By: Erin Dobbelsteyn, PhD Student, uOttawa Faculty of Law
Introduction
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is an absolute gift, and reading it was a life-affirming and life-altering experience. From the first page to the last, I savoured every poetic sentence and profound lesson that Kimmerer shared about the power of reciprocal relationships between human beings and the natural world. I chose to read Braiding Sweetgrass for pleasure and as a break from the academic reading required as part of my graduate studies in environmental law. Little did I know that this book would so significantly and indelibly enrich my thinking about sustainability, law, and my future path as a legal scholar. In this blog post, I draw connections between the teachings of Braiding Sweetgrass and sustainability, and explore the ways in which the expression of these principles in legal systems and theories might assist in achieving global sustainability.
Lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, writer, Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and the founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She is of European and Anishinaabe ancestry, and is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer weaves scientific knowledge and traditional Indigenous wisdom about the environment and ecology with personal narrative to show how humans can restore our connection with all other living things on this Earth and, in doing so, cultivate a sustainable future. If you have not already read it, I encourage you to immerse yourself in its magnificence someday soon. I will not endeavour to provide a complete summary or review of Braiding Sweetgrass in this blog post. Instead, let me share some of the overarching lessons about sustainability that I took away from this transformative book.
One of the most prominent lessons of Braiding Sweetgrass is that the Western ideology of individualism and dominance, which says that humans are in control of and separate from the Earth, is a fiction. Through her lyrical storytelling, Kimmerer demonstrates how substantially dependent we are on ecosystems and all nonhuman beings, including plants, animals, water, soil, and air. She speaks repeatedly about the importance of living in a respectful, reciprocal relationship with nature in order to restore the balance necessary to safeguard a habitable planet for future generations—a relationship built upon responsibility to the Earth and gratitude for the extraordinary gifts that she gives us every day: food to eat, air to breathe, water to drink, and beauty to appreciate. These gifts, however, “multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect” (p. 382), binding humans in a covenant of mutual responsibility and reciprocity with the Earth.
Braiding Sweetgrass also contains lessons about the inherent limits of Earth’s gifts. Through stories of the Windigo—a mythic monster of Anishinaabe tales who wanders the Earth in a perpetual state of ravenous and insatiable hunger, destroying the land and people—Kimmerer emphasizes how the perpetual growth model and compulsive overconsumption that dominates the world economy is not compatible with the laws of nature. According to Kimmerer, governments and multinational corporations “willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet” (p. 309). Like the Windigo, they insatiably devour the Earth’s resources as though human consumption had no consequences, a form of self-destruction that drags all human beings and the more-than-human world along as victims.
Although Braiding Sweetgrass is centered around plants, when you look deeper, lessons about law abound. Law is primarily about shaping relationships, and what Braiding Sweetgrass tells us is that the land teaches us about our legal obligations to each other, to past and future generations, to other species, and to the natural world. Through traditional Indigenous stories and ecological knowledge, Kimmerer points to natural law and the laws of reciprocity, responsibility, equality, regeneration, and mutual flourishing as necessary for a sustainable relationship with the Earth.
The Problem with Mainstream Conceptions of Sustainability
The global pattern of natural resource extraction and consumption is unsustainable and is driving climate change and biodiversity loss, among other adverse environmental consequences. It is also a source of tremendous injustice: wealthy countries in the global North are primarily responsible for climate destruction, and yet, the devastating effects of these actions fall predominantly on countries in the global South, who have done the least to contribute to the problem. Making the transition to a sustainable society will be a significant challenge, one made all the more difficult by the fact that mainstream notions of sustainability focus on economic growth as a central component. While dozens (if not hundreds) of different definitions of sustainability have been offered, the “three-pillar” model, which says that society must harmoniously balance economic, social, and environmental factors in order to achieve sustainability, is widely accepted. The problem is that when economic development is treated as equally important to the environment, governments and corporations can hide behind claims of “sustainability” while preserving the status quo. Canada, for example, enacted the Federal Sustainable Development Act in 2008, and has implemented a Federal Sustainable Development Strategy. Although this has led to some positive changes, recent performance reviews conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the Conference Board of Canada suggest that Canada’s economic development continues its dangerous trend of depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, and declines in biodiversity.
What mainstream conceptions of sustainability lack is an appreciation of the ecological limits of our planet. Without functioning ecological systems, we will have no social justice, no economic prosperity, and no forward progress. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer provides a striking metaphor for human and ecological wellbeing, using the three rows of a hand-woven Black Ash tree basket. This metaphor offers an alternative conception of sustainability towards which we should strive. Without exception, the first row symbolizes ecological wellbeing and the laws of nature, without which there can be no “basket of plenty” (p 152-53). Material welfare for human beings is the second row—as Kimmerer puts it, “[e]conomy built upon ecology” (p. 153). She goes on:
It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent the recognition that our lives depend on one another, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future (p. 153).
Eco-centric Alternatives to Contemporary Environmental Law
Even though domestic and international environmental laws have been in place for multiple decades, and have embraced the principle of sustainability (though its meaning remains elusive and the subject of debate), there is a growing consensus that these laws are incapable of halting the damage being done to the world’s ecosystems. This failure can be attributed to numerous false assumptions about humans and nature embedded in environmental laws and the supremacy of economic freedom and private property rights. Fortunately, there are many ways in which the values and principles of sustainability expressed in Braiding Sweetgrass are already reflected in alternative legal paradigms and are gaining increased recognition.
Many Indigenous legal scholars have elaborated upon the notion of land as teacher. Professor John Borrows, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at the University of Victoria, has written about Indigenous legal methodologies for learning law on, and from, the land, as well about as the implementation of land-based education in Canadian law schools.
Professor Deborah McGregor, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Environmental Justice at Osgoode Hall Law School, has written and spoken extensively on Indigenous knowledge systems, governance, and sustainability. She has stated that the common thread among diverse and distinct Indigenous societies and systems of knowledge, law, and governance is that the foundation of Indigenous peoples’ relationship to the Earth is based on responsibility. Recently, Professor McGregor published an article on the Anishinaabe philosophy of mino-mnaamodzawin (“living well” or “living a good life”) and how its requirement for maintaining mutually respectful and beneficial relationships among all “relations” may help to achieve environmental justice for Indigenous peoples. Many of the lessons about sustainability in Braiding Sweetgrass appear to be encompassed within the philosophy of mino-mnaamodzawin. Summing it up well at a lecture on Indigenous environmental justice, Professor McGregor stated that society has a choice between the path of the Windigo, as described by Robin Wall Kimmerer, or the path of mino-mnaamodzawin.
We are also seeing the emergence of ecological conceptions of law. The Earth Charter, a set of sustainable development norms established in 2000, has been endorsed by thousands of organizations worldwide, and emphasizes global interdependence and responsibility to Earth’s greater community of life. Equally inspiring is the Rights of Nature movement, of which Kimmerer is a vocal supporter. In lawsuits around the globe, the personhood and rights of nature (e.g., rivers in Columbia, New Zealand, and India) are being recognized and upheld in order to protect ecosystems for the benefit of all.
Ecological law, which is founded on the respect and enforcement of systemic ecological boundaries that constrain the economic and social spheres and promotes a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship, is becoming increasingly influential. The Ecological Law and Governance Association, a global network of interdisciplinary professionals and practitioners, is seeking to transform the current human-centered, growth-focused legal paradigm to an Earth-centered “ecological law and governance paradigm” and has created a roadmap for doing so called the Oslo Manifesto. The values and principles of ecological law are derived from and/or expressed in many other ecological approaches to law, such as Indigenous legal theory, Earth Jurisprudence/Wild Law, the principle of sustainability, and public trust/global commons doctrines. It is encouraging to see so many different approaches, and to consider the potential they have to complement and reinforce one another.
Embracing A Different Path Forward
Contemporary environmental law—and its tendency to view environmental problems as discrete and separate from a larger complex adaptive ecological system—has failed to ward off today’s environmental crises, like climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem damage. I am writing this blog post in the midst of another global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic. Society has been forced to slow, at least for the moment, the pace at which it is careening towards irreversible environmental catastrophe. In this time of great loss and uncertainty about the future, I am grateful for the opportunity Braiding Sweetgrass provided me to pause and reflect upon the epistemological gaps in our dominant legal system and the paradigm shift necessary as we come out of this crisis in order to build a better world for all.
Robin Wall Kimmerer powerfully stated that seeds carry justice in the lessons they teach us about the mutually sustaining relationships between humans and the natural world. I think it is important that we now ask ourselves, how do we plant seeds for a just and sustainable future? And how can we fulfil our shared responsibility to the Earth? Getting on a path to sustainability is going to require a reorientation of our legal systems, in which humans are recognized as part of ecosystems and not separate from them, different ways of knowing and being are embraced, and our laws are aligned with the laws of nature. I intend to start by listening to the land and exploring how I can incorporate the lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass about Indigenous legal orders and systems of knowledge into my relationship with the Earth, as well as my graduate studies in environmental law.