A perfect evening in the Stoney Creek Valley; the sun’s path bends toward the horizon, casting a golden glow, the mosquitos are mercifully few. A small group of people moves along a grassy path, observing the flora that populate Camrose’s riparian area.

The occasion is a presentation from the Battle River Watershed Alliance in a summer series hosted by the Camrose Wildlife Stewardship Society. Presenter Sarah Skinner points out willow, sage, asters and goldenrod, evoking botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer, who wrote in Braiding Sweetgrass that she chose to study botany: “to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together.” Wall Kimmerer would come to find that while science can describe how the human eye is uniquely able to detect those particular colours, questions of beauty go beyond science’s remit. “Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning: purple and gold, the heraldic colours of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colours,” she writes.

The BRWA’s presentation came while Camrose was under Stage 2 water restrictions (on non-essential outdoor use such as watering lawns and washing cars) due to low water levels in our water source, Dried Meat Lake, fed by a Battle River that was not flowing.

“All of the water that we have in this region comes from groundwater supplies, which is stored in lakes and wetlands across the region. And then also when we receive precipitation, whether snow or rain, throughout the year.” Skinner says. “It’s a unique challenge and opportunity to really understand what it means to live within our means in terms of the amount of water that we have.”

While subsequent precipitation and the efforts of residents averted further water restrictions, persistent low water levels could mean similar restrictions come into place early next year.

The Braiding Sweetgrass chapter referenced above is not only a poetic meditation on the glories of goldenrod and asters, it is a reflection on Wall Kimmerer’s experience as she studied to be a botanist. Her adviser told her that beauty “is not at all the sort of thing about which botanists concern themselves.” Despite this discouragement, over time she learned for herself that science and traditional knowledge can co-exist, that in fact we see the world more fully when viewing through both lenses.

If we have any hope of meeting environmental challenges, we will need these two ways of seeing to address both sides of the problem: the technological versus the spiritual or cultural. In a beautiful turn of phrase, Wall Kimmerer reflects that the complementary pairing of purple and yellow represents “lived reciprocity.”

“Science and art, matter and spirit, Indigenous knowledge and western science. Can they be goldenrod and asters for each other?” she writes. “When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary colour, to make something beautiful in response.”