Key Terms: Season Synthesis
Goal: After this lesson you can define the cross-cutting concepts that tie the whole season together. Subject: Vocabulary | Run time: about 5 minutes
Your word bank for the synthesis. These are the big ideas that span all six commodities. Read it quick, out loud if you can. The full glossary lives in the course Resources.
The patterns
Geographic specificity spectrum. A ranking of the season's plants from most adaptable (tea) to most restricted (kava).
Climate vulnerability spectrum. A ranking of how badly climate change threatens each plant, tracking how place-bound it is.
Four-stage pattern. The repeating history: indigenous knowledge, then colonial extraction, then post-colonial dependency, then a justice movement.
Colonial extraction. An economic system in which colonies provide raw materials for an imperial power to process and profit from.
The economics
Value chain. The stages from raw material to retail, along which value is distributed, usually leaving the grower the least.
Commodity trap. When producers of a raw material stay poor while processors and brands capture most of the value.
Market economics. A system that values scarcity, allocates by competition, and measures success by efficiency and profit.
Traditional economics. A system that values sharing, allocates by cooperation, and measures success by relationship and sustainability.
Benefit-sharing. Arrangements that ensure the communities a product or knowledge comes from share in its profits.
The ideas to carry forward
Origin narrative. A story of how a plant came to humanity and what it asks in return, found across the season.
Plant's-eye view. Pollan's reframe, asking how plants use human desire to spread themselves (Pollan, 2001).
Reciprocity. Kimmerer's idea that we are in relationship with the living things we take from, and should give back (Kimmerer, 2013).
Honorable harvest. Kimmerer's principle of taking with gratitude, restraint, and a return of something in kind (Kimmerer, 2013).
Earth democracy. Shiva's idea of organizing economic and social life around sharing and care rather than pure extraction (Shiva, 2005).
Daily altar. A short habit of attention, reading an everyday thing through the four lenses so the world inside it stays visible.
Sources
- Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
- Pollan, M. (2001). The botany of desire: A plant's-eye view of the world. Random House.
- Shiva, V. (2005). Earth democracy: Justice, sustainability and peace. South End Press.