The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

All Flourishing Is Mutual

Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they changed themselves. Eating with the seasons is a way of honoring abundance, by going to meet it when and where it arrives.

When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.

Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?

When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?

It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.

Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything?

Ecological economics is a growing field that integrates Earth’s natural systems and human values and ethics into conventional economic theory. Valerie prefers to define economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves.” I like that better.

In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.

This required a narrowing of the definition of well-being, from common wealth to individual wealth, from abundance to scarcity.

You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance.

Let’s remember that the “System” is led by individuals,

THE THREAT OF REAL SCARCITY on the horizon is brought to us by unbridled capitalism.

it is an engine of extinction.

She is losing the return on her investment by inviting us to come fill our buckets with this surfeit of sweetness. She is not obeying the rules of the capitalist market economy; she is not behaving in a way that will maximize her profit. How un-American.

But I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy. After all, what we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics.

thriving depends on more than meeting basic physical needs, and includes goods like a sense of community, mutual support, and equality.

I’ve seen it happen. Students on my walks who hold themselves back, flash their skepticism of gift thinking with barely concealed eye rolls. Too cool for school, there’s no way they’re going to put a wild wintergreen leaf in their mouths. 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.

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?

There’s nothing in this world that we do alone.