The Serviceberry is a short book with a heavy burden. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a distinguished environmental biology professor and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, has been out under the serviceberry trees, thinking about what is wrong with the global economic system. The mixed market economies in which most of us live, she argues, have reduced us to self-interested, greedy competitors, imprisoned in “patterns of gross overconsumption that have brought us to the brink of disaster.” In the serviceberry economy, though, Kimmerer sees only generosity and abundance: gifts of carbon dioxide and solar waves to the serviceberry, gifts of sugar to the pollinating flies and cedar waxwings, gifts of feathers to the beetles, who are themselves gifts to the voles, whose carcasses feed the microorganisms, who build the soil, which in turn nourishes the serviceberry. Out here, she writes, “all flourishing is mutual.” It could be so with humans, says Kimmerer, as suggested by alternative economic arrangements such as Indigenous potlatches, little free libraries, open-source software projects, and – in what seems to be the genesis of the essay – the sharing of serviceberries by her farmer neighbors. Gift economies abound in the world’s unnoticed corners.

The targets of Kimmerer’s ire are massive global forces – governments, corporations, and systemic greed – while her heroes are mostly neighbors and friends. The contrast is too glib, and it sidesteps the question of whether gift economies can only exist in the shadow or ruins of such large-scale systems. The little free library books were printed by cutthroat publishing companies. The “free knowledge” available on YouTube and TikTok is heavily monetized. Looking to the natural world for models of moral economy is perilous, whether it is the grim winner-takes-all vision that Kimmerer critiques, or the harmonious mutualism that she cheers. On a planet where some 40 percent of all animal species are parasites, where eating means that someone else dies, all flourishing is mutual only if our definition of “flourishing” includes piracy, cannibalism, and countless painful deaths. The world may be stunningly beautiful, as Annie Dillard underscored in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but it is also “festering with suppurating sores.”

Kimmerer’s vision – full of sweet-tart berries, chortling birds, and the Indigenous tradition of the “Honorable Harvest” – is a sunnier version of the “possibility of life in capitalist ruins” in Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, or the strangely hopeful rewilding of the world’s “eeriest and most desolate places” in Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. We certainly need hope, and we need to see the gifts we have been given, especially in a twenty-first-century economy where companies seem pleased to help us transform every part of our lives into income-producing assets: spare rooms into hotels, extra seats into taxis, and our looks, families, hobbies, and aesthetic tastes into “personal brands.” And on this point Kimmerer is right: it need not be so. The Israelites lived for decades on a mysterious bread that fell from the sky each morning with the dew. Jesus commended the economic attitudes of sparrows and lilies and satisfied five thousand people with a single meager meal.