The Serviceberry

A friend handed me a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s slight new book, The Serviceberry. I’d been meaning to get the book, but it had been backordered over Christmas, so I accepted the gift gladly, and asked how she’d liked it. “Nice, but unrealistic,” she said.

I read the book—maybe with this in mind. Copies arrived at the bookstore, and I gifted a copy to a friend, who thought it “delightful,” although she also said it was “depressing”—if we think about all of the ways we’ve “messed” with the world’s natural processes.

The book begins with the serviceberry and its bounty: species and names—serviceberry, juneberry, saskatoon, etc.; then picking bucket, pies, neighbors, birds, etc. But soon moves on to economics. Kemmerer describes the classical capitalist economy of “scarcity” and its creation of individual and corporate profit, and contrasts it with the natural world’s economy of “abundance,“ of sharing and interdependence. “Mutualism,” she calls it.

She finds an entire new group of ethnobotanists who are exploring the ways in which the natural world grows with interdependence and recreates itself, even through catastrophe. Kemmerer briefly criticizes evolutionists’ emphasis on competition in nature, saying that alongside competition in the natural world there is exploration of niches and growth of specialization and interdependencies. Burned out forests blossom with explosive growth of dense, monolithic species, return nutrients to the ground, and then make room for more long-growing and sustainable species. Birds and bees develop special niche relations with plants, etc.

The Serviceberries in her title are bound to the neighbors who planted them and invited her and others to pick their abundance. Birds too come to the party, overeat, process seeds in their digestive tracks, replant them in new places. The gift of the bush brings pies, neighborly conversations, birdsong, and renewal.

It is easy to get caught up in the smallness of this, the naivete, the David of it in the face of the Goliath of capitalist economics. And, indeed, when we look around us and see the successes of superrich entrepreneurs in high tech and the size of baseball stars’ contracts, even the lesser wealth created with college athletes selling their images and online influencers counting their followers, the economy of the Serviceberry in one small new England town seems almost quaint.

Oligarchs have been around since the dialogs of Plato, and wealth and ecclesiastical and military power have moved the world forever. Yet… botany and biology, the workings of the natural world, have also been continual players in the story of human evolution and development. And, current fires in California remind us that wealth is not a guarantee of survival and success; rich and poor watch their houses, and their ways of life go up in smoke in California. Historically, the eruption at Pompei, the scourges of the Plague, smallpox, polio, and covid took the lives of the famous, royalty, the saints and the wealthy along with those of sinners, commoners, and the indigent.

Kemmerer, a Potawatomi tribal member, a Phd botanist, bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and recently named MacArthur Fellow, reminds us that the power of plants and natural processes has always been with us, and can continue to serve as an example and catalyst for an economy based on sharing, on mutualism and sustainability. Not that we will soon—or maybe ever—do away with an economy based on scarcity, competition and private gain created through real and contrived scarcities. But that the two have existed side by side for a very long time, and that for our own happiness as individuals and as societies, we should embrace the serviceberry.

Watching the California fires on television is a lesson in humility and humanity. There is tragedy of course—the loss of lives and property, the climactic disruption of all that is normal in a place that seemed solid and safe. Safe with schools and swimming pools—and yogurt shops mentioned by many survivors as places they’ll miss. Tragedy in the name-calling and blaming of and among federal, state, and local governments. Tragedy in the looters dressed as firemen, in the strange odd person caught trying to start a fire.

Alongside the tragedy is humanity, the outpouring of goods and services by food preparers and ordinary citizens driving miles to drop off clothing and food, blankets and simple furniture. Firefighters working long shifts and saving individual houses and lives, neighbors checking on neighbors and helping them flee.

We see the same local heroes helping and sharing in hurricane and war—I am struck by Palestinian soup kitchens in the midst of bombings; by Syrian “white helmets” digging through bombed out cities.

It’s no surprise that Robin Kemmerer is Native. And that all I have learned in the last decades of my blessedly long life about Native American culture and values celebrates the gifts and interrelationships of our natural world.

Will Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos get to Mars? Their competition seems trite next to the Los Angeles firefighter or the Serviceberry’s service to an ongoing world of birds and humans.

# # #

1 Comment

  1. Robin Wall Kimmerer is my go to for grounding and healing. I think it gets overwhelming and ‘unrealistic’ when we try to envision a circle much larger than what we touch in our daily lives, in situ, this ground, these plants, this water, these acquaintances. Circles spread to other circles and if we just tend to our piece with all the giving and nurturing that we are able to, that will voyage outward.
    We do not have to make a difference Everywhere, but the difference we make right here right now may reach far wider than we have any conception of as we make our small effort.

Leave a Reply