Two Buckets—An Economy of Right Relationship

Robin Wall Kimmerer, the biologist behind Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, and Kate Raworth, the economist behind Doughnut Economics, spoke in a lecture hosted by the Center for Climate Psychology. The turnout was massive, and nearly everyone wanted to know how Kimmerer was doing, given the state of the world. She had just come in from her garden and said she carries two buckets, one of grief and one of joy. She admitted she’s tired of carrying both.

The Work

Kimmerer’s central argument is that to change behavior, you first have to change the story that governs it. She described two ways of understanding land: the pragmatic, such as a berry picked in the forest and eaten, and the conceptual, found in the language we use. In many Indigenous languages, a tree isn't an “it.” It’s a “she” or a “they.” She and Raworth both returned to weaving a web of reciprocity, moving from the individual to what Kimmerer calls the ecological and cultural We. The tool is attention, and the way into attention is humility. Her assignment to the room was to take a walk in the woods and treat it as an act of humility rather than exercise.

Raworth brings circus performance into economic storytelling, staging a circus about wealth where people can laugh before they think. Her closing line to every show: everything we need is already in the tent.

Why It Matters

Climate Week in New York ran on a different energy this year: less dread, more “stop trying to get it perfect and get it done.” Beside Kimmerer’s two buckets, it points to the same idea. Storytelling isn’t decoration on top of the real work. It is the part that decides whether anything else sticks. A doughnut economy, a chinampa system, a biochar kiln: none of it spreads on data alone. It spreads because someone told it well enough that a stranger repeated it at their own dinner table.

Kimmerer is tired, and she said so. She’s still carrying both buckets. The medicine may not be the absence of grief, but the refusal to let it travel alone.

Support This Work

Robin Wall Kimmerer is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, and a founding voice in weaving Indigenous knowledge into how we understand ecology and economy.
→ Braiding Sweetgrass

→ The Serviceberry

Kate Raworth is the economist behind Doughnut Economics (2017), a framework for building an economy that meets human needs within planetary limits.
→ Read Doughnut Economics

The Center for Climate Psychology hosted An Economy of Right Relationship.
→ Learn more

Read the full essay → A Bucket of Grief and a Bucket of Joy: The Storytellers We Need Right Now—and the Ecological, Cultural We