The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass explains how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. - (Baker & Taylor)

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass explains how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity and community, based on the lessons of the natural world. Illustrations. - (Baker & Taylor)

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”

As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.” The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer is donating her advance payments from this book as a reciprocal gift, back to the land, for land protection, restoration, and justice. - (Simon and Schuster)

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

John Burgoyne is a member of the New York Society of Illustrators and an alumni of Massachusetts College of Art. John has won over 100 awards in the United States and Europe including Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts, Hatch Awards, Graphis, Print, One Show, New York Art Directors Club and Clio. His work can be found at JohnTBurgoyneIllustration.com. - (Simon and Schuster)

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* While picking serviceberries among singing birds doing the same, Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, professor, MacArthur fellow, and writer renowned for Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), envisions a new take on a traditional way of living in sync with nature. Serviceberries, she explains, sustain numerous animals and insects and have long been prized by Indigenous people for being delicious, nourishing, and medicinally beneficial. When her farmer neighbors invite people to pick their serviceberry harvest for free, Kimmerer found herself musing over how the Anishinaabe people are guided by gratitude and respect for nature's sustaining abundance and reciprocity. In a "gift economy" based on sharing "the sustenance that the land provides," and in which "all flourishing is mutual," there would be "no such thing as waste." Gracefully elucidating these resonant concepts, Kimmerer contrasts the imperative to share and an abiding respect for nature with our economy's harsh focus on commodification, scarcity, and competition. She writes about how using the living world" as a model for "human ways of living" could decrease economic inequity and environmental destruction. Accompanied by John Burgoyne's vibrant line drawings, Kimmerer's deeply rooted, wise, and inspiring reflections coalesce into a fresh approach to connecting ecology, economics, and ethics, beginning with achievable grassroots endeavors in the hope of gradually widening the circle. Copyright 2024 Booklist Reviews.

Library Journal Reviews

Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and author of the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass, offers lessons and inspiration from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world as she considers the serviceberry, which embodies reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. She posits that the serviceberry symbolizes a better way to live, in contrast to an economy based on scarcity, competition, and hoarding of resources. Prepub Alert. Copyright 2024 Library Journal