Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Manifesto for a Gift Economy

My guest today, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is a botanist who combines scientific methodologies with indigenous practices to study the natural world in a more holistic way. She sees the world a bit differently than the typical guest I have on this show.

KIMMERER: What I marvel at is the economy of nature, where the wealth is diversity, clean water, and bird song. And it’s this disconnect between the biophysical laws of how ecosystems work and how market economics work.

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

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  Robin’s book Braiding Sweetgrass is one of the best-selling and most influential nonfiction books of the last decade. But my favorite of her books, the one that totally enthralled me, is called Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. I’m not sure I could even have told you that moss was a plant until I read her book. And that’s where we started our conversation. With my admission of just how ignorant I was when it comes to moss.

KIMMERER: I love that notion that you couldn’t even necessarily say what they were. People think about them as maybe like green film on a rock or something, but yeah, they are the most remarkable and the most ancient of plants on the planet. They were the first plants to come out on land.

LEVITT: They don’t have roots, right? Nor do they have the kind of structures that allow plants to grow tall. Their niche is to be hearty survivors, right?

KIMMERER: They don’t have roots, they don’t have interior plumbing of xylem and phloem. They don’t have flowers. And therefore, they don’t have stature. Mosses are generally under an inch or two tall. But that smallness is actually where their power lies and why they have persisted for millions and millions of years.

LEVITT: So mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Does that mean that traditional plants evolved from mosses or was it a parallel evolutionary channel that brought other kinds of plant structures on the land?

KIMMERER: What we know from evolutionary biology is that mosses gave rise to more mosses, and where, therefore, did higher plants evolve from? They evolved from the same common ancestor that gave rise to this multitude of mosses. So they share ancestry, but the higher plants are not lineal descendants of the mosses.

LEVITT: Let me dive into one of your research studies that I found really interesting and it focused on reproduction in a type of moss known as tetraphis — maybe I’m not saying it right.

KIMMERER: You’re right on.

LEVITT: Could you talk about what you were trying to learn in those studies and how you went about your research methodology?

KIMMERER: The reason that I chose to study this moss well, one, it’s beautiful and it lives in places I like to hang out, but it’s also a model system of how plants make choices of when to do sexual reproduction, or should they clone themselves. Mosses have eggs and sperm and those sperm have to swim in a little pool of water, which goes leaf to leaf to make a watery bridge, almost like a little river between the egg and the sperm in order for spores to be made that can start new mosses over again. And you can imagine perhaps that’s a risky business. It fails more often than not. So mosses are also masters of cloning themselves, and they have really specialized ways of breaking off parts of their bodies that can then regenerate a whole new plant from a leaf fragment or from a little bead-like structure at the end of a stem. And it turns out that this little moss, which grows on decaying logs in conifer forests, can do both. And so really my research was an inquiry into, well, when does it pay to do sexual reproduction and when does it pay to do asexual or clonal reproduction?

LEVITT: So with all we know about the world, when you undertook these studies, this is something that humankind did not understand?

KIMMERER: Well, I think it’s fair to say that biologists for a long time have asked generally these questions of why clone yourself versus reproduce sexually because those options are available to many different kinds of organisms. But in this particular case, because this moss can do both, what was unknown is what are the factors that turn on either one of those ways to make more mosses.

LEVITT: How do you go about trying to answer that question?

KIMMERER: When I do research, in the field, I think of it as an interview. I’d like to be able to ask that moss, “Why did you make this choice?” So what I do is create various conditions and see how the moss responds, and to look at the whole range of behaviors out in the woods and say, Under what circumstances are they making sexual spores or under what circumstances are they cloning themselves? Then testing those hypotheses. So it’s deeply observational, but also experimental.

LEVITT: So if I understand correctly, you’re tromping around in the woods and you’re finding various colonies, and you record them over the course of years. You watch evolve naturally, and then you also intervene to try to change their circumstances to see how they respond?

KIMMERER: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s the beauty of this one little moss that you can wander through the woods and say, “Oh, here’s a whole colony where they’re only doing sexual reproduction. Here’s a colony where they’re cloning themselves. How are those environments different?” And then I can map them out and come back the next year and see whether they’ve changed and if so, has the environment changed too? But of course that can take a really long time, and that’s where the experimental protocols come in to say, If I think that it might be that they’re more crowded in this circumstance, well, I’m going to go in with my little moss forceps and thin out this tiny little stand to reduce its density. When the moss gets really crowded and therefore running out of resources, including the resource of space, they tend to turn on sexual reproduction so then they make airborne spores and go find someplace else to live because their current place is no longer suitable. If there’s low density, if there’s been a disturbance there, if there’s a lot of territory to be colonized by mosses, they do asexual reproduction. They clone themselves to fill up that space.

LEVITT: But then I have to ask myself, how does a moss know whether it’s living in a high or low density patch? We don’t usually think of plants as knowing.

KIMMERER: What we’re talking about here, Steve, is plant behavior, right? These mosses, these little tetraphis guys are sensing the environment, knowing whether they’re crowded or not, and responding accordingly. How they do it, I don’t know. There’s some hypotheses that it may be hormonally mediated, but we are not yet to the point in understanding the physiological mechanism by which that might happen.

LEVITT: You broaden my view of the world because you know, I’ve interviewed Jane Goodall and she observes the chimpanzees. But it’s so interesting to hear you talk about observing plants you use words that are really telling about how you think about the world and I think most of us don’t spend our time observing plants because we have the impression that they are static.

KIMMERER: Conservation biologists actually have a term for this lack of knowledge about plants. They call it plant blindness. Our perception of the world in general is animal-centric. We really don’t know anything about plants.

LEVITT: A few years back I had Suzanne Simard on the show, and like you and her description of the amazing ways in which trees communicated, it really changed the way I think about plants. It’s incredible how trees within a forest are able to send messages back and forth. Very surprising, I think.

KIMMERER: If you can’t move that means you have to be an expert at managing relationships in your neighborhood, right? And so all these different kinds of abilities to sense the environment in the neighborhood, and then to respond in a flexible way. It comes with the territory of being static, of staying in one place. And we, human beings, we just can hardly even imagine what it is to live life as a sessile being. And it demands of us as humans patience and the humility not to dismiss them as nothing going on there because they don’t move to, Oh, I wonder what genius is at work here?

LEVITT: Now you grew up loving plants and appreciating and experiencing them in a way that was informed by indigenous knowledge and values. And in your book, Braiding Sweetgrass, you mentioned how over the course of your formal training as you pursued a Ph.D., you felt this pressure to alter your relationship to plants to become scientific. Could you talk about the process of what I might call scientific brainwashing? I don’t think people who haven’t been through a Ph.D. really understand the extent to which there is this single accepted view of the world and one is expected to submit to it. Could you talk about that?

KIMMERER: From an indigenous perspective and from the perspective of a kid wandering around the woods madly in love with everything that I saw, like, Wow. These beings, what are they doing? There is a perspective of other species as persons of a sort, not human persons, moss persons or aspen people. I viewed plants as teachers, as relatives, as subjects. And in coming into higher education in western science, I was corrected of those notions that they are indeed objects that we will learn about as opposed to teachers that we will learn from. The dogma is the notion that we must leave subjectivity behind in order that we can come closer to understanding the physical reality, the biophysical reality, without coloring it with emotion. That’s why we use the scientific method. That’s why we have controlled experiments. It’s why we statistically analyze the data because we’re testing a true-false question, a hypothesis, about the reality of the world as close as we can come. That also demands an amputation in a way of our very human subjective response to the living world. You and I have been talking about how the moss world or the plant world in general is so complicated, is such an instructor for us about how we might live. All of that way of thinking is not welcome in the hyper-objective scientific method. There’s power in that. There’s a kind of poetry in that too, of a minimalist paring down of your view of the world. But to me it’s very, very limiting. So that was what really propelled me to reclaim this more holistic way of knowing, and talk about the science, and talk about what it means. That’s the journey.

LEVITT: So obviously I’m a big believer in the scientific method, but if you live in a world in which you cherish objectivity, you don’t ask the same questions that you would ask if you recognized subjectivity as well. And it seems to me that there should be a way in which one can use the scientific method to tease out causality, but without abandoning common sense and experience along the way. Do you know what I’m talking about? 

KIMMERER: I sure do. And that was very much the motivation behind writing Braiding Sweetgrass, whose subtitle is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. It was an opportunity to say, What questions do we ask and what can we learn through those different lenses? Western science is an incredibly powerful tool for certain kinds of questions, but not necessarily the most important questions. In indigenous knowledge, in Potawatomi ways anyway, when we think about our knowledge systems, we absolutely honor the intellect, those things that we can learn and engage with through our brains. But we also recognize empirical embodied knowledge, things we can observe and measure. But in indigenous ways of knowing, we also say, “Oh, and we have this incredible ability for emotional intelligence. And we have this embrace of the mystery of spiritual ways of knowing. And to really understand a complicated problem, we need to use all of those.” As an Indigenous scientist, what I see is that western science with its restrictions on what kind of knowledge counts as valid, is missing half of our capacity to understand the world. That true-false hypothesis testing of the scientific method answers true-false questions, but it can never answer the question of, What should we do? What is the right thing to do? For that we need other ways of knowing. And so to me, that’s this difference between knowledge and wisdom.

LEVITT: This is going to sound off point, but I think it’s actually really hitting to the same place. Right after the financial crisis occurred, in 2008. I was chatting over lunch with a leading macro economist at the University of Chicago, and the details aren’t important, but the explanations he was giving for why the financial crisis had occurred and what the impacts were, are what an economist would call Keynesian explanations. And the irony is that we hadn’t taught Keynesian models to our graduate students for at least 20 years, and this gentleman I was talking to was one of the key reasons why we didn’t teach Keynesian approaches. And I asked him whether he thought maybe we should be teaching those models, if they were the models he actually used to make sense of the world. And with a totally straight face, he responded by saying something like, “Well, those models might describe what we see in the economy, but they don’t make any sense theoretically. So why would we teach them?” It’s a kind of blindness to common sense. It’s a kind of indoctrination into an academic discipline that rules some things in and some things out. As you try to bring insights, indigenous views into botany, I’m sure people don’t just ignore it, it’s real hostility. There’s a sense of, That is not allowed, you shouldn’t be doing that.

KIMMERER: That’s absolutely true. The very earliest question when I began my journey, as a scientist, I wanted to know why the world was so beautiful. And in particular, I wondered why two different plants, this goldenrod and asters that are purple and gold, Why do they grow together? They’re so beautiful when they do, are they serving beauty? And I was told on day one of my higher education journey, like, “Scientists do not concern themselves with beauty.” And I was told, “If you are interested in beauty, you should go to art school, not be a scientist.” Many decades later, I think why the world is so beautiful and how we keep it that way is of paramount importance. It includes human values, not excluding human values. It includes respect for more than human beings as opposed to reducing them to objects and specimens. There is a way in which that very reductionist, purely materialist thinking, which is the hallmark of much scientific inquiry actually does damage.

LEVITT: So have you figured out, or has someone figured out why asters and goldenrods live together?

KIMMERER: Well actually, there is some biophysical evidence that these two species and species like them with these different color palettes can actually attract more pollinators because of the vibrant color landscape, which is created. And so when they grow together, they may get more pollinators than when they grow apart.

LEVITT: Beauty actually turned out to be the answer to the question that you weren’t allowed to ask, because it wasn’t scientific. It’s this irony around the perceived infallibility of scientific thinking. And I’m curious — I know when you teach students, one of your main goals is to try to get them to see that there’s truth and wisdom beyond the narrow views expressed in botany textbooks. You take them out in nature, right? Could you talk about what you do on these trips and anything in particular that breaks through this wall that students have?

KIMMERER: This is such an important question. I’m really grateful to you for raising it because there’s a way in which, what I’m going to call, not necessarily science, but scientism, the belief that western science is the most important and indeed exclusive way to truth about the world, is a kind of intellectual imperialism that erases other ways of knowing. So when I’m teaching in the field, and that is definitely the place where I feel like the most effective teacher is when I’m really introducing students to how to learn from the land, how to learn from other species without that filter of these doctrinaire ways of asking questions and answering them — I find my students really come alive. They’re much more imaginative in designing their ways of thinking when they’re engaged with the freedom, I guess it’s a kind of intellectual freedom, to just really look at the world and see what’s going on there without all these filters that tell us, “You must be purely objective. You can’t have any emotions about this. You can’t use your intuition.” I think some of the really best scientific discoveries have been made on the basis of intuition and this really expansive, imaginative way of looking at the world. I don’t think they have to be mutually exclusive, but in the way that we conduct a lot of education and training of scientists, it often is.

LEVITT: I’ve never heard this term scientism, but I love it. And I’m going to start using it because I do think our textbooks often suffer from it. The best example I can think of is sexual reproduction. You could imagine if you wanted to teach science in a way that cultivates wonder and excitement, you would talk about what an absolute miracle it is — DNA is so incredibly complicated. How in the world did it come to be, and why do plants and animals spend so many resources on sexual reproduction? But, when I watched my high school-aged children do biology, that was completely missing. What they were asked to do is to remember the names of different phases of what the DNA go through. It took all of the joy and the fun and excitement out of it. And I think as educators, we owe it to the next generation to bring that wonder back into the way we teach science.

KIMMERER: Oh, I could not agree with you more. The way that science education is, too often, practice is all about, as you say, memorizing facts. As if science was about what is already known, not about what we could learn. I will say that in retrospect, knowing those mechanics, knowing how DNA works makes me, when I look at a moss or a flower or an ear of traditional corn with all of the different colors — I can look not only at that but go back to think about the genes and what’s going on in the DNA. And it just magnifies for me the wonder by knowing those things. But it wasn’t taught to me with wonder. It was taught to me as just facts that I needed to memorize for no apparent reason. 

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with author and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer after this short break.

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LEVITT: Your book Braiding Sweetgrass has had just an incredible social impact. It entered the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, right around the time Covid started. And if I’m not mistaken, it’s still on the bestseller list, which is truly amazing. But what I never realized is that book was actually first published in 2013.

KIMMERER: Yes.

LEVITT: Seven years passed between when you published it and when it made the bestseller list? That’s very unusual.

KIMMERER: It is. And Braiding Sweetgrass had a, you know, as a biologist, I think about an exponential curve. It’s a really slow slope in that curve, right? And that’s where Braiding Sweetgrass was from 2013 to 2020, slowly building, being passed. Booksellers say that people would come in and buy a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass and they would come back a couple weeks later and buy a handful of them because they wanted to give them to other people. That’s really how it grew, and then in remarkable timing and circumstances when we had a forced pause to consider what we really value in the world, Braiding Sweetgrass was there. To me it really says something about a shifting awareness in our culture about values clarification, about our relationship to nature, our relationship to knowledge. Just a few weeks ago, we celebrated five years on the bestseller list. A book about indigenous plant knowledge? I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it as well.

LEVITT: So I suspect many people who read Braiding Sweetgrass, they love it because instinctively they see the truth in what you’re saying. And it’s a truth that society has taught them to ignore. And your stories are very personal. They’re about the way you choose to live your life, and the way you live your life is very different than the way others live their life. And I wonder if you could maybe talk through some of the examples in the book. One was a 12-year project you embarked on trying to make a pond in your backyard swimmable. Could you talk about one of those quests?

KIMMERER: One of the most prevalent responses that I get from people after reading Braiding Sweetgrass is they see themselves in the book. They’re able to say, “I want to live in this state of wonder and this orientation around gratitude to the abundance of the world. I want to live that way.” And that is what has propelled the Braiding Sweetgrass trajectory. It’s like this yearning to be in right relationship with the land. And one of the examples is care for my backyard farm pond. The years that I spent trying to bring that pond back to ecological health. There were blisters and backaches and broken tools and a lot of laughter at the insanity of trying to do this. It was really hard work that many people would look at and think, wait, you’re going to wade into a mucky pond and call this fun? And, the answer is yes! This is why I became a biologist so that I could still play in the water and the mud in order to be a good relative to the land. When you’re raking algae out of a pond, you get to look at the pollywogs and you get to notice the different kinds of algae. To me it was joyful work. The cleaning of the pond; the changing of the vegetation around and in the pond, was a labor of love for me. It was a way that I could give back to the land. I was just up there this morning — there are dozens and dozens of kinds of birds and plants just exploding biodiversity and I really like to be able to say, “I helped that along.” It wasn’t all my doing, it is the inherent regenerative capacity of the land. But I had a role in that. The demonstration that human beings can be good for the land is what I think people long for. Because we are surrounded by stories of exploitation, of destruction, of this message that humans and nature — they are a bad mix. I want to say “No. Humans and nature can be medicine for each other. And here’s how I practiced it. What are you going to do?”

LEVITT: Now you sound, as we talk like a very kind and gentle person, but I’m going to say your latest book, which is entitled The Serviceberry, is really fun to read, but at the same time, I’m going to call it a manifesto for social change. Would you agree with that characterization of The Serviceberry?

KIMMERER: I think that’s fair. It’s an invitation to think differently. It’s an invitation to say that this economic structure in which we are all complicit, and which I understood very little, and I knew in fact that the people around me understood very little as well. We just accepted it as the default way that we live. Is to say, there’s another way. Let’s collectively imagine an economy, which doesn’t actively destroy what we love, but could in fact heal what we love.

LEVITT: Okay. So I don’t agree with everything in The Serviceberry, but I will say it really made me think deeply about what I do believe, and also to ponder why I believe it. But before I describe my reaction to the book, I would love to give you the chance to talk in more detail about The Serviceberry. I’m sure many listeners are wondering what a serviceberry is and how that can possibly serve as a centerpiece for what I’m calling a manifesto for social change.

KIMMERER: Serviceberry is a kind of tree. You might know it is juneberry or shadbush, but I chose to work with the name of serviceberry because of the echoing of the goods and services of economics. The whole premise of the book is, I was actually asked to write an essay about economics, and I had to say, “I can’t do that because I don’t know anything about economics.” But they said, “That’s why we asked you.” And I said, “Well, I do know a fair bit as an ecologist about the economy of nature.” I took the approach from indigenous knowledge of saying that the land is our teacher. The land gives us the models and the inspirations for how we might live in a balanced and generative way. And so I used the way that serviceberry lives and participates in the goods and services of a natural economy to ask questions of why doesn’t the human economy work in the same way? And so what we see in the example of serviceberry, is that it’s a fruit producing plant where it’s very clear that there is reciprocity involved by which I mean that the plant is like the producer of this economy, but it doesn’t hoard and accumulate all of its wealth. It gives it away to the pollinators and to the birds who then take care of the soil and the rest of the biodiversity, which enables the tree to thrive. So it’s an example of a circular economy that redistributes wealth rather than hoards it. It’s an example of how keeping the energy and the materials in motion in this circular way produces abundance rather than scarcity, which market economies can do.

LEVITT: So the idea is that the serviceberry takes the energy from the sun and the water, and it turns it into these amazing, delicious berries that the birds come and thrive on. And then it goes from there. Now the skeptic — or the economist, maybe not the skeptic — would say, “Look, the serviceberry really doesn’t want to make these amazing, tasty berries. It’s just that the birds won’t do it for free. The birds aren’t going to come to the tree unless the tree gives the birds something that they want.” The serviceberry needs something. It needs a way to distribute its seeds. It has a want, and it would’ve loved to find an inexpensive way in terms of energy to do it. But the best thing you could figure out was to co-opt the birds into the, doing the work for it. But it’s got to pay the birds in the form of berries. It’s interesting how important language is, right? ‘Cause we just described the same process and I tried to turn it into the language of a market economy, but in essence, we’re really describing very much the same thing. Would you agree?

KIMMERER: Yeah, you’re not wrong in anything that you’ve said, except I don’t know that they are paying for it. It’s like a mutual-aid society. The plant has an abundance of sunshine and carbon, so it can make an abundance of fruit. It’s not inexpensive, but it has all the raw materials that it needs to do it. This doesn’t take away from the fact that there could be bad years when those berries aren’t going to be made in abundance, but generally speaking, the plants themselves are not carbon limited. But what is scarce for that tree is mobility, right? It can’t get those berries to the place that they need to grow. So it enlists the help of those birds by essentially giving them the gift of these berries. And in return, the birds give the tree the gift of mobility. So that gift keeps moving through the ecosystem. And the reason that the system works is that the wealth of those berries is continuously redistributed within that ecosystem.

LEVITT: And you extrapolate this idea from the serviceberry to something, which I think — economists don’t really talk very much about gifts, but anthropologists do, and there’s something which is called a gift economy. Spend a minute talking about that. I think it’s a really interesting concept and something that as an economist I’ve never really thought about before I read your book.

KIMMERER: Some of my colleagues who teach economics have made the same comment, Steve, that never in their education were they ever introduced to this notion of gift economies. And you’re right, anthropologists talk about them because it’s an antecedent way of delivering goods and services. Many indigenous economies are based on a gift economy. Probably the best examples of this are — I’ll use the one that I talk about in the book of when there is abundance, that abundance is not hoarded by the individual who gathered it, hunted it, collected it, but shared with the community. That creates these bonds of reciprocity and gratitude and sharing so that when they have abundance, a full fish net or a successful hunt, they’re going to share it with you. And one of the most poignant stories around this is of an anthropologist working with a rainforest community of hunters and gatherers. The village people had a big successful hunt. And so the anthropologist asked, “What are you going to do with all of this meat? You’re going to store it, you’re going to dry it, smoke it?” And the hunter said, “What? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.” I.e. I’m not going to keep that for myself or sell it to anyone. I’m going to invite people to come to a feast. So I know that when they have excess, when they have surplus, they’ll invite me. And so it is that fostering of relationships of mutual aid, that promote food security. And that’s a really viable way to do it when you live in a small community where no one’s anonymous. Alternatively, you could create food security not by storing meat in the belly of your brother, but by keeping it for yourself, by hoarding it, by keeping it close. That creates food security too. But it creates food security just for you, not for the whole community. And that’s the real difference.

LEVITT: As you said, in economics, gifts are just not part of our formal training. The only time that I can ever remember gifts coming up in economics. It was a famous research paper written by, actually a friend of mine, a guy named Joel Waldfogel, and it was a paper called “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” So a deadweight loss is what economists call when there’s waste, when things aren’t allocated as efficiently as they could be. He surveyed his undergraduates and he asked them what Christmas gifts they had received and, if they had to go to the store, how much would they be willing to pay for those gifts that they had received for Christmas. And then he compared that to their estimates of what the gift giver actually had to spend on buying it. I went back and looked at the paper knowing I was going to talk to you because when he asked them how much they value their gifts, he explicitly says, “I want you to value the gift excluding any sentimental value associated with the gift.” To most economists, that exclusion seems sensible, but rereading the paper now with a broader vision, it seems totally bizarre that he wouldn’t include the sentimental value because that is actually part of what makes gifts powerful is the idea that someone giving it to me actually makes me feel differently about the commodity I receive than if I bought it.

KIMMERER: Well, you’re never going to see the value of a gift economy then, because that’s the currency. The currency is gratitude. The currency is respect and relationship. 

LEVITT: We’ve talked about scientism and as an economist, I know that I have these blinders that it’s hard for me to see past. And when I moved a few years back to a house in St. Paul, Minnesota, and — I’m an extremely antisocial person, and I will never talk to anyone willingly. I would always prefer to be alone than to be with other people. And that very first day, a new neighbor named Becky knocked on our door and handed us a loaf of bread that she had baked with her own hands. That very simple gift transformed my family’s view of this neighborhood and what our role was in the neighborhood in a way that completely and totally transcended the value of that loaf of bread. And I think that’s in some sense what you’re talking about. It’s the power of relationships which have really been destroyed by the modern organization of society around efficiency and production.

KIMMERER: Precisely. That is exactly it. The example that I like to give when we think about the world as gift is if you went to your local store and bought a pair of socks, they’re going to keep your feet warm and they’re pretty great, but do you have any responsibility to those socks? You don’t because they’re just a commodity. What if those socks were knit for you by your grandma? Whoa, wait a minute, those socks, by virtue of the gift relationship, oh, you’re going to take really good care of them, right? You have a relationship to them of tender care. To me, that is at the root of why we are suffering the consequences of an extractive economy that commoditizes the gift of nature. Because we’ve separated, we’ve amputated ourselves from that loving, respectful, mutual relationship with the living world. We just think it’s stuff. And we have no moral obligation to stuff. 

LEVITT: One of the things you talk about is property rights and there’s probably nothing more fundamental to economics than the idea of property rights. When you give someone ownership over something, then that gives them incentives to make investments and improvements and to take responsibility for something. And as an economist, I deeply believe in the importance of rule of law and the importance of people investing and improving in what they have. But you make an interesting point that there are ways in which, at least in small, close-knit communities, you can use social pressure to achieve all of the same good outcomes that economists have relied on property rights to generate.

KIMMERER: Well said. And I think the difference in the framing there is that in a western context, which deems these natural resources to be property, what if things that you can own that you have rights to — those same entities: water, trees, fertile soil. If you think about them not as natural resources, but as gifts from Mother Earth, you then have not a rights-based orientation to the natural world, but a responsibility-based orientation that these were gifts to me, just like those socks we were talking about. 

LEVITT: Yeah. So many people express interest in preserving the planet, of fighting against climate change. And most Democrats, I would say, hold that to be a very important outcome. And yet, during the Biden administration when gas prices went up, rather than to say, “Wow, this is actually a wonderful thing because higher gas prices will internalize the costs that burning of fossil fuels have and will get us closer to the right equilibrium.” Instead, his immediate reaction politically driven was to open up the reserves of petroleum in the U.S. to make sure that we offset the shortage of gasoline so that the price would actually fall. And nobody really seemed bothered by it. Everybody thought, ‘Oh, that makes a lot of sense.’ But it points to what I think is a really disjointed view we have where we are so incredibly dependent on an economy that is amazing and is efficient in ways that one can hardly believe. The fact that I can walk into a grocery store and buy something ridiculous like Lucky Charms. Imagine all of the people around the world that have had to come together to produce the oats that go into the Lucky Charms and the chemicals that go into the marshmallowy things and the cardboard. It’s incredible what a market economy can do in terms of efficiency. And you’re reacting, I think, rightfully, negatively to the fact that we live in a world in which things are so packaged and so perfect and just arrive via Amazon at our door that we’ve lost any touch with what actually goes into the production of these goods. 

KIMMERER: It does boggle the mind that all of this can unfold. I agree. But then I want to say at what cost? Because of the way we value things as commodities, it’s not fully understood what the real cost of those little pink marshmallows are. Or to your earlier example, the real cost of cheap gas. I think it makes me pretty unpopular when I hear, “Oh, the economy isn’t growing.” I’m going like, “Yes!” Because I’m an ecologist, I understand how ecological systems work where constant growth, unending exponential growth is a formula for ecological disaster. And yet we have created an economy which can deliver all of these goods and services to us without counting the cost that we are beginning to pay now in climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss. What I marvel at is the economy of nature, where the wealth is diversity, where the wealth is life and the wealth is clean water and bird song. It’s this disconnect between the biophysical laws of how ecosystems work and how market economics work. We seem to have forgotten that that same root word of economics and ecology — same root word. It’s either the study — ecology — of the household or the management of the household — economy — right? But it’s still our home and we have to take care of that home. And to me, a market economy with rapacious capitalism is destroying our home. We know that it is, and we need to think differently. 

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire. I’m Steve Levitt. After this short break, Robin Wall Kimmerer and I will return to talk about our differing world views.

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 My guest Robin Wall Kimmerer and I have radically different backgrounds and worldviews. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, but when two people are so different, there’s always the chance that things can go badly awry. I was curious whether she felt any trepidation coming on this show to talk to an economist.

KIMMERER: Of course. You’ve been very kind, Steve.

LEVITT: I think that 25 years ago, 30 years ago, I just had a deep belief in the indoctrination into economics. And I’ve had the good sense as I’ve aged to recognize that there are many ways of seeing and that I know very little and others can teach me. And when I see people respond to you and your writing the way they do, I know that I have to listen.

KIMMERER: I so value that perspective and we share that. To me it’s, I think you said indoctrination, right? It’s so important, and as we get older, as we have more life experience, we can really try to separate, what are the stories that we have been told as if they were the only stories? And just to recognize that there are other ways to conceptualize the world. And I love that. I love those conversations where I’m able to say, “Oh, I see how you think about this. I might not agree, but I see how this is internally consistent as a way of knowing.” And listening to each other, just for expanding our imaginations of what’s possible is — that’s a good thing.

LEVITT: I love the ideas in The Serviceberry. As an aspirational goal, I’m a hundred percent behind it. I don’t really see a path within the economy, the modern economy of creating the society that you like through the mechanism of the economy. But I can see that this very laser focus on efficiency takes away much of what feels good in life. So we might not agree on whether or not it’s feasible to build an economy around these ideas, but I think we can certainly both agree that it’s worth people in their daily life investing in the communities and relationships around them to create something that feels much more like this gift economy than whatever modern urban environments look like.

KIMMERER: Oh, beautifully said. And to me it echoes your wonderful story about your neighbors showing up on your door with a loaf of freshly baked bread. That wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t convenient. 

LEVITT: So inefficient!

KIMMERER: Exactly. And yet it meant everything and changed your relationship to place in a profound way. So there has to be room for both of those. That micro gift economy — how do we nurture that within the structures that we also are bound to in this current configuration anyway?

As I reflect on this conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer, my mind keeps on coming back to the recent episode we did with John Green on tuberculosis. Robin and John are both hugely successful authors who are trying to leverage their enormous platforms to make the world a better place, but they’re taking radically different approaches. John Green is working very much within the system, trying to find ways to pressure drug companies and governments to do the right thing. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in contrast, wants to trash the system and replace it with something different and better. I have absolutely no idea which approach is likely to be more fruitful. I’m usually willing to offer an opinion on just about anything, but in this case, I haven’t got a clue. All I know is that change is always hard and I greatly admire them for trying to make the world a better place, and I’m hoping both of them will succeed. Robin’s newest book is called The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.

LEVITT: Now is the point in our show where I welcome on my producer Morgan, and we tackle a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. So a listener named Sanjay sent us an email about our recent episode with author John Green. In the episode, John talked about the challenges of providing treatments for tuberculosis to people in poorer countries. You had a suggestion: Governments should essentially buy out promising treatments from pharma companies. That way pharma companies like Johnson & Johnson or Danaher would get paid for their R&D efforts and innovative drugs. But then the drugs would enter the public domain and would not be guarded by patents. They would be much cheaper, essentially. Sanjay thinks that your idea won’t work unless someone works to build up political support. He says that in general, economists often have great policy ideas, but never seem to worry about currying political favor to get those policies enacted. Why not?

LEVITT: Yeah, so essentially what Sanjay is saying is completely true, right? So Sanjay’s saying, “It’s not enough for economists to work out the economics of something, because in reality, politics matters as much as economics for getting things done. And so, why don’t economists work on the political economy of a problem? So both the politics and economics.” Look, of course we should work on both, but the thing is, economics is hard and politics is hard. I’m lucky if I have the good fortune or the insight to be able to say something that makes sense economically, an idea that could actually economically fix the problem. So the idea that I could be, or any economist would both be an expert at the economics, and also be a super sophisticated manipulator of public opinion or able to judge what Congress might or might not be willing to pass. I think that’s just a big ask. And so I’ve taken the view, perhaps wrongly, that Look, I should stick to what I’m good at and let others, if they are so inclined, to try to figure out how to sell any policy ideas that I have.

LEVEY: So this to me seems like an issue that a lot of physical scientists are dealing with these days. In the past decades ago, scientists, let’s take biologists for an example, would’ve just worked on biology. But these days, because so much of science is politicized, they have to be communicating with the public. If they want to talk about mass extinction of species, they need to make their case to the public in a sense. But I guess this hasn’t necessarily happened with economists. What do you think about that?

LEVITT: I honestly think it goes deeper. I think to economists, the policies that we propose are so sensible and so obvious that we can’t imagine why other people look at them and say, “Wait, that makes no sense at all.” So I think economists are particularly tone deaf and blind to how others perceive us. Many economists, many of my friends, they go to Washington, they work in administrations. And when I talk to these economists, what they learn is that within the political domain, really nobody cares very much about actually getting the economics right. The ideas that win are not ideas that are more efficient or they’re Pareto-optimal. The ideas that win are the ones that people think sound good. And so it actually puts economists in public policy in a tremendously difficult situation, because reputation wise, if I’m an academic economist and I know what the truth is, what economics tells us, but then for political reasons, I’m forced to back, say, a very different kind of policy, it becomes very, very awkward. Historically, our ideas almost always lose when it comes down to the actual policy that gets made. You can have two responses to that: One is, Well then I’m just going to stay out of public policy, or the other, like you propose Morgan, Well, we just got to get a lot better at it. At least for me, I have to say, I’m not very interested in getting better at it because I hate persuasion. I love ideas. I love data, but I hate the idea of going and trying to convince people that I’m right.

LEVEY: Sanjay, thank you so much for your thoughtful question. If you have a question for Steve Levitt, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

In two weeks, we are back with the brand new episode featuring David Yeager. He’s a psychologist who specializes in motivating young people. And I think what he has to say is going to surprise you.

YEAGER: Teenagers are great at goal-directed behavior when it’s a goal that they care about.

As always, thanks for listening and see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey, and mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima@freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

LEVITT:  Potawatomi. Potawatomi.

KIMMERER: Potawatomi.

LEVITT: Potawatomi. Potawatomi.