Lambert Strether: Dang, another book to read: Kropotkin.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” Originally published at Undark.
In the opening scene of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World,” a flock of birds descends on a tree heavy-laden with fruit. Though the birds devour the waxy purple berries with fervor, there are more than enough to go around — not just for the robins and cedar waxwings, but for Kimmerer and her human companions. “There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way,” Kimmerer writes. “And yet here they are.”
Kimmerer’s book, the long-awaited follow-up to her best-selling 2013 essay collection “Braiding Sweetgrass,” is a novella-length meditation on the abundance that sharing and mutual exchange can create. A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, which is native to the Great Lakes region, Kimmerer grounds her worldview in traditions that resist attempts to quantify or hoard what the Earth produces.
Unlike Westerners who prize individual ownership and accumulation, many Indigenous peoples live in “a culture of gratitude” that recognize natural bounty as belonging to all, discourage mindless consumption, and embrace giving’s multiplicative effects. “A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance natural well-being,” she writes. “The economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as all flourishing is mutual.”
Though these ideas wend their way through “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Kimmerer’s latest book examines them more rigorously. She brings a botanist’s eye to descriptions of natural thriving that evoke collaboration’s rewards. The berries she and the birds enjoyed, she notes, could never have ripened without a host of willing contributors — the cedar waxwing that dropped the serviceberry seed so it could germinate, the microbes that fertilized the soil. She traces repeated cycles of flourishing: After single-celled algae take up molecules of phosphorus, zooplankton eat the algae and excrete the phosphorus back into the ocean, where a new generation of algae can feast on it.
“The Serviceberry” continues a long tradition of naturalistic writing about interdependence in the wild. Among the first to cover this ground, over 100 years ago, was Russian naturalist and revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, who observed how animals on the steppe protected each other and collaborated to secure food — and whose work rebuked the idea that nature mostly consisted of winners and losers. “Sociability,” Kropotkin wrote, “is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”
Like Kropotkin, Kimmerer draws on cooperative successes in nature to mount a vigorous case against human greed and opportunism. “The Serviceberry” broadly indicts economic and political systems that run on the idea that a win for one person must mean a loss for someone else. “There is a tragedy in believing the proffered narrative of our system,” she writes, “which turns us against each other in a zero-sum game.” She compares unchecked accumulators to the mythical Potawatomi villain Windigo, who eats and eats yet is never satisfied.
There’s a distinctly American fear — propped up by “welfare queen” stereotypes — that offering resources up to a communal pool invites freeloaders to drain that pool, a mindset crystallized in ecologist Garrett Hardin’s famed 1968 paper “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In this particular “mathematics of worthiness,” those who could benefit most from community aid are marked as least trustworthy and deserving.
But Kimmerer deftly turns this calculus on its head. Evolutionary scientists like David Sloan Wilson, she notes, are finding that cooperative human and animal societies actually do better across time and generations than those whose members distrust others and look out for number one. “When the focus shifts to the level of a group,” she writes, “cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving.”
While “The Serviceberry” convincingly links hoarding to long-term decline, the book’s most resonant passages celebrate the joy to be found in connection and reciprocity, as well as the ongoing ways they multiply. Kimmerer profiles her neighbor Paulie Drexler, who invites community members to come pick her serviceberries for free — mostly because it lifts her spirits to do so. “In the berry patch, all I hear are happy voices,” Drexler says. “It feels good to give that little bit of delight.”
Yet the reciprocal effects of offering that delight, as Kimmerer shows, accrue to both Drexler and the wider community. Grateful berry-pickers may return to Drexler’s farm for sunflowers, blueberries, and pumpkins, and buoyed by their immersion in the joyful harvest, they might even end up voting for farmland-preservation measures on the next ballot. Kimmerer’s narrative complements years of research showing that people who share what they have — time, love, or resources — are happier and more fulfilled than their stingier counterparts.
Though readers are bound to wonder how thriving local gift economies can drive broader shifts away from zero-sum thinking, that isn’t really the province of this book. Kimmerer notes that gift economies do best in small-scale communities, village atmospheres where everyone knows each other on sight. What holds people back from spoiling the commons is a sense of obligation to those around them, and on larger scales, this communal obligation often disappears.
Kimmerer envisions gift exchanges, mutual aid networks, and all the rest as “yes-and” solutions that will play out against a capitalistic backdrop, not direct systemic rebukes. “I don’t think it’s pie in the sky,” she writes, “to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.”
Yet Kimmerer is a bit vague about what would compel us to launch these smaller-scale giving ventures. She artfully describes the rewards reciprocal systems produce once we set them in motion, but she’s less clear about what might motivate more of us to do so. What would make a critical mass of Americans, marinating in a rugged individualist culture, want to become their neighbors’ keepers? How dramatically would our current system have to cave in — whether through climate disaster, civil unrest, or autocracy — before a more communal ethos could take hold?
The promise and peril of the world Kimmerer envisions is that it requires a leap of faith, a kind of hurling yourself into the universe and trusting that others will be there to catch you. In our dogged focus on punishing freeloaders, and on seizing whatever can be stockpiled, we’ve collectively detached from that trust.
“The Serviceberry” is an impassioned call not just to return to the natural webs of exchange that are our birthright‚ but to recapture the fulfillment that stems from interdependence. “To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people,” she writes, “we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.” Whether we emulate their example is up to all of us.
