Robin Wall Kimmerer

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry's relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth--its abundance of sweet, juicy berries--to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, "Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency."
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is "a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world." The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that "hoarding won't save us, all flourishing is mutual."
Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice.

Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

The Serviceberry

Sabrina D. 

Regenerative economies that reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants. They invite us all into the circle to give our human gifts in return for all we are given. How will we answer?

Sophia 

Jacob Hopkins

…people will want to come back to a place they have a relationship with… Good feelings are the real value added. Even when something is paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it.

This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for. nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in towers of cumulonimbi, a distant storm building. You could calm them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full. 

Part of the rationale for converting public goods to private commodities resides in the theory of the “Tragedy of the Commons” articulated by Garrett Hardin. His notion is that shared resources—for example, a meadow where all the farmers are allowed to graze their sheep freely—will inevitably be destroyed by competing self-interests. In this theory, the people involved were assumed to behave with the strict self-interest of the “Rational Economic Man.” The narrative is that someone will always overgraze or spoil the water source and the collective pasture will become useless to everyone due to the reign of selfishness. Therefore, the story goes, land should be privatized rather than communally held, converting a commonly held source of abundance to individual property in order to safeguard against the Tragedy.

How do systems change? How can we move toward the just communities we need and want? The natural process of ecological replacement highlights two mechanisms at work in replacing a complex system that dominates the landscape and seems too big to change. Succession relies in part on incremental change, the slow, steady replacement of that which does not serve ecological flourishing with new communities. But it also relies on disturbance, on disruption of the status quo in order to let new species emerge and flower. Some massive disturbances are destructive, and recovery from them may not be possible. Other disturbances, of the right scale and type, create renewal and diversity. Indigenous land stewardship relied on humans using carefully calibrated kinds of disturbance to create a living mosaic in different stages of recovery. Disruptions create gaps, openings and edges between the new and the dominant. I want to see emerging gift economies nurtured in the gaps carved out of the overbearing market economy. Both of these tools—incremental change and creative disruption—are available to us as agents of cultural transformation

But when we get to the raspberry bushes, I know they’ll have to drop their guard. The simple act of encountering a wild berry, dangling there just waiting for their fingers and their mouth, loosens something in them, to the evidence of the gift. I’ve begun to think that berry-picking is the medicine we need to create a legion of land protectors.

I have some family members who have taken this a step farther. They live in an urban neighborhood where there are plenty of curmudgeons growling at kids to stay off their lawns. So they converted their once tidy little yard to a garden of berries and patches of flowers and put up a welcome sign for the kids in the neighborhood to come on in and find a handful of berries and pick a bouquet to take home. They converted their “private” yard to a common space. The currency of this gift economy is relationship and a neighborhood where people know each other’s names, even the curmudgeons. The Tragedy of the Commons became the Abundance of Community. This is a gift economy in reach of everyone. It’s subversive. And delicious.

Emiley Jones

When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies. 

To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.

There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories.

The Serviceberry quotes

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