Book - Serviceberry

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for orienting our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on lessons from the natural world.

As Indigenous author and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside birds, she reflects on the ethics of reciprocity at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is based on scarcity, competition, and resource accumulation, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship to the natural world embodies reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—the abundance of its sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And that distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains: “Serviceberries show us another model, founded on reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a love song to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our time, and a reminder that “accumulation will not save us, all flourishing is mutual.”