In order to understand the debt that we owe to the natural world, Robin Wall Kimmerer recommends berry picking, one of humanity’s older and most quietly enlightening occupations. To harvest these wild fruits is to receive a gift. We didn’t plant the berry bush. We are not responsible for the rain, the sunshine, or the finely balanced soil which allows it to grow. Still, it offers up its sweet fruit without any expectation of return.
Kimmerer is a mother, a biologist, a professor at the State University of New York in Syracuse, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, an Algonquian people whose members once ranged from the Great Lakes region to the upper Great Plains. Her previous bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass offers an Indigenous perspective on our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world.
Her new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, further develops the idea that nature provides an invaluable model for how to structure our own human society. This new book is an extended meditation on what she calls “the gift economy” of nature. She contrasts our market-driven approach, which treats the goods of nature as commodities to be bought and consumed, with the natural world, which produces gifts to freely share. “A gift economy includes a system of social and moral agreements for indirect reciprocity, rather than a direct exchange,” Kimmerer writes. “So, the hunter who shared his feast with you today could well anticipate that you would share from a full fishnet or offer your labor in repairing a boat in the future. The prosperity of community grows with the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.”
Kimmerer is a big fan of the serviceberry, a small, deciduous fruit tree sporting fragrant white flowers that bloom in early spring and produce purple-red berries that taste like blueberries with a touch of apple. Historically, the Potawatomi mashed the berries together with meat and tallow fat, then dried the mixture to create pemmican, a kind of energy bar rich in calories and protein that sustained them on their journeys. Kimmerer views serviceberries—which the Potawatomi called the “best of the berries”—as exemplars of the natural economy.
Serviceberries have never entered the ranks of our commercial crops, but they are productive powerhouses nonetheless. They offer their pollen to bees and their fruits to birds like robins and cedar waxwings, which feast on them well into the sparse winter months. Their roots feed bacteria and fungi. Their leaves create life-giving oxygen for animals like us to breathe, and when they fall and decompose, they enrich the soil with humus.
The benefits that serviceberry trees provide are not merely altruistic, of course. In return for proffering their gifts, the trees are pollinated by insects in the spring. Their seeds are scarified in the digestive tracts of birds (which stimulates germination) and scattered throughout the forest in their droppings. They depend on microbes and mycorrhizal fungi hosted by their roots to provide nutrients they can’t produce on their own. Without these mutual gift relationships with other organisms, serviceberries would disappear from the planet, Kimmerer writes. And so would we.
Humans receive life from the lives of innumerable others and from the land. “It is no empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth,” Kimmerer observes. We are fed by her not just physically, but also spiritually: “Our spirits are nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods.” What’s more, we are enriched by our gratitude for earth’s gifts, gratitude which arouses in us the impulse toward reciprocity, the urge to share our own unique bounty with others in a never-ending community of exchange.
Feeling grateful for the gifts of nature also hits the brakes on our tendency to overconsume. When we respect the generosity of the giver, we take only what we need, and we develop a sense of what Kimmerer calls “enoughness.” Knowing that we have enough—and indeed, that in ourselves we are enough—is an antidote to the endless cravings actively cultivated by advertisers and their corporate overseers.
The market economy is based on a false sense of not-enoughness. We are conditioned to think that we need to acquire more stuff in order to be happy and admired. But, ironically, the more we have, the more we feel we need. It is a vicious cycle whose endgame is all too clear. “Extraction and consumption outstrip the capacity of the Earth to replenish what we have taken,” Kimmerer writes, and the inevitable result is climate change and mass extinction.
Tragically, this disordered consumption also distorts the human spirit. Kimmerer describes a monster in Potawatomi lore called the Windigo who suffers from the illness of having too much and sharing too little. His hunger will never be satisfied, even by devouring the whole world. Kimmerer sees the Windigo as the archetype of what she calls our “cannibal economy.” “When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?” she asks. She insists that the core of the problem is spiritual—a lack of inward connection to creation—and the solution is spiritual as well. “Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequence of unrestrained taking by humans,” she writes. “Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?”
Gratitude arises organically from the feeling that we are being well taken care of. The gift economies of nature are based on abundance, while our money economy runs on scarcity, which drives up demand, prices, and corporate profits. In the natural world, there is more than enough to go around. The oak tree is not stingy with its acorns. The sun gives freely of its rays, fueling the unfolding of life in all its forms.
Nature, we read, is a circular economy of constant flow and transformation where nothing is hoarded or allowed to stagnate, and everything is recycled—nitrogen, carbon, sugars, rain. It is also a realm where—superficial readings of Darwin aside—cooperation is at least as important as competition as an engine of evolutionary success.
Ecology, by definition, is the story of how myriad species work together in balance with one another to form a greater dynamic whole. Competition is certainly part of it. But the greater part, Kimmerer argues, is cooperation. The creation of biodiversity, she says, is driven by each species being different from all the others and having different requirements, and thereby avoiding unnecessary competition. Nature is less a battleground of hostile forces than a complex web of mutually beneficial interrelationships. She points out that the Greek word oikos means “household” and is the origin of the “eco” in both ecology and economics. Whether in the household of a family or the household of the natural world, “thriving is only possible if you have nurtured strong bonds” with others. “Wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
Kimmerer challenges us to imagine a human economy modeled on ecological systems, one that values long-term sustainability over short-term profit, and she presents us with the gift economies of Indigenous people around the globe for inspiration. These traditional economies based on sharing may seem foreign to our modern sensibilities. The Potowatami “giveaways” and the elaborate potlatches of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, in which “gifts circulate in the group, solidifying bonds and redistributing wealth,” were banned by colonial authorities who held that they violated “civilized values of accumulation.”
But the values behind these Indigenous practices are no more foreign than Christian charity. If the scriptures of the world religions and the testimony of anthropologists are to be believed, generosity is coded in our hearts and in our genes. Kimmerer relates the story of a hunter who was asked by an anthropologist why he gave away so much of his precious meat instead of storing it for his own future use. “Store my meat?” the hunter replied. “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”
If such an ethic still seems far-fetched, Kimmerer asks us to consider the plethora of new (and not so new) ways that Americans share with others: free boxes, front-yard giveaways, work exchanges, repair cafes, clothing swaps, cooperative farms, open-source software, YouTube videos where people share the fruits of their expertise with others. The ubiquity of these grassroots efforts testifies that the urge to share has not been defeated by late-day capitalism.
We cannot help but share because of the pleasure it gives us. “I’ve always believed that the ones who have the more joy win,” Kimmerer observes toward the end of her short but rich and thought-provoking book. “We have joy and justice on our side. And berries.”
The Serviceberry
Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Scribner
$20 | 128 pp.
