When the ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer is in a city for work and starts to feel disconnected from the natural world, she likes to do a breathing exercise. She inhales and thinks about how she is breathing in the breath of plants. And then she exhales, and she thinks about how her breath, in turn, gives plants life. “That is a super fundamental way to recognise our reciprocity in the living world; that we are not separate,” she tells me, speaking on a video call from her farm near Syracuse, in upstate New York.
Once you begin to recognise yourself as symbiotically connected to plants, it might shift your views on politics, too. One of the great “delusions” of market capitalism, Kimmerer continues, is its notion of self-interest. Because how should you define the self? “If my self is the economic me, supposed to maximise my return on investment, that’s a very different notion than if my self is permeable, if it includes the trees whose oxygen I am breathing, and those birds, and the soil,” she says.
It is October and outside her home the leaves are turning, while farmers are harvesting corn and picking apples. She is speaking from her office, which is painted such a vibrant shade of blue that it looks otherworldly. Kimmerer, who is 71, with long grey wavy hair and a mellifluous voice, does most of her writing in this blue room. She writes her first drafts longhand, in green or purple ink on lined yellow legal paper. “I can tear them up and shuffle them!” she says of this method, flapping a few pages of her next book towards the computer camera.
Kimmerer’s second book, Braiding Sweetgrass, was published in 2013 by the small nonprofit publisher Milkweed Editions and became a word-of-mouth sensation, entering the bestseller lists in 2020 – where it remains – and selling more than 2m copies. It is beautiful and unusual, the rare book that might cause you to forever see the world a little differently. In lyrical essays that span science, memoir, Indigenous wisdom and storytelling, Kimmerer, who is Native American, invites people to reconsider their relationship with plants and animals. She tells me she wanted to “help people fall in love with the world again”.
Her new book, The Serviceberry, is a slim, elegant distillation of some of her political ideas. It uses the serviceberry – a wild, red-purple berry, also known as a juneberry or sugarplum – to explore the idea of the gift economy, one structured around interconnectedness and reciprocity, as an alternative to the market economy. The serviceberry shares its wealth, its berries, freely with the natural world, and these birds, insects and humans in turn ensure its survival. In this world, all flourishing is mutual.
When we buy something, we acquire rights over it and feel we can use it as we please. When something is a gift, however, we recognise our wider responsibilities. “A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favourite auntie, then you are in relationship to that ‘thing’ in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world,” she writes. A serviceberry picked by the roadside feels, quite obviously, like a gift from nature: it would be greedy to pick all the berries and wrong to cut down the bush. What if we recognised more things as a gift from nature?
The Serviceberry is the first book Kimmerer has written knowing she now has a wide readership, and she felt newly “cautious”, particularly as she is venturing into new territory by writing about economics. It grew out of an essay she wrote for the US magazine Emergence in 2022. She initially turned down the commission to write about economics, saying that she didn’t know enough about the subject, “other than that what I understand to be market capitalism is somehow destroying the things I love, and that I am somehow complicit because it’s the default world that we live in”. But then she realised that as an ecologist she had long studied the “economy of nature”, how energy and resources are distributed between living beings. “And so I wondered if my own musings, confusion, resistance might be of value to others,” she tells me.
In the book, she cites free farm stands, used to share surplus vegetables, and Little Free Library, the book-sharing initiative that has spread across the US, as examples of thriving gift economies. Knowing that such projects exist gives people more agency to push back against modern capitalism, she argues, and invites them to ask: “How could we create this more subversive, relationship-based, commons-based economy and let it grow up underneath capitalism, hoping that one day it might replace it?”
When we speak, the US election is fast approaching, and upstate New York is politically divided. On the country roads near Kimmerer’s farm, she sees both Harris signs and “vitriolic” Trump signs. “We’re on the precipice of great change. We’re in great danger. I feel that every day,” Kimmerer says. She has found the level of support for Trump in Syracuse shocking. I wondered how these stark political divides play out in close-knit rural communities. “There are tensions,” she acknowledges. “For the most part, people are very community-minded … if you slip off the road on an icy, snowy night, people are going to pull you out of the ditch regardless of what bumper stickers you have on your truck. But it does undermine this call for coming together as a community, because we’ve become distrustful of each other.”
The prose in The Serviceberry is vivid and poetic, and also fierce. The frilly cup at the top of a serviceberry is called a calyx, she writes, “in case you were craving a delicious new word, the way some people crave money”. When she writes of people who are greedy and dishonest, she calls them “Darrens”, after Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil. When she was writing The Serviceberry, new evidence emerged that Exxon and other fossil fuel companies made accurate predictions about global heating decades ago but covered up the evidence. (Exxon denies the allegations.)
She says when she feels “paralysed” she finds it helpful to remember that even a system as big as global capitalism is led by individuals. “We do have to call them out, and name them as the Windigos that they are, with all the ethical, moral jeopardy associated with that,” she says. (A Windigo is the selfish, cannibalistic monster of Native American storytelling.)
Kimmerer has long been involved in the environmental movement but believes its efforts to scare people into action are misguided. Fear doesn’t motivate people to act, she says. But love does. “And it’s really love more than hope,” she tells me. “We hear so much of: ‘Well, do you have hope?’ Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again. We know as people the power we have when we really recognise our love for someone or something. Hmm! – there’s nothing that’s going to stand in our way.”
As an author, Kimmerer’s first inspiration was the scientist and writer Loren Eiseley, whose lyrical explorations of natural science served as a model. She says she also draws inspiration from the poet Wendell Berry, and Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, a foundational text for the modern environmental movement. Kimmerer says she admires Carson as a pioneering female scientist and one who “combined her knowledge with a sense of responsibility for that knowledge”.
“I fear altogether too many scientists hide behind this notion that our objectivity will somehow be compromised by advocacy. I couldn’t disagree more,” she says. “When we have the privilege of understanding how the living world works, who better than the scientific community to also stand up and tell this story?”
Kimmerer, who has enjoyed an eminent academic career and is a distinguished teaching professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York (SUNY), is nonetheless critical of academia, which she describes as “highly conformist, highly assimilative; there are milestones you have to meet, ways you have to behave”. When she was applying for graduate studies, an adviser wrote that “she’s done remarkably well for an Indian girl”, and for many years Kimmerer felt forced to conform, which meant setting aside her Native heritage.
Her grandfather had been sent to a state boarding school, where students were forcibly stripped of their Native language and traditions, but Kimmerer was raised by her parents as part of the Potawatomi tribe. Kimmerer now leads the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY, which champions the marriage of Indigenous wisdom and modern science. She tells her students they must become “bilingual”, and they must understand the use and limits of each intellectual tradition. The scientific method is the best tool for settling factual questions, but it isn’t equipped to answer questions about values or ethics.
Kimmerer always describes herself first as a mother and only then as a scientist, decorated professor and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Introducing herself in this way is an “act of resistance”. “I got a bit tired of mostly all of my male colleagues, every time they introduced themselves, it was like a resumé,” she tells me. She remembers the first time she accidentally let slip that she couldn’t make a work meeting because she had to go to Brownies, and how this confession opened the way for her colleagues to also be more honest about their personal commitments.
I tell her how deeply her writing on motherhood has resonated with me. In Braiding Sweetgrass there is a poignant essay about time and entropy, her two daughters growing up and leaving home, and her efforts to create for them a swimming pond in her garden – the epic, never-ending task of keeping the algae at bay so that the pond can sustain other life. “It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out of the door with a wave over the shoulder,” she writes, and although my children are still very young, this line always makes me cry. Children are “a gift, and the essence of a gift economy is a gift stays in motion”, she tells me. And then she leans forward and adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper: “But they do come back!”
Kimmerer remains close to both of her daughters, one of whom lives near her in Syracuse, and she now has three grandchildren, aged four, seven and 10. She sees them regularly, and they craft together, cook, garden and go foraging. “The wild grapes are ripe now, so we’ve got to take a little walk to pucker their lips with those,” she says. These wild grapes are growing by the pond, which has become overgrown, and is, she concedes, one victim of her success.
In 2022, Kimmerer won a MacArthur “genius” grant. “Oh my goodness, it’s actually kind of funny,” she says, when I ask her about how she found out about the $800,000 (£615,000) award. She is “notorious” for not replying to emails, she says, and had noticed several from the MacArthur Foundation. She assumed they were seeking her input on recommending someone for the award, and she really did intend to reply, except life kept getting in the way. Eventually, the foundation phoned her, saying they needed to speak with her urgently, and she arranged for them to call her back later that day, when she would be driving and would have 20 minutes to spare. The phone conversation was an utter shock.
“I pulled into a construction site, which is now indelibly in my memory … I just couldn’t believe what they were saying. Talk about a gift!” she says. The grant has enabled her to semi-retire from the university, so that she can devote more time to her writing. She is deep into work on the next project, her most ambitious yet. In her previous books she has invited her readers to learn from plants, but in this next one the plants themselves will be the storytellers. “It is an exciting creative challenge, to give voice and personhood to plants,” she says. Some of the book is typed up, but readers will have to wait a little longer as much of it still exists only in green and purple ink, dispersed among sheets of yellow legal paper in Kimmerer’s very blue office.
• The Serviceberry is published by Allen Lane (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• This article was amended on 19 November 2024. An earlier version mischaracterised Wall Kimmerer’s parents’ interest in their Potawatomi heritage as a “rediscovery”.
