March 31, 2024
Friends,
Thank you for your comments on Issue #17, The Essential Water Wanderers. Kevin wrote that our commenters seem to know and like each other. Phil responded: indeed, we are an ecosystem. (Phil, I hope my paraphrasing is acceptable.) My dear eco-colleague, Hannah, also noted a relevant discussion in the comments.
“I remember discussing what pronouns to use for the Swannanoa River at our watershed meeting last year. You suggested using they/them pronouns for the River. This led us to a conversation about human gender identities. I wonder if using pronouns for natural bodies will help people build compassion for nature and one another.”
In the watershed group that Hannah mentioned, we had been in review mode for a month of Fridays. We based our ambitious goals for the watershed on Oxford economist Kate Raworth’s vision for a thriving community within a thriving ecosystem. After hours of debate, I still felt our presentation favored social justice over ecological justice. I come from a lineage of activists who believe that social justice and ecological justice go hand in hand.
Recognition for the watershed’s animacy was missing. The river was referred to as “it.” I asked for a change. I asked that we acknowledge the river’s animacy. Animacy is rooted in the Latin ”anima,” which means soul or life; animacy distinguishes between the living and the non-living. Rivers are alive; they flow, they hydrate us, and they are home to other living beings. Please call her kin, I asked; please give her a pronoun.
A few people nodded in agreement, but then, a committee member flipped her hands up, “I have no idea what you are talking about. Why call a river ‘kin’? A river is not a person.”
The outburst was understandable. Our culture tends to objectify nature. “Objectification of the natural world reinforces the notion that our species is somehow more deserving of the gifts of the world than the 8.7 million species with whom we share the planet. Using ‘it’ absolves us of moral responsibility and opens the door to exploitation.” Nine years ago, The Sun published these words in an essay called “Nature Needs a New Pronoun: To Stop the Age of Extinction, Let’s Start by Ditching ‘it.’” The author? Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist, professor, author, recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Also, my north star.
If I had my wits about me, would I have quoted Kimmerer? I thought I had explained kinship in previous meetings, but the evidence was not apparent, given the committee member’s exasperation.
In 2021, the Center for Humans & Nature Press published the Kinship series co-edited by Robin Wall Kimmer, Gavin Van Horn, and John Hausdoerffer. Gavin Van Horn wrote in the introduction to Kinship:
“The English language is noun dominant, and compared to many Indigenous languages, the animacy and agency of other beings often receive less emphasis….Kinship can be considered a noun, of course, a state of being whether this is couched in terms of biological genetics; family, clan, or species affiliation; shared and storied relations and memories that inhere in people and places; or more metaphorical imaginings that unite us to faith traditions, cultures, countries, or the planet. But the voices in these volumes point us toward an alternative perspective: kinship as a verb.”
“Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning. Humans are born kin, in any number of ways. But the words in this Kinship anthology collectively express something more than birthright claims: they point to how it is possible to become kin. In this understanding, being kin is not so much a given as it is an intentional process.” 1
Back in our meeting, the silence felt awkward. No one had responded to the frustrated member’s objection.
Then, I witnessed Hannah’s facial expression, a quiet storm ~ one befitting Georgia O’Keefe. Her voice rang out. “I can explain that! If one of my friends asks, ‘Where’s Hannah?’ another might answer, ‘They went to the store to get apples.’ There’s one of me, but ‘they’ is appropriate because sometimes I feel like a woman, and sometimes I don’t.”
This parallel that Hannah drew between gender pronouns and the pronouns of animacy that belong to nature is a keystone concept. Might we extend courtesy to humans in reference to their gender? Hannah has used the phrase “building compassion.” This will take some muscle, flexibility, experimentation, and practice. Hannah will contribute to this discussion in Kinning: Part Two.
Might we extend courtesy to more-than-humans in recognition of their animacy? Several years ago, I asked Gavin Van Horn for his opinion about referring to the more-than-human species. Gavin recommended using ‘he’ or ‘she’ if you know the sex, and ‘they’ if you don’t. In preparation for this essay, I asked if he still felt that way. “Pronouns: still the same. I never call another animal ‘it.’ To do so at this point would seem a sacrilege. He or she, or if unknown, they.”
I am in a period of, time after time, editing out my “its” and replacing them with animate language. Reading Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass was the defining moment in my comprehension of kinship. Six years after publication, without a New York Times book review or a big marketing budget, Braiding Sweetgrass landed on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there. I hand out Braiding Sweetgrass like other people hand out Bibles. Why? Kimmerer’s subtitle explains a lot: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Braiding Sweetgrass has been passed hand to hand, waitlisted at libraries, and discussed endlessly.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is an author who can, in one paragraph, explain how a salmon leaves a freshwater stream, transitions to saltwater gear in an estuary, lives in the ocean, locates their natal stream by scent and compass, swims back upstream, spawns, and dies. Without skipping a sentence, she explains that scientists using isotope analysis can measure the Nitrogen-15 in the rings of riparian Douglas fir trees to determine the salmon populations for any given year. Kimmerer writes through the lens of both ancient wisdom and science.
In a 2023 interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Marchese noted that the popularity of Braiding Sweetgrass extended to “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?”
Robin Wall Kimmerer replied: “The story we have to illuminate is that we don’t have to be complicit with the destruction…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?”2
What if? What if we were paying attention to the natural world? In the watershed meeting, I tried to reconcile my understanding of a thriving social system within a flourishing ecological system. I was not able to.
Several months after I left the watershed group, I co-founded the Rights of Nature committee for the Swannanoa River Watershed Ecosystem. (My Author’s Note has an update.)
But just briefly for now: The Rights of Nature movement gives rivers or any natural body ~ permanent rights. The Swannanoa River has the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve naturally. The River has inherent rights. The Great Blue Heron at the headwaters has rights. Sometimes, humans happen to be good at violating rights.
We can be better. We can begin with language that acknowledges the animacy of other living beings. We could experience the joy that results from a common understanding of how to live peacefully on Earth. As Hannah said, we can “build compassion” with the words we choose.
In Kinning: Part Two, Hannah writes about ecofeminism, and we will cover intergenerational work within kinship.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being kin.
I look forward to meeting you in the comments,
Katharine🌱
Author’s note
Rights of Nature project update:
In September 2023, a few of us collaborated with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund to advocate for Rights of Nature for the Swannanoa River. By March of 2024, our river rights group had met with town and state representatives, four French Broad River nonprofits, the water testing organization, the local Greenways committee, and many citizens. Our group wrote a Rights of Nature town charter amendment establishing rights for the river, a river advocate position, and a supporting court. In the process, we learned how fragile a small town’s budget can be and how legal costs could jeopardize the balance.
As of last week, we paused our Town of Black Mountain Rights of Nature legal initiative. We plan to partner with Representative Pricey Harrison, who introduced H.B.795, “The Rights of the Haw River Ecosystem River Act,” on April 18, 2023. The Act includes provisions that cover both the rights of nature and the rights of the people to a healthy environment. Representative Harrison did a virtual call with our group; she is open to advocating for the rights of nature for all North Carolina rivers.
Intentional community work + intentional people = good medicine.
Footnotes:
Van Horn, Gavin, “Kinning: Introducing the Kinship Series” in Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, ed. Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer (Libertyville, IL : Humans & Nature Press, 2021): 1-11.
You Don’t Have To Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction. by David Marchese, Talk, The New York Times, 1.29.2023
intentional YOU. watching you share this with all of us is a gift. we don't have to be complicit with the destruction, and you're teaching us how we can serve here. thank you. also Kimmerer's subtitle. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.
I think we should be paying attention to violence and political division because it has consequences for all of us, but yes, we shouldn't forget about the natural world, because it underpins everything.