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“We restore the land, and the land restores us��.

As we struggle to imagine a future not on fire, we are gifted here with an indigenous culture of reciprocity with the land, revived and weaved together with the science of ecology...

The Brilliant:
--In another life, I may have pursued ecology. Instead, I’ve spent my spare time reading deconstructions of capitalism/imperialism. It has been a challenge balancing this deconstruction with the social imagination for healing and reconstruction.
--I can’t remember where I started seeing all the glowing reviews, but it was settled for me when I saw one by Mexie (PhD grad in political economy, find her on YouTube). However, it took patience for my modernist, distracted side to settle into the rhythm of the storytelling; after re-reading the first 3 chapters, things finally clicked, and then the remaining chapters came in waves.
--The author’s journey to relearn her Potawatomi heritage and synthesize it with her scientific/teaching career in plant ecology was the perfect format for a reader even more disconnected from the land and culture. Had this been a collection of indigenous stories, I would not have been ready for it.
--Through her own trials and errors, we begin to see what it means for humans to receive the gifts of the land, establish gratitude, and build relationships of reciprocity with nonhumans and the land. Beautiful examples of symbiosis between plants, animals, and humans are revealed through the author's poetic dance between indigenous stories and ecological science.
--The author explains what the tool of science is useful for and what it is not (i.e. knowing does not build a culture of caring, an "indigenous worldview"), and further contrasts the "practice of science" from the "science worldview" (i.e. in the context of reductionist/materialist control, "the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility").
--We carefully unravel land as property/commodity (in a consumerist society of manufactured scarcity and endless growth), land as natural resource, land as machine (mechanistic reductionism, where humans are the drivers), and, more subtly, land as separate from humans (where humans can only do harm to nature).
--We carefully rebuild land as indigenous, where nonhuman beings are subjects, not objects, and where humans have humility to not be the sole drivers (thus, listening to the wisdom and stories of the nonhuman beings that are our elders on the land). Page by page, story by story, we start to reimagine land as sacred.
--I give detailed breakdowns of nonfiction, but this is a book of stories for you to experience��

I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an indigenous worldview—­stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.

The Missing:
--I’m all about synthesis, and there’s much work to do with connecting the gifts here with political economy, geopolitics and strategies for systemic change.
--A related synthesis is ecosocialism: socialist political economy + Earth Systems Science; after all, Marx's analysis of capitalism's contradictions ("use value"/"exchange value", "commodity fetishism", endless accumulation, etc.) provides useful insights when comparing market economy vs. gift economy, and his hints at capitalism's rift in social metabolism (relationship between society and nature) is foundational:
-Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
-Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto
-The Ecological Rift

--Which reminds me, political economy has not been just deconstruction; some more social imagination examples:

1) Global South’s censored struggles for decolonization, expanded human rights, internationalist nationalism, economic justice, global disarmament, etc.
-Intro: Hickel's The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-Details: Prashad's The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-Global decolonization playlist:
-Global decolonization and Civil Rights:

2) Radical anthropology on ��human economies�� (in contrast to “market economies��): Debt: The First 5,000 Years (also heard good reviews for Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition).
...This is related to alternatives to capitalist property regimes ("artificial scarcity"), esp. on ��the Commons�� ("radical abundance") and revaluation of values, i.e. social reproduction/"carework"/"essential workers" (think COVID19), and of course revaluation of nature (Marxian use-value vs. exchange-value in the market, which reveals the glaring dangers of introducing more market mechanisms to commodify and govern nature):
-Hickel's Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Varoufakis' Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails and Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-Folbre's The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values
-Ostrom's Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
-Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto and Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentring Oppression
-Federici's Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
-Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory