The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong. Where is the value of a butterfly whose species has prospered for millennia and lives nowhere else on the planet? There is no formula complex enough to hold the birthplace of stories. It pains me to know that an old-growth forest is “worth” far more as lumber than as the lungs of the Earth.

The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships, not the accumulation of goods.

We grumble about paying taxes, but in essence this legal obligation is an investment in collective care, in the commons.