monoculture
05:03 – Symbiosis and complementarity
05:15 – Beans fixing nitrogen, Squash shading the soil and suppressing weeds
05:45 – Mutualism
06:00 – Three Sisters yield more energy and protein per hectare than monocultures, Coevolution of people and crops
06:33 – David Pimentel’s Food, Energy, and Society, Ecological Society of America
06:55 – Ecological economics
08:05 – Pattern recognition
08:49 – Experimental design as a way to interview plants, Intuition
09:12 – Weaving Indigenous knowledge and Western science
10:08 – Objectivity in Western science, Materialism, Indigenous ways of knowing
10:47 – Indigenous science
10:59 – Fossil energy accumulated over geological time and consumed over centuries
11:16 – Topsoil depletion, *Every unit of U.S. food energy uses 13 units of mostly fossil energy
11:38 – Polyculture
11:51 – Share of employment in agriculture
12:53 – Scaling down to relationships with homeplace
13:53 – Fractal nature of the living world
14:36 – Charismatic megafauna
15:10 – Peatlands store more carbon than all other vegetation types combined
15:22 – Peat formation
15:53 – Permafrost as a “ticking carbon bomb”
16:08 – Guided imagery, Temperate rainforest of British Columbia, King bolete
17:02 – Old-growth western red cedar and success as energy throughput
17:14 – Mosses: among the first land plants, slow to change since
17:30 – More than 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct
17:38 – Success as long-term persistence, The global contribution of soil mosses to ecosystem services
17:58 – Olivier Hamant (The Great Simplification appearance): The Benefits of Imperfection and leaving the era of the mean for the era of the standard deviation
18:28 – Generalist and specialist species, Related research on the human climate niche
18:45 – Stress-tolerator plants, Mesic habitats
19:04 – Power of being small
19:34 – Laws of thermodynamics, Boundary layer, Moss cushion size, water relations and carbon gain
20:04 – David Sloan Wilson (The Great Simplification appearance), E.O. Wilson, Multilevel selection
20:33 – Cooperation in nature, Individualism
21:29 – Homo economicus
21:36 – Related: Arne Næss on self-realization and the wider self
22:42 – Rex Weyler and Nora Bateson (Reality Roundtable with Nora Bateson, William Rees and Rex Weyler) on when the apple becomes me
22:57 – World population of 8.2 billion in 2026
24:14 – Elephant matriarchs and the adaptive value of age
24:36 – Biodiversity loss, Climate justice, Polycrisis
25:03 – Human exceptionalism, Aristotle’s scala naturae
26:00 – Humility in the Seven Grandfather Teachings
26:04 – Haudenosaunee
26:11 – More-than-human relatives (Frankly on such)
26:20 – Homo sapiens as a recent species
26:36 – Indigenous science combining empiricism, emotional intelligence and spiritual knowledge
27:20 – Integrating Indigenous knowledge into decisions about the future, Ecocide
28:57 – Attempted genocide of Native peoples, Trail of Death, Native American boarding schools
30:06 – Kinship worldview, Kincentric ecology: Indigenous perceptions of the human–nature relationship
30:26 – *2019 UN biodiversity report (IPBES Global Assessment): Declines less severe or avoided in areas managed by Indigenous Peoples
31:00 – Biodiversity and linguistic diversity co-occur (related study), Biocultural diversity
31:24 – *Indigenous Peoples manage or hold tenure over more than a quarter of the world’s land (Estimates vary substantially by methodology; no basis found for the 80% biodiversity figure, Its origin in a 2008 World Bank paper)
32:06 – Related research on Indigenous lands, remoteness and deforestation
33:25 – Economic Superorganism (Frankly #97)
33:40 – Thich Nhat Hanh on interbeing
34:03 – Honorable Harvest, Traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management
34:59 – Heterotrophs
35:50 – Honorable Harvest guidelines:
- Ask permission and abide by the answer
- Share what you take
- Be grateful
- Harvest in a way that minimizes harm
- Reciprocate the gift
- Take only that which is given
37:12 – Wisdom as restraint
37:33 – Never take the first, never take the last as a Conservation ethic
39:15 – Fossil energy as principal, not interest
40:15 – All my relations
41:22 – Potawatomi Seven Fires prophecy
42:10 – Anishinaabe migration story: Wabanaki, Turtle Island, Nishnabe (Anishinaabe)
42:42 – Prophecies fulfilled: Black robes (Christian missionaries), Removal from homelands, Loss of language, Children taken
44:23 – Two paths at the fork in the road
45:24 – Bottleneck of the great narrowing, Eighth fire
46:44 – Species-wide rite of passage
46:58 – Bill Plotkin (The Great Simplification appearance) on ecological adulthood
47:28 – Carbon Pulse, Possible future shapes of the Carbon Pulse, Debt as claims on future energy
48:46 – Anthropocene, Sixth mass extinction, Age of remembering
49:40 – Re-membering ourselves as members of the family of life
52:44 – *575 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. as of January 2026
52:53 – Women’s leadership in Indigenous governance (Haudenosaunee clan mothers), Matrilineality, Matriarchy
53:30 – Seven generations thinking vs. Quarterly profits
54:44 – IPCC climate projections to 2100 and beyond
55:08 – Indigenous climate resilience
55:27 – India’s climate vulnerability, Related research on climate change awareness in India
55:42 – 69% of Americans rarely or never discuss global warming with family and friends
55:47 – NOAA, October 2026: strong-to-very-strong El Niño likely through January–March 2027 (The Great Simplification Ep on a super El Niño)
55:55 – The Serviceberry, from an Emergence Magazine essay (The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance)
56:28 – Economy of nature, Reciprocity, Gift exchange and reciprocity
57:08 – Photosynthesis
57:40 – Gift economy vs. Market economy, Enclosure of the commons, Artificial scarcity
58:09 – Extractive economy
59:44 – People as medicine for the land, Historical Indigenous land use and plant diversity
1:00:08 – Keystone species
1:00:30 – Restoration ecology, Beavers, Aspen
1:00:59 – Tallgrass prairie restoration, *Less than 4% of the original tallgrass prairie remains intact
1:01:15 – Corn Belt, Related research on Corn Belt topsoil loss
1:01:37 – Prairie restoration on schoolyards, former army munitions plants and abandoned airports
1:02:21 – Regenerative agriculture
1:03:10 – Sisyphean
1:03:25 – Restoration and re-story-ation, Society for Ecological Restoration’s principles and standards
1:04:20 – Center for Native Peoples and the Environment
1:04:43 – Plant Baby Plant, a play on “Drill, baby, drill”
1:05:27 – Ethics of artificial intelligence, Colonization of Mars, Natural intelligence, Electrical signaling and its physiological significance in plants
1:06:42 – Precautionary principle
1:07:03 – Victoria Sweet, English as a noun-based language
1:07:29 – Grammar of animacy, Verb-centered Potawatomi grammar and animate/inanimate verb classes
1:07:47 – Potawatomi language,
1:08:16 – Verb-based language, Grammatical gender in Romance languages, Potawatomi animate and inanimate words
1:11:29 – The Three Sisters in Haudenosaunee agriculture
1:12:06 – Indy Johar (The Great Simplification episodes 238 & 147) on Earthrise (1968) and the Earth becoming self-aware
1:13:21 – Species-wide great simplification
1:13:58 – Mother Earth
1:14:20 – Biophysical economics
1:15:00 – Abundance as enoughness, IPCC discussion of sufficiency and well-being
1:15:33 – Wealth as how much you give away, “All flourishing is mutual” (referenced quote), Sharing, distribution and the accumulation of wealth
1:17:04 – Ecological grief and despair
1:17:40 – Reclaiming agency
1:18:38 – First Earth Day, 1970
1:19:31 – Wile E. Coyote moment
1:21:38 – Reforestation, Protecting existing forests, Forests and rainfall, Carbon sequestration
1:22:10 – Plants building soil and cooling the air
1:22:31 – Climate defeatism
1:23:33 – Harnessing love for the world, Nature connectedness and proenvironmental behavior: a meta-analysis
