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Wall Kimmerer (Credit: Rosem Morton for The Washington Post/Getty)
The sun is the source of energy in “the economy of nature”, writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, red-hot botanist and professional ponderer from the Native American Potawatomi nation. She spends her latest book The Serviceberry, a follow-up to the 2013 sensation Braiding Sweetgrass, proposing an alternative to “cannibal capitalism” in the form of a “human gift economy” which promises to right the moral and environmental wrongs of Adam Smith’s rational economic man. And in the real economy, she asks, what is our version of the sun? “Maybe it is love.”
It’s worth asking what sort of person could read this without wincing — because, if Wall Kimmerer’s influence on eco thought leaders such as Caroline Lucas and Jane Goodall is anything to go on — her fans are many. One explanation for her disciples’ tolerance for the saccharine is that they are mostly American. The week after thousands of Barboured British farmers took to Whitehall to protest Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax changes, the tone of our own rural culture cannot be more different from the world of Wall Kimmerer, in which she considers, in return for a load of berries given to her by a neighbour, “offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind”. Meanwhile in London, the legions of Jeremy Clarkson lookalikes, led by the big man himself, presented a no-nonsense, rugged and masculine front against the out-of-touch Westminster chin-strokers. Nobody in this crew spends their days communing with the local robins, “stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness”.
Yet the timing of The Serviceberry’s publication for a UK audience — it coincided with the flat-capped populists descending on the capital — is providential, because it so perfectly illuminates the polarised interests scrabbling over the political and actual environment. Though far from natural bedfellows at first glance, Wall Kimmerer and the British farmers are both launching wails of discontent against metropolitan fops in their steel-and-glass palaces. For our bumbling botanist’s part, she proposes the scaling-up of the Native American custom of potlatches, or gifting ceremonies (in which serviceberries, the fruit of the shadbush tree, are often exchanged) so that rather than hoarding resources we instead store them “in the belly of my brother”. The enemy of the essay is faceless, multinational oil conglomerates. The farmers represent our own, homegrown rural mythology — that of the ruddy-cheeked countryman — protecting not only a livelihood but a part of our heritage against a spiteful, hopelessly urban Labour government who knows only the politics of envy. In each case, the countryside is upheld as the place of reality and common sense; the city is the locus of decadence, greed and misguidance.
Unlike Clarkson’s furious legion of farmers, and Wall Kimmerer herself with her “fingers stained with berry juice”, Wall Kimmerer’s celebrity fans seem to have more in common with those faceless urban elites. These include little-known smallholders Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. But the crucial thing about The Serviceberry is that its readers are not expected to own, or have ever seen, a trowel. This essay is an invitation to fantasise, not to farm. All the swooning around Wall Kimmerer’s last book, Braiding Sweetgrass, was generated by city dreamers whose fingernails were more likely to bear a glossy coat of Chanel vernis than a grubby tint of local soil. The writer herself is highly likeable, and clearly knows her onions — but it’s worth questioning the point of all this when her readers are probably slinging her hardbacks into their baskets at Wholefoods before zooming off back to Putney in their gas-guzzling 4x4s. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but “organic living” has become more of an aesthetic than a commitment and one wonders, particularly given the lack of solid policy in this essay, whether its peace-and-love-soaked vagueness is so very marketable because it is unchallenging to the actual realities of readers. These fans are willing to take their brood pumpkin-picking at a farm shop, and might even trade in their gas boiler for a heat pump, but there are limits. What they really want is to feel good about it.
Wall Kimmerer’s writing is interesting and in places, inviting. Her presence in the essay is that of an exasperated botanist who, faced with conundrums in economic theory — not her natural domain, by her own admission — marches off to pick berries instead. There is some, perhaps unintended, comedy in this. Wall Kimmerer spends much of her time lecturing, and half of the effort of these encounters seems to go into shoehorning in sentimentalism. During one such talk at a “big, prestigious university”, she suggests changing the name of the College of Natural Resources to “the Department of Earthly Gifts”. Okay, we get it Robin.
There is also a sort of sad comedy in the way that Wall Kimmerer’s concept of a global economy run on generosity and love is always undone by the thorny reality that some people are, in the end, just a bit too selfish for that to ever work. She describes a free farm stand where extra produce is left out for anyone to take. In the end, someone takes the stand itself. Wall Kimmerer acknowledges that “cheaters who violate the trust” are a sticking point in the “gift economy” model — but insists that “collective action, trust, and cooperation” can prevent this from happening as an alternative to state intervention. Now, I’ve never been to rural Syracuse, New York, where this author lives in peace with neighbours, swapping “zukes” (courgettes, to you and me) and “asking the plants for their guidance”. But living in London for a few years, and reading signs of escalating decline in the way people behave out on the street — spitting, pissing, littering, harassing, mugging — has gradually chipped away at my teenaged belief in the essential goodness of people. If you leave your bike unlocked, it will go. If it’s a Friday or Saturday night, people will leave half-full beer bottles dribbling over seats on the Tube for TfL workers to scrub in the morning. And if you leave lovely vegetables out for people to take for free, some selfish fucker will nick the stand.
Governments and the courts are meant to restrain these antisocial instincts; we cannot rely on the generosity of strangers in the way Wall Kimmerer insists we should — the great proposition of The Serviceberry. Now, I suspect that most readers also feel this way; but both this and Braiding Sweetgrass are not intended as genuine manuals for social change. If we look at Wall Kimmerer’s readership, they — unlike her, whom I respect for genuinely believing, however naively, in a better society — are not arsed about hauling the CEO of ExxonMobil in front of the Supreme Court. They are here for a holiday from the depressing doom-cycles of real life; as Havana hitmaker Camila Cabello writes in the blurb of an accompanying press release, the only real aim is to be vaguely reassured that “when we heal the Earth, we heal ourselves”. All of this, like many of Wall Kimmerer’s readers, is well-meaning and occasionally charming — but pointless.
Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse — and she is, I reckon, broadly right about aggressive growth agendas being responsible for the plundering of natural resources, and new approaches being needed. But the problem is that hers could never work. And so, given my doubts about The Serviceberry’s meaningfulness, it’s hard to swallow the at-times spiteful way she refers to her philosophy’s enemies — conventional, selfish, stupid capitalists. Teaching us the meaning of “calyx”, she adds: “In case you were craving a delicious new word, the way some people crave money.” Oh yeah, those other people and their idiotic desire for boring old, completely useless money — something she elsewhere refers to as mere “pieces of green paper”. Well, my wealth is my words. I am rich in other ways. Not in friends, though, because people are sick of me calling them fascist pigs for having bank accounts.
I work in a natural resources faculty in Canada, and Braiding Sweetgrass is gospel to most of woolly socialist-feminist faculty, and the swathes of now mostly female Phd students. I would be the first one to recognize that if the market contracts in the wake of some systemic crisis resulting from limits to growth, and the state contracts – because of the resulting fiscal implosion, then the ‘gift economy’ would inevitably take up the slack. But as Polanyi, Malinowski, Firth and others described in detail, anthropologically speaking, pre-modern gift or livelihood economies don’t exist in a liberal society of mobile individuals. The gifting isn’t between strangers. It’s in the context of families and tribes – place-bound, communitarian, traditional – and about as far from liberalism or feminism as it is possible to get. Robin Wall Kilmmerer’s vision is infantile and idiotic because she – like pretty well all those in the ‘decolonization’ ‘indigenization’ camp – is sociologically and historically illiterate. She thinks you can pick and mix: iPhones (check), local food grown in the community (check), all the products of urban civilization and the massive yields of industrial farming (check), cheap/free energy but without fossil fuel (check), ‘indigenous’ outlook and sensibility but without slavery, cannibalism, incessant warfare and with modern dentists and oestrogen (check), native ecological simplicity with million dollar transgender operations and treatments for all/for life….It’s so dumb…and even dumber that it has become the bible for environmentalists and ecological economists. E.F. Schumacher, Tolsyoy and Gandhi saw the virtues of self-made localism, community, the gift economy and place. But Schumacher’s vision of small and beautiful also recognized the trade offs. He had 8 kids, was a devout Catholic, openly supportive of the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae and understood (as an economist who had the respect of Keynes) that the political economy of subsidiarity – of pushing all activity of production, consumption and governance as far down towards families, communities and places – was not a solution but a game of trade offs (as Thomas Sowell would delight in pointing out). I have heard Kimmerer’s vision eulogized on campus probably 20 times in the last ten years. I have never once heard any academic or student explore the trade offs implied by her bucolic vision of strong women identifying ‘zuki’ exchangers. She’s the Judith Butler of environmental studies and not worth a nano-second of consideration
To the author, you’re being duped, or rather people who actually believe such nonsense are being duped. Actual American farmers do not think or act like this author. They overwhelmingly oppose the ‘green’ agenda. Many don’t believe in climate change or believe in a very different version than the one peddled by fearmongers. They voted overwhelmingly in favor of Donald Trump, who has promised to, among other things, withdraw once again from the Paris climate accords and make energy and fuel as cheap as possible by utilizing as many sources as can be economically tapped. I regularly see bumper stickers that read something to the effect of “Did you eat today, thank a farmer” or “no farms, no food” in my rural area. Yard signs for MAGA and/or the Trump movement outnumber signs for Harris by approximately seven or eight to one. If anything, American farmers are far more vehemently profit driven and willfully independent than their European counterparts because unlike those European farmers, they constitute a major portion of American economic activity and have a powerful political lobby that reflects that, and also because the American experience of expanding across a continent one family farm at a time has raised farmers and farming to a near mythic status in our culture, especially outside the coastal liberal strongholds. American farmers are well aware of the stark realities of nature even if sheltered city folk are not and they are not at all shy about throwing their considerable political weight around to further their continued prosperity.
Further, Syracuse, New York, is not rural. It is a city of over 150,000 people with a greater metropolitan area containing over half a million. Further, the entire state of NY is a deep blue democratic stronghold and though the city is far from the coast, it is culturally very much like the rest of America’s eastern coast. Robin Wall Kimmerer is, predictably, an academic working for a small research university affiliated with and founded by the reliably liberal and incredibly wealthy Syracuse University in the same city, a university well known for being a particularly desirable destination for affluent coastal elites, particularly in NYC, just a couple steps below the likes of Harvard and Yale. As such, it contributes no small amount to the pretentious and silly nonsense that runs rampant in American academic circles. She is a patrician academic with patrician sensibilities writing for a coastal patrician audience. Any implication that she is anything else is absurd and misleading.
One can speculate upon endlessly upon Ms. Kimmerer’s motivation for writing such a nonsensical thing, but she likely falls into one of these categories. She is either a fool who legitimately believes such nonsense will work. One can find these sorts of utopian thinkers in any era. Her basic collectivist mindset is not new and has been attempted by, among others, the founders of various supposedly ‘ideal’ communities throughout America’s history. The ones based around newfangled ideologies and ‘enlightened’ thinking, such as the famous New Harmony community, have tended to disintegrate or fall apart after the founding generation who are unable to sustain their worldview without some compelling social force, while the ones revolving around organized religion, a rigid worldview, and a homogeneous, exclusionary culture can actually still be found today. Amish, Mennonite, and other primitive religious communities can be found in many states, including my own. They vary in their particular dogmas and the extent to which they eschew technology and modern consumerism, but they are almost all insular and self-isolating. While almost unfailingly polite to visitors in their communities or in their public interactions, they are otherwise closed to outsiders. It is generally difficult if not impossible for an outsider to ‘join’ one of these communities, though it occasionally happens through marriage. They rarely take any political positions publicly and many have powerful taboos against participating in ‘outsider’ politics at all. This of course never squares with liberal sensibilities and so the phenomenon and whatever conclusions one might draw from these communities are generally ignored by them with the same zeal they ignore all other information that is inconvenient to their worldview.
The other possibility for Ms. Kimmerer’s motivation is that she is simply a profiteer. Writing to suit a particular audience and exploit their preconceived notions is not difficult for a skilled writer. It is entirely plausible that she is well aware her book will find far more fertile ground in Europe than in her native lands, despite her sentimental focus on the customs of Native American Stone Age civilizations and the overwhelmingly different conditions which produced them. I’m sure she also engages in the usual cherry picking of those particular historical civilizations that support her basic ideology as opposed to the many other different civilizations which presumably she would write off as irrelevant. Native American culture was far from monolithic. Indeed, it shows a typical level of diversity one would expect from different civilizations in different environments, with different food sources, different economies, and different ways of life. There were, in point of fact, communities of Native Americans which subsisted largely upon raiding and preying upon other more peaceful communities, much like the Mongols or Vikings of the old world, but you’ll never hear Kimmerer and her ilk mention that. Nature is amoral. Any survival strategy that results in the successful passing of genes to the next generation is equally valid. It’s simply another extension of the sheltered lives modern people lead, with affluent city dwellers being the most sheltered and the furthest out of touch with reality.
Whether cynical profit attempts or the deluded ramblings of adult children, it falls upon the serious minded and the grounded realists to address such inane assertions. There have always been those who take the easier intellectual path of seeking confirmation of their beliefs and believing in any nonsense that triggers their positive emotional responses and never any shortage of those who peddle nonsense to such individuals for their own emotional reasons or for base profit. The only way to address ideological nonsense is with the evidence of history. Such evidence is easily available to anyone who cares enough to seek it out.
It’s always great fun to read your incisive comments.
Living as I do in Iowa, I assure you that no one could be less appreciative of Wall Kimmerer’s twaddle than an American farmer.
At last, an excellent essay by Poppy without embellishments! More like this, please.
Is it really that good – or unembellished ?
“Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse”
I know it was a bit windy yesterday, but I can’t say I’d noticed the complete climate collapse apparently going on around me.
The weather has been a bit too Woke recently, had to bring out my umbrella
Good work Poppy. But what an idiot Wall Kimmerer is. And who sits at a meeting over her manuscript “The Serviceberry” and says, “Yep, this is going to be something big. Let’s go with it.” Maybe it was “asking the plants for their guidance” that convinced them, or “offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind”. I’ve seen all this before in the 70s, people in the city with their wooden shelves laden with glass jars of wheat germ, nuts, handmade recipe books made with love and mostly the forming of an identity. In the end of course they confirmed to reality knocking at the front door.
This book will probably be big, judging from her others. “Reality,” as you put, as far as the natural world goes, is a big web of interdependent and reciprocal exchanges. It’s good to be reminded this.
As well as being combative, vicious and destructive.
Oh dear. This article confirms what I suspected – the farmers are not winning hearts and minds. Yes, there are some visible rich farmers. However, there are many more poor ones. We have lost contact with any sense of where our food comes from, and the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer represent an attempt to heal that separation.
That was irony wasn’t it?
Having read Braiding Sweetgrass, my sense was that Robin Wall Kimmerer is genuine. So no, it wasn’t irony.
Like Jane, I’m not entirely in accord with the scoffing that is going on here. I was rearing babies in ‘the seventies’ that are referred to in one comment. I had a personal cookbook that contained recipes from friends. I also have a very pretty personal cookbook that belonged to my husband’s great grandmother who was a tenant farmer’s wife in the mid eighteen hundreds. It is beautifully handwritten in sepia ink and it has recipes that begin ‘take twelve larks’ (Mauviettes en croute) boil up a calf’s head (brawn) etc etc.
In addition to pretty cookbooks my ‘identity search’ also involved a deep freeze which contained quarter of a butchered bullock that I knew personally and collected in its various pieces from Aune Valley Farmers. I had a vegetable garden that you could get a John Deere in and I made bread with stoneground wholemeal flour that I bought by weight from the local mill and which developed weevils if kept for too long. You could say that I was inspired by John Seymour’s ‘The Fat of The Land’ which was the big ‘country living’ hit of the time.
Was it all a sham? Am I a sham? Well, on the days that my mother-in -law babysat, I worked as a large animal vet. I castrated calves and handed the testicles to farmers for them to cook. I delivered lambs and caesared cows. I saw how the ravens and gulls pecked the eyes from the helpless new borns and tore at any poor sheep that got stuck on its back.
So was I silly for keeping a pretty cookbook and lining stuff up in the pantry in nice glass jars? You tell me. Was it all a pretence? Or did I live something that enables me to understand what the author of ‘The Serviceberry’ feels in her heart ? Perhaps the loss of a distant something? Or the pull of something.
Scoff all you like. I might just read her book.
No, you’ve lived – are living – a very real and fulfilling life. You may learn something from her book, and probably be entertained by it, but you live in the real world. Your ‘transactions’, costs and incomes, financial and emotional, are real; hers are fanciful, and have, for her, no real world consequences. She has, I would suggest, far more to learn from you than you from her. And no, I’m not being obsequious.
In your comments you are obviously referring to my comment. I was not scoffing at you but people who were pretending to be like you. No one I knew in the city with their jars of wheat germ and beans ever got their hands dirty, much like those today who judge the people working on the land as “raping” the land. I’m pretty sure when you castrated calves you weren’t “offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind”, nor do I imagine you were constructing an identity contrary to how you were actually living.
Sorry. An accidental duplicate now deleted.
I recently enrolled as a member of the Apache tribe.
Looking forward to the initiation ceremony.
Did the environmental lobby ever have the plot?
Progressives are not allowed to say or write “toxic femininity”, but the rest of us can.
“Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse”.. Say what??? You lost me there.
Good essay, thank you. And like all good essays it engenders a response.
”Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse — and she is, I reckon, broadly right about aggressive growth agendas being responsible for the plundering of natural resources, and new approaches being needed.”
I think this framing of the debate is incorrect and harmful. We are not in a time of climate collapse. And the sooner we accept that the earth is OK—and that our role on it is relatively trivial—the sooner we can have sensible discussions about the human condition instead of getting our knickers in a knot about the “end of times.”
For what it matters, I live in a rural environment. And, I am writing this from a hotel room in Denver because rural health care sucks the big one; so going to the city for help now and then is simply part of the program. So is going to the Costco and Trader Joe’s while I am here. Love those dark chocolate peanut butter cups.
Read “The Serviceberry”, and let Wall Kimmerer mug you off too
Smugness is never purposeless.
The people, albeit well-intentioned, who exhort others to ‘be kind’, can they be kind to the people they don’t instinctively like?
Perhaps Ms Kimmerer could persuade Putin to exchange the nukes for the zukes. If no berries are to hand, pass round a bowl of borscht at the meetings with Trump.
Perhaps another criticism of books like this is that they drive more serious books on the same subjects out of the market.
As Poppy herself indicates, the world we live in is not that great, and there is too much greed and selfishness. But the answer isn’t a retreat into silliness and sentimentality and pretending people are better than they are.
Syracuse, NY, makes my native Buffalo, NY, look like Paris, France, by comparison. I do know of many wonderful people who live there, however, as it contains a sizable university, many credentialed nitwits live there as well.
There are in fact botanists who come from farming families, or who work for or with farmers – Cornell is also near Syracuse, and has a large department of agricultural studies.
This “berry stained” nincompoop is neither. Farmers have enormous capital costs, and very slight profit margins, which is why America’s huge farms, even heavily subsidized, are largely owned by huge corporations.
Smaller family farms and even much larger family farms often live in financial precarity. They can’t pay bank loans and other very high expenses in songs, nor with love, nor with the gustatory delight of pampered academics.
Farms also depend entirely on fossil fuels, from fertilizer and pesticides made from natural gas and petrochemicals to the diesel and gasoline that fuel tractors, irrigation pumps, delivery, and transport. There is literally no way to electrify a farm – heavy batteries sink in mud, and many days are neither sunny nor windy.
I was an environmentalist at an early age. World Wildlife Fund early contributor and Ranger Rick subscriber. I even “Gave a hoot, so don’t pollute!”. Then I went off to college, career, kids, etc. and now the environmental movement is about depopulation and decarbonization. What happened to pollution? Well apparently there’s no money in trash!
I enjoyed this on the whole. But for the avoidance of doubt: there is no climate crisis. There is ubiquitous climate catastrophising from people who have a vested interest in the gravy train of “scientific research” (i.e. feeding computer models that spew out the desired apocaplyptic scenarios in X number of years), the ESG blob and environmental activism. There is, furthermore, a looming energy crisis due to the West’s suicidal pursuit of net zero. Wind and solar cannot fuel heavy industry or transport and won’t even keep the lights on when the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing (see (if there’s enough light where you are) the recent Dunkelflaute in northern Europe).
“Kimmerer acknowledges that “cheaters who violate the trust” are a sticking point in the “gift economy” model — but insists that “collective action, trust, and cooperation” can prevent this from happening as an alternative to state intervention”
The “collective action, trust, and cooperation” in its more commonly-used form of words is called free market capitalism.
“Wall Kimmerer is writing at a time of climate collapse…” SAY WHAAAT?
In the modern internet driven and Americanised nu britn, Global warming, racism and LGBT have become quasi religion substitutes for people craving a ” higher belief” cum tribal security identity, with algorithm driven ” Moses on the mount” soshul meeja reinforcing the message.