Reflections on our relationship with nature and each other

Inspired by "The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance" by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Last winter was my first winter on Long Island in New York. I was in a new place without many friends, experiencing a real winter for the first time in more than a decade and a partner in medical residency who was (and still is) rarely home. I spent much of last winter reading and reflecting. It was the first winter in my life that I stepped back from doing and moved into a lower-energy reflective space.

This winter, with a new full-time job as of August, I don’t have quite as much space and time to step back and reflect, but I made an intention to create mini-spaces to do so during the holiday season.

My good friend Justin Adams shared with me an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance, that quickly began to occupy this space of reflection. Many of you have likely already heard of Robin’s more well known book, Braiding Sweetgrass, and some of you might have already read this essay. If you haven’t, it’s about a 30 minute read and I’d highly recommend doing so before you read the rest of my reflections here.

While I found myself wanting to distill the main take-aways from her essay here, I wouldn’t do justice to the beauty of her writing and the weaving together of different threads that are key to grasping the big picture and the small picture that she delivers so artfully.

Gift Economy

I first heard of the concept of a gift economy back when I was in graduate school. I can’t remember where, but I do remember a deep curiosity to learn more and find out where it can lead us. Assuming you’ve read the essay, here are some of my reflections on the essay and the concept of the gift economy and the implications for our world today.

An economy based on abundance instead of scarcity, where gratitude and reciprocity are the main form of currency instead of money and where relationships are the fundamental building block, music to my ears. The concept of a gift economy is wonderful and many of us wonder why it isn’t more present today.

The gift economy is based on the concept that there is no such thing as a transaction. I give something on my own volition to someone as a gift, which builds social capital with that person and they have an intrinsic motivation to return the favor in the future, maybe in the same form or a different form. But fundamentally, it is a gift without expectation of return.

I do this with my friends all the time. When we go out to eat, one of us will pay the bill with the trust that down the road, the others will pick up the next one. We don’t need to be “square”, because we know that we are all jointly committed to supporting each other and we know it will come back around. Because we are all committed to each other and our friendship.

This winter, I’m reflecting on the fact that our current global economy is one based on transaction, I think largely because transactions allow a system of mutual exchange without requiring trust and deep relationship between parties. We all know that trust and deep relationship is helpful in facilitating transactions, but it isn’t a fundamental requirement in order to exchange goods or services.

And this is where I start running into questions.

Is non-human nature a gift economy?

Back when we were bands of maybe 100 people, you had a relationship with everyone within that unit and a shared purpose of survival. The shared purpose and level of trust were the foundations of a micro-economy where different people would serve different roles without transactions or a system of exchange. I am not a historian, but I would guess that those systems of exchange and transaction started to come into play when your band encountered another band and you didn’t have trust/relationship, but you each had something that the other wanted, so you developed the ability to transact, one thing for another.

Now, if we step back from humans, as Robin Wall Kimmerer does in The Serviceberry and look at non-human nature, she notes that berries are a gift from nature to all animals. But now I’ll be a bit provocative. Is it a gift?

Plants created berries so that animals would help those plants procreate by spreading their seeds within a pouch of nutrients. This seems a bit more like mutualism or symbiotic, but perhaps not a true “gift”? In fact, as I reflect more, I’m struggling to think of any examples in nature where there is a pure “gift”. Where something is given with no expectation of a return. Kimmerer notes this herself in the essay.

Let’s ask the Saskatoons. 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 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 buzzing around is scarce. So they create a relationship of exchange that benefits both.

I would argue that nature is not a gift economy, but an economy largely based on the fundamental principle that cooperation will get species further than individualism. That mutualism will lead to better evolutionary outcomes for the individual as much as it does the collective.

In fact, I would posit the question of whether the concept of a “gift” is something that is uniquely human. That even where we might not get something in return (mutualism), humans have the ability to give a gift just because of our desire to help others. Without opening up pandora’s box of effective altruism, I do think it’s worth considering that the beauty of humans is that gifting is a part of our everyday lives and way of being. I haven’t seen any studies but I bet the majority of humans get more pleasure from seeing the response to the gift they have given someone else than the pleasure they get from the gifts they received.

Given your holiday gift-giving, does this hold true in your experience?

Can/should we shift the global economy to a gift economy?

So, what is possible to achieve our global economy?

I don’t know.

This is where I struggle.

I don’t think we have enough of a shared purpose or trust at a global scale to effectively implement mutualism without a system of transactions. In other words, I could absolutely be wrong, but I don’t think a global gift economy is possible.

BUT, two aspects of a gift economy I think could and should be possible.

First, focus on local. Especially in the face of changes to our world that are likely to put more strain and inhibitions on global exchange, investing more in local gift economies makes total sense. Simply building relationships of trust and mutual support in our every day lives is absolutely worth it. And who knows what might grow out of local circles of trust and reciprocity that starts to take different shapes and forms at larger scales.

Second, what if there was an economy that was based on mutualism? What if we stepped out of a zero-sum game mindset based on scarcity?

The reality is that we live in a world of limited resources, in which there is a growing demand for fewer resources. Regardless of whether innovation can help us get out of some of these challenges, but likely not all.

The question at the heart of Kimmerer’s essay for me, is what would happen if we truly shifted into a state of gratitude? Even when nature’s gifts might be more symbiotic than gifts, what if we acknowledged their gift-like nature? How would our relationship with nature change? How would our relationship with each other change?

I wonder if gratitude may be the key to shifting out of a perennial state of competition and “zero-sumism”. And those that know me know that I love to compete, I love to play, I love to win. But maybe we’ve swung a bit too far into the realm of competition rather than the realm of cooperation for our current society and world to bear.

I don’t know if a global gift economy would be better than a global market-based economy. But I do know that I am yearning for more relationships in my life than transactions. That practicing gratitude is something that will bring me more into balance with some of my natural or taught tendencies to seek forever more.

Would a gift economy value nature?

I want to end this reflection with the area that I spend most of my professional time thinking about. How can we value nature? If we had a gift economy, we wouldn’t even be talking about valuing nature because we would fundamentally understand, embody and act on the fundamental fact that we are nature. We would intrinsically act in support of our environment because we understood that our health depends on the health of our home.

But now I’ll say something that others might disagree with. The reality is that today, we have a transaction-based global economy. The average human does not understand our interdependence with non-human nature. And we do not value it. And I’m not talking about putting a price on nature, I’m positing, that as a species, we fundamentally do not value the benefits that nature provides for us.

And my hypothesis is that the way to bring humans back into deep relationship with nature, given that we currently are so far from that intrinsic state, is to put a price on nature. Is to value nature within our current economy. And help humanity realize the value that it has by putting a dollar amount on nature.

But, recognizing that valuing something is different than commoditizing it. And how to value nature without commoditizing it is something that I think we are all figuring out. And many of us, myself included, are also figuring out how to bring humans back into deep relationship with nature so that one day, we don’t need to have a monetary value of nature for humans to value non-human nature. We don’t need to price it to value it.

Kimmerer’s essay for me is a reminder that there are two paths forward and we must walk them both at the same time. One path is the deeper cultural and spiritual work needed across across humanity to bring us back into relationship with non-human nature and each other. The other path is making forward progress within the current paradigm. We need incremental progress towards valuing nature within our current economy while also planting the seeds of a gift economy within our every day lives and local efforts that might grow into something that does shift how global economies function.

But it won’t, and it shouldn’t be a government that decrees any such shift. It can and it should be the will of the people, recognizing that we are all in this together and an economy more weighted towards gratitude, reciprocity and cooperation will take us further than one based on pure competition and scarcity. And I want to be clear, this isn’t black and white. I don’t think pure cooperation or pure competition are the answers.

The answer is a blend of both.

Thanks for reading and I hope you get some time to rest and reflect during this winter season.

I’m grateful for the 2300 of you that regularly read these reflections and share so much knowledge and wisdom with me that inspire and constitute the content of my writing. We all have our own unique role to play and I thank all of you for your contributions to the bigger end state that we all share, no matter our differences of opinion in how we can best get there.

And thanks for your grace for my grammatical & spelling errors and these half-baked thoughts.