- In “Picking Sweetgrass”, Kimmerer encourages us to consider the degree of reciprocity in our transactions.
a. How adequately do you think our money-based economy provides for reciprocity? (Kimmerer asks herself on page 177, “How do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives we take?”)
I believe that our modern economy has a lot of shortcuts in order to ensure that the rich and powerful spend less money on goods or services that take a lot of effort from the lower class. For example, Elon Musk, the multi-billionaire founder of companies such as Tesla and the Boring Company, avoids paying taxes by changing his income status. Musk receives salaries from his multiple different companies in the form of stocks and cryptocurrency, which are not taxable. So, technically, his income is $0 a year. Along with that, multiple US companies, hoping to maximize their profits and enrich their owners, often outsource their product manufacturing to
countries in Asia and Africa, where the people working on the products can be paid less than a dollar an hour.
b. In what ways might the convenience of all of our “taking” — what Kimmerer sees as the rampant consumerism of modern life — complicate our participation in this reciprocity? The sad truth about being having a lot of money is that it is never enough. As people start to earn more money, suddenly their income goals start to rise. A million dollars a year is not enough, they want 10 million. After a couple years, they want 100 million, and all that money has to come from somewhere. Many of the millionaires in our modern society get rich at the expense of the poor. This unfair distribution is a result of the upper class paying less for a good or service than what it is actually worth. c. What do you think about Kimmerer’s conclusion that “[n]ot everything should be convenient” (179)? Rewards that are easy to earn are generally not as well appreciated if they were easy to attain. For example, designer clothes are not just valuable because they look better than generic store brand clothes, they are valuable because they are difficult to attain. This is why you often notice that people who just recently became rich wear a lot of designer outfits, while people who have been rich for years are less picky about the clothes that they put on. Once you no longer have to put in much effort to earn money, money means less to you, but when you’re working towards a project to get you rich, the money means everything to you. d. How might the rules of Honorable Harvest find adoption in our modern economy? What choices would consumers have to make in order for that to happen? In order for Honorable Harvest to be adapted in our society, our entire food industry would have to go through a drastic change. The food we currently get from crops is done so in a mass harvest that does not take time to acknowledge the life force of the plants. If we wanted to start performing practices, such as asking for permission from the plant, that means fruit and vegetables would be a lot harder to put onto shelves in supermarkets. This change would force consumers to either switch their diets or grow their own produce. e. How might cultural values stand in the way of such adoption? (Recall Kimmerer’s description of early European who regarded the rules of Honorable Harvest as laziness.) Many people may not understand or care about the cultural significance of such practices. Having access to an abundance of food is something that we take for granted nowadays. We do not truly comprehend the idea that the food we eat comes from multiple different forms of life that all play an important role in nature. f. Now focus on how this applies to the question of energy. Kimmerer says, “By no stretch of the imagination is coal given to us” (p. 187). Might the rules of Honorable Harvest be applicable to energy consumption? While the Honorable Harvest only focuses on caring for life energy, its rules can be applied to other forms of energy as well. Practices such as not overusing electricity or fossil fuels in order to save some for others could be done to stop the misuse of energy as a whole. g. What are some of the choices that Kimmerer is asking us to think about in this chapter? One of the ideas that Kimmerer questions is why we buy food and produce in supermarkets that come from animals and plants that are slaughtered at mass. There is no celebration of life or gratitude for resources involved in the process of bringing food to our grocery stores, simply killing in order to get the products that we want and need