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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.
