Botanist, author, and educator Robin Wall Kimmerer is both a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY-ESF (Environmental Science and Forestry). The author of Braiding Sweetgrass, her work bridges the fields of plant ecology, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous knowledge. Image copyright John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

""We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice, and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.

""My economics colleagues speak of these everyday miracles as 'natural resources,' as if they were our property, just waiting to be transformed. In the ecological sciences we call them “ecosystem services,” as if they were the inevitable outcomes of the ongoing function of the ecological machine. But, to me, simply as a human person filling my basket with berries and my belly with pie, they feel like gifts, bestowed by the other beings whose lives throb around us.

""Though we live in a world made of gifts, we find ourselves harnessed to institutions and an economy that relentlessly asks, 'What more can we take from the Earth?' This worldview of unbridled exploitation is to my mind the greatest threat to the life that surrounds us. Even our definitions of sustainability revolve around trying to find the formula to ensure that we can keep on taking, far into the future. Isn’t the question we need, 'What does the Earth ask of us?'” - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Essay: Returning the Gift