Gift economies arise from an understanding of earthly abundance and the gratitude it generates. A perception of abundance, based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies?

Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.

Reciprocity – not scarcity

Competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving.

An investment in community always comes back to you in some way.

“The gift builds relationship, and that’s always a good thing. That’s what we really produce here—relationship, with each other and with the farm.”

Paulie – from The Service Berry and essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer

When we center our economy on cooperation we can focus on what we really want: relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning, which can never be commoditized.

Do you 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?

Do you 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?

We no longer live in small, insular societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could.

It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy.

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 reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.

“There is symbiosis at every single level of living things, and you cannot compete in a zero-sum game with creatures upon whom your existence depends.”

Richard Powers

How can we create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy, where the good that is served is community?

What we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits, but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics. We have the power to change that, to develop the local, reciprocal economies that serve the community, rather than undermine it.

“In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow.”

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

Economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil.

Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle, genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren. Regenerative economies that cherish and reciprocate the gift are the only path forward.

Resources

Sacred Economics – Charles Eisenstein
Understand our history of money and how can we transform to a more connected, ecological way of living and transition to an abundance and gift economy.

The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Reciprocity and gratitude, the gift economy and abundance economy

The Solidarity Economy – A global movement to build a just and sustainable economy prioritizing people and the planet.