The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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.

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

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.

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. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity?

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

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.

BECAUSE I’M A BOTANIST, my knowledge of economics and finance is about the size of the frilly little cup at the tip of a Juneberry that was once part of the flower. It’s called the “calyx,” in case you were craving a delicious new word, the way some people crave money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When systems of governance and market economies of debt are disrupted, networks of mutual aid arise.

Take the books, enjoy them, bring them back so someone else can enjoy them, with literary abundance for all. And all you need is a library card, which is a kind of agreement to respect and take care of the common good.

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.

Other nations provide more than books and green spaces for the common good. These social democracies provide free universal health care, education for all, elder care, family support, and investment in sustainability. The 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.

Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you can take care of them.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life?

market economics demands that abundant, freely available, earthly gifts be converted to commodities and made scarce by privatization and high prices.

It was previously unthinkable that one would pay for a drink of water; but as careless economic expansion pollutes fresh water, we now incentivize privatization of springs and aquifers. Sweet water, a free gift of the Earth, is pirated by faceless corporations who encase it in plastic containers to sell. And now many can’t afford what was previously free, and we incentivize wrecking public waters to create demand for the privatized. What induces people to buy bottled water from a corporation more convincingly than contaminated water flowing from the faucet?

‘Without farmers, you’d be naked, hungry, and sober.’

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. I’ve begun to think that berry-picking is the medicine we need to create a legion of land protectors.