As Andrew Belfield said yesterday:

Well, between “friend” & Google’s Olympics ad, it’s been a bad couple days for humans.

It’s true! Which is why I am glad to have read the chapter “Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass yesterday. It’s a refreshingly humane contrast to the artificiality of Silicon Valley.

The chapter discusses an experiment performed by Kimmerer and a graduate student at the request of some basket weavers. The ancestral wisdom of the weavers stated that sweetgrass wanted to be harvested, in accordance with the principles of the honorable harvest (e.g., never take the first plant you see, never take more than half). That was known and acknowledged. What was not agreed upon was the method of harvest—snip the stems at the base or extract the plant, roots and all.

So, knowing Kimmerer is a botanist, they asked her to determine if one of the two harvesting methods might be the cause of sweetgrass’ ongoing disappearance. Kimmerer proposed the task to a grad student, who then presented it to a faculty committee. They were not impressed. The project had an insufficient theoretical framework, they said, and “everyone knows that harvesting harms a population. You’re wasting your time.”

The grad student went ahead, however, and worked on the project diligently for two years. Some grasses were harvested by snipping, some by uprooting, and some were untouched as a control population. The results were surprising: it didn’t make much difference which harvesting method was used. Both havested stands flourished. The control group, on the other hand, did not. “It didn’t seem to matter how the grass was harvested, only that it was.”

Later analysis also compared areas where sweetgrass was known to have once thrived and since disappeared and areas where it still thrives. The areas where it still thrives were found to be clustered around Native American communities that use sweetgrass in their basket weaving.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is Sweetgrass that reveals this story. Wiingaashk was the first to be planted by Skywoman on the back of Turtle Island. The grass gives its fragrant self to us and we receive it with gratitude. In return, through the very act of accepting the gift, the pickers open some space, let the light come in, and with a gentle tug bestir the dormant buds that make new grass. Reciprocity is a matter of keeping the gift in motion through the self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving.

Our elders taught that the relationship between plants and humans must be one of balance. People can take too much and exceed the capacity of the plants to share again. That’s the voice of hard experience that resonates in the teachings of “never take more than half.” And yet, they also teach that we can take too little. If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer. These laws are the product of hard experience, of past mistakes.

I don’t know what future the machine minds are planning. The world as it actually exists, however—the world of flesh and stem, soil and water—has an essential place for us.