Penguin, 2024
ISBN: 978-1802067460
Reviewed by Chris Holmes
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In just over 100 pages Robin Wall Kimmerer presents a way of living which is radically different from the individualistic, acquisitive model we live with in our Western culture today. Based on her deep and extensive knowledge of plant life, she uses the example of the ‘Serviceberry’, an edible fruit found in temperate areas of the Northern hemisphere, especially in the north-eastern United States and south-eastern Canada, to illustrate the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. Kimmerer proposes an economy where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships with the human and with the other-than-human, wherein flourishing is mutual and sharing and cooperation are fundamental.
Kimmerer is a botanist and professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science. She is also an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Nation located largely in the Great Lakes area of the US and Canada. In her professional career she straddles both western science and the indigenous wisdom of her inheritance. Kimmerer writes with clarity and passion. While not hesitating to criticise capitalism -‘the economy of extractive capitalism, of abusing the gifts of Mother Earth, is a crime against Nature’- she recognises and laments her own immersion in the market economy.
In the closing pages of the book Kimmerer considers how we might get to the just economy we need. It is going to be a mix of incremental change – a journey many of us are already on – and creative disruption, something far harder to get right in terms of scale. Disruption can be destructive but it may also create renewal and diversity.’In these urgent times, we need to become the storm that topples the senescent, destructive economy so the new can emerge’.
It is so very sad to see the tired, narrow growth mantra alive in our current politics. We desperately need another way and ‘The Serviceberry’ is surely one of the inspirational ingredients.