Humans have gathered and used plants since the origin of our species some 160,000 years ago. Interaction with plants has been a driving force in hominid evolution for far longer, influencing, among other things, the development of highly dexterous hands and large brains. Learning how plants may be of use to us, locating them in the landscape, tending them and gathering them, and making from them food, tools, clothing, and shelter are all fundamental to being human. It is not much of a stretch, then, to suppose that these activities—which I will group under the term gathering—are human needs, almost as essential as walking, eating, and sleeping. What if there is a kind of innate instinct to gather plants, an ancient urge encoded in our DNA like the honeybee’s quest for nectar from the wildflower?
If such an instinct exists, it would be an atavism—a genetic and behavioral tendency that lays dormant in us, suppressed by a modern society that demands our hands work mostly with machines and our attention focus on flickering screens. When considering what it might mean for humans to call up our plant-gathering instincts, I think of the dog Buck in Jack London’s novel Call of the Wild, a St. Bernard–Scotch collie mix who, when put to the test of survival, reached deep down into his wolf-like primal instincts to survive and thrive in the sub-zero cold of the snowy Klondike Yukon of Canada during the 1890s Gold Rush. By shedding the veneer of civilization, London suggests, Buck became a real dog, the animal he was meant to be.
I argue that in not exercising our innate need to work with plants we are, like Buck during his initial civilized existence, failing to connect with our true natures. This has negative impacts on our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Participating fully in the plant gathering cycle—which includes growing, harvesting, processing, making, and using—asks us to use all our human characteristics together in a way that is more integrated than carrying out the compartmentalized tasks of modern life. It is what our bodies and minds are adapted to and crave. Basketmakers and cloth weavers will affirm this wholeheartedly: practicing their craft brings them balance, meaning, calm, and connectedness.
A key part of gathering plants is how it brings you in touch with natural cycles. Plant reproduction and the ecological renewal of vegetation and ecosystems through disturbance and fire are fundamentally about birth, death, and rebirth. When you tend and gather plants you participate in bringing cycles to completion—not once, but over and over again, ensuring that there is never an end. As a participant in these cycles, you receive feedback about the consequences of your actions—you witness either regeneration or degeneration. In this participant role, there is no room for exploitation or alienation; the obligations of giving back, of reciprocity, erase the gap between culture and nature. Gatherers and makers can thus have relationships with the natural world of sustained, compassionate attention, which the naturalist John Muir Laws has called “a useful definition of love.”
Separated from the possibility of tending, gathering, and using plants the ways our ancestors did, many of us today seek substitutes. One of these substitutes is shopping. Advertising and consumer culture push us toward shopping in ways that have been clearly demonstrated by many writers, but I argue that we are also pulled toward shopping because it superficially resembles plant gathering. We trade the burden baskets of our ancestors for shopping carts. In stores, we gather clothes, shoes, jewelry, household items, foods, gadgets, trinkets, and myriad other items we need and desire. The objects we buy as consumers often fulfill the same functions as those our ancestors made from plants, but they are empty of meaning. No matter how much we buy and consume, we never fill the void left by distancing ourselves from nature and gathering.
For me, shopping never feels very satisfying because I’m not involved in the making of the thing that I’m buying. I am not participating in any part of the cycle of its creation—and in most cases, as exemplified by things made of fossil fuels, there is no cycle, just a one-way chain from raw material to eventual disposal. Being a shopper, I only widen the chasm between my culture and the landscape. I am left fragmented, empty, and always wanting more.
Corporations have, of course, capitalized on our innate need to gather and on the psychological needs left unfulfilled by our distance from the natural world and its cycles. By turning us all into avid shoppers, they have reaped immense profits but also widened the chasm between the user and the gathering landscape and put us on a path that is destroying our planet. Because the things we buy don’t last and are often made with synthetic materials that don’t decompose, they end up in the landfills and pollute our land and oceans. The burning of the fossil fuels to make the energy needed to produce, package, and transport all this stuff fills the atmosphere with gases that are threatening to heat the planet beyond what we can tolerate.
Through years of watching Native women weave baskets, forage, and gather medicines, I’ve come to realize that having a daily relationship with plants—touching, tasting, seeing, smelling, and even talking to them, being grateful for their fragrance, beauty, oxygen production, shapes, and colors—is necessary for sanity. Author and environmentalist Paul Shepard says that our psyches still yearn for contact with “the other” and I would put plants at the top of the list of desired others. The gathering cycle joins us to our ancestors, to our community, to place, to the very plants we are using, and awakens our creativity and awe. It’s no wonder that the word gather derives from an ancient Proto-Indo-European word that means “to unite, assemble, or keep.”
Written with input from, and edited by, Eric Engles.
Photo by Jandy Jones
I was delighted to finally read through your essays, and this one struck a powerful note! Thanks for sharing your more intimate connections with plants and birds, and reminding all of us that down at ground level, the earth as-it-is holds invaluable lessons about ourselves. Your excellent writing bridges an important gap for those of us who might be yearning for greater context, meaning and sense-of-place. Thank you!
This one makes me reflect on the atavistic processes of fire at landscape levels, incorporated into daily observations and timing, at an acreage manageable to a small, interdependent community that must exercise some level of democratic input into big decisions. And likely the wisdom of elders. Imagine a shopping mall or open-air supermarket recreated every year, all within the variables of rain, heat, light, animal impact, and growth cycles! To think that in industrial society, we’ve sublimated our dependence on fire through combustibles, power plants*, and flickering screens…
A fascinating essay on gathering and its contemporary substitutes (which are no substitute at all)! Makes me wonder what I am gathering, which leads me to interrogate, more fundamentally, how I’m “spending” my energy. Also some important intersections here with Cutcha Risling Baldy’s “Why we gather” (which starts by quoting Tending the Wild!). Gathering does strike me as a basic human activity, how we use our energy to shape our lives and environment, sustain livelihoods and identity, and participate in collective existence. The mis-uses of this primal urge does point to something fundamentally broken. There is deep ethical resonance in your writing — great stuff!
Hello, I’ve read the essay and the comments through on three different occasions. I’m from the dwindling class of people, in the United States, that has communed with the plants since toddlerhood into elderhood. My mother bought rural property, southwest Michigan, in 1956 and I hightailed it into the woods, where I am home. I make annual pilgrimages to those plants most every May.
Ironically, despite living from New York City to the Bay Area, points in-between and abroad, I devote much time to land conservation and regenerative agriculture within a twenty mile radius of that same property. Early spring many hours are spent removing invasive plants from protected land and once the garden, Community Shared Agriculture, is producing I transfer my efforts to harvesting.
But here’s the thing. If I’m harvesting a long a row of vegetables intended for consumption by anonymous shareholders, it becomes a mechanical act, production. If my “work” is done and I’m wandering the hedgerows and “idle” fields it is an entirely different experience. This is when the magic happens, the oneness betwixt and between all the components of the universe. Even having the luxury of a couple potted tomato plants, or some plants around the house bearing edible flowers, to step out and eat directly from the plants is the act of being one with infinity.
I think of the evolution of the indigenous cultures throughout time, the people that thrived by necessity, being dependent on what they could reckon from the environment, eventually determining the most suitable sized group for success. They best understood that all our needs could be met by plants: food, clothing, shelter.
We know the story, someone was a little more clever, settlements developed, some became leaders, some required tributes, the industrial revolution, the assembly line, Madison Avenue, citizens became consumers, yes we are now regarded as consumers. Everything, everyone, everywhere, is a commodity, and nations are fretting over low birthrates, what will happen without economic growth!!!
If only we could have learned and retained somethings from the pandemic. It can stop and we will survive if not thrive. Environment markers improved, humans went outside, they tried their hand at gardening, food preparation at home, some ventured out for a walk. And now, more time with the gadgets removing us from engaging our senses with the rest of the glorious universe. Just step out and be with the universe, no agenda needed, it will be fine, it could become an obsession, it could be home.
Gathering plants might very well be a suppressed need–I know i love to get out and gather plants and I find it very fulfilling and enjoyable, all the more so when gathering with friends or when singing. I loved the idea that we are driven to gather by our ancestral genes, but end up in stores shopping rather than in the fields gathering basket plants or food through some sort of market economy sleight of hand. And shopping does certainly end up leaving me feeling empty and also wanting more of it! Your line of thinking very much reminds me of Layla Feghali’s suggestion in The Land in our Bones that we have an ancestral connection to the plants of our ancestors, our Plantcestors she calls them, and that the body responds to our plantcestors when we take them in. YOu have had the good fortune of being able to gather with elders, and we can only hope to do the same to help us find fulfillment and care for the land.
When pruning trees all day during that season in an orchard, you experience states of being not available to you when you’re — for example — writing up a board of supervisors’ meeting in a newsroom. I don’t know why it is but when you’ve pruned a few trees and dawn has turned into day, you get so intimate with your tree of the moment that your feet remember how to climb down after your brain has forgotten the route. Your hands become your mind and the nature of trees comes clear.
Writing an article on the relationship between high school dropout rates and the loss of shop classes and other “vocational” courses, I asked an educator experienced in dealing with smart kids failing in school, “How much does a 14-year-old boy learn with his hands?” “Everything!” he replied adamantly. Tonight, I heard a 81-year-old pianist in a state of complete dejection sit down and play the most fabulous set of jazz standards I have ever heard him play. “They’ve broken my spirit,” he said, just before sitting down and giving us a quarter-hour of pure heart, soul, and mastery of what he calls “saloon music” and stuck a little Chopin in between tributes of Patsy and Hank. I kept thinking about the incredibly supple wrists floating over those chords and arpeggios.
Thanks, Kat, for making us think about this.
This essay is so beautifully developed and written. It is essential to reflect on how we got here as a society – to a state where our very air, water, and soil that we need to survive are contaminated and we have become disconnected from the plants and animals that have sustained humanity for millennia. In our increasingly urbanizing world, Kat Anderson calls upon us to abandon our reliance on short-term material and emotional gains we may get by shopping for unnecessary goods and to reconnect with our innate relationship with plants. Thank you, Kat, for reminding us to understand our inherent need to tend to the land and gather plants for our own wellbeing, and that of our greater ecological community.
Kat, A lot of comparison and observation and focus occurs when shopping both online and hands on. That focus puts one into flow where time changes. ,Like Michael says, it puts one into a euphoria. All of that occurs when I am in zone of observing everything around me when I am going for a walk around the neighborhood. Is that a new oak popping up? That flower wasn’t there last week. There’s a vulture cruising overhead. Was that lizard?
Our knowledge of genetics, human evolution, and more show that we have behaviors and instincts that are genetically based and evolved over millions of years. Our ancestors that preceded the evolution of hominids ate a lot of plants and evolved to be good at finding and selecting the best to eat.
So having an innate satisfaction with focusing, choosing, selecting and gathering things is ripe for commercial exploitation. I like your proposal that we humans become aware of our innate desires and pleasures and focus them back to where they came from. Instead of shopping, spend more time walking, observing, digging in gardens, harvesting fruit, bird and lizard watching etc.
Good work on this essay!
Incredible wisdom once again from Kat Anderson. One wonders if this could be investigated through an MRI of someone reflecting on shopping v. gathering? Learning to exponentially decrease my shopping behavior and increase the amount of gardening I do has benefited my life to an unexpected degree. I feel so connected to my garden, my plants and their health, in a way that is constantly satisfying, unlike the rush of consumerism. This is true as well for anyone who enjoys investing money–investing in plants, trees, and flowers feels like an abiding, grounded, bodily experience as opposed to a head high. I appreciate Michael’s nuanced comment about how this might be different on a large scale, but I believe asking troubled youth to grow a plant, meditate, exercise, and create art are far more effective remedies to what ails them than many psychopharmaceuticals. But that’s a different topic altogether! Thank you for the wisdom, Kat.
Thanks for asking this interesting question, Kat. When gathering wild foods, I sometimes find myself in a state I can only describe as euphoria. This may be akin to what is known as the “shopper’s high” – but I wouldn’t know. For me, shopping is usually mildly uncomfortable or even stressful. Especially when confronted with a thousand options in the supermarket aisles, my mind is constantly running assessments and comparisons – not only of cost and value, but also of health effects and ethics – for which I generally feel underprepared. Buying something nearly always feels like a compromise of one or more of my essential human values. In contrast, when presented with an abundance of acorns, bay nuts, mussels, or wild mushrooms I feel a kind of childlike joy and excitement. The next feeling is one of gratitude – not only to the specific plant or animal that seems to be offering itself to me as food, but to the generosity of the Universe as a whole. I feel connected to and part of the surrounding ecosystem and also to humans in the past, who probably gathered this same food source in this same place over many centuries.
These sensations also contrast with my everyday experience as a farmer. For some reason, when faced with a similar profusion of food ready to be gathered from my orchard, the primary feeling is often one of obligation or even burden. Although I try, it is much more difficult to muster the same gratitude when harvesting fruit from trees that I planted, prune, irrigate, mow, weed, and fertilize. One reason may be a perception of ownership that makes me feel entitled to the harvest. Issues of money and time are also involved, sending me back into that analytical framework that makes it harder to access gratitude and joy.
I’m interested in exploring the middle ground between gathering wild foods that I have done no work to propagate and harvesting a crop that I expect as a natural consequence of my labor. The gray area that you call ‘tending the wild.’ I long to have a relationship with the farm where I live and with the plants that provide my livelihood that feels more like cooperation and less like control. I’d love to hear suggestions on how to cultivate a mindset of gratitude and wonder when tending plants and gathering their fruits is my daily bread rather than an occasional recreational interlude. Any ideas?
Michael,
Good points! Rachel Carson, one of my heroes, urges us adults to leave behind the impulse to label, explain, or teach about nature, but rather go out with no agenda and explore nature with emotions and senses fully engaged, just as a child might. She knew that there were kinds of insights about nature that can’t come from more serious and detached adult analysis. That it needs to come from joy, from play.
Just chat with the plants and trees as you go as you would greet a loved one. Tell them how gorgeous they are, how fragrant, tasty, nutritious. Comfort them if they are sick. Take a pause, stretch, enjoy the view of a hawk overhead, a pollinator, a tiny beautiful weed. Find the sweet spot of perhaps cultivating less for happier healthier produce, yes, hard to do.