On the Language of Animacy
An Orion Magazine interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer
From the editors:
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s bridging of ILK (Indigenous Local Knowledge) and Western science opens our fragile global futures wide open. This urgent bridging of old-world deep understanding with the natural world will revive our lives, it will restore the spirit of what thrives, and it will tilt us back to what is important to study.
ILK is now finally recognized as an intrinsic part of the immediate solution to grappling with global warming in the 2019 UN IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report. This is the same report that says we only have t-minus 10 years and counting. How can we square the time needed to restore traditional knowledges into right relations with scientific approaches, while mitigating the already converging impacts of the planet’s eroding atmosphere?
The trustworthy path is clearly to work with those who are most intimate and practically engaged with the regional ecosystems we live in. Rectifying nonbinary pronouns is important work. More fundamental, however, is rebirthing what Kimmerer proposes as “ki” and “kin” relations to the living planet we are in.
