Nicole’s Reviews > The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World > Status Update

Sense of belonging, relationship, purpose and beauty can never be commoditized. Cultivate a system in which wealth = having enough to share, meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. A society where the currency of exchange is gratitude, the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared, not depreciating with use

In Potawatomi culture there’s this concept of ‘Windigo’, a monster who takes too much and sharing too little. This mindset incentivises individual accumulation far beyond enoughness.

Up til this part of the book it compares how Serviceberry’s natural system is an analogue to human’s economic system. What if scarcity is just a cultural construct? This calls to differentiate manufactured vs real scarcity.

The author raised examples from Dish With One Spoon Treaty and the Honorable Harvest that the indigenous people were involved in. Basically it translates to sustainability, constraining rampant consumption to ensure that the Dish remains full.

I like how she names Human people, Deer people, Bear People, Fish people - to see them as someones, not somethings.

Not necessarily a gift economy since it’s supplied by our tax dollars, but it’s close

Public libraries seem to the author a powerful example of the way that gift economies can coexist with market economies.

They embodied the civic scale practice of a gift economy and a notion of common property.

Margaret Atwood writes, every time a gift is given it is enlivened and regenerated through the new spiritual life it engenders both in the giver and in the recipient’

You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences .

How to cultivate our inherent capacity for gift economics without the catalyst of catastrophe? The key is to build trust

The author introduced us to Ecological Economics, where the prof and friend of hers, Dr. Valarie Luzadis defines economics as ‘how we organise ourselves to sustain life snd enhance its quality’. A different definition when compared to traditional economics - all about scarcity.

When something moves from the status of gift to the status of commodity, we can become detached from mutual responsibility.