Focus on Arts and Ecology

By Robert Kunzig, ENVIRONMENT Executive Editor, June 1, 2021

As spring gives way to summer, I’ve started reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. In the first pages, I encountered a passage that clarified a lot of things I’ve been thinking about lately. Kimmerer is a Native American, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and her memoir is about melding that heritage with the very different view of the natural world she acquired when she trained as a scientist. In the passage I’m talking about, she describes how one day she gave her environmental biology students at SUNY Syracuse a survey designed to probe their attitudes toward humans and nature.

“Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix….” Kimmerer writes. “They were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and the land. The median response was ‘none’.

“I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?”

At least part of the answer, she decided, was that these students had been raised on a particular origin story, the one in Genesis (illustrated above). It says that all humans are descended from a couple of sinners who were kicked out of the Garden of Eden and forced to make a living subduing the wilderness and exerting dominion over animals.

In contrast, in the story told by Native American peoples around the Great Lakes, including Kimmerer’s ancestors, the original human was Skywoman, who fell from the sky and was rescued and welcomed by the animals. She in turn brought them the seeds of valuable fruits, flowers, and grasses. (Read about Native “forest gardens” in British Columbia.)

“We’ve been captured by a world view of dominion that does not serve our species well in the long term,” Kimmerer told Krista Tippett in an interview. “And moreover, it does not serve all the other beings in creation well at all.”

Most environmentalists would agree, I suspect. And yet the idea that humans are an inevitable blight on nature—the notion that filtered into Kimmerer’s students, not just from the real damage all around us, but from the way environmentalists often talk about it—is just the flip side of the idea of dominion. In both cases we’re apart from nature—fallen, evicted from the Garden.

That idea of apartness is not the only way to read the Bible. The Hebrew phrase in Genesis that is usually translated as “have dominion over” the animals, Duke theologian Ellen Davis told me last year, is more accurately rendered as “exert skilled mastery among” them—a very important nuance. That notion of stewardship is found elsewhere in the Bible too, and it’s a better starting point than original sin for thinking about the environmental problems we face.

It’s also not so far from the story of Skywoman (pictured below). Her descendants never left the garden she fell into and helped create: They continued to tend to it, with love.

(Sources: National Geographic)