00:00:13 Kiara
Today we are here with Professor Godfrey. Thank you so much for coming on today. And could you introduce yourself to us?
00:00:18 Pheobe Godfrey
Us. Yes, thank you so much, Kiara, for having me. My name is Phoebe Godfrey. I’m an environmental sociologist here at UCONN in the sociology department. And I’ve been at UCONN almost 17 years. So. Uh. Been around the block.
00:00:36 Kiara
So to harp a little bit on your involvement here at UCONN, could you tell me actually about your work at the Spring Valley Farm or any other projects that you have worked on at UCONN?
00:00:45 Pheobe Godfrey
Yes. So back in 2009, I was looking at different campuses that had student farms and I was inspired to put forth the idea that that UCONN should have a student farm and got lots of support, but it was a very long process. I sort of initiated it, but then I left UCONN as a full-time employee, and others took up the mantle and made it happen. In particular, Julia Cartabiano who’s no longer with us, and lots of students. I mean, it was a kind of convergence of student visioning, and faculty support and administrative support to create this wonderful place called Spring Valley Student Farm. And then we’ve also created… And again I like the “we” and that’s a very important part of how I conceptualize social change, by recognizing that it’s a collective effort, that it’s not about an individual… But we’ve created the sustainable community food system over the last. Oh, ten years or so that enables students to do summer internship projects on farms. Also in my own town of Willimantic and Windham, my wife and other community members created a commercially licensed cooperative kitchen, which is known as Click. That still exists and enables people to incubate food businesses and works with local farmers. And does a lot of things for our local food system. So I like to think of myself as sort of multifaceted and bringing together campus and community and food and the arts and sustainability and really looking to practice, like, how can we take these ideas and model them for students and give students opportunities to practice them themselves?
00:02:58 Kiara
Absolutely. And your work does not go unnoticed. I see your stuff on campus. I know people who live and work on the farm, and I’ve only heard amazing things.
00:03:07 Pheobe Godfrey
Nice. Yeah, and. And the farm manager, currently Jessica Larkin Wells, is a former student of mine also who went through the Sustainable community food system. Who also worked with Julia Cartabiano and lived on the farm, and so there’s this beautiful legacy of where a lot of our students, who live on the farm or who have that experience go into environmental careers and go into food system work, or who then come and end up working with us. Yeah, we’re building this small community, but a very dedicated one.
00:03:44 Kiara
And a growing community!
00:03:45 Pheobe Godfrey
Thank you. Yeah, growing.
00:03:47 Kiara
So to get into the meat of today, we are going to be analyzing and talking about a very special book, The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robin Wall Kimmerer is a Potawatomi botanist, author and activist known for her work in Indigenous environmental knowledge and plant ecology. She is a professor at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Kimmer’s writing blends scientific research with indigenous wisdom, emphasizing the importance of reciprocity and respect for nature. Her most well known book, braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the teaching of plants, explores the deep connections between humans and the natural world. In her most recent book, The Serviceberry, she explores the concept of gift economies through the lens of nature, particularly the serviceberry tree. Kimerer contrasts capitalist economy, which prioritizes scarcity and accumulation, with indigenous traditions that emphasize generosity and communal well-being. She argues that nature itself operates on a gift economy. Trees provide fruit freely. Rivers nourish the land and ecosystems thrive through interdependence rather than ownership. The serviceberry trees serves as a metaphor for this system, demonstrating how mutual exchange ensures survival. An interesting point for me in the novel was the revaluing of competition as a primary force of regulating evolutionary success.
00:05:15 Kiara
According to The Serviceberry, competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus is on the group level, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving, but for thriving. Kimmerer says how competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned. Natural selection actually favors those who can avoid competition. And it is this avoidance of competition that leads to diversity, and that diversity is the antidote.
00:05:45 Kiara
Here’s what Professor Godfrey has to say about that.
00:05:49 Kiara
So we learn that there are actual downfalls to competition and in a capitalist society, not only are we not avoiding it, but it is a fundamental principle for us. What do you have to say about this idea, and do you agree that we as humans are fundamentally competitive as we have been told?
00:06:06 Pheobe Godfrey
I absolutely do not agree, and one of the terms that I take issue with is our use of the word humans. Humans are social beings that create their cultural kind of contexts and their cultural identities and humans without social contexts are not humans right, which is why, if you really want to mess a human up, you put them in isolation. Even those who have been socialized their whole life into a particular cultural context will start to lose that context without the constant affirmation and reassertion of who we are and what it is. And it’s kind of, you know, why we are a very repetitive culture, right? If you are part of a religion, you repeat the prayers every day or every week or every month. If you are in a love relationship, we repeat, I love you. You know, you’re special. You’re this. You know, we repeat, we are Huskies. We repeat, we are Americans. We wave flags, we repeat, we repeat, we repeat because the minute you stop repeating that story starts to dissipate. Humans are not anything in particular other than social beings.
00:07:20 Pheobe Godfrey
So when we in our culture say, oh, humans are naturally greedy, humans are evil, humans are destroying the planet. Humans are… We’re not actually talking about humans, right? As in our species. We’re talking about a particular cultural lens, which happens to be what we would call, you know, sort of the judeo-christian Western lens.
00:07:41 Pheobe Godfrey
That has humans constructed as sinful. In particular Christianity, Judaism is a little different on that point, has humans as naturally greedy. And those are actually the cultural attributes of our economic system, right? Capitalism based on the idea of scarcity, that there isn’t enough and that we have to compete against each other. And we have to be on top and the bottom line and you know who sold the most widgets today is the winner. Again, that is not a natural state, right? It’s it’s a possible state, which we’ve seen, but there are many other ways that humans can have and do organize themselves, and that are probably healthier. I mean, most of our family lives are not organized around capitalism, right? We don’t charge our children, you know, hopefully we don’t, you know, measure. While I was loving yesterday, you should be loving today. I did this yesterday. You owe me that. But a lot of the kind of relationship building is about reciprocity, but it’s not as formalized as under capitalism, where our debts rarefied into being truths, right where I owe you something. And now you’re going to resent me, rather than you gave me something, and because that’s part of the culture of reciprocity, right and and so Kimura’s book the Serviceberry is all about how in nature, it’s not about keeping an account of what is owed to whom. It’s a realization that every, every being.
00:09:21 Professor Godfrey
Which is a key point, right? Not everything, right? Every living being is interdependent and our kind of gifts and debts are all accounted for in that interdependence.
00:09:36 Kiara
Absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting what you said about the term human. And I know in the book she uses the term ecological citizens, which I think I’ve been trying to use more just because I feel like in a way it holds me more accountable. But yeah, do you agree that that term is better?
00:09:55 Pheobe Godfrey
Absolutely. In fact, you know, on my house, I have a flag with the earth on it. I I would not fly a nationalist flag. I don’t think I’m a member of a nation. I’m a member of, I’m an ecological citizen, which I love. Right. And Citizen has that term of not only membership. Right. But accountability right that we belong to this planet, right? The planet does not belong to us. And which is another thing that really drives me kind of crazy about, you know, our culture and how we talk about the planet, for example, you know, save the planet and it’s like we are from the planet, right? The planet has created us, sustains us, animates us. And we have the audacity and the hubris and the and the delusion. That we are now going to not only destroy her, and I’m using her intentionally, but now we’re going to save her, right. Which, you know, if anybody who’s listening has done any gender studies, knows all of the implications of saving the damsel in distress, right. Sort of. You know, white masculine patriarchy is going to put on their white lab coat and come up with something in a laboratory and then head out and go save Mother Nature, right?
00:11:18 Kiara
Absolutely. And on this intersectional note, we are also seeing how important diversity is in the environment, but also within societies.
00:11:31 Kiara
How would you say capitalism affects diversity?
00:11:34 Pheobe Godfrey
Yeah. Really, really, really interesting question. Right. I just want to reiterate what you just said because of course the word diversity has been sort of bastardized to mean, oh, there are people of color in a white space. Oh, that’s diversity, right? Oh, you know, there’s one queer in the corner. And I myself identify as queer, so I’m using that word in that ownership way.
00:11:59 Pheobe Godfrey
Oh, that’s diversity, right? You know, check. Check. Rather than looking at diversity as an essential part of life, there would not be life on Earth were it not for an incredible level of diversity in terms of how that life is expressed, how that life functions, how that life gathers resources and, right? And yet we have ruined that word and made it a bad word, but under capitalism, I mean the market, you know, wants to homogenize. You know, we get a new idea, it can be a new commodity, right? A new fashion, a new type of telephone. Here’s here’s something diverse or different. But then it becomes totally homogenized. Right. And and the way it functions is taking creativity and then de-diversifying it. And then everybody wants one, and everybody has one. And then and then your identity is now based on do you have one and are you part of the group that has one?
(Transition music)
00:13:04 Speaker 3
Kemmerer points out that ecology and economy have the same roots. Oikos. Home, and it brings us to the question of what do we do with our resources? What do we do when we have abundance?
00:13:17 Speaker 3
There is a really amazing example in the book where Kemmerer takes an example from the linguist Daniel Everett, who was learning from a hunter gathering community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a kill far too big to be eaten by his family.
And the researchers asked him the question how will he store all of his meat? Smoking, drying and the hunter was confused by this question and answered store my meat. “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”
What a concept that there is real energetic value in providing for your community that outweighs the value of storing resources for yourself.
This is what a gift economy is, and this is what it means to not have a scarcity mindset.
00:14:02 Kiara
Can you explain to us what scarcity mindset is and how it relates to The Serviceberry? Does a capitalist market create the construct of scarcity?
00:14:13 Pheobe Godfrey
That’s a really great question and a very simple example. Let’s just take water. Obviously, there would be no life on Earth if there was no water and water, you know, in varying degrees in terms of geography is abundant in some places it’s more scarce and life has adapted to different levels of Water.
00:14:32 Pheobe Godfrey
Under capitalism, water is becomes a resource. It’s no longer sacred. It’s no longer seen as holy water. It’s a commodity, it it’s a thing. And the goal is, is to own it, right? To privatize it, to make it scarce, so that you then control the market for the water, and then you can sell the water back to people and make a profit. If water was abundant or if we hadn’t poisoned a lot of public water, then I wouldn’t go and buy water in a plastic bottle, which is itself also toxic. Right? So how do we create the mindset in people, in terms of the market, to convince people that they should buy water in a plastic bottle and carry that around and drag it from the supermarket and put it in their car?
And then drag it into their apartment and then, you know, take a couple sips and then throw a bottle that is never going to return back to the earth. And so that idea of how you privatize resources in order to create scarcity and scarcity mindset.
00:15:37 Kiara
Something that I thought was interesting when I was thinking about this is Kimmerer makes the distinction between real scarcity, in privatizing things, you create that real scarcity of like it is hard to find natural, fresh, healthy water.
00:16:00 Pheobe Godfrey
No, but that but that scarcity is part of your strategy, right? Right. So same thing. You know, the privatization of land, the privatization of food. Right. One of the first things you do, if you and that happened under capitalism was the grabbing up of land right, pushing peasants or, you know, farming indigenous people off their land. Therefore you own it. And then now the land is now scarce. And now they have to work for you in order to survive on your land or in your factory or under your conditions.
00:16:38 Pheobe Godfrey
Right. And so that’s why, you know, Marks is very clear that that capitalism begins with the creation of private property, which is itself is a scarcity mindset right, that I own it. You don’t.
00:16:53 Kiara
So going back to this idea of water, turning gifts into products. I think this comes into an issue of respect and sacredness.
00:17:04 Kiara
In indigenous societies all over the world. You know, water is sacred. It is a gift. Do you think in Western society, do we have things that are sacred or not? And how does this affect us?
00:17:16 Pheobe Godfrey
Us. Yeah, again, this is a question that sometimes makes me a little sarcastic and. Under Christianity, when we think of the Holy Land, right, holy and sacred are sort of similar. It’s like, ohh that’s Jerusalem, you know? That’s, that’s Bethlehem. That’s the Holy Land, right. And you know, and it’s like this little, this little tiny piece of the entire planet, or, oh, it’s where my church and you know, Christianity being part of, you know, kind of the stepchild of Judaism emerging out of that, and then Islam, right for but for those big three. You know although they all accept that under their teachings that the planet was created by their God, it’s still the sacred pieces are very much humanly kind of determined, right? It’s where the church is. It’s where you know, are where are rituals happen, where the synagogue is, right, and doesn’t apply to the entire planet, right. Whereas you know there’s a famous Native American quote, the Holy Land is everywhere, right? This whole planet is sacred. Everything on it is sacred, every tree, every river, every mountain, every being is sacred, right? And I think that’s a very different perception versus what we say where our God is and that’s where the sacredness is it t really challenges us. Again, if we’re looking, you know and I’m not indigenous, I’m a settler. My parents came here from England. Right. But I I’m so moved and liberated by ideas that, in my mind, put things back into sole perspective from me.
00:19:17 Kiara
Actually, that sort of perfectly goes into my next question, is what is it that got you out of your cultural trance? You know, it takes work effort and willpower to go against what you have always been taught. And I wonder what your experience with that.
00:19:32 Pheobe Godfrey
Was that’s, that’s a fun question.
00:19:37 Pheobe Godfrey
Part of it is that I I grew up in Europe, my parents were both from England. My mother was a a very creative person. She was a gardener. And so I always had a relationship through her with the living Earth.
00:19:56 Pheobe Godfrey
And my parents were not religious at all. They were atheists. But my mother found the sacred in the garden and you know, in the fairies and in the flowers. And I think I internalized a lot of that. I also didn’t grow up with television at all. I grew up in the woods in Belgium, and I have a lot of time to dream as a child. A lot of opportunity to develop my inner life.
00:21:12 Pheobe Godfrey
So I I’ve just never adopted the ideologies of this culture and I’ve always sought some deeper meaning. I actually was a born-again Christian for a while because I was very interested in in the concept of truth and justice and I found those teachings in some of the core sayings of the Prophet Jesus, I don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah. I don’t. That’s not my thing. But I do love, love thy neighbor. I do love judge not. And I do love turn the other cheek. Those like 3 things. So I became a pacifist by age 15, a conscientious objector, I became an activist. I became an artist, you know, all of those things that I felt came out of judge not nonviolence and love your like and if, if only Christians stuck to that.
No, not to be mean or anything, but it’s like, Oh my gosh, you know, you see such hypocrisy in everything that doesn’t adhere to the three fundamental teachings and , you know, and so most of what I do comes out of those 3 teachings.
(too long a pause?)
00:22:35 Kiara
To get back to the serviceberry and the idea of gift economies, how do you think we can implement that on a larger scale in our society? You know, we’ve talked about how capitalism is more than just an economic system, but a cultural, social, and political force. And this is a lot to take on, especially as a young person sort of coming into the adult world and budding consciousness, this can be quite daunting to conceptualize changing something like that.
00:23:04 Pheobe Godfrey
Yeah. And actually I want to, since I was just doing the three teachings of Jesus. The loaves and fishes, the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Yeah, I I like to thank God. Did he charge people? What made it a, you know, a part of the miracle was that it was, it was a gift.
00:23:21 Pheobe Godfrey
Right. And the ultimate gift, of course. You know, was they come from the ocean? They come from the earth. Right. And we want to say, oh, our gods, you know, made them. But OK, maybe. But they they still come from Earth, right. And so, you know, to me gift economies are so fundamental to spirituality.
00:23:40 Pheobe Godfrey
Right to that shared community of coming together of communion, right. I mean, when you, if you were raised Catholic and you go to communion, right, they give you, you know, the little biscuit and the little, you know, they don’t charge you. That’s a gift right there. You know, the blessings bless you. And you know all.
00:24:01 Pheobe Godfrey
You know and love in its essence, we don’t charge for love. Or shouldn’t you know. But that realization of how much of our society is actually not run by capitalism, right. And that’s, I think, a really inspiring place for young people to start is wait a minute. Like everything I do for my friends and all the ways that we, you know, we trade songs or we trade clothing. Or we, you know, we help each other on our exams, or we work together in our club or you know, it’s like, Oh my God, you know, those are not under the market.
00:24:50 Pheobe Godfrey
And those make us feel good and those make us feel meaningful and all the ways we volunteered and we did an alternative spring break and we over the summer we went here and we helped this person we and and if they can kind of see the value of those right and not see those as oh, that’s just extracurricular. Oh that’s just you know something I did over the summer. Like, no, that is where you are creating your life and feeding your soul and your inner self. That’s what we need to grow.
00:25:23 Kiara
That’s very interesting. So that sort of makes me realize that part of the trance is thinking only about the market economy and market transactions versus thinking about instances of freely exchanged things.
00:25:40 Pheobe Godfrey
Yeah. It’s like if you ask somebody, you know, let’s say somebody, a student spends half of their day helping a student who is having a really hard time, like a lot of students, they’re depressed. Like I’m spending, you know, five hours sitting with my roommate who’s going through a really rough time.
00:25:59 Pheobe Godfrey
And then and then I, you know, and then I couldn’t study. And then you asked them, So what did you do today? I didn’t. I didn’t get to my work. I didn’t get to my work. I’m like you were. You were doing work. But you were doing meaningful, ou were doing soul work, you were doing community work. Right? And all the time that we’re sitting with our roomate, right, we’re feeling guilty. There’s a little voice in my head. I should be studying. I should be being productive. Always the work takes the precident, right, it always the one, that’s the activity that gives us bragging rights. Like I studied all night, you know versus you know I meditated all night, I made food with my friends. I picked Serviceberries for five hours and feed them to the birds. You know it’s like so how can we kind of recalibrate our values right to recognize that that the gifts are the real meaning.
00:27:00 Kiara
And for my last question.
00:27:03 Kiara
I’m sure as someone teaching about the dismantling and the unlearning of harmful structural systems, there is a good amount of backlash that comes with that. You know, it scares people, whether that be staff, students, parents or the general public. I wonder how you respond to it and what you sort of have to say to this crowd.
00:27:24 Pheobe Godfrey
Well, divergent ideas always scare established norms, right? Yeah. As a sociologist, we know that humans thrive on sort of homogeny. Homogenies, though, are created, right. So, you know, racism is not a natural state of being. It’s it created. Right.
00:27:44 Pheobe Godfrey
But we could have created different ways of being homogeneous, right? We could be homogeneous around diversity. That could have been our cultural narrative, you know, and that’s sort of, a bit of the lie of the United States, right? We’re the melting pot, but we’ve never really embraced that, that is who we are. And that’s who we should be. And that’s our strength. Race isn’t meaningful unless you create a narrative and a hierarchy and give it all of this power.
00:28:13 Pheobe Godfrey
Right. So, you know, in terms of challenging the status quo, I mean, brave people have always challenged power and oppression, right? And you know, again, challenging hypocrisy challenging, saying, you know, turn the other cheek that’s challenging a culture of war.
00:28:33 Pheobe Godfrey
Right, you know, don’t raise your sword. Let let them arrest me. That’s not my value. You know, I think for students and particularly, you know, when you’re young, is figuring out. What do you care about? How are you going to commit to your values and how are you going to kind of walk the talk? Right. I mean, we’re seeing universities completely abandoning walk the talk. I’m happy Hartford is pushing back a little bit.
00:28:58 Pheobe Godfrey
Right. But this is a real challenge for our culture. Are we once again going to, you know, have this made-up narrative of equality and justice for all, while we all know the practice has nothing to do with that or, you know, our young people really going to be like, wait, I want a world that corresponds and resonates with what we say we are.
00:29:24 Kiara
Professor Godfrey leaves us on a very powerful note here, what do you value? How much do you value it and how do you want to walk the talk?
00:29:35 Kiara
Thank you so much, Professor Godfrey, for coming on today. I had an amazing time.
00:29:41 Pheobe Godfrey
I did too. Thank you for having me.
00:29:43 Kiara
I would like to give another thank you to U Conn’s radio station 91.7 WHUS for allowing us to use their studio and equipment and making this all possible.