A humble berry at the heart of a virtuous cycle

Plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer is best known for her book “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which explores how plants in Indigenous traditions might yield valuable lessons for building community and saving the planet. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, and her views are shaped by her experiences as an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

“Braiding Sweetgrass” scored modest sales after Milkweed Editions, a small nonprofit press, published it in 2013. It took off seven years later and has sold millions of copies. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the book widened its audience during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when so many families were at home and thinking about plants and gardens. Kimmerer’s reflections on social justice in “Braiding Sweetgrass” also resonated with particular urgency during those fraught seasons of the pandemic.

Now, in another challenging year, Kimmerer is revisiting some of those ideas in “The Serviceberry,” a book-length essay on the value of cooperation in building a healthy world. The title plant of her book, Amelanchier arborea, goes by many names, including saskatoon, juneberry, and shadbush, though serviceberry is its most poetic handle. “The name ‘Serviceberry’ comes not from its ‘service’ but from a very old version of its Rose Family name, ‘Sorbus,’ which became ‘sarvis’ and hence ‘service,’” Kimmerer tells readers. “While the name did not derive from its benefits, the plant does provide myriad goods and services – not only to humans but to many other citizens.”

The bushes and their berries yield food for deer and moose, and birds feed on them, too. Visiting pollinators help grow more serviceberries, and the birds help spread their seeds. Kimmerer marvels at this virtuous cycle, and one can find similar networks of mutual advantage throughout nature.

But serviceberries spark the author’s interest when a neighbor invites her to harvest the fruit. “This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land,” Kimmerer writes of the lovely food filling her pail. “I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are – along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in towers of cumulonimbi, a distant storm building.”

Kimmerer is reminded that the human sharing of this treasure is creating its own virtuous cycle. “In a serviceberry economy, I accept the gift from the tree and then spread that gift around, with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes.”

She’s describing a gift economy, one “in which goods and services circulate without explicit expectations of direct compensation.” Instead of making a direct payment, the recipient is expected to reciprocate by sharing something else within a community. The idea is that in all the giving and receiving, everyone flourishes.

Kimmerer points to a strong tradition of gift economies in Indigenous culture, though she concedes that the practice seems to work best in small communities where social trust is high. “You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, close-knit societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations,” she notes. “But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy.