The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance.

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.

A world of produce warehouses and grocery stores enables the practice of having what you want when you want it. We force the food to come to us, at considerable financial and ecological costs, rather than following the practice of taking what has been given to us, each in its own time.

These Serviceberries were not coerced, and their carbon footprint is nothing. Maybe that’s why they taste so good—they come only this time of year—these ephemeral si...

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.

I can’t help but gaze at them, these shiny gems, cupped in my hand—and breathe out my thanks. In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. 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.

When we speak of these not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes. In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another. The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude—of which you will be reminded.

This kind of gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” Not an automatic ritual of “manners,” but a recognition of indebtedness that can stop you in your tracks—it brings you the realization that your life is nurtured from the body of Mother Earth.

All that we need to live flows through the land. It is not an empty metaphor that we call her Mother Earth. Food in our mouths is the thread that connects us in a relationship simultaneously spiritual and physical, as our bodies get fed and our spirits nourished by a sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. I have no claim to these berries, and yet here they are in my bucket, a gift.

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

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. Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?

If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.

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

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 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.

I suppose in an industrial economy “production” is the source of the flow, rooted in human labor and the conversion of earthly gifts to commodities. But so often that production is at the cost of great destruction. When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?

Some powerful feminist thinkers call us to remember that gift giving is among the most primal of human relationships. Each of us begins our life as the recipient in what Genevieve Vaughan has called a “maternal gift economy,” the flow of “goods and services” from mother to newborn.

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.

A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand-knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than of the commodity hat, because the gift hat is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking.

I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given.

How we think ripples out to how we behave. If we view these berries or that spring as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy. When something moves from the status of gift to the status of commodity, we can become detached from mutual responsibility. We know the consequences of that detachment.

Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love.

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.”

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 gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.

Scientist and philosopher Marshall Sahlins names generalized reciprocity as the heart of a gift economy, which functions most effectively in small, close-knit communities. Those who have give to those who don’t so that everyone in the system has what they need. It is not regulated from above but derives from a collective sense of equity in “enoughness” and accountability in distributing the gifts of the Earth.

“Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.”

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

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.

Is this an economy? I think it is—a system of redistribution of wealth based on abundance and the pleasure of sharing. Someone says: I have more than I need, so I offer it to you. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these small acts all happen on a few miles of one country road. Giving begets giving and the gift stays in motion. And there are a lot more roads.

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. People give freely to one another, and bonds of ownership disappear when everyone pools their resources of food and labor and blankets in solidarity. When systems of governance and market economies of debt are disrupted, networks of mutual aid arise.

The challenge is to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economies without the catalyst of catastrophe. We have to believe in our neighbors, that our shared interests supersede the impulses of selfishness. There is a tragedy in believing the proffered narrative of our system, which turns us against each other in a zero-sum game.

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. I have a newfound affection for the language we use.

I love bookstores for many reasons but revere both the idea and the practice of public libraries. To me, they embody the civic-scale practice of a gift economy and the notion of common property. Libraries are models of gift economies, providing free access not only to books but also music, tools, seeds, and more. We don’t each have to own everything. The books at the library belong to everyone, serving the public with free books (and a wider selection than the corner post!).

This is the inherent problem with gift economies—they can’t function well when there are cheaters who violate the trust. This little gift economy was derailed by too much taking, by someone breaking the rules of sharing.

There are also protocols in many Indigenous cultures for individual taking from the land. 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. I suspect that these ethics also arose from making mistakes and suffering the ecological consequences. I wonder if we will learn again.

But the mindset that claims permission to convert a free gift to private property, robbing the community for individual gain, is of the highest consequence.

What might Serviceberry teach us here? She replies, “Serviceberry, or Shadbush as I learned it, provides a model of interdependence and coevolution that is the heart of ecological economics. Serviceberry teaches us another way to understand relationships and exchange. A Serviceberry economy as our model prompts the opportunity for articulation of the value of gratitude and reciprocity as essential foundations for an economy.” Reciprocity—not scarcity.

But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this avoidance is achieved by shifting one’s needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting “If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.” This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote.

“It’s not really altruism,” she insists. “An investment in community always comes back to you in some way. Maybe people who come for Serviceberries will come back for Sunflowers and then for the Blueberries. Sure, it’s a gift, but it’s also good marketing. The gift builds relationships, and that’s always a good thing. That’s what we really produce here—relationship, with each other and with the farm.”

Good feelings are the real value added. Even when something is paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it.

I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.