Gift Thinking
November 20, 2024 at 03:55AMIn this thoughtful and inspiring conversation, Jenny Odell speaks with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass, about her new book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. How can we be better stewards of the environment? They discuss embracing responsibility and participation; the power of love and relationships in a gift economy; and looking at healthy, diverse ecosystems as models for human economies.
JO: There’s a part in The Serviceberry that really hit me, where you’re talking about an icy cold spring whose water is a gift that you feel responsible for keeping clean. I remember maybe ten years ago, in Shasta, California, visiting a spring that a local told me you could drink from. There were all these people there, some filling up plastic jugs, some just lounging–but for some reason I found myself hanging back. I realized I was not used to the idea of that kind of direct relationship with water, which for most of my life has been an anonymous substance that I pay for. It makes me wonder: Are there ways we might begin to rehabilitate our ability to see things as the gifts they are?
RK: Jenny, I love this question, thank you. My perception of the world as a gift is so natural to me, so unquestioned that I sometimes wrestle with articulating how we might reawaken it. Our economic system has tried to convince us that the earth is a big warehouse filled with as you say “anonymous substance” rather than gifts. I wonder if “gift thinking” might be like a hidden potential, a muscle that atrophies without exercise. And the needed exercise for that muscle is paying attention.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/19/gift-thinking/
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