Featured Reviews

Robin Wall Kimmerer – The Serviceberry [Feature Review]

The ServiceberryLessons From Our Flora 

A Feature Review of

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
Robin Wall Kimmerer

Hardcover: Scribner, 2024
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Reviewed by Julie Lane-Gay

On rough days, it’s often the natural world that cheers me. Remembering that the roses’ luscious scent exists for no other reason than delight, that dull-looking Alders altruistically feed the soil of the shrubs and trees around them, shows me so much about God’s brilliance and generosity in creating our world. They remind me God is here.  God cares about everything

And now I’ll notice the Serviceberry—that blueberry look-alike also known as the Juneberry or the Saskatoon. Sweet, plump and (usually) blue, they’re wonderful plucked right off the bush or folded into pies. In botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, she introduces us to this uncommon fruit not just for its deliciousness but as a lens to see how a tiny berry is part of a giant magnanimity.  She writes, “Juneberries represent hundreds of gift exchanges that led to my blue-stained fingers: 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…” (11). 

Kimmerer spotlights the Serviceberry (and countless other plants) as examples of the ethic of reciprocity, as prototypes of a different way to interact as we face the daunting realities of climate change.  At heart, The Serviceberry is an economic argument, a plea to turn our attention (and hearts) to the economies of nature.

The Serviceberry feels like a dessert to Kimmerer’s earlier feast, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. An outstanding collection of essays first published in 2013, it mysteriously and suddenly jumped onto the New York Times Bestseller List in 2021 (was it that solitary time of the Pandemic?) and has remained there ever since. A professor of Environmental Biology at the State University of New York, Kimmerer was a recipient of a 2022 McArthur Fellowships and is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, where she lives (and eats berries) in Upstate New York.  A small, short book with lovely illustrations, Kimmerer has written The Serviceberry to epitomize the fruit it extols.

Kimmerer longs for mutual flourishing—mutual because if it doesn’t happen for all of us, it’s not flourishing. She urges her readers to focus on sharing from our abundance, be it our abundance of berries, our books, our clothes, our time, so we all might have enough.  She writes:

“The Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Without the gift relationship with bees and birds, the Serviceberry would disappear from the planet. Even if they hoarded abundance, perched atop the wealth ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance…. All flourishing is mutual” (72).

Kimmerer’s mutual flourishing would bless not just our troubled planet, but one another.  

The Serviceberry is also an excellent layperson’s introduction to biomimicry, a way of seeing nature as an inspiration for designs or processes that might solve human problems through nature’s examples. Kimmerer writes, 

“These ten-foot-tall trees are the producers in this economy. Using the free raw materials of light, water and air, they transmute these gifts into leaves and flowers and fruits. They store some energy as sugars in the making of their own bodies, but much of it is shared.  Some of the abundance of spring rain and sun manifests in the form of flowers, which offer a feast for insects when it’s cold and rainy.  The insects return the favor by carrying the pollen.  Food is rarely in short supply for Saskatoons but mobility is rare. Movement is a gift of the pollinators, but the energy needed to support the buzzing around is scarce.  So the trees and the insects create a relationship of exchange that benefits both” (68).

While her passion for mutuality, flourishing and gift economies can feel idealistic, we intuitively feel our desire for this flourishing even if it feels impossible.  We see it in the serviceberry’s economy and we see it in our longing of how we wish to be treated.  To Kimmerer’s credit, she focuses on starting small.  Come August, share your zucchini.  Finished with the novel your brother gave you for Christmas?  Give it to someone else. Know your neighbors. Practice sharing, not just for the effect but to build the inclination, the muscle. 

“The natural process of ecological replacement highlights two mechanisms at work in replacing a complex system that dominates the landscape and seems too big to change. Succession relies in part on incremental change, the slow steady replacement of that which does not serve ecological flourishing with new communities. But it also relies on disruption of the status quo in order to let new species emerge and flower” (100-101).

The Serviceberry, as a berry and a book, is small, but generous and far-reaching.  It’s got a lot to teach us.

 

Julie Lane-Gay

Julie Lane-Gay is a writer and editor in Vancouver, British Columbia. She is an avid gardener and trained horticulturist who writes for garden magazines in the US and Canada. She is also the Senior Editor of CRUX, Regent College's journal of thought and opinion and a Catechist at her Anglican church. She is the author of The Riches of Your Grace:Living in the Book of Common Prayer,(IVP,2024).


 
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