Book Review: The Serviceberry
Jun. 12th, 2025 11:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerRecently I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and have not yet been able to write about it, because I need time to digest it. But Kimmerer recently released a shorter companion book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which is a distillation of certain ideas from Braiding Sweetgrass, and also easier to digest simply by virtue of being much shorter.
The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?
And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.
Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)
And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.
This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.
Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.
***
While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.
But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.
“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”
He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”
And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.
The Serviceberry’s basic idea is this: our current extractive industrial economies are rattling down the road straight toward ecological catastrophe. What other economic models could we follow instead?
And as a model, Kimmerer offers the serviceberry itself. As she notes, Western economics is founded on the idea of scarcity. But while scarcity is a condition that occurs in nature, it’s not a constant. In the natural world, abundance is just as common as scarcity. A serviceberry tree after a rainy spring has more than enough berries for birds and squirrels and humans.
Serviceberries are thus one model of a gift economy. They invite humans to understand “natural resources” not as a source to be exploited but as a gift from the earth, which like all gifts creates a reciprocal relationship between the giver and the receiver. We take, but also give. (In the case of the serviceberries, by spreading the seeds.)
And, furthermore, Kimmerer suggests, modern society could use traditional gift economies as a model for one possible way forward out of our current economic race toward climate catastrophe. There are already small-scale attempts in Little Free Libraries and free farm stands and Freecycle and the Buy Nothing movement, everything from the traditional mutual aid in churches to the new forms of digital gift economy exemplified in, for instance, fandom.
This last is not something Kimmerer discusses, but fandom is my own most extensive experience with a gift economy, where people write fic or draw fanart and post it with no expectation of direct payment behind perhaps a few comments - but also the more diffuse payment of helping create an environment where other people also post their fan creations for everyone to enjoy.
Now, at this point in my life, I’ve mostly moved over to selling stories for regular old money, because we have not (yet) learned how to leverage the gift economy so that it can pay for, let’s say, a two-month road trip. But, on the other hand, so many of the friends that I stayed with on that road trip were people I met through fandom, or through book reviews or nature photos on Dreamwidth or Livejournal. The road trip would not have been possible without the money, but it also would not have been possible without the web of relationships created by the gift economy.
***
While I was reading The Serviceberry, I discovered a couple of serviceberry trees on a street near my house, in a location that made it clear they had been planted by the city. Visions of serviceberry muffins dancing in my head, I went out to pick some berries - keeping a weather eye on the road, as picking berries from a public tree felt vaguely illicit.
But berry-picking is an absorbing occupation, and I didn’t notice the man walking his dog until he was almost upon me. “What are you doing?” he asked, curious, with some slight accent I didn’t recognize.
“Picking serviceberries,” I explained. “Would you like to try one?”
He would and he did. “It’s good,” he said, a little surprised. “Better than blueberries.”
And we said good evening, and I went back to picking serviceberries as he and his dog walked on.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-12 08:23 pm (UTC)I think it can be difficult to imagine what it would look like to live in a gift economy - and is that actually our goal? Is that compatible with a large-scale industrial society? (But, also, is a large-scale industrial society compatible with continued life on earth...)
But, leaving all those big questions aside for the moment, noticing the gift economy aspects in our own lives can make the concept feel much more real/livable, whereas in the abstract I think it's easy to feel cynical/resigned about the possibility that we could do this in the era of hypercapitalism. I definitely had to spend some time thinking about how it fit in my own life to see, oh, actually I've experienced this.
And for me, there's also some feeling that cash is fluid/flexible, you can get whatever you want as long as you have the cash, whereas the idea of a gift economy can feel constraining - you're stuck with whatever someone else feels like giving you?? But that's not actually what the lived experience feels like, most of the time, in part because most gift-givers want to give you a gift you do, in fact, desire. You're not gonna eat the berries if they're not delicious.
Yes, The Serviceberry is super short! It's like a little hors d'oeuvre to Braiding Sweetgrass's five course meal (with paired drinks and a dessert). Definitely I think it would work well to start with The Serviceberry and work backward.