Emily Articulated: Honorable Harvest

By Emily Erickson
Reader Staff

There’s a cherry tree at the far end of my neighbor’s yard. It stands proudly between the vast lawn and the road, in clear view on my daily drive to town. I’ve watched its fruit redden over the past few weeks, growing fat and glistening in the morning sun. Lately, I’ve also watched it become a gathering place.

Yesterday, large turkeys perched improbably high in its branches, gorging on cherries and sending others tumbling to the ground. Deer munched happily below them, as though the fall fruit was sweet confetti and today was their birthday. The scene could have been painted in watercolor, spilling across the pages of a children’s book. But there it was, beside the road, on an ordinary morning, from life at the edge of nature.

This is the time of year when fall and harvest feel synonymous. Apples weigh down branches and pumpkins swell to their full size. Squash waits to be picked, carried inside and roasted, and food becomes visibly connected to the place from which it comes: dirt still clinging to its sides, leaves and vines still reaching toward the sun that sustained it from seed.

Watching the animals beneath the cherry tree, I’m reminded that the harvest feeds more than humans. The same sweetness that draws me to an orchard draws a turkey into the branches and a deer beneath them. My appetite is one among many.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer considers how language shapes our relationship with the living world. Calling a plant or animal “it” can make a plant or animal sound like an object. Her discussion of animacy (instead, using “he/she/they”) asks us to recognize the lives around us as beings worthy of consideration.

That recognition also informs what she describes as the “Honorable Harvest”: a moral framework for taking that is predicated on a responsibility to the lives that sustain our own.

She writes, “If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives we take?”

The question follows me off the page, to the grocery aisle, at the checkout counter and in front of the refrigerator when confronted with something I bought and forgot to eat. What sustained this? What did bringing it into my life require? What responsibility comes with having it?

I’m accustomed to thinking about food in terms of what I want, what it costs and whether I have enough. Kimmerer asks me to widen that attention: to the plant, the place, the other lives that depend on it and what will remain after I leave.

“The guidelines for the Honorable Harvest are not written down, or even consistently spoken of as a whole — they are reinforced in small acts of daily life,” she explains.

I love that idea: an ethic learned through practice and passed down through action. In effect, an inherited way of life.

Kimmerer describes these unwritten rules: “Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. / Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. / Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. / Take only that which is given. / Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. / Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. / Give thanks for what you have been given. / Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. / Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”

Reading these guidelines, I feel a flicker of recognition. Of course, leave some berries. Someone else is hungry. Obviously, care for the place that feeds you. You will need it again. We teach versions of this to children all the time — to share, to say thank you, to clean up after ourselves, to think about whose turn is next. 

But then we send them into a world that often rewards the opposite. We say, “take the opportunity, secure what’s yours, get more while you can.” We measure success by what we accumulate, and worry that whatever we leave behind will become someone else’s advantage. “Dog eat dog,” we say, as though desperation is a model toward which we should aspire.

The Honorable Harvest offers me a different way to move through the world. It asks, “What do I need? What can this place give? Who else depends on it? How will I help sustain what sustains me?”

I won’t always answer these questions perfectly (or ask them at all). I still need to eat, buy things and participate in systems that make the origins of what I consume difficult to see. But I can pay closer attention, waste less, share more and learn something about where it all comes from.

And I can keep noticing, with reverence and gratitude, the cherry tree on my way to town, with turkeys in its branches and deer at its roots, as its fruit falls through the morning light.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.