And mosses, I mean, this is beautiful, this is very poetic, right? Because mosses actually, in some ways, stitch the world together, right? And so, I'm just, what do you know from mosses that would teach us about this recreating what is actually the deepest truths?

What a wonderful question.

You know, moss is in our language, we call them a sagamak.

They are the blanket of Mother Earth.

They're that comforting beginning place, really, for so much of life.

They're the oldest beings, the oldest plants on the planet.

Really? And, oh, there's so much to say about them, but I guess what I would want to say say in this moment is that those mosses who are practitioners of the small, practitioners of taking very little and giving a lot back, these ancient beings, in the evolutionary history of the world, 99.9% of all the beings who have ever lived are extinct.

Mm-hmm.

So I'm curious what questions you think we should be asking ourselves right now to guide us towards a future we actually want to live in, one that is not dystopian.

You know, I'm so interested in the way that you framed that, Ayanna, is that oftentimes our protection and care for the land is supposedly wrapped up in our self-interest, that it's good for our health and well-being, which it is, right? But to me, what we're called to do, one of the important questions, is this expansion of what does the self mean? What does self-interest mean? I can't be well unless the plants that I eat are well.

I can't be well unless the water is clean.

So self is bigger than this contained body.

as Western science is showing us at every turn, right? That we are all permeable, that we are all both genetic and ecological and biogeochemical kinfolk.

And so I think one of the questions that really can reshape our imagining of the future is to reconsider what does the self mean? And I also think of, and thank you for highlighting teaching, because for me, that's really where I learn.

I think of myself as a translator from what the land is teaching to help my students learn from the land.

So I'm curious what you have learned about the relative effectiveness of collaboration versus competition that might serve us well in this particularly bananas moment in human history.

And I was hoping you could share about, uh, one story about one plant and how, uh, knowing about plants can influence things about ourselves and human society.

Yeah, you know, both as, as a plant scientist and as a Potawatomi scientist, plants in my culture are understood as our elders, as our teachers, and as a Western-trained plant ecologist, they are my teachers, and as an Indigenous woman trying to figure out how it is that we live well here, they are my teachers.

And I think that I would want to invoke the contemporary science of biomimicry that says, "Oh, given the evolution and problem-solving by, by plants throughout evolutionary time, how might we take lessons from them? How might we have the humility to view them as, as, as teachers and models?" So hard to choose which plants to talk about, but I think I would choose the embodiment of traditional ecological knowledge as it regards plants and choose corn, beans, and squash growing together in the Indigenous polyculture that we know of as the Three Sisters.

Because as we know, in contrast to contemporary monoculture agriculture, by growing corn, beans, and squash together in a polyculture, it's better for the soil.

You don't need any tillage.

You don't need any pesticides.

You don't need any fertilizer because it is the interaction between those three species provides everything that they need.

And you're right, all those things are coming to pass.

Hmm

... what if you magnified that so that, you know, you ha- you're living in a interspecies neighborhood where the, the aspen tree is taking care of you, um, as well and demands your reciprocal care? It's like suddenly you're living in this world of, of, of relations that, um, uh, that demand our respect and our, and our curiosity as well.

An important question is how did we lose that sense of connection to the living world, to this respectful engagement with the living world as, as, as kinfolk? And I think it's really important that we recognize the role of colonialism and colonization in that process.

At root, when I think about colonization in the Americas, much of that enterprise was designed to replace a sense of the land as provider, as sacred, as teacher, as a place of belonging, and replace that notion with the idea of land as property, um, not as a place of belonging, but as a source of belongings.

And that was the colonial enterprise.

That was manifest destiny writ large, was the erasure of land as sacred homeland to land as commodity.

And, and that's deeply part of, of American history.

Hmm.

She sells out theaters.

The way that I like to talk about economic thinking grounded in indigenous principles, as I understand them, and natural law, um, is this notion of the gift.

Let's take water.

I'm gonna sell water.

How can you sell what you don't own? Well, hello, capitalism.

To me, that, that, that is, um, that is corrupti- corruption.

Um, these are, these are, are, are gifts.

Serviceberry.

[laughs]

Um, you know, as I travel around, which I do a lot, what I hear from people relentlessly is, "What can I do? What can I do?" And, um, so to try to direct people with that longing, we've...

we're trying to launch Plant Baby Plant as a counter-narrative to drill baby drill, um, and say that what we really need to do is restoration.

What we need to do is to counter those forces of destruction with forces of regeneration.

And so the idea is a, is a call to action, and to try to help connect people to the work.

And for some people, that means a little pocket pollinator garden in the city, and for other people, it means call you up-

Sure.

Um, and eventually what we wanna do is to have online workshops and conversations.

What do you think Western science and traditional ecological knowledge have in common as we relearn how to learn from what the plants and animals know?

[upbeat music] In terms of epistemology, scientific, Western scientific ways of knowing, and traditional knowledge or indigenous sci- ways of knowing, um, have, they have different foundations, right? But they also have something deeply in common with biomimicry.

What they have in common is the knowledge that the land teaches us, because to me, both traditional ecological knowledge and in my experience as a scientific plant ecologist, um, both of those are just human knowledge systems with their own frameworks and wor- and worldviews.

But ultimately, we're trying to figure out, what does the world know? What does the plants and animals know? That commonality of deep attention to the living world is a place where, where we have common ground.

The way that we generate knowledge and communicate knowledge and validate knowledge, all of which are im- important in both TEK and, and SEK, are really different.

But indigenous epistemology, there's great honor given to the fact that we human people certainly do have our intellect as a way of knowing, our big old brains.

We also have physical knowledge, those things that we can measure and observe and sense, right? And in Western science, we say those are the two data sources that we will use to understand the world.

[instrumental music] I wonder how we make this happen at the sort of pace that we know we need, given the, the crisis sort of point that we're in.

How do you see these small acts scaling into something powerful?

It's such an important question, and one of the first, of course, is that collective small action multiplies.

If you have a small native plant garden, let's say, that creates pollinator habitat, you might say, "Oh, my little square meter of, of pollinator habitat, what good does that do?" It does a great deal of good for the, for the beings who are using that, and it's a stepping stone to the next square meter that your neighbor has planted or is present in a park.

So it connects the dots.

It connects the habitat dots in a very pragmatic way, and there's some pretty good science to show that these, the accumulation of these small patchworks of habitat really does support regeneration of, of biodiversity.

But I think the work of Plant Baby Plant is even bigger than that because I think we all know that when we take any kind of action, it prepares us to take the next action.

When you cultivate agency, that agency then expands and has this real ripple effect.

[laughs]

Sure.

It's so coherent with the philosophy of your question, right? Yeah, here's the story, and again, thinking of how it is grounded in Indigenous practice and philosophy.

I'll try to give you a quick version of that for your listeners.

But the story is that one of my graduate students and I were planning to do research around the threats to sweetgrass because sweetgrass basket makers were telling us that it seemed to be dwindling.

And so we're doing a lot of research to try to understand the problem.

And we needed to evaluate what was the relationship between sweetgrass harvesters and sweetgrass.

Because some people said, well, you know, if people are picking it, that's the problem.

And certainly,

Can you talk about the gifts that you think the serviceberry have to offer our modern way of thinking?

Sure.

You know, I chose the serviceberry when I was invited to write an essay about economics.

And I chose the serviceberry because, partly of its name, that economics is all about the delivery and distribution of goods and services.

And so the serviceberry seemed like a really good companion in that examination of our economy.

But also because I wanted to use essentially a kind of cultural biomimicry to think about how does the economy of nature, as evinced by the serviceberry, contrast with the human market capitalist economy that we have today? created.

And because serviceberry is such a generous plant, it seemed to me, again, a really good model of the abundance of nature.

So I was wondering if you could explain what that means, particularly in the context of an ancient but altered ecosystem like the Thane family forest.

Could you talk about one of those quests?

One of the most prevalent responses that I get from people after reading Breeding Sweetgrass is they see themselves in the book.

They're able to say, I want to live in this state of wonder and this orientation around gratitude to the abundance of the world.

I want to live that way.

And that is what has propelled the breeding sweetgrass trajectory.

It's like this yearning to be in right relationship with the land.

And one of the examples is care for my backyard farm pond.

I think it's a really interesting concept and something that, as an economist, I've never really thought about before I read your book.

Yes,

yes.

You can't body train a tiny bird.

It's true, but you're right.

But in fact, perhaps you know, mosses have long been used as diapers by humans.

Really? Yes, yes.

Okay, tell me a little bit about that if you don't mind.

How do you mentally bridge Indigenous culture and intuition with Western science? I'm really grateful