A short book — essay length, illustrated — built on one plant. The serviceberry ripens in June and everything eats it: Birds, bears, people. Kimmerer uses it to lay out what she calls a gift economy, the way it works in the woods and the way it used to work among people, where abundance gets circulated rather than stockpiled and status comes from what you give away. She sets that against an economy built on manufactured scarcity, and points at the places gift logic still runs — seed libraries, tool shares, food banks, neighbors. It takes an hour and it’s the distilled version of her whole argument.
The Serviceberry