Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, an enrolled member of the citizen Potawatomi Nation.

She is the best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

In this essay, Robin Harvest Service Berries alongside the burns and considers the ethic of reciprocity

that lies at the heart of the gift economy.

How, she asks, could we learn from indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies

of exchange?

The cool breath of evening slips off the wooded hills,

displacing the heat of the day,

and with it come the birds, as eager for the cool as I am.

They arrive in a flock of calls that sound like laughter, and I have to laugh back

with a seem delight. They're all around me, cedar waxwing and catbirds and a flash of bluebird

iridescence. I've never felt such a kinship to my namesake, Robin, as in this moment when we are both stuffing our mouths

with berries and chortling with happiness. The bushes are laden with fat clusters of red, blue,

and wine purple, and every stage of ripeness. So many, you can pick them by the handful. I'm glad I have a pail and wonder if

the birds will be able to fly with their bellies as full as mine. This abundance of berries

feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way.

And yet here they are, along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain,

gathering in towers of cumulonimbai.

You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services,

...