Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote an essay for us called The Service Berry, a piece which ended up being our most read ever.

The immense popularity of this essay, along with her other work like braiding sweetgrass,

seems to speak to the deep craving many of us have in this moment, to return to ways of living in

reciprocity with and care of the Earth. Robin has been a central leader in this space for a while,

offering knowledge drawn from Potawatomi Lifeways and her work as a botanist.

And this year, the Serviceberry essay she wrote has become a book,

one that offers a powerful manifesto on abundance and reciprocity as models for a new economy

that operates in right relationship with the earth.

In this conversation with Robin, we delve into her new book and speak about the potential

of a gift economy to restore what has been broken by a capitalistic and extracted economic model.

She speaks about how a sense of enoughness can radically shift our habits of consumption

and how the ethical and pragmatic guidelines of the honorable harvest

can invite us to honor a currency of relationship over a currency of money.

While this may seem huge to imagine from within a monolith of capitalism and never-ending growth,

Robin illustrates how deeply intuitive a gift economy is to humans, drawing on the idea of a

maternal gift economy, where mothers give to their babies in support of continued life.

And she asks us what this model could mean if we applied it to our relationship with our

collective mother, the earth. For Robin, the responsibility is inherent in the gift economy,

...