On the day I talked to the American ecologist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, politics was dominated by talk of growth-at-any-cost. In the UK, financial markets were faltering after Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget, which announced the exploitation of new oil and gas fields. In Brazil, the Amazon-destroying Jair Bolsonaro had exceeded expectations in a first-round presidential vote. But in the eyes of the acclaimed plant biologist, such an outlook counters any long-term evolutionary narrative. “Forces which sacrifice the natural world for so-called economic growth have forgotten that unlimited growth is not an ecological possibility,” she said. “How strange to be a species that engineers its own demise.”
Silver-haired and softly spoken, Kimmerer’s world-view draws on two ways of seeing, she told me over Zoom from her home in upstate New York. On one side is her scientific training in bryology – the study of moss – and expertise in the empirical observation and measurement of non-vascular plants; on the other there are the myths and ceremonies of her native Potawatomi culture, which views plants, animals and landscapes not as objects of consumption but as subjects to embrace and nurture.
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