About M. Kat Anderson: A Lifelong Journey in Ethnoecology

Exploring Tending the Wild and Kat Anderson’s Writings – Reviving Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and practices in California.

M. Kat Anderson is an ethnoecologist, writer, gardener, and gatherer dedicated to restoring relationships between people and native ecosystems. With a Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science from UC Berkeley, she has spent over 25 years learning from Native American communities, integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Western science. As the author of Tending the Wild, she highlights indigenous stewardship practices essential for biodiversity, climate resilience, and cultural restoration. Her latest work, I Sing to the Earth and She Sings Back, explores how we can reimagine time, embrace reciprocity, and cultivate deep, healing relationships with the natural world through essays that examine the cyclical rhythms of life, the intelligence of other beings, and the wisdom of holistic perception.

Kat has co-edited two other books: Before the Wilderness and Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness. Given ongoing biodiversity loss, climate change, and the escalating threat of wildfire in California and the West, the issues explored in these books are as important and relevant as ever. Kat’s writings have appeared in Wilderness Magazine, News from Native California, United Plant Savers Journal of Medicinal Plant Conservation, and numerous scientific journals and books.

Kat is currently focusing on restoring human relationships to the earth and its living things. This entails honoring and reviving the gathering and tending practices, ethical stances, and ways of being of pre-industrial cultures from around the world. Of particular importance to Kat are the practices of the indigenous people of California and the Old Ways of her European cultural heritage. She is on the Board of Directors of Fibershed https://fibershed.org/, which works to unite farmers, ranchers, artisans, scientists, and others in textile programs which create community and are kind to the earth.

Kat lives in Redbud House, in Davis, California, where she is bringing wildness back to her garden and tending the plants native to the Central Valley and her other motherlands.