Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, eloquently blends Indigenous wisdom and Western science to propose a gift economy rooted in reciprocity and regeneration. Her work challenges the dominance of scarcity-driven capitalism and envisions a future where human communities thrive in harmony with the natural world.
Robin Wall Kimmerer ’s writing has a practical eloquence perfectly suited to our times. In an America, indeed a world, so challenged by the dysfunctional relationship between capitalism and climate, she offers, as a conduit of her Potawatomi cultural principles, and as a botanist trained in the Western scientific tradition, a way towards unifying the antipathetic threads currently causing so much cultural, physical and economic pain.
Her 2013 book, published in 2013, has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. With its engaging style, it included us all in a discursive weave of anecdotes and narratives demonstrating how a complementary relationship between Indigenous wisdom and Western scientific knowledge can offer a productive approach to the abundance of the earth we rely on for our survival. Her 2020 hardback publication, further develops her abiding account of how natural biological systems can provide us with the models of cultural and economic co-operation we need to survive and, even better, to flourish well beyond what has become an era of crisis. A fundamental concept is how the ideas of reciprocity and recycling of resources that underpin botanical systems can be mirrored in human culture. In analysing Western capitalist economics, Wall Kimmerer sees the concept of scarcity at its heart, whereas in the gift economy endemic to her own people reciprocity is the chief, and chiefly practical, currency under exchange. Her account of the logic of this inversion reminded me of when, as an undergraduate in the “greed is good” 1980s, I was first exposed to the ideas around utilitarianism that form the basis of Western political philosophy. A core precept of Bentham’s foundational analysis was that individuals were basically out for themselves, an idea which struck me at the time as not only imprecise but also as an entirely reductive, dead-end view.And now, as the gap grows between what Bruno Latour describes as “the world we’re living in” (the market economy) and “the world we’re living off” (the Earth), Wall Kimmerer’s highlighting of the biomimetic alternative appears as a light-seeking harmony in a sea of negativity and disjuncture. This resonance comes in part through the fusion of its acknowledged lineages, firstly in her own Indigenous cultural inheritance, and then in the work of writers such as Lewis Hyde, whose recently updated classic, takes a deep dive into the perfectly natural yet now radical-seeming logic of the gift economy in the realm of the arts. Wall Kimmerer’s traction as a communicator also comes from the cultural torque created by her fusion of Potawatomi values with the complementary application of her expertise as a botanist. Two types of science overlap in her writing: Indigenous science, in which the natural motion of a literacy of living things dissolves the stagnancy of individual ownership and hoarding, and Western Enlightenment-style science, with its highly useful inventions, classification systems, research technologies, and its precise articulations of our natural inquisitiveness as a storytelling species. Wall Kimmerer’s own storytelling gift focuses on the way communities can seed a slow recovery from cultural and economic atomisation via the circularity of a different approach to the food, air and water that sustains us. In this system, the economics mirror the model of our bodies, receiving energy from the Earth – water, air, vegetables, fruit, meat – which is then passed on to recirculate in a regenerative process of gratitude from exchange. She outlines the “goods and services” involved in the life cycle of the berry from soil, sun and rain, to flower to fruit, to dispersion via the other species who consume it – herself included. The central emblem, the serviceberry of her heartland, becomes, in her purposeful hands, as nourishing culturally and philosophically as it is as a medicine and foodstuff. Importantly, this account of the seasonal processing of the plant serves also as a political metaphor. Wall Kimmerer does not mince her words about the impacts of extractive capitalism, and she shows how if scarcity is our starting point then it’s more than likely to be our end point too. She prefers the pre-emptive concept of knowing when we have enough; she employs the simple fact that a mother does not sell her milk to her baby as a guiding motif for a maternal gift economy that works within the perpetual logic of mother earth. Wall Kimmerer is clear that the kind of fluent connections this kind of economics relies upon cannot be scaled up. Nor does she think the serviceberry model will entirely replace current systems, but she does believe it can work within and alongside them. Indeed, that it must. Anyone who lives in any kind of community knows that if sharing and gratitude become the rule of thumb then the circularity of plant and animal systems, including our own, is soon joined by hope for the future
Robin Wall Kimmerer Gift Economy Biomimicry Sustainability Indigenous Knowledge Capitalism Environmentalism Reciprocity Regeneration
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Robin Wall Kimmerer: The Gift Economy and a Bio-mimetic FutureRobin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, offers a compelling vision of a future rooted in reciprocity, sustainability, and the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge. Her writing explores the connection between natural biological systems and human culture, advocating for a shift away from the scarcity-driven logic of capitalism towards a more regenerative and equitable gift economy.
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