Main takeaways
How can we cultivate gift economies where abundance is shared with neighbors, where the currency for exchange is a feeling of community and relationships? Where status is measured by what we give instead of what we have?
If our first response to the receipt of gifts is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? I could return the gift with a direct response, like weeding or bringing water or offering a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. I could make habitat for the solitary bees that fertilized those fruits.
When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment.” I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem. We ecologists think about the currency of ecosystems in terms of biogeochemistry-the cycling of life’s materials, between the living and the not.
To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy-and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand-knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than of the commodity hat, because the gift hat is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given.
Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We’ve surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. Our metrics of economic value like GDP count only monetary value in the marketplace, of that which can be bought and sold. There is no room in these equations for the economic value of clean air and carbon sequestration and the ineffable riches of a forest filled with birdsong.
My son-in-law Dave teaches high school economics, and the first principle his students learn is that economics is about decision making in the face of scarcity. Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.
I’m way past high school, but I’m not sure I grasp that thinking, so I fill a bowl with fresh Serviceberries for my friend and colleague Dr. Valerie Luzadis. She is an appreciator of earthly gifts and a professor and past president of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics. Ecological economics is a growing field that integrates Earth’s natural systems and human values and ethics into conventional economic theory. Valerie prefers to define economics as “how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves.” I like that better.
He observes that a hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question-store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t the hunter store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.
In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.
Good feelings are the real value added. Even when something is paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it.
I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.
References
- A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
- Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein
- Kate Raworth’s concept of “Doughnut Economics”
- Katherine Collins work on designing investment strategies that enable a circular economy