Author: Antonia Malchik

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

Last week’s Threadable reading* consisted of two documents:

• The original Charter of the Forest, a companion document to the Magna Carta, signed in 1217 by the regent for King Henry III and reaffirmed by Henry III in 1225; and

• Two excerpts from Pace University law professor Nicholas A. Robinson’s book chapter “The Charter of the Forest: Evolving Human Rights in Nature” (Part I: Introduction: The Forest Charter in a Nutshell, starting on page 317; and Part IV: Substantive Provisions of the Forest Charter, starting on page 339)

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try Threadable and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now. For anyone new to On the Commons, an overview of this 12-week project is here.)

Both of these documents are freely available online through the links above. The original Forest Charter is straightforward in its provisions but challenging to read due to the arcane and obsolete language; the second selection (Part IV) from Robinson’s legal paper lists its provisions in (mostly) plain modern English.

I spent some hours last week looking up and defining words like swanimote and freemen (the rights detailed in the Charter are for “freemen”—that is, not serfs, who were considered property; one medievalist estimated that only about 1 in 5 English men at this point in time would have been freemen, and I won’t go into the status of women because I’ll just get sidetracked by rage).

An entire list of these definitions would be a lot of clutter-text, so I’ll just define a few important ones. Feel free to ask for any others in the comments if you want or need and I’ll answer there.

• forest: “The Norman definition of Forest extended beyond wooded areas and was used to describe any rural area that contained useful natural resources such as wood or peat, or where animals that provided game for sport and meat for aristocratic tables resided. These areas were often enclosed and became the exclusive property of the Angevin royal family. This state of affairs existed as a result of a perversion of the Norman forest laws that had been imported by William the Conqueror and applied to his new Kingdom of England in 1066.” (This is from an article by medievalist Timothy R. Jones on the lasting importance of the Forest Charter: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/02/charter-forest/)

• afforested/disafforested: “Afforestation” was the practice of expanding Royal Forests; “disafforestation” was forcing the monarch to give up lands they’d previously claimed as Royal property. Almost a third of England had been claimed as Royal Forest by this time, and disafforestation was one of the main purposes of forcing Henry III to sign the Charter of the Forest.

• swanimote: “A court formerly held before foresters, verderers, and other forest officers to try offenses against vert and venison and to hear grievances against forest officers.” (Oxford English Dictionary; also: vert is greenery, and venison, according to one source, applied to any game animals of the forest, not just deer—rabbits, for example)

• lawing of dogs: “The cutting of several claws of the forefeet of dogs in the forest, to prevent their running at deer.” (Black’s Law Dictionary)

• demesne: “Possession (of real estate) as one’s own. Chiefly the phrase ‘to hold in demesne’ (tenure in dominico), i.e. in one’s own hands as possessor by free tenure.” (Oxford English Dictionary, definition of demesne as related to the law)

(I love the richness of words, so didn’t mind doing this and don’t mind doing more if you can’t find something. Part of me still just wants to be an etymologist.)

This note I left on Threadable gets at one of the reasons I think the Charter of the Forest is so important for people to get to know:

The Forest Charter is a crucial document because it’s an early example of how fluid private property rights can be, and how much people disagreed over claiming and enforcing of those rights even 800 years ago. William the Conqueror simply declared vasts sections of common land to be Royal Forest, starting in 1066, and subsequent kings expanded those claims. Literal bloody battles were fought to push back on royal assertions over land.

Getting Henry III to sign the Charter of the Forest (in 1225—his regent had initially done so in 1217; Henry was 9 years old at that time) and agree to disafforestation wasn’t the last of these battles. In the parts of Nicholas A. Robinson’s paper that isn’t in the reading, he goes into detail about these power struggles over the centuries. Extensive afforestation was one of the major complaints against King Charles I that led him being beheaded, for example.

Getting a good grasp of what rights of sustenance and land English people nearly a thousand years ago insisted they had feels necessary to getting our heads around the idea that, whatever the dominant culture currently thinks of as private property rights over land, they have always been subject to change. Not only that, but defining the parameters of those rights spills out into many other areas of our lives.

Robinson’s paper focuses on this legacy. He writes about how the Forest Charter informs modern environmental laws, but more importantly—to me—he focuses on the ways in which the practice of defending the Charter of the Forest and the subsistence rights it details was the means by which the more abstract human rights listed in the Magna Carta were also defended and defined. For most of the past 800 years, he says, the Forest Charter was the more well-known and important of the two documents. It was the crucible in which human rights were shaped.

Some questions and thoughts I left in the Threadable version of the readings:

• What is the relationship between physical rights and more abstract rights? How do these interactions relate to land access or lack thereof? (It seems to me that it’s hard to have rights of freedom if you aren’t also guaranteed rights of survival.)

• Related to that, where does law come from? Reading these documents, it felt to me that laws are first born out of interactions with the physical land we live on and with—and all the other people who do the same.

• How might a study of the Forest Charter change how we view property law? Should property law have embedded in it a right of survival for everyone else? What about Rights of Nature?

• Could different societies be served now by modern equivalents of the Charter of the Forest, maybe centered around management of commons?

Take your time with these. The struggles over land ownership, property rights, and rights of subsistence have been going on for an unimaginably long time, and none of them are going to come to a resolution next week. Or next year. Or next millennium, probably. But better understanding their roots might help us envision a different way forward.

Next week’s selection will be from Simon Winchester’s new book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World (Chapters 1 and 2 of Part II). After that, we’ll be delving into the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, its progenitor the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery, and the ongoing consequences of both.

A little private property trespass to start your week with.

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

Last week’s Threadable reading* was a selection from law professor Erik T. Freyfogle’s book The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good: pages 16 (starting after the section break at “What, then, are the fundamental elements of private property?”) through 36 (end of the chapter).

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try Threadable and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.)

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the book on archive.org, but most of the selection is on Google Books, which has pages 16-35. There’s only half a page after that and the line that I chose this selection for, which ends the chapter: “To study property law is to gain insights into society as a whole: where it has been, what it values, and where it wants to go.”

The chapter opens with a 1993 case from Iowa, but since the selection starts after that case is detailed, I gave a brief overview of it in a comment:

(The Google Books Preview has that first part of the chapter, starting on page 11, if you’d rather just read it.)

The Land We Share is a very readable set of legal cases, starting from the earliest days of the United States’ existence and tracing the evolution of private property rights. The Bormann case referenced above is a tangled culmination of our latest legal iterations, which has allowed the narrative of property rights to be framed by those who believe in absolute private property rights—as if, somehow, one’s rights to use land and resources cannot ever affect or be affected by others—and who have enshrined the idea that private profit is almost always a public good.

The Bormanns won their suit through a nuisance law approach: by their county rezoning land to allow a CAFO, it was creating a nuisance that decreased others’ property values and eroded their own rights. “Nuisance law,” wrote Freyfogle,

“enhances and protects property rights at the same time as it limits them.

To recognize this practical fact is to see why ‘absolute ownership’—viewed by some as the baseline of private property—literally makes no sense. What could absolute ownership mean when ownership necessarily includes both a right to use land and a right to complain about interferences by neighbors?”

No property ownership or property use, in other words, ever exists in a vacuum.

I often turn back to Freyfogle in part for his extensive legal scholarship on this subject, especially as it’s so accessible for a layperson; but even more for his repeated approaches to the idea of law as a story.

Property law, he states in as many ways and through as many examples as possible, reflects the values of a society at a given time. That’s why I like the quote at the end of the chapter, “To study property law is to gain insights into society as a whole: where it has been, what it values, and where it wants to go.” I really think this is true.

Some things to think about while reading:

• Freyfogle has a continuous focus on balancing the rights of individual property owners with the community they exist in. To me, this fits in naturally with Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons-based land use systems and her idea of “nested” commons agreements. But there are a lot of different ways to think about this balance. Are there situations in your own community where it applies?

• What kinds of arguments successfully persuade large portions of a population that land ownership rights should be, or even could be, absolute?

• On the last page, Freyfogle mentions the problems posed by interpreting property rights in the abstract, instead of understanding them as tied to the ecosystems they’re located in. That is, not all rights—or uses—are appropriate for every bit of land. Are there ways that private property laws can be written and interpreted to be ecology-based, flexible according to the varied environments they’re applied to?

Trying to keep this shorter this time, so I’ll stop there! I really like this book. An environmental lawyer friend recommended it to me years ago, and it’s Freyfogle who (in Chapter 4 in this book) introduced me to Henry George’s Progress & Poverty, which has been so influential on my thinking with regards to the injustices of land ownership.

Walking composition

"But to me the exile's always wretched,
Like a convict, or a patient.
Wanderer your road is dark,
And the bread of strangers tastes bitter."
—from "I'm not one of those who left their land," Anna Akhmatova*

Last weekend I had to force myself go for a walk. After several years of writing and researching about walking, I still have to do this sometimes: make myself walk when I know I need it.

I was in a glum mood, sad and bordering on grumpy, and it was a beautiful day with no commitments. My brother-in-law had sent me an album with a melancholy but light tone appropriate to my mood and the sun-dappled day. I’ve mostly weaned myself off of listening to something while walking but felt like it that day. Sometimes the right music can short-circuit the ruminations.

And so I walked for two hours, a lot of it through parts of town I rarely visit—where there are new bike and pedestrian paths!—and along the river, where I looked for and did not see any muskrats.

Toward the end of that time, when I emerged to visit the grocery store and walk home along the highway, I felt better.

I spent years researching walking. I wrote a book about it. I walked thousands of miles. I believe in what walking can do for each of us and our communities. And somehow I still have to drag myself out on a regular basis, prove to myself once again its potential for knitting good back into our lives.

When I went away to a forest service cabin again for a couple of days this week, I found myself reading through four books on walking and movement. The themes are ones I’ve explored countless times: grounding, community, physical and mental health, and what it means to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us. It amazes me how something you’ve encountered a hundred times can still feel new.

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Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

This post is for anyone interested in reading about and/or discussing land ownership in parallel with the reading circle I’m leading on Threadable. If you can access Threadable and want to try it, I recommend diving into other circles, too—I’ve been enjoying reading Cadillac Desert with the Water Politics and the World circle; and the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case Tanner v. United States with the hosts of 5-4, a podcast about “how much the Supreme Court sucks.”

Last week the social reading app Threadable launched several reading circles, including the one I’m leading, Land Ownership: Who Owns the Earth and Why? By request, I’m experimenting with facilitating discussions here on On the Commons for those who can’t (or don’t want to!) participate in the Threadable app, particularly since it’s currently only developed for iOS (Apple devices).

Threadable uploads the texts I’ve chosen, where people can then comment on passages and discuss the reading. Obviously, I can’t do that here—copyright issues among other things—but I can tell you what we’re reading, share the ideas and questions that have come up, and, thanks to reader Jake, who told me about archive.org (how have I never come across this before?!), can also recommend creating a free account there to borrow the book online and read the selection. If you want to. I’m not a teacher, there are no grades or other assessments, and there’s no requirement to read the chapter in order to participate in the discussion.

The first text for Land Ownership is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, pages 9-23.

Linklater’s earlier books, such as Measuring America, have to do with land surveys. In Owning the Earth, he digs underneath those survey lines to look at where the idea of private land ownership started and how revolutionary, destructive, and creative it has been—though I’m not totally sold on the creative aspect. Many of the “creative” and beneficial consequences of private land ownership he points to seem to be fixes for earlier feudal systems that were in themselves unequal and unjust and just generally awful for most people (looking at you, Russian serfdom).

I chose Owning the Earth because Linklater’s overview of private land ownership is so far unequalled—where it’s taken hold, why, how it spread, and what the consequences have been. Later in the book he details many community-oriented land sharing systems that were, or still are in some cases, more commons-based, but in this first chapter he introduces us to the idea that private, individual land ownership, when it first came into being, was massively disruptive.

With that, here are some of the quotes highlighted and questions prompted in the reading—respond to as little or as much as you like, or talk about something else entirely:

• (Emphasis added to the quote below.) Discuss:

“The way you own the earth requires the agreement of your neighbors, the society you live in, and the government of your country. In a very fundamental way, it is the glue that holds a community together. And every society agrees that it cannot in fact be owned.”

• Chapter 1 starts in the 15th-century house Linklater lived in (he was Scottish) and his musing on the rumblings of private property and enclosure that led to the building of a chimney and private bedroom in the house. He writes of the original builder thinking about himself as an owner of land in a way that was completely new in societies across Europe.
  My question is: What changes in our relationship to nature and other humans, the world, when we see ourselves as owners of nature and land rather than part of it, or in relationship with it, without owning.

• A key part of Linklater’s work throughout this book is showing how many different ways there are, and have been, of owning land throughout the world. None of them are set in stone. All of them are cultural.

• Linklater describes a desire for privacy and comfort that inspired some new practices. Question: How far can a person take a desire for privacy and comfort—in the 15th century or now, for example for the introverts among us (including me)—before acting on it begins to have a detrimental effect on others?
  Below is the highlighted quote from the book with the comment from a reader:

• The focus of this chapter is to introduce the revolutionary aspect of private land ownership through the practice of land enclosure that really took off in the 1400s in England. Enclosure, by which people with means and pre-existing ownership claimed common land for their own, for profit, had violent and far-reaching effects (many of which, while Linklater details them, I feel he later glosses over in tone and a bit of a “but progress” reverence):

“In a single day in 1567, Sir Thomas Gray of Chillingham in the north of England cleared off his manor no fewer than 340, villains, cottagers, and laborers whose right to work their plots of land existed simply by tradition. Whole villages and townships were soon emptied—in Shakespeare’s county of Warwickshire alone, sixty-one villages were wiped out before the year 1500.”

• There was a period when it was legal to enslave homeless people in England, such as under the Vagrancy Act of 1547, which came out of the forced removals that made enclosure possible:

“So many peasants were driven off the manors that once supported them, they were deemed a menace to England’s emergent property-owning society. New legislation condemned homeless people without means of support as ‘rogues and vagabonds’ who were liable to branding with a red-hot iron if found begging in the highway.”

• How much modern chatter about homelessness is that different from a few hundred years ago? And how different, truly, are the causes? Below is a relevant quote from a reader from Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516:

• The concept of “home” can be visceral. Who does not crave a sense of home? And what happens when others’ ownership makes “home” tenuous? (Emphasis added in quote below.)

“Yet that was the very point of the revolution, to allow one person to profit from the land, regardless of the consequences to the community.”

• There are many lines in here that make me want entirely different essays, like this one: “Living in a private property society encourages a primacy of self,” on which I left this question:

• Owning land does not exist in a vacuum. It is dependent on the surrounding commons and people who live on them, and it affects them in turn. (This is something discussed more in next week’s reading from law professor Erik T. Freyfogle’s The Land We Share.)

• How do you get such a massive spectrum of land access that includes a Swedish- or Scottish-style extensive “right to roam” (which applies anywhere on private land and includes uses like camping and foraging) and “Trespassers will be shot” attitudes that pervade places like Montana?

• How does ownership relate to a sense of security, or fear of scarcity?

• Not within the reading or the comments, but something I’m perennially interested in because it played a pivotal role in enclosures of the commons, the Highland Clearances, and continues today in public lands grazing rights and battles in the American West: what is it about sheep?

I’d like this to be a discussion open for anyone who wants to participate, without my own narrative framework around it or paywall limitations. Feel free to share. I’ve got readings lined up for 12 weeks, including selections from a variety of books as well as original texts like the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the 1823 court case Johnson v. McIntosh that enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery in U.S. land ownership law, and the 15th-century papal bulls that make up that Doctrine.

This is a bit of an experiment, and I think of it as something we’re doing collectively, rather than something I’m leading. Do you want more time to read and think? More quotes? Fewer quotes? Just one prompt to get started? Let’s figure it out together.

I hope it’ll all be thought-provoking and that we can discuss these concepts with curiosity. Giving one another, as always, a little bit of grace.

All our lives are the commons

There are a lot of new subscribers here at On the Commons, thanks, I think, to Mike Sowden’s overly generous interview with me on Everything Is Amazing. (I’m looking forward to the second half where we geek out over science fiction because I am always ready to geek out over science fiction, which is far more interesting than any words I put out in the world. Let’s talk about Murderbot or A Memory Called Empire and who gets to define personhood, or how climate collapse and societal decay intertwine in The Parable of the Sower, or the power of enforced and self-policed speech, and even perception, in The City & the City, or resource governance and self-determination in The Expanse . . . )

However you got here, welcome. Feel free to ask anything (within reason), either in the comments here or by emailing me directly. As always, if it’s not your thing, no hard feelings. And if you want to go for the paid version but can’t pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set you up, no questions asked.

There are three basic formats to posts from On the Commons (four with the Threadable reading circle, which you can read about here; just scroll past the part about the bear that got into a neighbor’s outdoor chest freezer):
1) intermittent longer essays on a variety of subjects, from highways to authoritarianism;
2) upcoming chapters from my book-in-progress No Trespassing on private property and the commons (these will come slowly over at least two years); and
3) what I call “walking compositions,” weekly-ish, which are a kind of triptych three-section mini-essay combined with a curated list of reading, podcast, and sometimes video suggestions.

I haven’t explained the walking composition concept in a long time (have I ever?), but there’s a story behind that title.

A few years back, when I first started writing my book A Walking Life, I was lucky enough to be accepted at an interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The Banff Centre is a gift to any artist—space, time, beauty, long walks into the mountains or along the river, and really good food. I’ve attended residencies there twice and always dream of going back. Except for the part where the institution is largely funded by tar sands oil money. Which makes it . . . difficult.

I applied for this one because Pico Iyer was heading the writing portion, and the entire residency was structured around the ideas he’d expressed recently in his TED talk and accompanying book The Art of Stillness. It was an Art of Stillness-focused residency that brought together musicians, writers, dancers, choreographers, composers, and visual artists. (Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire led the music section of the residency, and, in addition to being an authentically interesting and down to earth person, managed to completely change my mind about cover songs, which I had never liked—“You mean folk music?” he said.)

The second residency I attended there was one of the writers-only ones and, much as I enjoyed it, I’d take an interdisciplinary group any day. I learned so much from the other artists in that first residency, from the dancer who would spontaneously perform for me outside my studio window, to Christopher House, the choreographer who guided a movement meditation for an hour every morning and who reminded us throughout each session that we were “exploring the deep ethics of optimism,” which I’m still attempting to achieve.

One of the composers in my group, Alex Mah, created works like nothing I’d ever experienced before. In one performance, he had a pile of words on pieces of paper, and sang a kind of dialogue with another singer as they pulled words out one by one. It sounds simple but the way he did it was not. I wish I could fully describe what he does because not much of his work is online. There are some videos, like this one, but they don’t really capture the sensory experience of watching his work, much of which incorporates pauses in a way that gives them texture, a world of their own.

As we were preparing to leave the residency at the end of two weeks, Alex handed me a sheet of paper with what he said was a walking composition for me, like a musical score.

I’d learned by then that when Alex structured words and spaces in particular ways it was for good reason—he wasn’t just decorating the paper. The composition isn’t only the instructions written down, the strolling and treading and so on; it’s the way it’s shaped on the page, how he wrote it. Which, six years later, I still struggle to understand. The only way I’ll ever be able to gain some insight is by continuing to do the practice.

I started performing the walking compositions literally: 500 steps each day, strolling, meandering, pausing once to breathe for a while, all of it. I used Instagram as a small way to share that experiment with the world and ended up pairing a quote from something I was reading or listening to with a photo I took while performing the walking composition.

When I left Instagram and started this newsletter, I pulled that practice over with me. It’s changed, mostly because my words aren’t limited to a brief social media post. But the picture, quote, and thoughts all still entangle themselves in what I experience as a walking composition.

The topics of these triptych mini-essays range freely, from gardening experiments—why won’t the beets grow? (it was the soil; thank you for the advice, elm) how do we have zero cucumbers one year and a zillion the next? and always, always, the battle with knapweed and thistles—to skiing to hunting season to Russia to books I’m reading, whether science fiction or research on private property and the commons. Pretty much anything I end up walking with.

Which often might feel tangential, aside from the gardening with its obvious seeds and soil and commodified food aspect. What does this have to do with the commons?

Part of the reason I think the commons is so important to reinvigorate is because enclosure isn’t just of land and resources but of ideas and experience. A sense of scarcity and competition infiltrates every aspect of our lives. Even the idea of opening up a country’s history to narratives and realities that had previously been oppressed, if not outright killed, is seen as a threat to survival. Of what? Of identities, of a story we’re told, and tell ourselves, about what a society is and what it can be. And so that story becomes enclosed—impervious, its defenders hope, to outside influences.

These stories are commons, too.

Every thought we explore, every cucumber seed we plant, every forest we breathe in and path we walk, every essay that goes viral, every individual experience denied for the sake of another hot take, every child struggling over a poorly-worded math problem or a grief they’re not allowed to articulate, every fence posted with a “No Trespassing” sign, every community destroyed in extraction of a commodity it lives near, every life we injure or enrich, is the commons. Simply by existing, we are in the commons and of the commons.

I touched on this idea briefly toward the end of the original essay I wrote on the commons for Aeon,

“Troubling implications of our fetish for private property abound, well beyond the question of land ownership: the rights of companies to patent and therefore privatise seeds, taking access to food out of the public realm. Battles over open-source computer programming and whether libraries should be privatised bring into question who gets access to the powers of information and creation. . . . our very genes and tissues can be collected, traded, tested, and sold as private property, a prospect many people find appalling. It’s a long road from owning a mobile phone or a quarter-acre lot of surveyed subdivision to owning your genetic information, but all of these examples fall into the question of who owns what. Arguments in favour of preserving the public commons against private interest could be made for every one of them.”

and will explore them more fully in No Trespassing (an overview of that project is here).

When I told Alex Mah after a couple of years that I was still using the composition he wrote for me, he gave me another that instructed me to walk backward for a hundred steps. Which I did, on an ocean-pounded beach in Norfolk, on my way to view a village where 800,000-year-old fossilized hominin footprints had been found before they dissolved into the sea. What did I learn from walking backwards? I don’t know. But it’s something that I remember, the press of my boots on the sand, the roar of the relentless ocean, the feel of the mud cliff walls crumbling as I pulled out a tiny piece of flint rock.

I’ve walked enough by now to know that it’s those memories full of sensory detail—traffic on a city bridge in Pittsburgh, chickadees calling outside my home in early spring, the broken cobblestones of a Boston sidewalk, the particular scent of imminent snow, a child’s scream of frustration, a lover’s glance in the sunlight—those are the memories that stick around, that make a life.

I retained the title “walking composition” because I’m still walking, still thinking, still reading, still wondering, still taking a photo and pairing it with a quote. So is everyone, even without the photos and quotes. I’d love to have us all head out right now, every day in fact, and each find our own walking composition. Isn’t that, in a way, what resistance is—finding and fighting for our own ways to be in the world? Isn’t that what living is?

Walking is always a composition. We compose our lives by walking through them, however that looks and whatever that entails. Every part of that experience is our commons.

I’ve put over 5,000 miles on these boots. We’ve meandered and wandered, trudged and trespassed. We’ve walked so many stories together, and I hope will walk many more.

Walking composition

“Walking teaches patience. It works as an antidote against fear. It erodes cynicism about the violence of fellow Homo sapiens. In its capacity to sustain hope, it makes you a baby again.” —Paul Salopek, from “Cracked World,” Out of Eden Walk

Quick note on Threadable: Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Land Ownership reading circle! And, very seriously, thank you for your patience with the link confusion (see previous post). Please email me if you’re still having trouble. Once you’re on Threadable, there are also other great reading circles to join, like “Water Politics and the World” and “Against Oppression: Black Antifascism(s).”
Our first reading is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which is uploaded on the app and ready for reading and commenting. Next week I will come up with a discussion forum format about the text on this newsletter. From here on out, I’ll put a “Threadable” subhead on any posts related to that project so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to!

Last week I stayed at a Forest Service cabin within a couple hours’ drive of my house. It’s one of my favorite places to be because there’s no internet or even electricity (gas light and stove) and rarely any other people nearby; but it does have the deep nighttime darkness that provides a dazzling starscape once the moon has set.

I sorted through a huge pile of research, read books, sat by the creek for long periods, and got to explore parts of my mind and self I hadn’t spent much time with in a while.

Audio respite: a little over a minute and a half of this babbling creek.

I was sweeping the floor just before leaving the place when I noticed how deeply worn down the sill of the door was. Many of these cabins are old homestead places, but this one was built—if I remember right—by the Forest Service itself for fire crews working in the area. In the nearby campground the evening before, I’d talked with a man who told me that when he was a child the cabin was in active use all the time, people cooking indoors and tents filling the yard outside.

I couldn’t help but think of all the shoes being scraped of dirt that had worn down the wood under the door. A long, clean curve dipped down from the edges, rubbed smooth like stone steps hundreds of years old whose edges have seen lives beyond count.

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I deleted the previous post and am resending with a once-again corrected link and extra apologies because dealing with corrected-link emails is personally one of my least favorite things, so I am very grateful for everyone’s patience. I really hope to goodness this works.

Hello all! If you’re having trouble joining the Threadable reading circle, it looks like there’s an answer. Apologies—when I embedded the link yesterday, Substack turned it into a Substack link, which might be why many are having trouble joining. This link should work: https://threadablenative.page.link/voPLjeE4H7doM8zd8

Don’t hesitate to send me a message if you’re still having trouble. After my not-very-old laptop turning itself into a brick last week, I’m thinking digital technology might have it in for me. Please accept this sunrise from Wednesday morning, one of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a long time, as a balm.

Invitation to Threadable

A few weeks ago I mentioned a project I’m doing with a social reading platform called Threadable. Starting next Monday, October 10, I’ll be leading a three-month reading circle on the Threadable app structured around the subject of land ownership. I just got confirmation that my reading selections have been approved and uploaded to the app, and I’m excited to invite everyone—all subscribers, paying and free, and any friends, relatives, frenemies, strangers, coworkers, book clubs, random acquaintances at the bar, anybody who might be interested—to participate.

This link should get you straight to the app, where you can request to join the reading circle once you’ve downloaded Threadable. (The app is designed for Apple smartphone use. I’ve tried this out on my laptop and it seems to work but looks exactly like a little smartphone screen. Once I downloaded the app it took me straight to the Land Ownership circle, where you can request to join.)

All of the readings are between 10 and 25 pages long. I have one reading per week lined up, starting with Chapter 1 (pages 9-23) of Andro Linklater’s 2013 book Owning the Earth, which I return to repeatedly for its extensive scholarship and knowledge of how and why land gets turned into private property, and what the consequences are for both people and nature itself. The second selection, starting the week after, will be pages 16-36 (in Chapter 1) of law professor Eric T. Freyfogle’s 2003 book The Land We Share, which I chose for Freyfogle’s ability to demonstrate that the laws around land ownership arise out of values and stories a society tells itself. They’re not immutable laws of the universe.

After that we’ll be on to the original Charter of the Forest of 1217, with parts of an accompanying law review article (both accessible online), and then a section of Simon Winchester’s Land (by then I’ll try to have finished my unpublished review of Land and will post it here so I can be transparent about how much I disliked it and why). That’ll be the first session, with the second session focused on the detrimental effects of private land ownership, especially of the Doctrine of Discovery, mostly from the perspective of Indigenous writers and scholars; and the third session on the older philosophical arguments in defense of private property and newer scholarship on how we can start to look at the whole subject differently.

A note on the time commitment: I timed myself reading the first selection while taking notes on it yesterday and it took me about 40 minutes. It’s possible that I read weirdly fast, but I hope the length of the selections won’t be too burdensome for people. Again, none of them are over 25 pages long.

I realized the other day that this public reading project on land ownership will begin on what was once known (and still is in many places) in the U.S. as Columbus Day, celebrating Christopher Columbus; the day is now also known as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. At first this timing felt jarring, given the topic and the fact that Columbus was an eager enslaver and murderer of Indigenous people as well as colonizer of land. It still, to be honest, feels jarring. But maybe it’s also fortuitous. I have a clear purpose for this reading circle, which is to interrogate the very foundation of private land ownership: its legal basis, its history, its role in provoking and perpetuating injustice, theft, and genocide. Why is land able to be privately owned by individuals and what implications does that choice have for the planet and the rest of humanity?

In conservation circles I often hear the line that “private property is bedrock,” but I don’t think that’s true. I think that in many cases private property is what we cling to because so much else has been taken—beginning with land itself. We can see this in the first reading selection, where Linklater gives a brief overview of England’s enclosure movement starting in the 1200s and the tension it created between private profit and the losses of people who no longer had access to the land they needed to survive.

But this is my perspective. Part of what interests me about working with Threadable is that I’d really like to hear more of what other people think. Threadable’s structure happens to be a good fit for my own thought process—reading, taking notes, connecting a lot of seemingly disparate sources—and I hope it will be inviting for others. It will be a space to welcome ideas and discourse. No need (or desire) for dunks or hot takes. All you need to bring is curiosity and a measure of grace for everyone else.

Threadable is still an app in development (you can download it here), and unfortunately for now only functions on iOS (Apple phones). They are working on an Android version. After a couple conversations with subscribers who don’t have Apple but are interested in the subject, I’d like to run a kind of parallel conversation here on On the Commons.

On Threadable, the text selections are uploaded and people can highlight, comment, and have discussions about the text. That won’t be possible here, but I can tell you what book chapters we’re reading and link to texts that are in the public domain, like the 15th-century Papal Bulls that comprise the original Doctrine of Discovery. I’m not sure exactly what that will look like on here, but I’d like as many people as possible to be able to participate in these conversations because I think they’re important. And interesting!

I hope you’ll join, one way or another, in this commons of ideas.

Walking composition

“Decolonizing the colonizers is necessary so that they can once again learn how to respect themselves and others.” —As Long As Grass Grows, Dina Gilio-Whitaker

Over the past two or three weeks we’ve been doing a lot of garden harvesting, which means my hands have been very busy. Digging up potatoes, scrubbing carrots, drying onions, throwing on another batch of cucumbers to ferment, cleaning and freezing huckleberries, cleaning and drying mint (my family goes through a lot of mint tea), roasting and canning tomatoes, deciding what to do with the tomatilloes, thinking about hunting season, . . . there is so much involved in gathering and preserving food for the months ahead, so much for my hands to constantly do.

As someone who’s written a great deal about the importance of walking to being human, it struck me as almost funny when I thought this week about the significant role hands—and by extension sitting still to use them—play in my own relationship with life. But it’s a whole-body thing: my feet in their wandering practice a love for the world; most of what my hands do is about a love for human beings, for all our flaws and failings.

Recently, I’ve felt overcome with the uncanny feeling that these hands are a disembodied part of me, a whole different self busy busy busy picking and chopping and digging and lifting and soothing and caring and hardly ever resting. They write, too, and occasionally play music. I forget that sometimes.

It’s made me wonder how many other caregivers—of earth or of people—have this kind of relationship with their hands. What about artists? Musicians? Sheetrockers, finish carpenters, baristas, photographers, lab techs . . . how many people all around you at this very moment are pouring care into their hands, care that you will never see no matter how visible the work itself is?

This seems like a good time to admit that I have never before liked gardening. My parents can both verify this, having witnessed my complaints for many years, including a two-week period in August when I was sixteen and they were in Russia and I failed to water the garden even once. All the peas dried up and died. It was very sad.

This garden has managed to be different, or I managed to be different with it. I like being in there, like watching the bees work the borage, like planting and weeding and picking and turning over. It’s made a difference that it was more of a collective effort than my gardens have been in the past—my father and stepmother did a tremendous amount of digging and planting, along with a retired friend who managed to turn it into a space to grow food rather than mostly thistles and knapweed. But my hands also just plain enjoyed the work for once, like they enjoy so much other work.

Last week Patrick left a comment with a quote from Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh, whom I’d never heard of before. When I read the whole poem, titled “Sonnet” (I hope I’ve got that right; it was hard to find!), another line hit me: “I am tired / Of loving through the medium of a sonnet.” It brought back to me something I wrote about last year, of being tired of metaphors. Knapweed isn’t white supremacy and thistles aren’t the patriarchy, though they’re very handy metaphors for both (especially as knapweed releases a toxin that makes it hard for other plants to grow, plus wildlife can’t eat it). And the surprising productivity of the garden, despite the clay soil and scant nutrients, isn’t a metaphor for life and birth and death and resilience.

That doesn’t mean metaphors aren’t useful. They’re part of how humans story the world, and I find them necessary when doing science writing because many of the research and concepts are so hard to grasp. But there is something about them that has felt increasingly distancing to me, strangely akin to turning living things and human needs into data points.

The garden didn’t need to become a metaphor for anything. It has had a meaning all its own, its only medium the hands of the people who cared for it.

In his fascinating book The Hand, neurologist Frank R. Wilson lays out a case for the theory that our hands’ evolution and activity shaped hominin brain growth, not the other way around:

“I would argue that any theory of human intelligence which ignores the interdependence of hand and brain function, the historic origins of that relationship, or the impact of that history on developmental dynamics in modern humans, is grossly misleading and sterile.”

Something that happened to a family member recently, a bad hand injury, made me wonder how we might be forced to change if and when our hands can no longer express care in the ways they always have, whether temporarily or forever. How long can I keep picking, hunting, slicing, stirring, serving, stroking, and touching—caring in all the ways that have always come naturally? My hands have been kind to me. I hope I learn not to take them for granted.

I wonder—how many of the metaphors that shape our language and perception come through the use and care of our hands? Maybe it’s not just the brain’s growth that relied on the evolution of human hands, but its ability to transform the world into the stories that in turn mold our lives.

Aspen grove in a forest area near Glacier National Park.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Before he wrote The Hand, Frank Wilson was interviewed for a 1986 New York Times article in which he made the case that not only can humans learn music at any point in our lives, but that we’re evolved to play music: “‘Because of the unique organization of the human brain, not only can everyone be a musician but,’ he says emphatically, ‘all people are meant to express themselves musically.’”

• Paris Marx on the Team Human podcast talking about his book The Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation: “We also need to recognize that not every new technology is good for us, not every new technology is beneficial, and we need to assess these technologies on their merits to make sure that they’re actually going to serve the public.”

• Kyle Rowe on Traffic Technology Today with an I-couldn’t-agree-with-you-more piece on the long-past-due need for abolishing jaywalking laws.

• Hayley Campbell on the Smarty Pants podcast discussing All the Living and the Dead about the labor of death workers—embalmers, undertakers, mass casualty investigators, executioners, and more, including bereavement midwives, who serve the mothers whose babies are certain not to survive. (This episode was a little intense but I think necessary for Campbell’s repeated reminder of how insulated most of us are from the end of life.)

• Smarty Pants with a slightly lighter episode, a conversation about retelling the Eastern European and Russian Baba Yaga fairy tale, transferred to America in GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot.

• Paul Tullis in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with a sobering investigative piece on the avian flu strains mixing and mutating in Netherlands’ poultry farms: “With such broad distribution this year, there is now a very real concern that the spread of a virus that originated with human activity—mass poultry farming—is now coming around to bite humans back.”

• Scotland Outdoors podcast with a conversation with Peter Cairns of Scotland the Big Picture on what it would mean to rewild Scotland: “It perhaps means a different mindset so that we don’t see nature as something to be continually extracted from. It’s not a resource that is just there to serve us. . . . We’ve used it as a commodity, and I think we need to turn a switch off in our minds that has a different reimagined relationship with nature.”

• Nicole Iturriaga writing in Aeon on the role of forensic science in truth, and possibly justice, when investigating genocides and political executions: “The countries that require the services of forensics-based human rights are reckoning with rips to the societal fabric so deep they seem endless – and often, for the victims’ families, they are.”

• Followers of Chris La Tray’s work have probably already seen this one, but if not, first of all I highly recommend becoming one, and secondly, Tony Tekaroniake Evans’s essay in Atmos, “Yellowstone Reveals Its Indigenous Soul,” is one of the more instructive and powerful things I’ve read in a long time: “‘It’s OK again to be who we are here. We are connected again to what this world has to give, not just to the small square of our reservation, which is the same as a [prisoner of war] camp.’ Longknife said the whole concept of land ownership is foreign to her: ‘Our culture is based on reciprocity. For us, it’s crazy to think that we have this land inside this fence, and it’s not yours.’”

Walking composition

“Where’s the glory in making mothers weep?” — “Hey I Don’t Know,” Kongos

Last week I was listening to a podcast episode on green energy—I listened to a few back to back and they kind of blended in together; I can’t remember which one this was and I didn’t really like any of them anyway—that reminded me of People of a Feather, a Canadian documentary I wrote about on here almost exactly two years ago, a musing on the tension inherent in being a consumer of the world (that is, being alive), and being an exploiter of it:

“The residents of the community at the center of the film have lived in balance with ice, seal, eider ducks, and the sea for countless years. But as massive Canadian hydropower projects pump fresh water into the ocean at the wrong times of year, responding to southern neighbors’ needs to heat their homes, the resulting imbalance in ocean salinity puts the entire ecosystem at risk.”

Large-scale green energy projects are generally accepted as part of a necessary transition to a future that might evade climate collapse. What bugged me about all these podcast episodes, though, is also what brought me back to that documentary: What is sacrificed for what others deem necessary, and who is being asked to do the sacrificing?

When people are making decisions about what is considered necessary or right, for whatever reason and at whatever scale, what would change if the first questions we asked were 1) who has to suffer for this to become a reality, and 2) do they have a choice?

Before returning to Russia and her son and grandchildren, my stepmother said to me, “You know, Nia, we cannot fall apart. We have to be strong. It’s how we survived. It’s how we survived in Soviet times, it’s how we survived all these things.” How many times over how many centuries in how many lands have people had to tell one another, tell themselves, tell their children and grandchildren, the same?

A few years ago my stepmother was able to retrieve the Soviet-era records on her family—her grandmother in particular, a poet who spent well over a decade in labor camps—the hard evidence of show trials and exile to prison camps that Putin has worked so hard to suppress, to deny even the memory of. I met her grandmother several times before she died, when we lived in the Soviet Union, and since she could no longer speak English she asked me to read her own poetry in English back to her; it’s one of the most vivid memories of my time there.

Part of poetry’s power, it sometimes seems, is that it’s asked to serve far more purposes than any other writing, articulating both the pains and joys of human existence, of possibility, with precision and depth that defy even the language it relies on.

Pregnant with her second child, who would later die of starvation, my stepmother’s great-aunt (a more famous poet than her sister, the grandmother) wrote a poem that always confuses me with its combination of sorrow throughout with an uplifting prospect that carries the weight in its final lines, which read:

"In the dark midnight, under the ancient trees' shroud
We gave you sons as perfect as night, sons
As poor as the night . . .

We never stopped you, companions for marvelous hours
Poverty's passions, the impoverished meals we shared
The fierce bonfire's glow
And there, on the carpet below,   
Fell stars. . ."

Like so much of Russian literature and music, the poem wraps its love in grief, or its grief in love, encompasses its fears in a seeking for the beauty of the world that never fails us. The poetry that weeps but also caresses.

It’s easy to speak of war in terms of strategic maneuvers and capabilities, but in the end the same questions get buried: Who has to suffer for what someone thinks is necessary, and do they have a choice?

“Like tyrants everywhere and all times,” wrote Timothy Snyder recently of Putin, “he has made a fatal mistake, and so his last act will be to make sure that it is fatal for his own people.” Tracking almost exactly with the kinds of pretense democracy described in Spin Dictators, which my father recently had me read, Snyder writes of the upcoming “referendums” in some Ukrainian regions that,

“It is beside the point to say that such numbers are implausible, because they will just be invented. . . . the fictions provided in the media exercise will be implausible. And deliberately so. The way Russian electoral propaganda works is to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie, and then to show by force that there is no alternative to living as though the lie were true.”

What truths do we tell ourselves about what we think the world needs, society needs, we need? Putin needs the lie of his war to be true. But it’s not the only perceived need in the world that requires the suffering and sacrifice of others who have no choice.

Maybe poetry and love and the beauty of the world are the only truths, or even the only choices, we really have.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• In Machines We Trust podcast on the AI used to monitor underage student content—its claimed benefits for suicide prevention, and its pitfalls with regards not just to privacy, but to interpersonal trust.

• Cyber-security expert Nicole Perlroth on the Your Undivided Attention podcast on a number of cyber-security issues, including how woefully behind the U.S. is on cyber-security awareness and preparation: “I have seen Russian hackers probe our nuclear plants, and they are not there for intellectual property theft. They are probing these plants for bugs in the software that touches these critical systems, just like Stuxnet did.”

• Along with People of a Feather, the short Canadian documentary Angry Inuk is a compelling look at what sustainable consumption within a global market might actually look like.

• Clive Thompson writing in Medium on “rewilding” our attention: “They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete. This is why I always get a slightly flattened feeling when I behold my feed. . . . It’s like checking my reflection in the mirror and seeing stock-photo imagery.”

• In Aeon, graphic designer Jeremy Shuback with a 7-minute video on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 22-foot-wide, 1-foot-tall 13th-century copy of a 4th-century Roman map that looks to be a transit map but is actually a map demonstrating the extent of the empire’s power: “How [innacuracies] shape up show how the benefactors of the map wish for the world to be seen. In shaping how someone sees the world, you shape how they see their role in it, how they see themselves.”

• Nikita Arora writing (also in Aeon) on the wonders of moss and the deceptions of touch: “This, then, is the first lesson that moss taught me: you can touch Time. Not our human time, not even mammal time, but Earth Time. . . . It is a species that cohabits our cities and apartments, a witness to human time and its catastrophic speed. If only touching moss were enough to live at Moss Time.” (This is a delight of an essay if you give yourself the time for it. I loved Arora’s comments on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings on embodiment have been so influential for me and many others: “Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being – to the inevitability of others, both human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back.”)