This essay is inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, and gathers ideas that resonate with my own experience.

In the South American rainforest, anthropologists once puzzled over a hunter who, after a rare and successful kill, invited neighboring tribes to feast instead of smoking the meat for later. Asked why he wouldn’t store it, he replied: “I store my meat in the belly of my brother.” It wasn’t a metaphor; it was a worldview. Prosperity wasn’t what you could lock away. Security lived in relationships.

From that vantage point, reciprocity deepens in layers. At the surface, there is direct reciprocity: I give to you, and you give back to me. Go deeper and it becomes indirect: I give here, and goodness returns from elsewhere, through the larger field of community. At its most profound, reciprocity becomes infinite: I give because giving is its own return. No ledgers. No expectations. Just the quiet knowledge that the act completes itself. Many Indigenous and service-centered communities rely on this deeper current; generosity becomes a way of being, not a tactic.

The potlatch ceremonies of Indigenous peoples along the Pacific Northwest Coast embody this ethic. Hosts lavishly give, redistributing resources, renewing bonds, honoring life’s thresholds. Status isn’t what you keep; it’s what you release. Generosity is not an afterthought. It’s governance.

We often frame our predicament as a choice between two stories: prosperity through individual accumulation or prosperity through shared abundance. But they already coexist. Consider a town with both a bookstore and a public library, one runs on price, the other on trust. Both deliver knowledge. They can share a street. The harder question is: which logic do we design around when things truly matter?

Standard economics warns of a “tragedy of the commons”: leave shared resources to many users, and self-interest will deplete them. The proposed cure, historically, has been privatization. Yet history shows the opposite pattern, too: fragmentation, sale to the highest bidder, and the degradation that follows when the sacred becomes a commodity and stewardship gives way to extraction.

Elinor Ostrom, awarded the Nobel in economics, documented communities across the world that have tended shared forests, fisheries, and water with durability. The through-lines were consistent: locally crafted rules, transparent monitoring, mutual accountability, and a culture of care. The commons is not fated to tragedy; it is a trust that thrives when relationships are tended. In Törbel, Switzerland, villagers have co-managed alpine pastures for centuries with locally set grazing quotas, rotating schedules, and communal enforcement. These are commons that endure because the relationships do.

Many Indigenous teachings add a moral architecture for how to take: the Honorable Harvest, never take the first, never the last, never more than you need; use what you take; give thanks; give back. It is ecological wisdom, yes, but also spiritual economics, a culture where restraint and reverence are normal, not heroic.

Still, good intentions can be cornered by bad design. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer shares the story of Darren, who accepts work in extractive industry not out of greed but survival: a paycheck, health care, stability. When care is treated as a luxury, extraction becomes the “practical” choice. That is a design failure, not a moral one.

Redesign is possible. Doughnut Economics, articulated by Kate Raworth, asks us to meet everyone’s basic needs without breaching the planet’s ecological ceiling. Between those rings lies the safe and just space for humanity. Growth is reframed as balance. Progress is “thriving in place.” In such a system, Darren wouldn’t have to choose between survival and stewardship.

We already have the technology to feed everyone; we continue to organize around the logic of scarcity. The antidote may not be an abundance of goods so much as an abundance of relationships, trust, reciprocity, belonging. 

The question, then, is not whether markets and gifts can live side by side, they do. It’s whether we’re willing to center designs that make the caring choice the practical one. To store our wealth, once more, in one another.