Interview with the vampire

Robin Wall Kimmerer got to headline the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Unfortunately it was a conversation with someone who channeled the dumbest forms of skepticism, but I suppose it does surface what Kimmerer's approach is up against. The interviewer David Marchese seems to have thought it is job to offer her offramps back to mainstream Western views of a hostile natural world. 

There’s a certain kind of writing about ecology and balance that can make the natural world seem like this placid place of beauty and harmony, he begins disingenuously. But the natural world is also full of suffering and death.1 Do you think your work, which is so much about the beauty and harmony side of things, romanticizes nature?

[Even sleazier, he adds a "footnote" to his question, quoting "visionary" Werner Herzog, which the reader will assume Kimmerer didn't see, but accept as "apt."]

Kimmerer's answer to the obnoxious question is modest and grounded. Her home place, Maple Nation, is generous as others may not be, she says. And she offers a third way beyond his forced choices. It is a mistake to romanticize the living world, but it is also a mistake to think of the living world as adversarial. 

The interviewer's having none of this:

Undeterred, he suggests that her work can be misread as a critique of capitalism (although if he'd been listening he might have heard echoes of capitalist "creative destruction" in what she just said). Hasn't capitalism lifted millions out of poverty? She doesn't take the bait. 

Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But the costs that we pay for that? It goes back to human exceptionalism, because these benefits are not distributed among all species.

She punts gamely in this way on all his stupid questions, and I suppose some people might be inspired by her answers to learn more about her work. Surely 1.4 million readers of Braiding Sweetgrass can't be wrong! But the coherence of her views, their roots in both indigenous and botanical wisdom, and her celebration of the love-ful "democracy of species," never really have a chance to show themselves. A shame.