“When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.” I first came across this common wisdom when I was about eleven years old, on a poster in the family living room at a classmate’s house. It has been with me ever since, just below the surface, simmering, reminding me of the fundamental weirdness of life in times of capitalism. For we all know, of course, that money cannot be eaten and that we are exhausting the world, exhausting ourselves. Still the capitalist World-devourer is fed with land and ecosystems, with humans and more-than-humans, driven by money and feeding into the accumulation of this elusive thing called “capital,” while at the same time accumulating waste, shitting “externalities.”
Working on my dissertation last year, digging into the intricacies of capitalism, I decided to look into this proverb. As the unknown author – “Quote Investigator” – of a blog post on its origins explains, it is usually attributed to Abenaki artist and filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, who made these remarks in an interview published in 1972. Although it has also been characterized as “a Native American saying,” suggesting it predates the interview, the author convincingly argues that “the phrase seems to have been crafted in relatively modern times, and thus does not have the deep historical resonance provided by age.” Considering the mention of bank accounts, the saying can indeed not go back too long. Considering too the rising awareness about the dire ecological straits we find ourselves in from around that time onwards – think: Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson and Limits to Growth (1972) by the Club of Rome – it makes sense to situate it in that time period.
The question she posed in the 1970s remains unanswered: how come we have forgotten that money cannot be eaten? Or more to the point: how come we act as if money can be eaten while we very well know that it cannot? In Parallax of Growth. The Philosophy of Economy and Ecology (2016) Danish sociologist Ole Bjerg zooms in on a common misunderstanding about money. The idea that money emerged out of the barter economy in order to ease transactions – I have an ox, you have eggs, and if we want a fair exchange we need something like money to allows for that – is both historically and categorically wrong. “The account of money as emerging out of a primitive barter economy,” Bjerg explains, “projects the fantasy that, even before the emergence of money, economic exchange was structured by the law of equivalent exchange.” However, the economy of equal exchange that followed from the introduction of money should be taken as fundamentally different from the economies of sharing and gift-giving that preceded it. Money kills the gift, Bjerg explains, and has brought into being a new type of subject, the economic subject, that cannot help but have (economic) growth in mind. Money disconnects from the environments it capitalizes upon, putting “into motion a self-perpetuating movement towards more and more growth.” This explains why the non-edibility of money is continuously disavowed and the importance of reciprocity and gift-giving has receded from view. With dire consequences, because the growth this has given rise to is ultimately self-devouring. It only takes and does not replenish, it exhausts what it fundamentally relies on. In times of capitalism this non-reciprocal relationship to the environment appears as a given, but this is not necessarily so.
In Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explores reciprocal relation between humans and their environments. Crucially,she argues that humans can have a nourishing relationship with their environment. In fact, environments are dependent on reciprocity, by humans too. She captures this beautifully when she writes about pecans:
How generously they [pecans] shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. Our taking returns benefit to them in the circle of life making life, the chain of reciprocity. Living by the precepts of the Honorable Harvest—to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift—is easy in a pecan grove. We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds so that new groves will shade the prairie and feed the squirrels.
She reminds us, then, that our taking can be generative and that our giving can be self-serving. Flourishing is a communal, mutual thing, and when we engage in chains of reciprocity we do well for both ourselves and for others, whom we cannot disentangle ourselves from.
As Kimmerer astutely and painfully observes, this is not how those coming across the Atlantic from the 16th century onwards to settle in the “New World” saw it, who “attributed the richness of the land to the bounty of nature” and did not consider the people living there had a vital part in that bounty. (Note here that capitalism and colonialism go hand in hand.) As a consequence, the settlers did not understand why people never harvested everything and let so much go to waste. They construed this as laziness, Kimmerer explains, because they “did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered” and she notes an Elder once saying: “Yes, we could get more that way. But it’s got to seed itself for next year. And what we leave behind is not wasted. You know, we’re not the only ones who like rice.” This, of course, is key. If flourishing is mutual you cannot just think about yourself, about your harvest.
Kimmerer asks if the indigenous tradition of the Honorable Harvest can be brought in line with the modern-day consumer capitalism. She acknowledges that “city folk” are separated from the land from which they consume but argues that in the ways in which they spend their money reciprocity is exercised. “We consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets,” she writes, turning dollars into an “indirect currency of reciprocity” and have them become “a surrogate, a proxy for the harvester with hands in the earth” and as such support the Honorable Harvest. Or not.
In light of my argument that money should not be taken for a means that does little more than allowing for easy and smooth transactions, and should instead be taken for something that in fact kills the gift, I am not convinced by Kimmerer’s argument that dollars can be turned into a currency for reciprocity. She seems to realize this herself when she describes doing an Honorable Harvest in a shopping mall and finds it just isn’t doable. “I’m trying hard to make this work,” she writes, “but what I feel in the woods, the pulsing animacy, is simply not here. I realize why the tenets of reciprocity don’t work here, why this glittering labyrinth seems to make a mockery of the Honorable Harvest. It’s so obvious, but I didn’t see it, so intent was I on searching for the lives behind the products. I couldn’t find them because the lives aren’t here. Everything for sale here is dead.” Kimmerer does not explain what she means by “dead” here, but it seems to refer to something non-reciprocal, to what might be considered the opposite of mutual flourishing.
What Kimmerer found on the shelves are not so much the dead but the undead. Things stuck in-between life and death, unable to die, unable to give life. These undead remind us that what capitalism comes down to, ultimately, is exhaustion. If we follow the proverb I started out from, this life-exhausting self-devouring growth will only stop once there is nothing left to feed on. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would argue that what we are dealing with here is a neurosis of destiny. In repeating bad behavior we convince ourselves we cannot do otherwise. The point is to see that we are not destined to consume ourselves to exhaustion. We can have a nourishing relationship to our environment, for we already had it and, perhaps, in some sense we already have. How to feed into that?