The Serviceberry is a short book with a heavy burden. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a distinguished environmental biology professor and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, has been out under the serviceberry trees, thinking about what is wrong with the global economic system. The mixed market economies in which most of us live, she argues, have reduced us to self-interested, greedy competitors, imprisoned in “patterns of gross overconsumption that have brought us to the brink of disaster.” In the serviceberry economy, though, Kimmerer sees only generosity and abundance: gifts of carbon dioxide and solar waves to the serviceberry, gifts of sugar to the pollinating flies and cedar waxwings, gifts of feathers to the beetles, who are themselves gifts to the voles, whose carcasses feed the microorganisms, who build the soil, which in turn nourishes the serviceberry. Out here, she writes, “all flourishing is mutual.”

It could be so with humans, says Kimmerer.