Culture

There is a version of MacKenzie Scott’s life that reads like a fable about the wrong kind of ambition. She studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, who called her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.”1 She spent ten years writing her first novel while helping her husband build a company that would become the most valuable retailer on earth. The novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, won an American Book Award. Morrison reviewed it as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”2 And almost nobody read it. By NPD BookScan’s count, her books sold modestly.3 ...

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013 Executive Summary Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and Braiding Sweetgrass is an attempt to hold both ways of knowing simultaneously (the scientific and the Indigenous) without reducing either to the other. The book’s central argument is not that Western science is wrong but that it is incomplete: it excels at describing how the natural world works and is nearly silent on what we owe it. The thesis: the animacy of the living world (the recognition that plants, animals, and land are not objects but relatives) is not mysticism. It is a different epistemology, and it may be the one that survival requires. ...

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture Wendell Berry, 1977 Executive Summary Wendell Berry’s argument begins with agriculture and ends with character. The industrialization of farming (the replacement of husbandry with extraction, of farm families with agribusiness, of care with efficiency) is not, he insists, a technical or economic development. It is a symptom of a deeper cultural disorder: the progressive severance of people from the land, from their communities, and from the disciplines that those connections impose. The thesis: how we treat the land reflects how we treat each other, and a culture that exploits its soil will eventually exploit its people by the same logic. ...