In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer goes berry picking in the company of birds and comes away with a question about economics. A serviceberry feeds the birds, and the birds carry its seeds. A good crop sets more life in motion. What might human communities do differently if they measured wealth by what circulates among them? It’s the sort of question Kimmerer can get an entire theater to think about, starting with a handful of fruit.
On Tuesday, November 17, at 6pm, Kimmerer will be at Hudson Hall in Hudson for the first event in the HERE Journal salon series, presented by The Understory and Hudson Hall. The in-person event sold out quickly, but Hudson Hall is offering a free livestream with advance registration. Kimmerer will open with a talk, followed by a conversation with New York Times garden writer Margaret Roach. An audience Q&A and a book signing will round out the evening at the hall.
An enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Kimmerer is a botanist whose books make room for close scientific observation and Indigenous teachings. In Gathering Moss, her first book, she directs the reader’s attention to plants many of us walk past without a glance. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she asks what obligations come with receiving the gifts of the living world. Roach, who writes and hosts A Way to Garden, brings a gardener’s habit of paying attention to what happens in the same patch of ground from one season to the next.
Kimmerer also appears in the inaugural issue of HERE Journal, in an interview titled “Resistance Is Fertile.” The print journal is part of The Understory’s Hudson Estuary Resilience Effort, which brings together local practitioners and backs community work through a $4 million grant program. The journal’s contribution is to give readers a fuller picture of the place those efforts are meant to sustain, through reporting, essays, and photography. With the salon, a conversation that began on the page moves into a room in Hudson.
There’s a productive tension between the scale of the problems The Understory is taking on and the scale at which Kimmerer likes to begin. A watershed is a big thing to ask someone to care for. A berry is small enough to hold in the palm of a hand. Follow it from the branch to the bird and into the ground somewhere else, and the larger place starts to come into focus.
The inaugural HERE Journal salon takes place Tuesday, November 17, at 6pm. Free livestream registration is available through Hudson Hall.
