“People feel a kind of longing for a belonging to the natural world,” says the author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. “It’s related to, I think, some of the dead ends that we have created for ourselves that don’t have a lot of meaning.” In part to share a potential source of meaning, Kimmerer, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, published her essay collection, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.” That book, which was put out by Milkweed Editions, a small Minnesota nonprofit press, and which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary, has more than done its job. “Braiding Sweetgrass” has now been a yearslong presence on best-seller lists, with more than 1.4 million copies in print across various formats, and its success has allowed Milkweed to double in size. Given the urgency of climate change, it’s very unlikely that the appetite for the book’s message of ecological care and reciprocity will diminish anytime soon. “As we’ve learned,” says Kimmerer, who is 69, “there are lots of us who think this way.”

There’s a certain kind of writing about ecology and balance that can make the natural world seem like this placid place of beauty and harmony. But the natural world is also full of suffering and death. Do you think your work, which is so much about the beauty and harmony side of things, romanticizes nature? Or, maybe more to the point, do you think it matters if it does? I am deeply aware of the fact that my view of the natural world is colored by my home place. Where I live, here in Maple Nation, is really abundant. We live in a place full of berries and fruits. So thinking about the land-as-gift in perhaps this romantic way would come more naturally to me than to someone who lives in a desert, where you can have the sense that the land is out to kill you as opposed to care for you. That’s absolutely true. But I don’t think that’s the same as romanticizing nature. Of course the natural world is full of forces that are so-called destructive. I think about Aldo Leopold’s often-quoted line, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” But those destructive forces also end up often to be agents of change and renewal. It is a mistake to romanticize the living world, but it is also a mistake to think of the living world as adversarial.

But in “Braiding Sweetgrass,” you write about nature as capable of showing us love. If that’s true, doesn’t it also have to be capable of showing us the opposite? The answer that comes to mind is that it’s not all about us.

What?! [Laughs.] Some of these cycles of creation and destruction that promote renewal and change might be bad for us, but we’re one of 200 million species. They might be bad for other species too, but over evolutionary time, we see that major changes that are destructive are also opportunities for adaptation and renewal and deriving new evolutionary solutions to tough problems.

I could easily imagine someone reading your work and drawing the conclusion that you believe capitalism and the way it has oriented our society has been a net negative. Both for the harm it has caused the earth but also for the harm it has caused to our relationship with the earth as individuals. But as plenty of other people have pointed out, capitalism has raised countless millions out of poverty, led to improved life-expectancy rates and on and on. Is that all fool’s gold to you? Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But the costs that we pay for that? It goes back to human exceptionalism, because these benefits are not distributed among all species. We have to think about more than our own species, that these liberatory benefits have come at the price of extinction of other species and extinctions of entire landscapes and biomes, and that’s a tragedy. Can we derive other ways of being that allow our species to flourish and our more-than-human relatives to flourish as well? I think we can. It’s a false dichotomy to say we could have human well-being or ecological flourishing. There are too many examples worldwide where we have both, and that narrative of one or the other is deeply destructive and cuts us off from imagining a different future for ourselves.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (left) with a class at the SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry Newcomb Campus, in upstate New York, around 2007. SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Unfortunately I think it’s fair to say that, at least when it comes to political and economic power, the world tends to get taken by those who see the world as theirs for the taking. Which is a master-of-the-universe perspective that’s antithetical to the ideas of environmental and social mutual flourishing that are behind your work. But I’m curious to know whether it’s a perspective that you think you can understand. David, I don’t understand it. But I think about it a lot. In my kinder moments I try to think about it empathetically and say people with that perspective were not raised with the word “humility” in their vocabulary as a good thing. “Humility” in Western culture is to be meek and mild and dispossessed. In Potawatomi ways of thinking, we uphold humility. Edbesendowen is the word that we give for it: somebody who doesn’t think of himself or herself as more important than others. What that means is that everybody is as important as you are, and what that creates is this sense of vitality and community and family. Like, dang, aren’t we lucky to be surrounded by these genius bats and incredible fireflies? Humility that brings that sort of joy and belonging as opposed to submission, that’s what I wish for those folks you’re talking about.

Another of the big messages in your work is that prioritizing the rational, objective scientific worldview can close us off from other useful ways of thinking. But how does one keep an openness to other modes of inquiry and observation from tipping over into the kind of general skepticism about scientific authority that’s been so damaging? I’m a scientist, but I think I’m more of an expansive sort of scientist. One of the powers of Western science that has brought us so much understanding and benefit is this separation of the observer and the observed; to say that we could be rational and objective and empirically know the truth of the world. Absolutely, but there are lots of truths. I like to say that there are multiple ways of knowing, and we could benefit by engaging more of them. I do recognize the slippery-slope argument, because people have said to me, Does that mean that you think that creation science is valid science? No, I don’t, because it is not empirically validatable. But sometimes what we call conventional Western science is in fact scientism. Scientism being this notion that Western science is the only way to truth. It’s a powerful way to truth, but there are other ways, too. Traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous science, is a more holistic way of knowing. In Western science, for often very good reasons, we separate our values and our knowledge. In Indigenous science, knowledge and values are always coupled. It’s an ethically driven science. When we do conventional Western science, our experimental designs, our statistical analyses, are all designed to optimize objectivity and rationality so that we come to some perceived truth about the natural world — minus human values and emotions and subjectivity. That means that the questions that we can validate with Western scientific knowledge alone are true-false questions. But the questions today that we have about climate change, for example, are not true-false questions. We know what to do. We know what the problem is. We know its drivers. We know all these things, and yet we fail to act. We fail to act because we haven’t incorporated values and knowledge together.

I see the success of your book as part of this mostly still hidden but actually huge, hopeful groundswell of people — and I mean regular people, not only activists or scientists — who are thinking deeply and taking action about caring for the earth. But that groundswell isn’t part of the story that we’re usually told about climate change, which tends to be much more about futility. What are the keys to communicating a sense of positivity about climate change and the future that’s counter to the narrative we usually get? The story that we have to illuminate is that we don’t have to be complicit with destruction. That’s the assumption: that there are these powerful forces around us that we can’t possibly counteract. The refusal to be complicit can be a kind of resistance to dominant paradigms, but it’s also an opportunity to be creative and joyful and say, I can’t topple Monsanto, but I can plant an organic garden; I can’t counter fill-in-the-blank of environmental destruction, but I can create native landscaping that helps pollinators in the face of neonicotinoid pesticides. So much of what we think about in environmentalism is finger-wagging and gloom-and-doom, but when you look at a lot of those examples where people are taking things into their hands, they’re joyful. That’s healing not only for land but for our culture as well — it feels good. It’s also good to feel your own agency. We need to feel that satisfaction that can replace the so-called satisfaction of buying something. Our attention has been hijacked by our economy, by marketers saying you should be paying attention to consumption, you should be paying attention to violence, political division. What if we were paying attention to the natural world? I’ve often had this fantasy that we should have Fox News, by which I mean news about foxes. What if we had storytelling mechanisms that said it is important that you know about the well-being of wildlife in your neighborhood? That that’s newsworthy? This beautiful gift of attention that we human beings have is being hijacked to pay attention to products and someone else’s political agenda. Whereas if we can reclaim our attention and pay attention to things that really matter, there a revolution starts.

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Opening illustration: Source photograph from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Lynda Barry about the value of childlike thinking, Father Mike Schmitz about religious belief and Jerrod Carmichael on comedy and honesty.