The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Scribner | 2024 | 128 pages
A few years ago, I went to my local garden store with a single mission: serviceberry. It was early spring, and most of the nursery was still sound asleep. I located the serviceberry in a back corner, tipped off by the flurry of hoverflies seeking its early blooms. The reason for my mission: Robin Wall Kimmerer and an essay she’d written for Emergence Magazine, the essay that would later grow into her book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. Like the essay that served as its seed, The Serviceberry is a song of gratitude, and in its expanded form it becomes an even more powerful ecological and economic investigation, an invitation, and a gift.
Kimmerer, who holds a PhD in botany and is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, begins The Serviceberry by introducing us to this plant that will serve as both narrative touchstone and exemplar of the “gift economies” the book explores. Fans of Kimmerer’s groundbreaking book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) will recognize this approach—the power of a particular plant to teach us ways of being in the world. Through vivid detail, Kimmerer whets our appetite for the unfamiliar serviceberry:
Imagine a fruit that tastes like a Blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an Apple, a touch of rosewater, and a miniscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds. They taste like nothing a grocery store has to offer: wild, complex with a flavor that your body recognizes as the real food it’s been waiting for.
She explains how the word for serviceberry in Potawatomi is Bozakmin, or “the best of the berries,” and the root of the word “berry,” min, is also the root of the word “gift.” From the start, we’re invited to reflect on the way deliciousness expands when encountered not as a commodity but a gift. This reflection is enhanced by John Borgoyne’s black-and-white illustrations. In the first illustration, the author’s namesake robin perches on a limb, berry in mouth, head tilted as if looking at the reader with a friendly, wry expression. Will we, like the robin, take only what we need and sing our gratitude, or strip the bush and hoard the fruit? Beneath the bird, there’s a cluster of berries. If we share, the illustration suggests, there’s enough for birds and humans.
Kimmerer explores what happens when we treat all elements of the natural world as gifts, rather than as natural resources for extraction and commodification. As with the depiction of the berries, she suggests we will experience greater joy and gratitude in such an approach. And linked to this gratitude comes a different sense of responsibility towards the giver of those gifts, such as the earth, which is in dire straits after centuries of deforestation, drilling, strip mining, pollution… the list goes on. Kimmerer says, “Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way… you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world.” It is this argument that leads to the concurrent argument: if we treat such gifts with respect, all will benefit. Or, as Kimmerer repeats like a mantra, “all flourishing is mutual.”
At just 128 pages, The Serviceberry is a slight book that invites reading in a single sitting or two, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is a lightweight exploration. Because of its conversational and welcoming voice, I didn’t fully realize until my second reading the extent to which it investigates major economic theory. Kimmerer moves from the mutual flourishing of bush, bird, and human to test this gift economy against a range of economic and ecological models, contrasting what she finds in the American Economic Association (defining economics through a scarcity-based model) and Garrett Harden’s “Tragedy of the Commons” with the research of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics and the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Elinor Ostrom. Kimmerer explains how Ostrom’s research, which pushes back against Harden’s “Tragedy” theory, “grew from her careful observation of systems of land management among communities that colonizing capitalists dismissed as primitive since they did not seem to value or practice accumulation of private property.” Always attuned to the nuances of languages, she reminds us, “The words ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning ‘home’ or ‘household,’” suggesting that we cannot heal one without serious attention to the other.
Still, Kimmerer is at heart a storyteller, so whenever things start getting too deep into theory, she returns us to the personal and the local. The joy found here is visceral and, importantly, always a shared experience. We first see Kimmerer filling her pail alongside her robin and cedar waxwing families. (As she explores in Braiding Sweetgrass, we have a lot to learn from cultures that view all nature as family). Later, we see her gathering the fruit with her human community, and we meet her farm neighbors Paulie and Ed Drexler (to whom the book is dedicated); Kimmerer’s daughter, who helps host a free farm stand; and her neighbors who create a Little Free Library.
Can such mutual flourishing be scaled up? Kimmerer questions the premise that everything must be made more, bigger, while recognizing the need for larger change and outlining possibilities to which we might turn. “I don’t think market capitalism is going to vanish,” she acknowledges. “But I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.” She proposes a range of interventions from the local to the national, and all are rooted in joy and gratitude. As she concludes: “I’ve long believed that the ones who have more joy, win. Maybe this levels the power differential… We have joy and justice on our side.”
Like the berries of the book’s title, Kimmerer’s words are themselves abundant and sustaining, given to us whether or not we deserve them, and as such they are a gift for the reader to keep in motion. Kimmerer discusses how the earth’s gifts include both physical materials endlessly transferrable and energy as heat, which is diffused. For the physical material of the book, one might borrow it and then return it to the library to participate in its literal circulation, or purchase a copy then pass it to a friend or a Little Free Library. And for that energy transmitted? Like the heat the berry gives to the bird who turns it into grateful song, why not keep paying it forward?
Those serviceberry bushes I planted three years ago have grown quickly, despite regular browsing by deer, and they’re now surrounded by other species that support my local insect and bird population—Joe Pye weed, coneflower, beebalm, milkweed. Although I’ve snagged a few berries, most are eaten by the animals, and I remind myself that the purpose of this space reclaimed from lawn is to give a patch of land back to my more-than-human family. In return, the serviceberries have formed a hedge connecting the crabapple on one side and the lilacs on the other; they’ve given me a corner of shady quiet, attracting more life to the yard, which in turn makes me feel more connected to the land.
It’s through such connections that we’re reminded of the moral imperative at the heart of the gift economy, which Kimmerer draws from the set of indigenous principles and practices known as the Honorable Harvest: “Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.” We have so much work to do, but The Serviceberry reminds us there is joy and abundance to be found in it.
Laura Donnelly is the author of two collections of poetry, Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review). Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, SWWIM, EcoTheo Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York where she teaches poetry and nature writing at SUNY Oswego.
Header image of cedar waxwing with serviceberry by DivaDan, courtesy Pixabay.
