When you look at a berry, what do you see? A snack, a storehouse of energy, a transformed flower, a commodity, a gift? In her latest book, the US botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer views a tiny fruit through all of these lenses, in the process illuminating much bigger questions about how we humans relate to plants, to the natural world and to each other.
The Serviceberry builds on the blend of Indigenous and western ecological thought that has made Kimmerer – unexpectedly – one of the best known environmental writers working today. During the pandemic, her essay collection Braiding Sweetgrass, which entwined Indigenous American teachings on plants and the land with western botanical science, became a slow-burn bestseller. It began as an unsolicited 750-page manuscript submitted to the small Minneapolis-based publisher Milkweed in 2010, was published in 2013, and has now sold more than 2m copies worldwide, featuring on the reading lists of celebrities from Emma Watson to Björk, and inspiring the singer Camila Cabello to get a neck tattoo of the eponymous herb.
As a follow-up to this outsized hit, The Serviceberry is far from inflated or grandiose: it’s a short book expanded from a magazine essay, peppered with simple line drawings by the illustrator John Burgoyne. But in it, Kimmerer issues a far-reaching challenge to look at even the simplest things around us differently. In the bucket of Amelanchier alnifolia berries she picks from her neighbours’ farm, she sees “the Maples who gave their leaves to the soil, the countless invertebrates and microbes who exchanged nutrients and energy to build the humus in which a Serviceberry seed could take root, the Cedar Waxwing who dropped the seed, the sun, the rain, the early spring flies who pollinated the flowers, the farmer who wielded the shovel to tenderly settle the seedlings”.
This interconnected way of seeing rests partly on Kimmerer’s academic expertise: she is a professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and director of its Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her account of the serviceberry follows conventional ecology in viewing it, like the human body, as a staging post in the cycling and recycling of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, the constantly dissipating and replenishing flows of energy ultimately derived from the sun.
But she is also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and draws on the Indigenous understanding of people as partners in an interconnected web of equal beings (to underline this point, the names of plants and animals are capitalised, and even flies are a “who”). In place of standard capitalism, The Serviceberry offers a vision of “gift economies” – as set out in Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift – in which wealth is something not to be hoarded by individuals, but invested in strengthening the network of relationships that our survival rests on. Alongside the tangible, Kimmerer imagines the cycling of intangible resources, such as gratitude, reciprocity and community, as a way to challenge the scarcity and competition that underpin so many of our economic and societal structures.
Like its predecessor, The Serviceberry is rooted in a specifically North American ecology – sweetgrass is used by Indigenous people in basketry and ceremonial smudging, serviceberry in traditional foods such as pemmican – and both books speak directly to North America’s history of colonisation, Indigenous displacement and runaway consumerism. So how do they translate for readers who have never tasted a serviceberry or smelled sweetgrass? Kimmerer herself has drawn a link between the success of Braiding Sweetgrass and the experience, common to so many around the world, of a previously unquestioned status quo being destabilised during the pandemic. In the face of this uncertainty, she proposes connection and appreciation as antidotes for the alienation and powerlessness that stem from severed relationships with the land and each other.
These themes are familiar far beyond the book’s setting, a green valley in upstate New York. The Serviceberry is a call to action for “ordinary people” everywhere, rather than an arcane technical treatise for experts. And yet the very accessibility and popularity of Kimmerer’s writing has drawn criticism. Some Indigenous scholars see it as insufficiently radical, warning that it risks reducing Indigenous culture to something picturesque and palatable, offering cover for the violent, white-dominated systems driving an environmental emergency.
It is true that The Serviceberry’s world is largely one of benevolent neighbours, free farm stands and recipe-swapping, and that while Kimmerer mentions the extractive hyper-capitalists she calls “the Darrens”, after the ExxonMobil CEO, there isn’t much evocation of the brutality and suffering these systems inflict or the upheaval that dismantling them would entail. But this is a book intended to inspire not intimidate. Although it asks big questions, the answers, Kimmerer suggests, don’t have to be sweeping – at least in the beginning. They could be as simple as a bucket of berries given to a neighbour.
• The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer is published by Allen Lane (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
