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Weaving Water, Land, and People BY ANN ADAMS
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’ve been reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. If you haven’t started reading it, I highly recommend it. As the subtitle suggests, Kimmerer integrates Indigenous stories and culture with her knowledge as an environmental biologist, with her personal experience as a hunter/gather and mother. The result is a delightful and thought-provoking collection of essays that makes connections across so many disciplines it is mind boggling. Of particular importance to me was her articulation of restorative reciprocity. It was
Root Cause INSIDE THIS ISSUE One of HMI’s testing questions involves identifying the problem you are trying to solve and then determining the root cause of the problem to make sure you are addressing that cause in any decision you are making. Learn what HMI’s Interim Executive Director, Wayne Knight, has to say about the root cause of brush on page 2.
In Practice a publication of Holistic Management International
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a clear articulation of what we as holistic managers are attempting to do. While I have often used the term “symbiotic relationships,” the phrase “restorative reciprocity” seems an even more elegant way to define that relationship as one of reciprocity. This reciprocity is not merely a give and take, but an effort to create greater outcomes for all parties as “medicine for our broken relationship with earth.” Kimmerer grounds her essays in the understanding that so many of her biology students come to her classes with the clear certainty that humans are bad for the planet. She suggests that such a broken relationship is not a given and has not always been the case. She notes: “As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of [our] vision.” Thus, Braiding Sweetgrass is a book that helps us move past that impoverished vision and engage in whatever restorative reciprocity we are capable of doing as we listen more closely to what the water, land, plants, animals, and people are telling us. It was with an expansive vision of our ability as humans to engage in restorative reciprocity that the organizing committee for the 2021 REGENERATE Conference decided on the theme for this year’s conference: Weaving Water, Land and People. The Quivira Coalition, the American Grassfed Association, and HMI will co-host this conference which will be both place-based and online to address the needs of our international audience and be responsive to COVID concerns. The conference will weave together field days, workshops, and plenaries—some of which can be attended in person. Field days will take place in the month of September, while workshops will take place during October, with plenaries taking place the first week in November. Registration will go live in July but we’ll be sending update emails throughout the late spring. Weaving is part art form and part survival. Every culture has some form of weaving that takes individual threads that become a
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whole cloth, serving practical and, potentially, aesthetic purposes. When we as producers choose to engage in restorative reciprocity on the lands we manage, we are weaving those symbiotic relationships that result in more resilient landscapes, businesses, and communities. We chose three elements for the theme: water, land, and people. Within the elements of water and land, we include all those beings that make up each of those ecosystems as well as the relationships between them. We separated out people to highlight how we, as a species with great power and the receiver of many gifts from nature, must consider our responsibility to use that power in a way that restores and builds reciprocity. At the very least, in our own enlightened self-interest, we must understand that as we impoverish our vision and our practices, we are destined to impoverish our families, businesses, and communities. So, how can we more consistently come to our work with that concept of restorative reciprocity in the forefront of our mind? How do we share what has worked for us with others so they, too, can achieve the results of improved land health, profitability and sustainable businesses that can be passed to the next generation of producers, keeping working lands working, and developing communities that support this work because the work supports them? These are the questions we will be exploring during the conference as we work to bring you a diverse group of producers who have learned or are learning how to weave water, land, and people in their production practices, marketing, and land stewardship. We hope you will join us as we all work to create a deeper understanding of what the world could look like if we lived “as if [our] children’s future matter, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.”
To purchase Braiding Sweetgrass online, go to: https://milkweed.org/book/braidingsweetgrass.