Book Review - The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Sometime last year, a friend of ours bought a copy of Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry for one of my housemates. I'd just finished reading Braiding Sweetgrass so I was excited to read this newer book too. But life went as life tends to do and I forgot about it. Then, a month or so ago, I saw a copy of the book in the Little Free Library in front of my house.
"Huh," I thought, "my housemate must've finished reading it and decided to share it on. Well, I want to read it, so I'll take it and put it back in the box when I'm done." I grabbed it, and asked if he'd finished and put it in next time I saw him.
"Nope, got it right here," he said. "Gonna be sharing it with other folks."
"Well then!" I replied. "I guess we have two copies! I'll extra-especially put this one back when I'm done!" I didn't know it yet, but we'd already been doing a wonderful job of just what the book describes.
The Serviceberry is about the abundance of nature, and how we can reflect that in our own lives. That means it builds beautifully on the core messages of Braiding Sweetgrass, which illustrated the ways in which nature is a web of relationships, and how we can be in good relation with it, but while the former book wove scientific essay and memoir, guiding us to learn and reflect, this slim volume calls us to turn our attention outward.
One of the most striking moments in the book for me was when it faced down our common formulation of economics as being fundamentally about scarcity, and asked why it had to be so. At first, this took me aback: Of course economics is about scarcity. I don't like it, but we can't escape the fact that you need to do something when there's more desire for something than there is availability. And yet, Kimmerer gently prods at this assumption, not as being untrue, but as being just one way of telling a story, suggesting that other perspectives might lead to new alternatives of how we lead our lives.
This is brought home even more clearly when the author turns her focus at a field related in etymology but far apart in philosophy; ecology. In her lyrical style, Kimmerer tells the stories of animals and plants acting in complex ways that support the health of a whole ecosystem. Trees produce fruit that birds eat, with sugars in them that make the birds… pass them quickly. The birds get fed and the trees get spread. I was struck how often I've read similar things treated as self-interest, or advantage-taking: The tree takes advantage of the bird, or finds a way to overcome the bird exploiting it. We have a grand history of simply assuming that "survival of the fittest" can only be about the individual being, or at least the individual species, just as we've assumed that economics can only be about scarcity.
These examples and counter-examples show how stories shape us, and the book is woven through with stories of Kimmerer's own life in a small town with neighbors near and far, all finding ways to share. A free farm stand is set up… then the physical stand itself is stolen at the end of the season. The community is baffled, jokes that the farm stand was after all marked as 'free', and makes plans to build more on other corners, in the hopes that they won't get needlessly stolen too. Excess food is shared, finished books are put in Little Free Libraries. All of this was aspirational, and bittersweet, living in the times that we do when everything feels a little (or a lot) strained, when it's far easier to see competition and scarcity than cooperation and abundance.
But this is where the book especially differed from its predecessor: The Serviceberry is, in its own way, eminently practical. It describes how gift economies can start small, within communities. Kimmerer points out the ways that all of us do bits of this ourselves already, and suggests ways we can do more. Even as she openly questions whether this could scale up to the size of states and nations, she reaffirms it as a valuable act to do on whatever levels we can. As someone who hosts regular rituals and feasts for friends and friends-of-friends, who stewards a Little Free Library of my own, who hopes to someday manage to grow enough food to give some away, I can find little to argue with here, and a lot to reach for.
Late in the book, Kimmerer features the analogy of post-wildfire succession. When a traumatic event rips through an ecosystem, the first things to grow back are the aggressive plants that grow fast and pull as many nutrients as they can. But before long, these overgrow themselves, setting the stage for what comes next; varied species in relation that build up to the strong new growth of a healthy forest. Our own world has had its share of traumatic events, and overeager successors. Can we be the ones who build something better atop their overreach? Sometimes it seems overwhelming, but I've already seen it happen in my own neighborhood.
It was after I started reading this book that I noticed something in another Little Free Library in our neighborhood: Another copy, of the same book. I can only assume there are more than the three out there, and I need not wonder why. The folk who tend these libraries and the folk who use them are already participating in a gift economy; this isn't the first time my life has been enriched by something I've found in there, and it won't be the last. As soon as I saw that third copy, I knew what would happen to this copy as soon as our household was done with it. It's getting gifted right back into someone else's book box.