How Plant Baby Plant Is Healing the Land Through Collective Action
At community 'Blooms' around the country, the botanist and writer is cultivating a gift economy rooted in care, inviting people to respond to ecological damage through acts of restoration.
On a March day at the University of Portland, the rain seems to fall sideways in tiny, shard-like drops blown haphazardly with the wind. But it does not seem to bother the 100 or so people gathered in a garden overlooking Oregon's Willamette River. The steel-gray water, mirroring the sky, throws the crowd's multicolored rain jackets into relief. Under white tents that threaten to blow away with each gust of wind, students and community members paint botanical watercolor illustrations and mix herbal tea blends. Others crouch in the dirt, planting strawberries in the saturated soil.
There is an undercurrent of anticipation in the crowd, and the chatter gives way to something like awe when the guest of honor arrives. 'She's here!' drenched students stage-whisper to one another, stealing shy glances. The 'she' in question is Robin Wall Kimmerer: botanist, professor, member of the Potawatomi nation, and the author of a beloved collection of books, including Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss.
The community is here to plant, baby, plant. At least, that is the name of the movement they've joined. Their goal is simple on its face: to gather people in acts of regeneration against relentless extraction; planting gardens, rewilding disused pockets of urban decay, and restoring wetlands.
But the movement is also about regenerating community and joy, and about fundamentally shifting our understanding of our place in the world. Its founder and public face is Kimmerer; and people are hungry for what she has to say.
Kimmerer's writing has a way of changing how people see the world. She writes about plants-from moss to beans-in a personifying way. Readers often come away from her books with a renewed sense that they stand in relationship to the so-called 'natural' world-a term that begins to lose its neatness in her hands, as humans, too, are part of it-much as they do with their human neighbors.
That much was evident at the Plant Baby Plant event, where nearly everyone I spoke to rhapsodized about Kimmerer's work. 'I put down Gathering Moss, and I looked out my back window, and I saw the moss. I've never looked at it the same way,' said Whitney Bailey, an urban conservationist with East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District.
'It opened my eyes to this other way of knowing and seeing things. I just absorbed it like a sponge,' added local artist Michelle Mitchell.
It was this energy-a deep love for the Earth and a pent-up longing to heal a damaged relationship with it-that inspired Kimmerer to launch the Plant Baby Plant movement. She spends much of the year traveling to communities for speaking events. At each one, people approached her with the same question: What can we do? 'All of this love and longing is behind a big old dam,' Kimmerer told Atmos.
