Lambert Straser: Oh, another book to read, Kropotkin.
By Elizabeth Svoboda, a science writer based in San Jose, California, and author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness. Originally published in Undark.
In the opening scene of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in Nature, a flock of birds descends on a tree laden with fruit. Birds eagerly munch on the waxy, purple berries, but there’s more than enough to munch on for robins and cedar waxwings, as well as Kimmerler and his fellow humans. “I cannot mathematically calculate the value that I somehow think they deserve,” Kimmerler writes. “And yet they are here.”
Kimmerer’s book is the long-awaited sequel to her 2013 best-selling essay collection, Braiding Sweetgrass, a novella-length meditation on the richness that comes from sharing and interaction. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Potawatomi people native to the Great Lakes region, grounds his worldview in a tradition that resists attempts to quantify or hoard what the earth produces.
Unlike Westerners, who value individual ownership and accumulation, many indigenous peoples recognize the blessings of nature as belonging to everyone, admonish mindless consumption, and embrace a “culture of gratitude” that embraces the synergistic effects of donations. I live inside. “The gift economy fosters community bonds and enhances natural well-being,” she writes. “The economic unit is not ‘I’ but ‘we’ because all prosperity is mutual.”
These ideas are echoed in Braiding Sweetgrass, but Kimmerler’s latest book examines them more closely. From a botanist’s perspective, she looks to depictions of nature’s flourishing that evoke the rewards of cooperation. The berries she and the birds enjoyed would never have ripened without many willing collaborators, including the cedar waxwings that dropped the serviceberry seeds so they could germinate, and the microorganisms that fertilized the soil. , she points out. She traces a repeating cycle of flourishing in which single-celled algae take up molecules of phosphorus, then zooplankton eat the algae and dump the phosphorus into the ocean, where it can be eaten by new generations of algae. I will.
“The Serviceberry” continues a long tradition of naturalistic writing about the interdependence of the natural world. Among the first to cover the area more than 100 years ago was Russian naturalist and revolutionary Pyotr Kropotkin. He observed how steppe animals worked together to protect each other and secure food, and in his work he rebuked the idea that nature was largely made up of winners and victors. losers. “Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle,” Kropotkin wrote.
Like Kropotkin, Kimmerer uses his cooperative successes in nature to make a vigorous case against human greed and opportunism. “Service Berry” is a broad indictment of an economic and political system that operates on the idea that victory for some must mean loss for others. “There is a tragedy in believing the narrative presented by our system, which pits us against each other in a zero-sum game,” she writes. She likens unchecked accumulation to the mythical Potawatomi villain Windigo, who eats and eats but is never satisfied.
There is a fear unique to Americans, fueled by the stereotype of the “welfare queen,” and a fear that freeloaders will try to dry out the pool if they provide resources to the common pool, an idea echoed by ecologists. It is embodied in Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 paper, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In this particular “mathematics of value”, those who could benefit most from regional aid are marked as the least trustworthy and undeserving.
But Kimmerer deftly flips this calculation on its head. Evolutionary scientists like David Sloan Wilson believe that cooperative societies of humans and animals actually outperform societies over time and generations where members distrust others and look to number one. She points out that she’s finding it works well. “When the focus shifts to the group level, cooperation becomes a better model for not only surviving but thriving,” she writes.
“The Serviceberry” convincingly links hoarding with long-term decline, but the book’s most resonant passages celebrate connections and reciprocity, and the joy found in their ever-increasing process. I’m doing it. Kimmerer introduces the profile of her neighbor Paulie Drexler. Drexler invites community members to come pick service berries for free. Mainly because it makes her feel better. “In the berry fields, all you hear is happiness,” Drexler says. “It feels good to give you a little pleasure.”
But as Kimmerer shows, the reciprocal effects of providing that pleasure occur for both Drexler and the broader community. People who appreciate berry picking may return to Drexler’s farm for sunflowers, blueberries, and pumpkins, and may be energized by the joy of harvesting to vote for farmland preservation measures on their next ballot. It might be. Kimmerer’s story complements years of research showing that people who share what they have, such as time, love, and resources, are happier and more fulfilled than those who are stingy. .
Readers are bound to wonder how a thriving local gift economy could encourage a broader shift away from zero-sum thinking, but that’s not really the subject of this book. Kimmerer points out that the gift economy works best in small communities, a village atmosphere where everyone knows each other at first sight. What prevents people from ruining the commons is a sense of obligation to those around them, and on a larger scale, this communal obligation often disappears.
Kimmerer envisions gift exchanges, mutual aid networks, and all the rest as “yes-and-” solutions that play out against the backdrop of capitalism, rather than direct institutional condemnation. “I don’t think it’s 50-50 to imagine that we can create incentives to foster a gift economy that operates in parallel with a market economy,” she writes.
But Kimmerer is a little vague about what drives us to start such a small donation business. She deftly explains that once we start moving, a reciprocal system of rewards is created, but she is less clear about what makes us do so. Why would a significant group of Americans, steeped in a culture of rugged individualism, want to be their neighbor’s keeper? By the time a more communal spirit takes hold, our current system will have to do much more than climate change. How dramatically would it have to collapse due to , social unrest, dictatorship, etc.?
The promise and peril of the world Kimmerer envisions is that it requires a leap of faith, a leap of faith: throwing ourselves into space and believing that others will be there to catch us. Our relentless focus on punishing freeloaders and seizing whatever we can stockpile has separated us as a group from that trust.
“Service Berry” is an impassioned call to return not only to the natural web of exchange that is our birthright, but also to the fulfillment that comes from interdependence. “To replenish the potential for mutual flourishing of birds, fruits, and humans, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the earth, guided by our oldest teachers, plants,” she writes. . It is up to all of us to follow their example.
