The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
- Feb 21, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★★☆
Expanded from an article that originally appeared in Emergence Magazine, a publication I’d never heard of before but am now completely smitten with, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry in many ways picks up where her best-selling Braiding Sweetgrass left off. While the latter weaves Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants into a sprawling and ambitious masterpiece of ecological spiritualism, the former, while no less ambitious despite its modest size and length (105 well-spaced pocket-sized pages interspersed with wonderful black-and-white illustrations by John Burgoyne), is more about turning on lights and asking questions than offering answers.
Throughout the book, Kimmerer uses the Serviceberry (also known as the Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, and Sarvis), and the picking of them at the farm of friends and neighbors, Ed and Paulie Drexler, who, during Covid, opened their doors and allowed people to pick this relatively unknown berry for free, as an exemplar of the gift economy. What is a gift economy, you ask? As you might guess, it is the opposite of a market economy, which is what drives capitalism. In a gift economy, goods and services are given away without expectation of reward—immediate, future, or otherwise. In a market economy, goods and services are exchanged for money or items or services of equal value (also known as bartering). A gift economy is based on abundance. A market economy is based on scarcity. The former shares, the latter hoards. Mutual dependence versus independence. Reciprocity versus selfishness.
Kimmerer is not an economist, a point she makes several times, and, like me, her mind isn’t really wired to wrap around economic principles—besides, perhaps the basics of supply and demand that we probably all understand. The American Economic Association defines economics as, “the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” Or, as Kimmerer’s son-in-law Dave, who teaches high school economics informs her: The first principle his students learn is that economics is about decision-making in the face of scarcity. Anything and everything in a market is explicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on the commodification of goods and services. That is, extracting as much value from available natural resources without regard for the natural resources themselves. In a market economy, land, plants, animals, water, wind, etc. have no intrinsic value. Each is valuable only for what it can be turned into and what it can be sold for. And that, dear friends, is leading to the destruction of the earth, or at least a habitable earth for humans and the roughly two billion other species who call this big blue ball home.
So, if the market economy is destroying the world, what then? Kimmerer introduces us to the emerging field of Ecological Economics, which redefines economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality … a way of considering how we provide for ourselves.” Anyone reading this book will like the sound of that. Just about everyone else will roll their eyes. And therein lies the problem. I think most of us know we can’t continue down the road we’re on and have lives and futures—or at least lives and futures for our children or their children—worth living. But most of us, myself included, can’t see how we go from a destructive market economy to a sustaining gift economy and keep our lives essentially as we know them—jobs, homes, cars, record or book or spoon or Precious Moments collections, dining out, flights and cruises for vacation. Yes, Kimmerer gives us some examples of the gift economy, but they are small-scale, and while inspiring, they don’t, or at least don’t seem to, extrapolate beyond their modesty.
Maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe I suffer from a lack of imagination. Maybe I’m holding on too tightly to what I have, and holding on requires maintaining the status quo. I can see it in Indigenous cultures, in small intentional communities, in the Free Library Movement, in free produce stands, in take-a-penny-give-a-penny trays. But I can’t see it for cities of 10,000 and one million and 10 million—at least not as a grassroots movement. That is, unless we the people rise up and do as Mario Savio implored, and “put [our] bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and make it stop. And indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless [we’re] free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” We could do that. In some ways, that’s exactly what China’s “lying flat” movement is all about. But we Americans didn’t do it in 1964 when Savio made his speech, and it seems unlikely we’ll do it now—until, that is, there’s no hope, and what’s the use in doing it then? No, this kind of systemic change will have to happen at the top, either through governmental policy or a complete 180 by corporate America. Of course, when half of the country thinks climate change is a sham and we must “drill, baby, drill,” changes from the top aren’t likely to happen either—until it’s too late, of course, and by then it will be, well, too late.
Kimmerer is at her best when she paints a picture of the world she wants to live in. I want to live in that world, too. But how we remake the world—the whole world, not just our little pocket of it—into the world we want to live in? Kimmerer doesn’t say. Like Mary Beard’s Women and Power, I wanted more. I wanted answers. I wanted solutions. But this is not a primer or instruction manual. This is an invitation to see the world, to see your neighbors and your neighborhood, to see your interactions and your transactions differently. All change starts with the first step, and Kimmerer invites us to find ways to take our first. Reciprocity, gratitude, delight: Each is infinitely abundant. There is no need to hoard it, to squirrel it away. Finding it reveals more. Sharing multiplies it. Each begets itself again and again and again. The Serviceberry begins, “All flourishing is mutual.” So are “flourishings” many opposites. I know which world I’d like to live in. How about you? The question is, Do we have the courage to realize it? As Brandt says in The Big Lebowski, “Well, Dude, we just don’t know.”
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