What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life?
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry
Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer critiques our obsession with economic growth:
The threat of real scarcity on the horizon is brought to us by unbridled capitalism. Extraction and consumption outstrip the capacity of the Earth to replenish what we have taken. An economy based on the impossibility of ever expanding growth leads us into nightmare scenarios. I cringe when I hear economic reports celebrating the accelerating pace of economic growth, as if that were a good thing. It might be good for [some in power], for the short term, but it is a dead end for others—it is an engine of extinction.
Kimmerer learns about the benefits of a “gift economy” from a local farmer and businesswoman who occasionally offers surplus Serviceberries to her neighbors for free.
Paulie has a reputation to uphold for being no-nonsense in her approach to life …: “It’s not really altruism,” she insists. “An investment in community always comes back to you in some way. Maybe people who come for Serviceberries will come back for Sunflowers and then for the Blueberries. Sure, it’s a gift, but it’s also good marketing. The gift builds relationships, and that’s always a good thing….” The currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road, because Paulie and Ed do have to pay the bills….
Even when something is paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it. The ongoing reciprocity in gifting stretches beyond the next customer, though, into a whole web of relations that are not transactional. Paulie and Ed are banking goodwill, so-called social capital….
I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use….
I don’t think market capitalism is going to vanish; the faceless institutions that benefit from it are too entrenched. The thieves are very powerful. But I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy. After all, what we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits, but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics. We have the power to change that, to develop the local, reciprocal economies that serve community rather than undermine it.
Reference:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024), 85, 88–93.
Image credit and inspiration: Aarón Blanco Tejedor, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Finland, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An open hand offering apples becomes a quiet critique of greed, embodying the wisdom and spirituality of enoughness where abundance is shared, not hoarded.
Story from Our Community:
One morning as I was running in my local woods, the sun rose a fiery red, setting the trees aflame. A silent deer trotted in front of me and few minutes later, a feathery snow started silently falling, making it look like someone had shaken a snow globe over everything. All I could think was, “This is too much. I know you are gorgeous, but do you have to show off like this?” I get the sense that Creation is fundamentally generous and creative to the extent that it can be overwhelming. The world we think we live in feels like one of scarcity, but could it be that we actually live in a universe of abundance, generosity, and unrestrained creativity? What would it mean to really know this to be true?
—Dominic V.
