Transcript: Robin Wall Kimmerer — The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life:
Robin Kimmerer gives me hope for the future. She’s a native woman and also a kickass scientist and advocate who’s spoken before the UN on the environment and social justice. Sometimes I look around at what we’re doing to the world and these systems we’re stuck in, destroying ourselves, and I wonder how we could possibly break out and actually fix anything. But then I hear her talk and she shows me ways we can actually do it and ways in which our understanding of the world is beginning to catch up to something more loving and interconnected.
DR. KIMMERER: Yeah. I can’t think of a single scientific study in the last few decades that has demonstrated that plants or animals are dumber than we think. It’s always the opposite, right? What we’re revealing is the fact that they have extraordinary capacities, which are so unlike our own, but we dismiss them because, well, if they don’t do it like animals do it, then they must not be doing anything, when, in fact, they’re sensing their environment, responding to their environment in incredibly sophisticated ways. The science which is showing that plants have capacity to learn, to have memory, it’s really — we’re at the edge of a wonderful revolution in really understanding the sentience of other beings.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. Here’s something beautiful that you wrote in your book Gathering Moss, just as an example. “The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet, yielding to a soft, green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces grain by grain, bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.” That’s so beautiful and so amazing to think about, to just read those sentences and think about that conversation, as you say.
DR. KIMMERER: Yes. And it’s a conversation that takes place at a pace that we humans, especially we contemporary humans who are rushing about, we can’t even grasp the pace at which that conversation takes place. And so thinking about plants as persons, indeed, thinking about rocks as persons, forces us to shed our idea of the only pace that we live in is the human pace. And it’s, I think, very, very exciting to think about these ways of being which happen on completely different scales, and so exciting to think about what we might learn from them.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1SfKmg9