Robin Wall Kimmerer is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, whose mission is to create programs which draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge for our shared goals of sustainability. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing, and her widely acclaimed Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants has earned her international recognition, with a 2022 young adult adaptation by Monique Gray Smith reinforcing how wider ecological understanding stems from listening to the earth’s oldest teachers: the plants around us. She has also authored The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Bud Finds Her Gift, and numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge, and restoration ecology. Robin tours widely, has been featured on NPR’s On Being with Krista Tippett, and in 2015 addressed the general assembly of the United Nations on “Healing Our Relationship with Nature.” She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. Holding a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF and MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. She lives on an old farm in upstate New York, tending gardens both cultivated and wild.
Why their voice matters: Robin weaves together indigenous wisdom and Western scientific knowledge to demonstrate that plants are not objects to be studied but teachers offering profound lessons about reciprocity, gratitude, and what it means to live as if the land feeds you and your children’s future matters. As both a rigorously trained botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she bridges two knowledge systems that are rarely held together, proving that scientific observation and indigenous teachings don’t contradict but rather enrich each other—offering a fuller, more alive understanding of the natural world. Her work addresses what she calls “species loneliness,” the deep unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, by showing how restoration of ecological communities and restoration of our relationships to land are inseparable tasks. Through the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, she creates tangible programs demonstrating that sustainable futures require listening to indigenous knowledge about human relationships with land, while her writing transforms readers’ capacity to see the world through the lens of gift-giving rather than resource extraction—recognizing that when all the world is a gift in motion, rather than a commodity, we become wealthy beyond measure and remember our responsibilities to the whole community of life.