UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times’ best-selling “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants,” will give the 2022 Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society Lecture.
The lecture is scheduled for 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 18, in 22 Deike Building on the University Park campus. A reception following the talk will be held in the Steidle Atrium.
The event is free and open to the public. The talk is also available to watch via Zoom; register here. In-person attendance is encouraged, and masking is requested in the seminar room.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” was selected as the book for the 2022 EMS Reads program. The College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ (EMS) Educational Equity Office hosts the EMS Reads program as part of efforts to build a welcoming culture supportive of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging by featuring readings and discussions on books that foster in-depth thoughts on diversity topics. The EMS Sustainability Council is also a partner on this year’s EMS Reads program.
About Robin Wall Kimmerer
Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is also the author of “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses,” which was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing.
She tours widely and has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on the topic of “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.”
Kimmerer is a State University of New York (SUNY) College Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology. She is also the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which strives to “create programs that draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability.”
Kimmerer holds a bachelor’s degree in botany from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and master’s and doctorate degrees in botany from the University of Wisconsin.
About “Braiding Sweetgrass”
“Braiding Sweetgrass” is a collection of essays seeking to reconcile science with traditional cultural knowledge. Woven together, the individual threads form a rich and lyrical meditation on our place in the natural world. Kimmerer’s book tells us how science and traditional cultural knowledge can complement each other as we strive to better understand the environment in which we live.
As a botanist, Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an Indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings — asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass — offer us gifts and lessons, even if we have forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the Earth and learn to give our own gifts in return.
“Braiding Sweetgrass” has received many accolades including:
- A New York Times Bestseller
- A Washington Post Bestseller
- A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
- Named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub
- A Book Riot “Favorite Summer Read of 2020”
- A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation
About the Lattman Lecture
The Lattman Visiting Scholar of Science and Society lecture series was created to engage undergraduate students in a broad range of scholarly issues. It was endowed by friends and associates of Laurence Lattman, a geosciences educator who taught at Penn State from 1957 to 1970. During that time, he developed a geology course for non-geology majors, Geological Sciences 20: Planet Earth, which he taught to more than 24,000 students.
Lattman also served as chair of the Department of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, dean of the University of Utah’s colleges of Mines and Mineral Industries and Engineering, and president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from City College of New York and a master’s degree and doctoral degree in geology from the University of Cincinnati.