A Favorite Read: ‘The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World’

When Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer quietly crept on to the literary scene in 2013 with her now seminal Braiding Sweetgrass (on Amazon), she hid within the text an equally quiet, yet weighty refrain: “All flourishing is mutual.”

It’s a concept initially given to her by the indigenous elders of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, of which she is an enrolled member, and later confirmed through her ecological studies (Kimmerer is a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and founder of the university’s Center for Native Peoples and the Environment). 

Kimmerer cites multiple examples of this mutual flourishing throughout the book. Take, for example, pecan trees. An individual tree produces nuts only when the rest of the pecan trees are also ready to produce, in an event called mast fruiting — a collective effort to overcome predators’ abilities to consume the full harvest. “If one tree fruits,” Kimmerer writes, “they all fruit — there are no soloists.” 

Eleven years after publishing Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer has returned to this idea in The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (on Amazon). Coming in at only 105 pages, the book is an expansion of a lyrical essay originally published in Emergence Magazine. Despite its slim figure and poetic nature, though, it’s a manifesto with a punch.

The Serviceberry calls us to reject the scarcity model that underlies our economy, in favor of a “Serviceberry Economy” — one that promotes reciprocity, gratitude, and abundance, based on the natural lessons of the plant world.

When the Serviceberry (also known as Shadbush, or Juneberry) fruits, it doesn’t hoard the abundance of sugar for itself, Kimmerer writes. “No, they invite the birds to a feast. ‘Come, my relatives, fill your bellies,’ say the Serviceberries.” The birds return the favor by spreading seeds, far and wide.

The reciprocity spreads to humans, too. When Kimmerer’s neighbors begin to grow Serviceberries on their farm, they invite the community to come pick for free — which may well inspire those folks to return with a Juneberry pie to share, or, “to vote for a farmland preservation bond in the next election.”

Standing in the way of the Serviceberry Economy are those who choose to hoard resources and commoditize gifts that the Earth has provided us, assigning monetary value based on scarcity. Kimmerer refers to these people as “Darrens,” after Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil. The Darrens are so harmful that Kimmerer compares them to Wendigos — cannibalistic creatures that haunt Potawatomi folklore.

But, the capacity of gift-giving is strong, and can have transformative effects on even the most entrenched systems. For instance, we are naturally inclined to take better care of a sweater that was knit for us by an aunt than one we purchased at Target. “I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth,” Kimmerer surmises, “we would take better care of what we are given.”

On a bigger scale, once we start recognizing that gifts like birdsong are as valuable as stocks, we are forced to acknowledge the harms we are committing to our planet (and one another) in the name of “wealth.”

Or, as Kimmerer puts it: “When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn’t it time for a different system?”