2023 Annual Lecture

Annual Leopold Lecture

This event features a distinguished environmental thinker who inspires audiences to explore today's critical environmental issues. The Annual Leopold Lecturers enhance the influence of the growing network of writers and respected environmental leaders who have been touched by the Leopold Writing Program.

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2023 Annual Lecturer

Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass - “Restoration and Reciprocity”

Saturday, April 22, 2023
5:30 | Leopold Writing Contest Awards Ceremony
6:00 pm | Lecture
Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

“Robin Wall Kimmerer is a writer of rare grace. She writes about the natural world from a place of such abundant passion that one can never quite see the world in the same way after having seen it though Kimmerer’s eyes. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she takes us on a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise. She is a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Robin Wall Kimmerer Plant Ecologist, Educator, and Writer

Named a MacArthur Foundation 2022 Fellow

click here for MacArthur Foundation page on Robin Wall Kimmerer

Articulating an alternative vision of environmental stewardship
informed by traditional ecological knowledge.

”I’m a Potawatomi scientist and a storyteller, working to create a respectful symbiosis between Indigenous and western ecological knowledges for care of lands and cultures. Biodiversity loss and the climate crisis make it clear that it’s not only the land that is broken, but our relationship to land. Both are in need of healing—and both science and stories can be part of that cultural shift from exploitation to reciprocity. I work in the field of biocultural restoration and am excited by the ideas of re-storyation. I hope that co-creating—or perhaps remembering—a new narrative to guide our relationship with the Earth calls to all of us in these urgent times. I’m really interested in how the tools of Western environmental science can be guided by Indigenous principles of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity to create justice for the land. I honor the ways that my community of thinkers and practitioners are already enacting this cultural change on the ground. Together, we are exploring the ways that the collective, intergenerational brilliance of Indigenous science and wisdom can help us reimagine our relationship with the natural world. I dream of a time when the land will be thankful for us.”