BRAIDING SWEETGRASS by Robin Wall Kimmerer, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light."

Linda Newbery has published widely for young readers and was a Costa category prizewinner for her young adult novel Set in Stone. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, will be one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing this month.

This remarkable book had been mentioned to me so many times that it was about time I read it. First I listened to the audio version, read by Robin Wall Kimmerer herself, then had to buy a copy to keep. Combining poetic observation, botanical knowledge, folklore and social history, it compelled me to note down something from almost every page. It'll be difficult to do justice to this much-admired, wide-ranging exploration of our relationship to the natural world, but I'll have a go.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, a tribe of the Anishinaabe people of Canada and the northern United States. She's a professor of biology as well as founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to bring together science and indigenous wisdom to raise awareness, protect ecosystems and create true sustainability. References to 'sustainable food' and 'nature restoration' are everywhere now - but what do those terms truly mean? Can we live and feed ourselves in sustainable ways without fundamentally shifting our perception of nature and our place in it? 

The term 'ecological services', often heard in political discussions of growth and the economy, supposes that the natural world exists purely to support humanity. Indigenous wisdom holds the different view that humans are part of nature, no more important than other species or than trees, rivers or mountains. This fundamental difference, Wall Kimmerer suggests, is apparent in creation stories: the Genesis account of the expulsion from Eden is based on concepts of ownership, rights, permission and exclusion, whereas the Anishinaabe Skymother myth which begins her book emphasises co-operation, acceptance and natural generation - and, of course, femaleness.

Her explorations of language highlight differences in perception. Alarmed to realise how few fluent Potawatomi speakers are left in the world, and how much will be lost if the language dies out - its culture, myths, beliefs, traditions and practices - she sets out to learn. At first, she's exasperated by the lack of precision in nouns; rather than a noun equivalent for 'bay', for instance, the Potawatami word means 'to be a bay'. Then the realisation comes to her that this is part of the animacy of Potawatami language and world vision, with the profound difference that a tree is not objectified by the observer but seen as something with its own life, its being. Felling a tree that's seen as an animate being requires more thought and justification than if it's just an object for human use or disposal.

Central to the indigenous way of life is the 'honorable harvest'. This means taking only what's given and what's needed; being grateful; giving something in return ('reciprocity' is a term that appears often in this book); being responsible about what you take and using all of it, for example when an animal is killed for meat. 'I believe that the principles of the Honorable Harvest have great resonance in an era when over-consumption threatens every dimension of our well-being. But it can be too easy to shift the burden of responsibility to the coal company or the land developers. What about me, the one who buys what they sell, who is complicit in the dishonorable harvest?' Acknowledging her privilege in living in the country, growing her own fruit and vegetables, buying from neighbours or swapping with them, she takes herself to a shopping mall, far from her 'comfort zone' where, looking at many of the plastic items on sale, she feels no sense of their living origins and is overwhelmed by the power of the market economy. The idea of taking only what you need gets lost when 'our needs get so tangled with our wants.'

'If we are fully awake,' she writes, 'a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own' - (a question that surely can't occur to most consumers of animal flesh). She describes the return of salmon to inland waters to breed and the indigenous ritual of celebration, allowing four days' worth of salmon to swim upstream unhindered before catching any to eat. That way, there will always be fish: 'you never take the first, and you never take the last' is another core principle of the 'honorable harvest'. The bones of eaten fish are placed back in the river, enriching the water with minerals and demonstrating respect and gratitude. This watching and waiting for the year's marker-point is a far cry from the abysmal treatment of farmed salmon, denied their migratory instincts and kept in crowded pens. 

The book is a series of essays, several focusing on particular plant species and what they have to teach us: black ash, red cedars and especially sweetgrass. Why sweetgrass? Because it holds a special place indigenous lore: 'Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth. Accordingly, it is honoured as one of the sacred plants of my people.' It is used to weave baskets and, along with the other three, tobacco, sage and cedar, it provides health and medicinal benefits. Learning from plants is crucial in chapters describing Wall Kimmerer's interactions with students, including camping trips. One student is dismayed to learn that they'll pitch camp miles from medical help or the nearest Walmart: "I mean, what if you need something?" Days in the wild reveal that everything the group needs can be provided by plants: food, building materials, shelter, comfort, kindling for their fires.

A chapter near the end focuses on Windigo, the legendary monster of the Anishinaabe people: a huge, fearsome figure, a terrorising cannibal. The more it eats, the more ravenous it becomes. The metaphor is all too clear. In Donald Trump's second term as President, Windigo is louder, brasher and more wasteful of the natural world than ever before. What chance does indigenous wisdom have of standing up to the brute forces of ignorance and greed? 

'The fear is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable ... we have unleashed a monster.'

Can traditional wisdom save us, or have we already gone too far down the road of exploitation and neglect?

Braiding Sweetgrass is published by Penguin.

More reviews of nature writing:

Sarn Helen, by Tom Bullough, reviewed by Alison Layland

Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour, reviewed by Tina Jackson

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf, reviewed by Linda Newbery

The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, reviewed by Laura Parker

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Lockdown Sunday extra: NATURE CURE by Richard Mabey

"In these days of coronavirus lockdown and climate emergency, the finding of solace in the natural world is ever more significant."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is currently working on a new adult novel.

A version of this review first appeared on Normblog in 2006 as part of a Writer's Choice feature hosted by the late Professor Norman Geras.

A chance hearing of Radio 4’s Book of the Week first alerted me to this wise and compelling account of Mabey’s decline into depression, and re-emergence. This was in 2005, but in these days of coronavirus lockdown and climate emergency, the finding of solace in the natural world is ever more significant for those of us lucky enough to have gardens, parks or countryside at hand.

Mabey’s book strikes many chords with me, from page 2 where he describes the finding of a grounded swift. I had the same rare experience when one of my cats somehow caught one and brought it indoors through the cat-flap. Handling the bewildered but unharmed bird, I saw the perfection of its aeronautical design – strong, swept-back wings, wide gape, tough eyelids with bristly lashes. Like Mabey, I realised that the only way to return it to the air was to launch it like a paper aeroplane, and watched in amazed delight as it skimmed the grass before soaring high to rejoin the flock. (NOTE: since writing this piece I have learned that this isn't advisable as it could risk injuring the bird. Better to see if there's a wild bird sanctuary near you that can examine and release the swift.)

Swifts, epitomising English summer with their screaming flight, hold a special significance for Mabey, echoing Ted Hughes for whom their return each May proved that “the globe’s still working”. So it was a sure sign of the depression he’d sunk into that he lay in bed too lethargic to turn his head while the swifts whizzed and shrieked outside his window. Many writers will recognise the odd, bereft feeling of completing a book. For Mabey the work had been a massive one, Flora Britannica*, and the sense of loss was compounded by the death of his mother from Parkinson’s disease, through which he and his sister had shared the nursing.

His home for most of his life had been in his parents’ house in the Chilterns. There, he owned a piece of woodland, from which he banned the local hunt (hurrah!) while encouraging neighbours to wander and collect wood. Debilitated and purposeless in his illness, he was encouraged by friends – and a new lover - to resume his absorption in the natural world and in writing, the twin passions which had always sustained him. Acknowledging that he’d never really “fledged”, and that the process of maturation demanded a move, he decamped with three cats to the Norfolk Breckland, as lodgers in an isolated seventeenth-century farmhouse. Here, through a solitary but cathartic winter, he finds new bearings and rediscovers his connection with the land. He examines maps, he ponders over interesting names, he reflects on the shaping of the landscape by human intervention and the enclosure of the commons, he becomes fascinated by “westing” – what seems an instinctive alignment of buildings and field boundaries towards the setting sun.

This isn’t only the story, though, of Mabey’s illness and recovery. There are frequent digressions – into the effects of the Enclosures Act on Norfolk life and landscape, glaciation and land-forms, language and folklore, flora and fauna. The Northamptonshire poet John Clare, like the swifts, is present throughout. Mabey feels a strong affinity with Clare, “ecological minstrel”, not only because of Clare’s mental illness and shared habitats, including the same Northampton hospital, but for Clare’s deep empathy with wild creatures and his skill in capturing their “jizz” (the concise term used by birdwatchers).

He found little solace in mainstream environmentalism, seeing it as merely utilitarian, "based on enlightened self-interest: we want a healthy, unpolluted, species-rich ecosystem because our material future depends on it,” while we assume “the right, or the duty, to determine every other species’ share, too.” (Has he seen a change, I wonder, since publication of this book in 2005? Extinction Rebellion, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace value the planet and its ecosystems for themselves, not solely for the benefits they bring to us. According to the organisation EcocideLaw, drawing on the work of the late Polly Higgins, "Ecocide is a crime against the Earth itself, not just against humans.")

Mabey sees our connection to the natural world as essential to our spiritual and physical well-being. In the worst slumps of depression, he had become, like the grounded swift, “the incomprehensible creature adrift in some insubstantial medium, out of kilter with the rest of creation. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but maybe that is the way our whole species is moving.” To read Nature Cure, at least, is to slow that progress. As well as the honesty of Mabey’s self-revelation and the range of his knowledge, it’s the quality of his prose – the Ruskin-like attentiveness to shifts of light, patterns of growth, and behaviour of even the most common bird - that makes this book so memorable.

Nature Cure is published by Vintage.

* Flora Britannica is another of my treasures, joined now by Birds Britannica (by Mark Crocker and Richard Mabey) which similarly combines natural history, folklore and anecdote.

See also The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

The Outrun by Amy Liptrott, reviewed by Paula Knight

Walden by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Sightlines by Kathleen Jamie, reviewed by Sue Purkiss

Corduroy by Adrian Bell, reviewed by Andrew Fusek Peters

Wilding by Isabella Tree, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Natural Selection: a Year in the Garden by Dan Pearson, reviewed by Linda Newbery

WILDING by Isabella Tree

"Essential, even exciting, reading for anyone interested in nature, wildlife, ecosystems and climate change." 

Linda Newbery is the editor of Writers Review. She has written widely for young readers and is currently completing a new adult novel.

'Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch.' Wendell Berry

What a fascinating book this is! It covers so much, overturning several preconceptions along the way, that I hardly know where to start. So I'll begin at the end, where Isabella Tree comments on the benefits of natural surroundings for mental health, and the sad fact that many people nowadays have little exposure - through choice or circumstance - to wild nature. Readers of this blog probably know that Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris were spurred to work together on The Lost Words - a beautiful book which won Jackie Morris a well-deserved Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration - by news that the Oxford Junior Dictionary was ditching such words as acorn, bluebell, wren and otter to make space for  terms deemed more relevant to today's world: celebrity, blog, broadband and suchlike. Macfarlane and Morris's widely-acclaimed collaboration is a timely and important book, and so in its different way is Wilding. 

Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell, inheriting his family estate of 3,500  acres, at first continued the arable and dairy farming already established there, but found that their hard-baked clay soil did not produce good yields. Could there be a way of letting their land fulfill its potential - not for commerce, but for wildlife? Inspired by a Dutch project on land earmarked for industry but then abandoned, they learned how the presence of grazing animals - greylag geese, then large herbivores - had produced surprising results; close grazing kept the water fringes clear and tree growth in check, providing habitat for a wealth of insects, birds and small mammals. It's often assumed that any fertile land, if left untended, will become mature woodland; but, as Isabella Tree points out, this notion overlooks the presence of grazing herbivores such as the ancient aurochs, tarpan and bison which preceded human intervention, later replaced by deer, domesticated cattle and pigs. Perhaps, she thinks, we have the wrong idea about ancient forests. She quotes Oliver Rackham: "To the medievals, a Forest was a place of deer, not of trees. If a Forest happened to be wooded it formed part of the wood-pasture tradition."

Wondering if this minimal-intervention approach would work with their own land, Isabella and Charlie sought grants from English Nature (now Natural England), the government's advisory body. Unlike most applicants for funding they had no clear plan for what was in effect an experiment: their plan was, over twenty-five years, to see what would happen if they fenced their land to make it deer-proof, a major expense, and introduced Longhorn cattle, fallow and later red deer, and Exmoor ponies. As in the Dutch project, they chose tough, sturdy animals that could fend and forage for themselves and withstand all weathers.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

Of course the Knepp project couldn't fully replicate natural ecosystems without including apex predators - lynxes or wolves - to keep the numbers of cattle, ponies and deer in check.The Dutch project, leaving weak and elderly animals to die from illness or starvation, had met with justifiable opposition; at Knepp, with the land crossed by footpaths, such a hands-off approach couldn't be justified on humane, aesthetic or even practical grounds. So the grazing animals are culled, and their meat sold. Apparently grass-fed beef is delicious, and pasture grazing is certainly the most environmentally efficient way of producing meat, although it's a luxury few can afford.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

The Knepp experiment, now sixteen years on, has produced inspiring results. Iconic species such as turtle dove, nightingale and purple emperor butterfly have moved in; beavers have been introduced, their dams creating marshy wetland which supports wading birds, amphibians and bog plants. The softening of water edges is so important for flood defences, another re-think: rather than funnelling water into hard-edged channels, it can effectively be dispersed and soaked up, to the benefit of pasture and wildlife. Another keystone creature is the humble earthworm, whose importance has been underestimated to the detriment of soil health.

Copyright Knepp Wildland

Few individuals will be able to replicate the Knepp experiment - Tree and Burrell owned a substantial swathe of land and were able to recruit expert help and funding. But I hope their findings will influence government and NGO policy on land management and conservation. Among many revelations, perhaps the most significant is that if we intervene less, nature can be trusted to restore itself. Whether there's time, in the face of climate breakdown, to attempt this on a wider scale, is impossible to know - we may be too far into our reckless uncontrolled global experiment with the world's climate and ecosystems.

I'd say that Wilding is essential, even exciting, reading for anyone interested in nature, wildlife, ecosystems and climate change - and I think most readers will find surprises and revelations to make them see the countryside, and our role in it, with fresh eyes. And I don't want to end without giving a flavour of the writing: although packed with information, comparisons and statistics, Wilding also has moments of lyrical joy, such as this description of a nightingale's song: "It throws the ear with unexpectedness ... florid trills, first rich and liquid, then mockingly guttural and discordant; now a sweet insistence of long, lugubrious piping; then bubbling chuckles and indrawn whistles; and then, suddenly, nothing - a suspended, teasing hiatus before the cascades and crescendos break forth again ... these pulsating strains issuing from tiny vocal chords belting out like organ pipes, throwing the music of the tropics into the English night air."

Wilding is published by Picador.

Find out more on the Knepp Wildland website.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THIRTEEN MOONS by Charles Frazier

"So lyrically written that I was quite bereft when I got to the end..."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books. They obtained 19 foreign rights deals and are still in print in the UK. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in November 2018. It comes out in paperback in August 2019. At present she is working on another title for adults.

Charles Frazier’s first book, Cold Mountain, was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. His second, Thirteen Moons, came nine years later, and it shows. I have enormous respect for writers who take their time against exhortations by publishers, booksellers and readers. A novel takes its own time, or it should, but everyone needs to make a living, and that can work against our best endeavours. I have no idea precisely why Thirteen Moons took nine years, but I like to think that at least one of the reasons might be because he refused to be rushed.

The title refers to the way the First Nations people in the novel trace their seasons. Frazier educates us as to where we are in the year by way of these thirteen named moons. They quietly pace his novel, the life story of Will Cooper told in the first person. He is a bound boy at the start, a twelve year old orphan, sent alone to the edge of the Cherokee Nation to run a trading post.

For anyone who loves to read of the natural world this is a delight, and also a sadness, especially now, as we appreciate just how much damage we continue to do to the world.

In this wonderful novel we get vivid images of how people think about the land and its inhabitants. The buffalo and elk for example are long gone from the mountains and valleys, and the deer are far fewer, but none of the Cherokee in this novel speak of the numbers of skins they traded being a reason for the animals' demise, just of their vanishment, as if they have simply moved on. That made me think a lot about the balance of nature, and how outside forces offering manufactured goods to make life easier can make change almost impossible to resist.

The Cherokee are a huge influence on Will Cooper, and as a white man he works hard in many ways to protect their land and their way of life. The fate of the First Nations is a matter of history, and shame, and so of course he does not have a quiet life, but even during the worst of times, when violence comes, his story is told reflectively, in the voice of an old man thinking about the past. That voice is so persuasive I could almost believe I was sitting by the fire, listening to him in person.

I was completely captivated by Will Cooper. His loves, his behaviour good and bad, his humour, and wonderful descriptions of riding through the country in good weather and bad. He describes deep snow, thrashing rainstorms and hot sun. The names of places are wonderful, and the way the flora and fauna were used to support life is fascinating. In addition, it is all so lyrically written that I was quite bereft when I got to the end.

Thirteen Moons is published by Sceptre. 

WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"I'm struck by how much it chimes with current preoccupations..."

Linda Newbery has written widely for young readers and is currently working on her second adult novel. The Key to Flambards was published this month by David Fickling Books.

The word Walden has come to mean a great deal: the rejection of materialism; a retreat from society into natural surroundings; a search for uncomplicated contentment. This much I knew without having read Thoreau's book (Walden, or, Life in the Woods, to give its full original title), but at last I have, and am struck by how much it chimes with current preoccupations. 

In 1845, aged 27, Thoreau went to live in woods near Concord, Massachusetts, building a single-room cabin on land owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. "I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He stayed there for two years, two months and two days, later recording the experience as the journal of a single year.

Thoreau and his anti-establishment ideals found new relevance in the 1960s. He was briefly jailed for refusing to pay taxes on the grounds that they financed slavery and the US - Mexico war, later writing an essay, On Civil Disobedience, which not only influenced Martin Luther King and Gandhi but echoed through anti-Vietnam War protests and the flouting of authority in the hippie era. The 60s, too, saw a revived interest in transcendentalism, a movement to which Emerson introduced Thoreau and which stressed individualism and intuition rather than adherence to religious doctrines and rituals.

In Buddhist fashion (he is greatly influenced by Indian spiritual writings) Thoreau explains how we clutter ourselves with possessions and responsibilities to the extent that we prevent ourselves from enjoying what we have. Rejecting the work ethic that's a central component of the American Dream, he says "we have become the slave-drivers of ourselves", and writes of the "seemingly wealthy, but most impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters." Productivity and economic growth are often seen as intrinsically desirable, but at what cost? Today we should certainly add: at what cost to the environment, as well as to ourselves?

Thoreau records details of his diet and plant husbandry, claiming that only thirty or forty days' work in a year were needed to support himself. Although not strictly vegetarian - he regularly caught and ate fish from the lake - he wrote, "I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food." In hunting and fishing, he finds "something essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh ... when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially ... It cost more than it came to." He sees a future in which the human race no longer eats animals, which is certainly pertinent today: it's becoming clear that the planet simply cannot sustain meat-eating as the norm in the affluent countries of the world.

Some of the most beautiful writing in Walden describes the waters of the lake at various times of year, and the birds and animals who inhabit it. Thoreau's deep interest in the natural world led to the making of detailed observations of what we now call ecosystems - long before ecology became a distinct scientific discipline. In particular, he was interested in how forestry regenerates after individual trees have been destroyed by fire; his notes on this have proved to be of lasting worth. Another area in which he was a forerunner of today's concerns is in identifying the mental health benefits of exposure to the natural world. "I have been anxious to improve the nick of time ... to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment." This "living in the moment" is the essence of mindfulness.

Walden was not and is not to everyone's taste. Thoreau has been derided for merely playing at self-sufficiency, regularly returning to his mother with his laundry; Bill Bryson dismissed him as "inestimably priggish and tiresome".  E.B. White, quoted by John Updike in a new introduction, was an admirer, but conceded that Thoreau sometimes wrote as if "all his readers were male, unmarried, and well-connected". (And, I might add, classics scholars - the text is liberally scattered with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology.) The tone can be preachy, and he is given to making the same point several times, as in the chapter on Economy. Thoreau can be patronising, as in his famous pronouncement that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." To a modern ear he is misogynistic, rarely mentioning women.

But I'll forgive him all that, because it seems to me that Walden speaks as clearly to our time as it did to its own - possibly even more so.

Walden is published by Empire Books.

See also: The Invention of Nature: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf