Book Review: “The Serviceberry” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In a world of buying and selling at the highest price possible, we don’t often stop to think about the little gifts that surround us. Such reflection is exactly what bestselling author Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to do in her most recent book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.
Kimmerer is a professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, a mother, a scientist, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and an incredibly talented writer. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass, published in 2013 by a small publisher in Minneapolis, rode on the power of steady word-of-mouth recommendations to eventually become a bestseller, read and cherished by people across the globe. Her other works include Gathering Moss (2003) and The Democracy of Species (2021). Her most recent book, The Serviceberry, published in 2024, grew out of an essay published in Emergence Magazine in 2022.
Serviceberries. Photo by Meggar, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=604930
Serviceberries, the book’s protagonist and central metaphor, are a delicious little fruit native to North America. As anyone who's ever tried them would know, they are a gift. The Serviceberry is a delightful book filled with gifts of its own. The book builds on many of the ideas in Braiding Sweetgrass, which applies Indigenous knowledge and ideas about reciprocity to ecology and science. In The Serviceberry, Kimmerer expands these notions to consider abundance and reciprocity in relation to scarcity in economics.
In a little over 100 pages, including several beautiful illustrations by John Burgoyne, Kimmerer explores what it would mean to practice a gift economy in the United States, and especially in the context of tight knit communities. She does not shy away from acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of our current economic system and gift economies alike.
What Is a Gift Economy?
To Kimmerer, a gift economy is one in which we do not reduce the things that we use—food, textiles, tools, books, and so on—to their simple monetary value, and instead remain aware of their inherent value as parts of the Earth. Building on Charles Eisenstein's book Sacred Economics, she writes, “A gift economy includes a system of social reciprocity, rather than a direct exchange.” She argues that “gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have a remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.”
Kimmerer’s understanding of a gift economy also connects to Lewis Hyde's in The Gift, which includes that monetizing works of art can have the effect of diminishing their value in other, perhaps more important ways. Kimmerer expresses this understanding by saying, for example, that a large portion of the benefits of a gift economy come from the relationships they create and sustain. Hyde writes, “[A] gift exchange tends to be an economy of small groups, of extended families, small villages, close knit communities,” and Kimmerer emphasizes that gift economies are possible in these spaces because of the trust established within them. While the term “gift economy” has been used by many writers, essential to Kimmerer’s argument is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to alternative economic models, because they already exist within many Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems.
Topics and Themes in The Serviceberry
Kimmerer begins The Serviceberry by telling a story of her joy as she picks serviceberries from a neighbor’s bush along with the birds and considers all of the possible uses she has for the delicious berries. She describes them as tasting like “a blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an apple, a touch of rosewater, and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds.”
As she considers the serviceberries’ roles in her life, she explores their many names in different languages, including Saskatoon, Juneberry, and their Potawatomi name, Bozakmin, which translates to “the best of berries.” She writes that the root word min appears in many other words for food, and is also the root word for gift. In this way, the Potawatomi language has long recognized the inherent gifts of the Earth in the form of food. “If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude,” writes Kimmerer, “then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return.”
She discusses why and how serviceberries are able to offer abundance in so many ways: providing pollen and fruit for the bees and the birds respectively, serviceberries also ensure their own survival. This connects to her work as a biologist, in that the relationship between serviceberries and bees is a mutually beneficial one, something she has seen widely in her study of Nature. She contrasts this state affairs to that seen so commonly in groups of people. In a Western worldview, creating more than what you need is associated with overconsumption and waste, whereas for Nature, creating abundance means having gifts in which excess is shared.
In the next section of the book, Kimmerer explores the capitalist concept “scarcity” in contrast to the abundance created within a gift economy. Here, she introduces ideas from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift regarding the “problem” of dealing with abundance. The linguist Daniel Everrett, discussed by Hyde, asks a hunter from a community in the Brazilian rainforest what he will do with excess meat, to which the hunter says, “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.” Later on in the book, Kimmerer likens this idea to the birds eating the abundant serviceberries, and thereby the serviceberries storing themselves in the belly of their brother. Kimmerer argues, “In a gift economy wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.” Drawing on Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, Kimmerer also points out that in times of crisis, humans come together, and people with plenty give to those in need. She further discusses the Honorable Harvest, an Indigenous idea that she introduces in Braiding Sweetgrass, which outlines how to harvest “with restraint, respect, reverence, and reciprocity.”
It is clear, then, that many cultures and societies practice gift economies, and yet she emphasizes that economic theorists too often still believe that the “rational economic man” is a “greedy, isolated individual acting purely in self-interest to maximize return on investment.” She goes on to demonstrate the many ways in which people care for each other in reciprocity, with examples like free swaps on college campuses, and even online tools such for sharing recipes and skills on social media so that other people can benefit.
Kimmerer differentiates between true and artificial forms of scarcity. In her view, true scarcity isn’t typically created by economies but by events like drought. She argues that while the capitalist economies create artificial scarcity, they also create true scarcity because of perpetual growth that is characterized by over consumption and that despoils ecosystems around the globe. Cleverly naming the billionaires who contribute to scarcity and to environmental destruction “Darrens,” after the EXXON Mobil CEO Darren Woods, Kimmerer puts a face and a name to such exploitation. She argues that this “small number of individuals” who created and continue to perpetuate “the System” that the Western world (and by default, much of the rest of the world) must live by are tremendously powerful. Importantly, Kimmerer argues that “Darrens” knowingly commit ecocide.
Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of gift economies, Kimmerer notes that an obvious strength is that they build and reinforce community because of their inherent orientation toward sharing. One of their weaknesses, however, is that gift economies rely on trust, which severely complicates their implementation in larger settings like modern cities and complex, geographically extended societies. For this reason, she concedes that while gift economies are incredibly beneficial, and could be implemented alongside a capitalist economy, they are unlikely to ever fully replace it. Gift economies are about communities caring for each other without expecting anything in return—and yet, being able to trust that if, down the line, they have a need, that need will be met by others in their community.
Do Kimmerer’s Ideas Apply to Earth Law?
In an interview with Yale Environment, Kimmerer discussed the Rights of Nature, specifically the rights of the Whanganui River, which in 2017 was “declared a legal person with fundamental rights” in Aoteroa New Zealand. She said:
“The notion that a river, who the Maori consider to be their ancestor, should have rights of self-determination, that the river ought to decide whether it’s going to be dammed or whether it’s okay to spew toxins into it, oughtn’t the river to have a voice? So rights of nature is an acknowledgement and pathway to hearing the voices of self-determination by other beings who have an intrinsic right to live their lives. And I’m very excited about it. To me, the rights-of-nature movement is a political and legal flowering of this notion of kin-centric relations and the intelligence of nature.
I do have some questions, though, in that rights of nature is very much framed in Western legal frameworks. Whereas in my experience, what we’re really talking about is not much rights but mutual responsibilities. So I have a little reluctance in centering Western legal thinking rather than sort of a reciprocal justice framing.”
The ideas of mutual responsibility and reciprocity are essential to the gift economy described in The Serviceberry, and they can be more fully woven into the nascent and growing field of Earth Jurisprudence. In ecocentric law, it is essential that humans recognize themselves as one part of a whole ecosystem, and practice respect and reciprocity within that ecosystem. If gift economies depend on abundance and create community and trust, can ecocentric law find ways to acknowledge and respect the currencies that flow within a gift economy?
