Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants
October 19, 2014

Robin Kimmerer, botanist, author, and Spring Creek Senior Fellow, read from her new book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Kimmerer has spent her career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as “the younger brothers of creation."

 

 

Journey of the Universe: An Epic Story of Cosmic, Earth, and Human Transformation
April 9, 2012

Journey of the Universe is narrated by evolutionary philosopher Brian Swimme, and produced by historians of religion Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. The film weaves together the findings of modern science with cultural traditions of the West, China, Africa, India, and indigenous peoples to explore cosmic evolution as a process of creativity, connection, and interdependence.

 

 

The Eye of the Storm: Re-imagining Ethics for a Changing Planet
September 30-October 2, 2011

This Blue River Symposium gathered some of the nation’s most creative moral thinkers—philosophers, activists, theologians, writers, poets, and scientists—to think collaboratively about the moral ‘pinch-points’ we will face and to imagine what a resilient ethic might look like. This gathering lead to the writing and publication of The Blue River Declaration: An Ethic of the Earth (pdf). (Participant List)

 

Dragonfly Eyes: Multiple Ways of Envisioning the Future of Landscape Changes
April 30-May 2, 2010

Twenty participants gathered for a weekend field workshop to explore what happens when people with expertise in many ways of seeing and communicating— poets, novelists, visual artists, philosophers, architects, teachers, environmental historians, scientists, land managers—began composing a multi-faceted view of future landscape changes. This exploratory work involved parallel activities with supplemental Long Term Ecological Research funding to four sites: Andrews Forest (OR), Bonanza Creek (AK), Harvard Forest (MA), and North Temperate Lakes (WI).