The Emergent Now

Don't know what this collection is shaping into yet—the economics of attention? practicing the future?

Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it’s also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reci

Emergence Magazine • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

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 o

Emergence Magazine • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer emergencemagazine.org

"We lost public spaces. Online public spaces. Facebook and Google are shopping malls, but we think they are parks!" — Aral Balkan

To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.

Emergence Magazine • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

"To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system."

— Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing

"Let me start by stating something obvious: in the last decade, technology has transformed from a tool that we use to a place where we live. If we’re setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we’d be wise to learn from the character of places." — Frank Chimero

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 wooly 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 diff

Robin Wall Kimmerer • The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate