Book Review: Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants and The serviceberry: Abundance and reciprocity in the natural world
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kimmerer’s books embed two-eyed seeing by incorporating lessons from Western science and Indigenous knowledge. In both books, Kimmerer explores the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world to reflect on modern economic life and an ethical way of being. She weaves together her personal experiences, knowledge of plants as a botanist, and traditional teachings as a Citizen of the Potawatomi Nation to advocate for a more sustainable and respectful relationship with the environment in a way that may also transform the economy. Kimmerer uses storytelling and personal reflection to bridge knowledge systems and generate her arguments. The economic themes are most prevalent in the latter half of Braiding Sweetgrass and at the heart of Serviceberry. She argues that the modern operation of the economy is built on a principle of scarcity rather than reciprocity. Reciprocity, which she observes everywhere in thriving ecosystems, along with focusing locally, she argues, may be key to making choices for a more sustainable economic future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".