My guest today, Robin Wall Kimmer is a botanist who combined scientific methodologies with indigenous practices to study the natural world in a more holistic way.

She sees the world a bit differently than the typical guest that I have on this show.

What I marvel at is the economy of nature, where the wealth is diversity, clean water, and birdsong.

And it's this disconnect between the biophysical laws of how ecosystems work

and how market economics work.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Robin's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, is one of the best-selling and most influential nonfiction books of the last decade.

But my favorite ever books, the one that totally enthralled me, is called Gathering Moss,

a natural and cultural history of mosses. I'm not sure I could even have told you that

moss was a plant until I read her book. And that's where we started our conversation,

with my admission of just how ignorant I was when it comes to Moss.

Music of just how ignorant I was when it comes to Moss. I love that notion that you couldn't even necessarily say what they were.

People think about them as maybe like green film on a rock or something.

But yeah, they are the most remarkable and the most ancient of plants on the planet. They were the first

plants to come out on land. They don't have roots, right? Nor do they have the kind of structures

that allow plants to grow tall. Their niche is to be

hardy, survivors, right? They don't have roots. They don't have interior plumbing of xylem and

flow them. They don't have flowers. And therefore, they don't have stature. Mosses are generally

under an inch or too tall,

but that smallness is actually where their power lies

and why they have persisted for millions and millions of years.

So mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Does that mean that traditional plants evolved

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