Top 41 Robin Wall Kimmerer Quotes
#2. All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#4. Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#5. Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#6. Something is broken when the food comes on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a being whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#7. Refusal to participate is a moral choice. Water is a gift for all, not meant to be bought and sold. Don't buy it. When food has been wrenched from the earth, depleting the soil and poisoning our relatives in the name of higher yields, don't buy it.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#8. We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#9. These woods are second or third growth and sadly lost their leeks long ago. It turns out that when forests around here grow back after agricultural clearing, the trees come back readily but the understory plants do not.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#10. Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#11. Wait a second," he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, "doesn't this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn't things be different if nothing was an it?
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#12. One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#14. This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden - so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#15. Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#17. Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#18. If time could run backward, like a film in reverse, we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#20. That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#21. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don't yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#22. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#23. What is it that brings me here to stand like a rock in this river of sound?
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#24. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. An economy that grants personhood to corporations but denies it to the more-than-human beings
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#25. Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they're bringing you something you need to learn.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#28. Plants are also integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#30. When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#31. But I need to remember that the grief is the settlers' as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can't drink the water either.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#32. If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#33. Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#34. caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#35. Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last - and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#36. It's not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#37. Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#38. In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#39. I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#40. I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#41. Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
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