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I feel like I'm the outlier here. I wanted to love this book so much. This title has been recommended to me for about ten years, and maybe I had built it up in my mind as being something it wasn't.
Don't get me wrong, the messaging is incredibly important, and there are some wonderful chapters in here about giving thanks to nature for what we have been given, stop and think about where things have come from, giving back to nature (reciprocity) and the importance of getting back to the earth. People have been separated from it for so long and especially now, consumer culture is out of control and destroying the one planet we have. Kimmerer's prose will leave you nostalgic for a time and place we've never seen, and a sadness for what our environment has become.
Hand in hand with this, however, comes the guilt. What was lost was not our fault, and likely happened before our time. She's got some great observations, and an has an incredible fount of knowledge for plant life and her indigenous past. That being said, she doesn't offer much in the way of action. I don't recall her once suggesting to write to your representatives, or become a lobbyist, or join/donate to the Sierra club or like organizations. She doesn't encourage you to go to the library and learn more about the world around you. She does tell you to go into nature and just sit. Oh, and build a garden. Apparently, that's all you need to do. What if you live in a city, or don't have access to an area to build a garden? What if you live in a highly polluted area and can't just plant something? What if you have a black thumb and can't grow anything to save your life (I'm one of those). What if you can't just drive out to nature and pick and eat something because of pollution or pesticides? It must be nice for her to be able to live in an area where that's possible.
This novel is also incredibly repetitive at times. She uses the same words and brings up the same points over and over in each of the essays. The length of the novel and the meandering nature of them prevent the message from getting out to those who need to hear it. This should have been split up into three or four novellas, either by topic (indigenous tales, her time as a professor, her experiences as a mother) or theme (growing, harvesting, braiding, and burning sweetgrass). This book would have had so much more of a punch had it been shorter, had better editing, and the theming was tighter.
I'm really glad that this landed with the majority of folks who read it, but it just didn't do it for me. That being said, it is still important, and would do better as an occasional read- one essay per week or month, say, instead of being read cover to cover as a novel.