My family must’ve been worried I might get smashed by a car.
One Christmas it was reflective, silver-striped calf sleeves. The next: a neon-yellow mesh runner’s vest, like I was a crossing guard. Then, a headlamp with an additional blinking-red warning light on the strap for the back of my noggin.
All of it came from those online “gifts for runners” guides my wife and daughters clicked on each holiday season. And to be fair, runners do love their gear.
But there’s another kind of guide runners need, a guide to gifts beyond gear. One of the best I’ve seen is Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry.
In many ways, it’s a guide to seeing the world differently. And for runners, it helps reveal the deeper reason behind why public lands matter—and why protecting and expanding access to them matters too.
Kimmerer writes about how she saw bushes planted by her farmer neighbor, heavy with “fat clusters of red, blue, and wine-purple” serviceberries, and how she feasted on them alongside the birds. The berries are called Bozakmin in Potawatomi, with “min” carrying a double meaning: both “berry” and “gift.” The scrumptious serviceberries, according to Kimmerer, taste like “a blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an apple,” with “a touch of rosewater” and “the minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds.”
But the berry-gift extends far beyond her own gastronomy. Serviceberries support the same birds during breeding season. Deer and moose browse their branches. Their flowers provide early pollen for insects emerging in spring. And they sustain the lives of swallowtails, admirals, viceroys, and hairstreak butterflies. The plant is less a natural resource than an active participant in a vast web of “generosity, care, and creativity.”
To encounter such luxuriant abundance as a gift, Kimmerer claims, changes our entire relationship to the world. “In the presence of such gifts,” she explains, “gratitude is the intuitive first response.” And after gratitude comes reciprocity. Not repayment in a transactional sense, but responsibility. In other words, gifts make us accountable. “Mistreating a gift,” the Potawatami botanist observes, “has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.”
It’s difficult not to experience public lands this way once we start to look at them with these eyes.
For runners, public lands are gifts everywhere around us: neighborhood trails, city greenspaces, dirt roads, coastal paths, desert mesas, mountain forests, and national parks. Places where cool air fills our lungs before sunrise. Where ever-shifting clouds captivate our attention. Where wind presses against our faces. Where the browns of soil and bark give way to the greens of grass and pine, and the grays of rock and stone, canyon walls and cracked pavement.
These places do more than host our miles. They feed, sustain, and inspire us. And when we experience them as gifts rather than just surface and scenery, our gratitude naturally leads to reciprocity. We begin to care for the places that care for us.
This impulse lies at the heart of everything Runners for Public Lands is about: empowering runners to protect public lands and expand access to nature for all.
Of course, gratitude alone isn’t enough. Policy work requires expertise; advocacy requires education, organizing, and mobilizing; and community requires leadership.
But gratitude may be where it all starts, because this is how gifts change and activate us.
Healthy public lands are gifts and thus forms of stored energy, released whenever we understand and appreciate them as such. And unlike the stored energy that fossil fuels release, these gifts are a renewable resource. The more attentively we run through these landscapes, the more they give. And the more they give, the more we feel called to conserve and steward them. This is all part of the exchanging of gifts. Not simply for better running, but for a different way of being, becoming, and belonging in the world.
Vic Thasiah, Board President, Runners for Public Lands
*Experiencing public lands as gifts does not erase the fact that these lands were often seized from Indigenous peoples. See RPL’s Public Lands Definition to learn more about this history.
Read or listen to the book by Robin Wall Kimmerer by clicking the image above.
The full audiobook is approximately 45 minutes long.
Featured photo of Vic Thasiah running in Ventura Land Trust by Liam Pickhardt