The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed.

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.

Human people, too, rely on those calories, especially in traditional Indigenous food practices. Serviceberries were a critical ingredient in the making of pemmican.

In Potawatomi, it is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries.

Imagine a fruit that tastes like a Blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an Apple, a touch of rosewater, and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds.

That word is a revelation, because it is also the root word for “gift.” In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity.

This gratitude flows toward our plant elders and radiates to the rain, to the sunshine, to the improbability of bushes spangled with morsels of sweetness in a world that can be bitter.

Everything that makes our lives possible—the splints for baskets, roots for medicines, the trees whose bodies make our homes, and the pages of our books—is provided by the lives of more-than-human beings.

Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude—of which you will be reminded.

Enumerating the gifts you’ve received creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you already have what you need. Recognizing “enoughness” is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

The wealth and security we seem to crave could be met by sharing what we have. Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyperconsumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.

When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem. We ecologists think about the currency of ecosystems in terms of biogeochemistry—the cycling of life’s materials, between the living and the not.

Materials move through ecosystems in a circular economy and are constantly transformed. Abundance is created by recycling, by reciprocity.

The juice that bursts from these berries was rain just last week and is already on its way back to the clouds. These processes are the models for principles of a circular economy, in which there is no such thing as waste, only starting materials. Abundance is fueled by constantly circulating materials, not wasting them. Energy, however, is a very different story. While chemical materials can cycle in an ecosystem, energy flows in one inevitable direction.

Energy cannot ever be completely recycled; it gets used up in the thermodynamic inefficiency of energy transfer among beings. Therefore, energy must be constantly replenished to fuel the flow.

There is no meritocracy or earning of sustenance. Mothers do not sell their milk to their babies, it is pure gift, so that life can continue. The currency of this economy is the flow of gratitude, the flow of love, literally in support of life. By analogy, can the sustenance from the breast of Mother Earth be understood as a maternal gift economy? These feminist thinkers argue that giving and taking in this sense are a fundamental way of caring for each other, without the intervention of states or markets. Scholars like Miki Kashtan are exploring how the philosophy and practice of a maternal gift economy might move social organization toward justice and sustainability. If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the “Sun” of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.

There is no making of community, only a trading of commodities.

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. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed.

Department of Earthly Gifts?”

Gift thinking means that in gratitude for the drink, I’ll clean the leaves from the bottom of the pool and take care not to muddy the edges. I care for the gift so it can keep on giving.

On their website, the American Economic Association says, “It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” My son-in-law Dave teaches high school economics, and 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 implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

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.

“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter. I feel a great debt to this unnamed teacher for these words. There beats the heart of gift economies, an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of “organizing ourselves to sustain life.” In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A

Anthropologists characterize gift economies as systems of exchange in which goods and services circulate without explicit expectations of direct compensation.

When the natural world is understood as a gift instead of private property, there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours to own. Gifts are not meant to be hoarded, and thus made scarce for others, but given away, which generates sufficiency for all.

In the western world, someone celebrating a life event might expect to receive gifts, but in our way the equation is reversed. The ones who have been blessed with good fortune share that blessing by giving away.

Potlatches were seen as contrary to “the civilized values of accumulation”

Making good relationships with the human and more-than-human world is the primary currency of well-being.

The whole enterprise of dispossession and assimilation of the original peoples was designed to eradicate the notion of land as a source of belonging and to replace it with the idea that land is nothing more than a source of belongings. This required a narrowing of the definition of well-being, from common wealth to individual wealth, from abundance to scarcity.

Rebecca Solnit, in her stunning book A Paradise Built in Hell, describes how gift economies seem to arise spontaneously in times of disaster. When human survival is threatened, compassionate acts overrule market economies.

Just hours ago, that bread was private property that would be sold at a profit and defended from thieves, but in the moment of trouble, it becomes a gift.

Can we imagine a system which nurtures a different economic identity and reclaim ourselves as neighbors, with shared investment in mutual well-being? As it happens, abundant empirical evidence attests to the fact that we humans lean as much toward cooperation and generosity as we do toward self-interest under circumstances when we are not coerced by outside forces. Imagine if we created the social and political climate to serve this “Empathic Mutualist Human.” I mean, why not?

These students recognize that their free store makes only a tiny dent in the stream of overconsumption and waste, but it represents a commitment to imagining and practicing an alternative that doesn’t pile up injustice along with plastic.

TikTok and YouTube videos where “you can learn anything because someone has made a gift of their time and experience to share with anyone who wants it.”

It is heartening to me that all these grassroots innovations are arising, created to resist the economic systems that are destroying what we love by making new systems founded on protecting what we love.

The greatest status and success come from possession and profit.

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.

The question that’s often asked is how do we take gift economies from individual relationships and scale them up? I have to say that I’m not sure that’s the right question. Why does everything have to be expanded? It is the small scale and context that make the flow of gifts meaningful.

As an institution, the library comes close to being a gift economy in the realm of civic life. Although it’s not exactly a gift economy since it’s supplied by our tax dollars, an involuntary donation to the common good. But it has me wondering whether systems of sharing common public property might be analogues to gift economies. Libraries, parks, trails, and cultural landscapes we regard as public goods; they are what we call “common resources”—meant to be shared and cared for by the people who use them. They become possible when we pool our excess dollars in the form of taxes for the common good. We grumble about paying taxes, but in essence this legal obligation is an investment in collective care, in the commons.

Nordic economies have been termed “cuddly capitalism” in contrast to the “cutthroat capitalism” of the United States. The rate of taxation to support the common good is much higher in these countries than in the United States, but so is the Happiness Index, which in Scandinavia is the highest in the world.

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. This powerful idea has been used as justification for commodifying what was once understood as a shared gift. But what if it’s wrong? What if there’s a different story, one that the privateers sought to erase? The groundbreaking work of economist Elinor Ostrom showed that land can sustain those resources held in common without either state intervention or market economies.

For much of our human history, before the rise of capital, there were systems in which people viewed land as a common source of abundance, where everyone shared access and met their needs. But it wasn’t a free-for-all of unlimited consumption, there were mutual obligations, at scales from individual behavior to international agreements.

These ancient guidelines, referred to as the Honorable Harvest, constrain rampant consumption to ensure that the Dish remains full. I’ve been told that these ethics themselves are the result of timeless treaties between the Human people and the Deer people, the Bear people, the Fish people, and the Plant people, in which our more-than-human relatives agree to share the gift of their lives to sustain the lives of the humans. In return, the Human people agree to protocols of restraint, respect, and reciprocity.

“The way I see it,” she says, “always value people over things. There’s that old line that farmers like to spout, ‘Without farmers, you’d be naked, hungry, and sober.’ But it goes both ways: without good neighbors, you’d also be alone, and that’s worse.”

Anthropologists who study gift economies note that they function well in small, tightly knit communities. You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, close-knit societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Maybe that is how we extract ourselves from a cannibal economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It’s about all of those things, but it’s also about the deep human desire for connection, for honor, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.