REVIEW: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World / Robin Kimmerer
The Serviceberry:
Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Scribner
Review by Spencer Tierney
Imagine a fruit that tastes like a blueberry with the heft of an apple, a dab of rosewater, and the crunch of almonds—this is how Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the best-selling Braiding Sweetgrass, describes a serviceberry. In the Potawatomi language, a serviceberry is called Bozakmin, the “best of berries.” The fruit serves as the thematic centerpiece of her latest book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, November 2024), and the lessons she draws from this fruit stretched into a subject I wasn’t expecting: Economics.
As a botany professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer weaves together learnings from Western and Indigenous sciences in her books to articulate what citizenship to the natural world can look like. The Serviceberry mixes personal anecdotes into explanations of science and economics, with some stylistic parallels to Braiding Sweetgrass, though with a narrower scope. It is a short book, and while I craved the breadth of topics and the many more moments of memoir in the earlier book, I appreciated Kimmerer's latest project’s more contained argument.
Kimmerer’s voice – both on the page and in YouTube videos – is deliberate and wise, with a distinct ability to engage people with gratitude and enthusiasm for the natural world. In Serviceberry, the book-length essay asks one central question: Since modern humans often borrow designs from nature, why not borrow an economic model from serviceberries?
The fruit, which is embedded in indigenous food practices wherever they grow, acts as a gift within an ecosystem. Trees that give out serviceberries receive important benefits in return. Birds disperse seeds when they eat the berries, which allows trees to propagate through a forest. And there’s a recycling of organic elements (carbon, nitrogen, etc.) from the tree to the berry-eaters and eventually back to the tree through the soil. The fruit reaches Kimmerer’s world during the pandemic when two neighboring farmers offer her and others the chance to pick and eat them for free. The benefit to the neighbors? Free marketing for their farm.
Kimmerer speaks to several experts who study economics and ecology, often in the combined field of ecological economics. She arrives at a less traditional, but perhaps more practical definition of economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality.” If certain trees sustain their lives through gifting serviceberries, then the organizing system is a gift economy. Kimmerer unpacks how this type of economy was embedded in her ancestors’ lives:
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.
An indigenous relationship to hunting and foraging acknowledges that a human ends the life of an animal or a plant to survive. In return, a human gives back their gratitude and an understanding of the land’s riches as gifts. Never taking more than you need, for example. Kimmerer imparts how a usually unwritten code of conduct, or honorable harvest, is a means of respecting the land. Honorable harvest also comes up in Braiding Sweetgrass, though Kimmerer expands upon it here.
It's probably no surprise that this book breaks down the failures of capitalism in elegant, if simple ways. Kimmerer successfully inhabits her role as a teacher in the concrete examples: If an aunt gives you a hat she knitted, you’re more likely to treat it better than if it’s store bought. Maybe you feel inclined to give something back, such as a thank-you card or another gift. Store-bought items, on the other hand, can be easier to throw away after a few uses, not unlike how fast fashion is designed to work.
While this book advocates for reciprocity, there’s a disclaimer that gift economies aren’t scalable like capitalist markets are. But communities can incorporate them. In fact, Kimmerer lists some gift economies that already exist, such as little free libraries, online “buy nothing” groups, open-source software and even Wikipedia. The book is more a starting point for understanding gift economies instead of a detailed guidebook. While I respect this, I wished for more examples of gift economies in action and more historical and natural use cases.
Reading this book, and Kimmerer’s other books, is like taking a breath and remembering that the air is not something to take for granted. That the air, the water, the land, are gifts by forces beyond human-made systems. But there’s no shaming or scolding or evangelizing. Kimmerer’s way is to inspire through education, through cited insights including the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who showed that land can sustain shared use of resources without market economies or state intervention. Findings that many Native peoples have known, but that the Western world tends to accept only when there’s proof formatted in its image. The Western references alongside indigenous teachings help bolster my hope that it’s not too late to convince ourselves of humanity’s ability to share resources even when the news points out all the ways we don’t.
If you feel disconnected from nature or people, this book reminds you of specific mindsets and activities to foster community not as consumers but as earth’s citizens – “citizens” for Kimmerer meaning every living thing, human and nonhuman.
