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.
Ah, that book should arrive tomorrow. Looking forward to reading; thank you for the review
I recently read Braiding Sweetgrass which is certainly well written but not necessarily persuasive re the Edenic nature of the Native American lifestyle. Time was Tahiti was described as a natural paradise but when you find out more you learn that the Polynesians fiercely warred with each other. It seems competition really is part of our nature and therefore part of Nature.
Still our rational side says that we must cooperate with ourselves and nature in order to survive and this urge waxes and wanes as more self centered urges exhaust themselves. Here’s hoping our rational side is about to make one of its periodic comebacks.
The Native American groups in fact also engaged in constant conflict with each other. Some groups adopted polygamy because the loss of men was so serious. Another related custom was kidnapping a man from another group, to substitute for a lost family member. (Or, if unlucky, the kidnapped man might be tortured to death over a few days in a community event – either adoption or torture execution seemed to provide consolation to the grieving family members). Again, edenic portrayals may leave out problems.
Women were also taken in raids to increase genetic diversity.
Did Kimmerer claim that the Native Nations practiced an Edenic nature lifestyle? Or does she merely note that various Native Nations practiced an eco-viable mutual co-operation approach within their own Nations?
Is the accusation of “Edenic nature hyper-valorization” merely a diversion to draw attention away from the obvious fact of Native eco-maintainance and even eco-upgrading in some cases, as with the up-terraforming of parts of Amazonia?
Since Industrial Man has been raised with an ethic of individual winning through zero-sum hoarding, with obvious eco-destruction results, it may be that Industrial Civilization humans will have to employ genuine rationality in order to up-value cooperation among selves and with nature.
My neighbor alerted me to Kemerer’s new book (she loves “Braiding Sweetgrass”) last week. She has a mature serviceberry bush in her yard; I planted a row of ten tiny serviceberry bushes as a hedgerow along the boundary of a field four years ago.
The descriptions of serviceberry, also known as shadbush or juneberry, mention that birds love the berries, but deer will leave them alone. Not sure what planet those people live on, but our Chautauqua County deer will browse them down to a nub if not robustly fenced.
Our neighborhood is a nascent ‘gift-economy’ and I had not realized just how much we had evolved until spending a week with my daughter in suburban New Jersey. We had a surplus of granddaughter’s pumpkin spice cookies, yet had to fork out almost $7.00 for a dozen ‘free-range organic’ eggs at the local Whole Paycheck. In Chautauqua County, a dozen fresh eggs would be available, exchanged for cookies and a mason jar of rich turkey broth.
Arigato in, arigato out? Dharma? The Wheel?
I believe that serviceberries are the same as the saskatoon?
Key ingredient in pemmican, the dried-meat-and-fruit native american ‘jerky’ of yore? Really have a delightful almond aroma and taste, fresh frozen and then re-deployed in Oatmeal or other hot morning gruels.
My dear, departed bird dog, wirehair/ brittany cross, The Devil With The Beard, Diablita con Barba, adored them and would stall out in copses on our walks.
The answer seems so obvious to me, it will be driven by necessity. When you have nothing, you give more. When you have more, you give less. When you have nothing you’re not driven by pride and entitlement. And this thinking is aligned with so many world religions, too.
Spot on. When we moved to our small holding 30+ years ago, we would amble on horseback around our canyon’s dirt roads and trails, stopping often to companionably chat with any neighbors we met.
Then came the McMansions, 12 foot high hedges, paving, monstrous greed and abject fear. These days, the few times we’ve gone out, we’ve been greeted by security cameras. The last of the WWII era residents have passed on and with them any sense of a commons.
The coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, bears, owls, hawks, road runners, acorn woodpeckers, rabbits, snakes, et al have simply adapted and remain. The ~600 year old oaks are imperturbable. Wendell Berry was right.
Ray Charles once said that poverty brings people together, while wealth divides them. One of the first things wealthy people tend to do is build a wall around their place.
Not having read Kemerer’s book but planning to after reading this post, I am reminded to two discoveries over the years. The first was a young woman with a baby at a Starbucks in a Target store who insisted on buying my double espresso. Since then paying for someone’s lunch at a grocery or at a McDonalds can turn an ordinary day into a special day. The other discovery years ago was the life and work of Elinor Ostrom, economist and the Nobel laureate in Economics in 2009 (different than the other awards). She was the first woman to win this prize and her life work was about preserving the commons. She (1933-2012) and her students went about actually doing life-size experiments demonstrated the value and community benefits of the commons. Having taught at Indiana University for decades there is a bronze statue of her on campus commemorating her achievements.
When I was thirteen (in 1953), I lived for a year on a small farm in Alberta to help do the milking, the feeding of pigs and cows and looking after the chickens by feeding them and putting them safely in the hen house at night to protect them from coyotes. During my year there, I certainly noticed the community activities that were attended by families from miles around. There was a rodeo held in a public space in the summer; there were Sunday Services attended by neighbours for miles around and there was wild berry picking. No one was rich but everyone helped others to build barns or houses, to hay the fields or bring in or plant the crops. Neighbors had to help others because otherwise the work wouldn’t get done on time, i.e, before the snow and cold of winter came.
I imagine if I went back to that farm I would probably not see the communal nature of the work being done there for many reasons one of which is that oil was discovered in that farming community long after I left that place.
Being well off, or being rich changes the nature of people.
It was once common for people to sing together, whether at church or at home, singing was a powerful way to bring people together. Now we have Karaoke.