The Serviceberry
An Economy of Gifts and Abundance
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Narrated by:
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John Burgoyne
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Robin Wall Kimmerer
About this listen
Brought to you by Penguin.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, an inspiring vision of how to reorient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity and community
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.
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.”
Critic Reviews
The time you’ll spend reading this book will, like the time spent picking wild berries, nourish your soul, heart, and mind. I hope to give this book to everybody (Anthony Doerr)
The Serviceberry is a gem of a book. It invites us to think again about economics, and imagine another way of relating to one another based on generosity, kindness, interconnectedness, and restraint. The book reminds us that how we think, and the stories we tell, shape how we live – and it’s high time we thought and lived differently, with new stories, about our place in nature. (James Rebanks)
An uplifting, open-hearted little book that asks us to reframe our relationships in the world as ones of easy generosity. To be wealthy, explains Robin Wall Kimmerer, is to have enough to share: give all that you have, and take only what you need (Cal Flyn)
This wise little book asks us to escape our doomed extractive economy, learning from the cooperative circularity of living systems and the sustainable stewardship of indigenous cultures (Gaia Vince)
Robin Wall Kimmerer's call to accommodate ecology and moneyless exchange into our economics is beautiful, radical and true. Her persuasive argument is a gift in itself (Philip Marsden)
A wonderful little book which imagines a kinder, sharing world where everybody has enough to eat and nature is respected and cherished (Dave Goulson)
What listeners say about The Serviceberry
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- David
- 24-12-2024
A refreshing perspective on what Economics could be
This book excels where Kimmerer covers new ground - considering the social structure of our economic value system and reconsidering it from the perspective of gift economies, non-human and otherwise. A fabulous, hopeful perspective.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Sam Skinner
- 05-12-2024
Short and sweet
Abundance over scarcity - a mindset shift with exponential benefits and a lesson that there is a different (better) way for modern societies
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- Dean
- 04-12-2024
The Serviceberry is a grift.
Story (ie: ideas present in the book)
The author demonstrates a deep ignorance of economics and perpetuates a myopic, small minded, anti-intellectual approach to the subject. The Serviceberry exploits economic dissatisfaction, misinformation, and political grievance to sell readers a naive worldview and encourages them to take action on the basis of that falsity. The work is strewn with basic mistakes that even a cursory understanding of economics would have corrected. The purpose is to exploit people who don't know better in exactly the same way a mega-preacher, or psychic, or any other charlatan would.
Performance
Robin performs this book in a sickly sweet way. I've watched videos of Robin and this isn't how she speaks all the time. It's a "sweet old grandmother" affectation to sell the hyper-fluffy, mega-cuddly, vibes-based economy that she's espousing. This is manipulative, but if you're into that kind of thing this may be less of an issue for you. For me it comes across like Dolores Umbridge and it's all part of the fiction.
Overall
The best use of this material is as a litmus test. If you can read through this work and not see the issues with it, then you need to improve your understanding of economics. It's 2hrs long and, when I bought it, it was more than $40 (the price has apparently since been reduced). It's a pamphlet preaching the giving away of your abundance from an author who has sold more than 2m copies of prior works. One wonders why it costs anything at all. The Serviceberry is a grift.
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