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.
