Monday, September 25, 2023

Opinion Today: What the turtles ask of us

A writer calls for a new type of relationship with the living world.
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By Eliza Barclay

Climate Editor, Opinion

The scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer left a singular impression on readers and the literary world with her 2013 book "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants," a collection of essays that overflows with insight on everything from motherhood and botany to the restoration of nature and the Indigenous tradition of reciprocity.

Last week, Kimmerer appeared onstage at a New York Times Climate Forward event, accompanied by live music, to read a version of a new guest essay about the turtles that she and her students encountered at a remote wilderness field school in the Adirondacks.

A group of mother turtles, Kimmerer writes, came to a community of humans to lay their eggs one recent summer to entreat us to pay attention to the climate crisis and the extinction of species around the world. And, she writes, we cannot respond to this call with small acts or even with the gradual adoption of renewable energy and other green technology alone.

"We need more than policy change; we need a change in worldview, from the fiction of human exceptionalism to the reality of our kinship and reciprocity with the living world," writes Kimmerer. She's presenting us with a powerful opportunity to reshape a fundamental relationship with the species around us, and do more giving instead of taking.

You can also read David Marchese's interview with Kimmerer in The New York Times Magazine.

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