Proposed by: The Lake Minnetonka Garden Club, Zone XI

Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2023 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and 2022 MacArthur Fellow, is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center of Native Peoples and the Environment at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York. The center’s mission is to develop programs that draw on the wisdom of both Indigenous and scientific knowledge in support of environmental sustainability.

Kimmerer uses her experience as botanist, author, professor, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation to motivate her audience to reframe their relationship with the natural world through intentional engagement. Her original and evocative storytelling, which blends science and traditional wisdom, underscores the power of language to change perspective. She urges kinship with the land, gratitude for nature’s bounty, and reciprocity through ecosystem restoration. She writes, “Though the Earth provides us with all that we need, we have created a consumption-driven economy that asks, ‘What more can we take from the Earth?’ and almost never, ‘What does the Earth ask of us in return?’”

Daniel Slager, publisher and CEO of Milkweed Editions notes, “She has enriched the field of botany by embracing the notion that plants are our oldest teachers. This shift in perspective—as fundamental and profound as it is subtle and inviting—is exactly what we need more of now, in a time of profound environmental degradation and disappearance of species.”