Tales of Sweetgrass and Trees

In this video, Harvard University’s Environment Forum features Mesa Refuge alums Robin Wall Kimmerer and Terry Tempest Williams in conversation with author Richard Powers.

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

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

Terry Tempest Williams joined Harvard Divinity School as a writer-in-residence for the 2017-18 academic year and is continuing in 2018-19. She is the author of numerous books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her most recent book is The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks, which was published in June 2016 to coincide with and honor the centennial of the National Park Service. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change.