Engaging with Honorable Harvest

 In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the native approach to honorable harvest.  She describes it this way:

The Honorable harvest rules:

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself.  Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

Ask permission before taking.  Abide by the answer.

Never take the first, never take the last.

Take only what you need. 

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half.  Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully.  Never waste what you have taken.

Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

Throughout the book she describes this way of relating to the natural world.  She describes growing food this way, she described gathering food or bark for baskets in this way, and she describes a doctoral thesis of one of her students who established that the gathering of sweetgrass by native tribes had been protective against the plant dying out.  (In short humans were part of the reproductive cycle of the plant).  There is a lot to take in, as a white person about this idea of honorable harvest.  It certainly frames a new for me the horror with which our Native siblings must have viewed the taking and plundering and ceasing, and mining of the natural world by colonists.  It also brings new light for me on how we got so badly out of sync with the natural world and the long path back for us to getting into sync.

She also says on p. 154:  What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours?  To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the threads of life in everything and pay it respect?  Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.

I almost weep to see how much the disconnect from the earth is that I don't see trees in Kleenex, or algae in tooth paste, etc.  (I have seen the oak in floors and furniture and paper).   I was taught that these were objects and to have no concern for where they came from.  This is far away from the ethic of introducing oneself and asking if you take, not taking the first or the last - this is not even knowing what is taken.  This is how we have an earth degraded and melting under climate change - because we have turned a blind eye to how we relate to the earth.

"Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.  Use it respectfully.  Never waste what you have taken."  I think of the common site of people in restaurants pulling 5 napkins at a time out of the dispenser.  They are on autopilot.   I don't think they believe they need that many, nor any real thought at all about it - it is a habit of grabbing.  They do not have any awareness when they later throw most them away unused that they have wasted the tree lives embodied in those napkins.   Yes on one level this is a small matter and will not significantly impact or end climate change.   And yet it is a metaphor for how we live in general on this planet: unconscious, grabbing, using, wasting, and unaware of the results.  On an even larger level we have taken whole mountains, whole waterways, whole Tar Sands and we have thrown them away, left them uninhabitable - taking both the first and the last and giving no thanks.

Robin has inspired me to try to figure out how to live into a new (and old) way.  What are your thoughts?