The Serviceberry cover art

The Serviceberry

An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Try for £0.00
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

The Serviceberry

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrated by: John Burgoyne, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £8.99

Buy Now for £8.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

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.”

©2024 Robin Wall Kimmerer (P)2024 Penguin Audio
Editors Select Environment Nature & Ecology
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Braiding Sweetgrass cover art
The Sacred Balance (25th Anniversary Edition) cover art
Any Human Power cover art
If Women Rose Rooted cover art
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language cover art

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 ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.