
The Serviceberry
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Narrated by:
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
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Written by:
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
About this listen
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies 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 rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”
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Editorial Review
What listeners say about The Serviceberry
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- Gardener Phyl
- 2024-11-19
An excellent read!
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s message and voice provides education, comfort and guidance. “The Serviceberry, Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World”, is the antidote to the catastrophe that will be Trumps second presidential term.
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- Anonymous User
- 2025-02-10
What a humble (tasty) berry can teach us.
A wonderful little book that highlighted the power of the tasty fruit of the Serviceberry as a metaphor and indictor of a different way to do and see economics. Especially for those who are more botanist/plant lover than Macroeconomics experts.
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- WestCoastBlue
- 2025-02-12
Very thin anti-capitalist utopianism
This book was enthusiastically recommended to me by a dear friend but I'm afraid it is rather thin in every sense. It's only two hours, and delivered quite slowly though pleasantly by the author, so it's little more than an essay. The serviceberry conceit is quite thin and developed into the concept of an economy based on giving everything away for free (easy to do when you're a tenured professor). There are few other references to "the natural world" other than a brief mention of mycorrhizal fungi in one paragraph (though she takes no time to explain how they work).
She bases most of the book on an ahistorical utopian vision of primitive societies being based on mutual sharing and communal stewardship of natural resources. This is complete nonsense. These societies, as far as legitimate researchers can tell, were strictly hierarchical, unrelentingly violent, and drove many species (and some peoples) to extinction all over the world. She is not a historian, anthropologist, or economist, but most of this essay treats those subjects. Her identity as an indigenous person appears to be based on having one native grandparent, which entitles her to register in that tribe, and taking an online class in their language. She grew up and still lives in upstate New York, far from the rez, and has had a comfortable career in academe. Her award-winning best-sellers depend entirely on her claim to indigenous knowledge. I'm not buying it, and I'm sorry I bought the book!
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