Democracy of Species

Penguin's 'Green Ideas' series is a new publication of twenty short books each written by an eminent environmental thinker and focusing on different aspects of our planet's environmental crisis. I am grateful to Penguin for sending me review copies of five of these works and, on the strength of what I have read so far, I look forward to completing the set myself.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's contribution to Penguin's Green Ideas series is her essay The Democracy of Species which, as I began to read it, I realised was already familiar to me. It is one of the chapters in her incredible book, Braiding Sweetgrass. If you haven't already read that tome then this little excerpt is an excellent introduction to Kimmerer's ideas and ways of viewing human relationships with the natural world. She focuses on how our language determines our attitude to the world around us, particularly contrasting the callousness of English against the inclusivity of her ancestral Native American language, Potawatomi. She also discusses the idea of the Honorable Harvest, a concept alien to Western thinking, in which one only takes as much as is needed rather than taking everything and then being surprised when nothing is left. In a week when the IPCC report declared Code Red for humanity almost entirely because of our voracious overconsumption of Earth's resources, The Democracy Of Species is a vitally important little book that everyone needs to read and act upon.