The Serviceberry

Abundance and reciprocity in the Natural World

Book By Robin Wall Kimmerer | Blog Written By Corey Larson

Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a short book. The kind you can finish in an afternoon. But like so many of the best books, it lingers long after you've turned the last page.

Part of what I love about the book is how deceptively simple it is. Kimmerer begins with something as ordinary as a berry bush. She notices that saskatoons don’t hoard their fruit. They produce abundantly and offer it freely. Birds eat. Animals eat. People eat. Seeds get scattered. New plants grow. Life flourishes because of generosity rather than competition and that observation becomes a lens for looking at the world around us.

Most of us have been taught to view life through the lens of scarcity. There isn't enough. Resources are limited. If someone else gets more, there must be less for me. We learn to measure, protect, accumulate, and compare.

Yet when we pay attention to the natural world, we see something different. Flourishing is mutual. Forests share nutrients through underground fungal networks. Pollinators and plants cooperate. Rivers nourish entire ecosystems. Nature is filled with relationships built on reciprocity, mutual care, and gift.

As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, that resonates deeply with me.

Living in northern Minnesota, it's hard not to notice these patterns. You see them paddling through the Boundary Waters. You see them on hiking trails. You see them in gardens, forests, and lakes. The natural world is constantly reminding us that everything is connected.

One of the reasons this book struck such a chord with me is that it quietly challenges one of the stories many of us have inherited, especially in places like this. Up on the Iron Range there seems to be a baked-in admiration for self-reliance. We celebrate the person who can fix anything, build anything, and figure things out on their own. And there is something genuinely admirable about resilience, hard work, and determination. Those qualities have helped people survive long winters, economic uncertainty, and the realities of life in remote places like ours for generations.

But sometimes that healthy self-reliance drifts into something else. We begin to believe that needing help is weakness. We imagine that successful people make it entirely on their own. We tell ourselves that we should be able to persevere through hardship without leaning on anyone else.

The truth is that none of us are self-made. Every one of us is the beneficiary of gifts we did not create for ourselves. Someone taught us. Someone encouraged us. Someone took a chance on us. Someone showed us kindness when we needed it. We drive on roads we didn't build, drink water from systems we didn't create, enjoy the shade of trees we didn’t plant, and live within communities sustained by the labor and care of countless others.

The natural world understands this better than we do. A forest is not a collection of independent trees competing against one another. It is a community. Trees, fungi, birds, insects, soil, and water all depend on one another. Flourishing has never been a solo project.

Kimmerer doesn't romanticize nature or pretend that life is always easy. There is struggle in every ecosystem. But she argues that gift economies are not some unrealistic fantasy. They already exist all around us. In fact, many of the most meaningful parts of our lives operate this way.

Friendship works this way.

Neighborhoods work this way.

Families work this way.

Congregations work this way.

Nobody sends an invoice after bringing a casserole to a grieving family. Nobody keeps a spreadsheet of every ride they've given a friend. We show up because that's what communities do. We receive help when we need it and offer help when we can.

Those exchanges are gifts, and she says that “The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence, and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bods that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”

Reading Serviceberry helped me realize how often the most important things in life cannot be measured in dollars and cents. It’s the stuff of relationships. Trust. Belonging. Love. Hospitality. Kindness. None of these fit neatly into a marketplace, yet they are the very things that make life rich.

I also appreciate that the book asks practical questions. What would happen if we organized more of our lives around generosity instead of accumulation? What if enough really could be enough? What if communities became places where gifts circulated rather than resources being endlessly extracted?

Those questions feel especially important right now. We live in a time when many of us feel isolated, anxious, and exhausted. The constant pressure to consume more, achieve more, and acquire more rarely leaves us feeling fulfilled. Kimmerer offers another possibility. Not a quick fix, but a different way of imagining what it means to live well.

For me, Serviceberry ultimately feels like a hopeful counterpoint to those pressures. It reminds me that generosity is not an exception in the world. It is woven into the fabric of creation itself. The earth continually gives. Communities thrive when people share what they have. Life becomes more abundant when gifts circulate.

Maybe that's why the book feels so refreshing. It names something many of us already know deep down but struggle to articulate. That we belong to each other. And when we live like that is true, beautiful things happen.