Reciprocity: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Natural World

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, published in 2013, explored how humans intersect with and depend upon the rest of the living world. A member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer is a Western-trained botanist who teaches plant ecology and ethnobotany at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her award-winning book, which has sold more than 2 million copies, argued that environmental problem-solving must incorporate multiple streams of evidence from both Western and Indigenous science.

In November, Kimmerer published her third book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which positions the ethic of reciprocity, or gift economies, as a counterpoint to market economies, which she describes as rooted “in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources.”

In an interview with author Mary Evelyn Tucker for Yale Environment 360, Kimmerer notes that both Western and Indigenous ecological knowledge need to be braided together for imagining and implementing environmental solutions. But Indigenous environmental knowledge, Kimmerer says, “is also associated with the understanding that we are learning from nature, not that we are learning about nature. Knowledge is always coupled to responsibility and to ethics.”

Read the full interview here.