Scarcity vs. Abundance at the Library

by Bill Peak

When I set out to write about a little boy growing up in a monastery in the seventh century and the friendship he forms with a hermit who lives on a nearby mountain, I read all the books I could find on monastic life and the so-called “Dark Ages,” and I went on retreat as often as possible at a Cistercian abbey in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. But I still wanted to know more.

So, telling myself it would give me a better feel for what it would be like to live in a monastery that kept the silence (and that it would also be a lot of fun), I decided to hike up into the Blue Ridge Mountains and spend a three-day weekend camping alone on the slopes overlooking the Shenandoah River.

Climbing into the Blue Ridge that day, so many years ago now, I began to hear a strange popping noise in the trees around me, as if a gentle rain were falling down through the woods. But there was no rain, the sky overhead was clear and blue.

It took me awhile to work out what the sound was, but eventually I realized it was frass, the excreta of caterpillars. The entire mountainside had been invaded by Gypsy moths, millions upon millions of them.

Frass consists of dry, harmless pellets, no real bother to me, and all the caterpillars meant the trees were full of birds. So I hiked on, enjoying the birdsong.

That was probably the only time in my adult life that I have gone three whole days without speaking aloud once. I remember I even tried to silence my mind, put a stop to the ceaseless interior blather that we tell ourselves is thinking but in my case often seems to be little more than passing, inconsequential billboards. It was an interesting experience, and I think it helped me write the book.

When, some ten years later, I finally placed the last period at the end of the last sentence in The Oblate’s Confession, I found myself thinking there ought to be a way to mark such a milestone. So I decided to hike back up into the Blue Ridge, see if I could find my old campsite.

And I did, but the place had undergone a complete change. The Gypsy moths were gone, but the damage they had done was clear. As far as the eye could see not a single oak or walnut remained alive, and most were no longer standing. Light now flooded the mountainside, and the dense forest I had known had been replaced by an airy wood of serviceberry, not a single tree more than twenty feet tall.

But that’s tall for serviceberries, which out here on the Eastern Shore are usually called shadbush, with the emphasis on the second syllable. I knew about serviceberry, had planted a couple in my backyard to attract birds, but I had never seen any like these before. Each was as tall and healthy-looking as a mature dogwood, and they were all loaded with ripe, delicious fruit. It seemed a second Eden.

Which, interestingly, is sort of the point of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new book, The Serviceberry. Of course I checked the thing out thinking it would be a natural history of the tree, and there is some natural history in the book, but it mostly ends up being about, of all things, economics.

Before you turn to the opposite page hoping to find an article about something more appealing, let me add that Kimmerer is interested in the contrast between the economics we were taught in school and the economics of nature. School taught us that competition is the driver of a healthy economy. Similarly (and not surprisingly considering the way one school of thought tends to influence another), the traditional view of nature has been that competition drives evolution. By this way of thinking, survival of the fittest explains both humanity’s rise to global dominance and Elon Musk’s.

But Kimmerer points out that new research in both biology and economics is finding that competition drives success only when the unit being measured is the individual. She writes, “When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving.”

A Distinguished Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY and an enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe, Kimmerer sees in my experience with the serviceberries on that mountainside all those years ago an example of what she calls a “gift economy.” Instead of looking upon resources like water, land, and minerals as commodities, her people survived for millennia by seeing them as gifts, gifts to be shared. She quotes a South American hunter-gatherer who, when asked why he didn’t store the surplus from his hunt instead of giving it away at a village feast, replied, “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

Kimmerer believes that the difference between a gift economy and our market economy is that the latter “incentivizes scarcity.” In a market economy, she says, when a resource becomes scarce, the wise investor buys up access to that resource and then doles it out to the public at a profit. What had been a shared resource—say open range or timber—becomes a commodity. The individual benefits at the community’s expense.

At a time when humanity’s acquisitive, extractive nature seems to be in danger of chewing up every last morsel of food, fuel, and land left on the planet, I found Kimmerer’s notion of a gift economy appealing. But is it also achievable? In a country that was founded on private property rights, is it possible to reset the template, to change from a land of individuals to one of community?

Of course in some areas of modern life such a shift wouldn’t be necessary. The perfectly human instinct to share remains alive and well in modern institutions like food banks, Toys for Tots, and Habitat for Humanity. Indeed, I was able to read Kimmerer’s book and consider its thesis thanks to one of the greatest proofs of our culture’s surviving desire to share: our local public library.