Author: Antonia Malchik

(Spoiler alert: I don’t know)

For some reason people often ask me about community—how to build it, how to get involved or engaged, what to do to make change. I’m not sure if this is because I frequently talk about the importance of community, or because someone’s read my book and there’s a chapter in there that addresses the role of walking in building community.

Either way, I’m the wrong person to be giving that kind of advice. I’m not a community organizer or even an activist. At best, I could make claims to being an advocate for some broad ideas like public schools, public lands (in ways that I hope help with rather than undermine #landback), and walkability. I don’t, to be honest, even know how to shake “community” out of the cliched buzzword that community has become. It might be that we all have to find that answer for ourselves. Communities are messy. True community takes hard work and involvement from all varieties of people and perspectives and it never ends. With some exceptions, it’s hard to get longstanding, resilient community if it’s made only of people with homogeneous opinions or ideologies, and living in that context of tension can be really hard most of the time. But humans need community—real community, whatever that ends up meaning for each of us—to thrive, and, to keep those communities going, enough people of good heart and care and civic mindedness need to stay involved.

That’s the best I got for the moment.

What I can do is talk about the things I do in my own community, and present some of the research from my book about how walking helps to build community through strengthening social capital. I’m going to break this up into two separate essays, possibly three, starting with the walking/walkability/social capital aspect because, like walking itself, those concepts spin off into a lot of seemingly unrelated things that might help us build better lives and care for a healthier planet.

I first became interested in local engagement when my spouse and I bought a house in a village of around 300 people in upstate New York. In case this evokes visions of a bucolic ideal, “village” is a legal term in New York—there was in fact no town center, only a tiny post office set off the highway, about a mile from my house, next to a mini convenience store that always seemed to have out-of-date milk. All the houses and farmlands were scattered around on comfy acreages with a lot of cornfields and forest and poison ivy everywhere, no sidewalks to be found, laced with narrow country roads full of commuters racing to and from New York City.

The first couple years we lived there, starting in 2002 or 2003, I went to a number of city council and planning meetings, where the planning board was made up of local landowners who were also developers. Newcomers’ perspectives, to put it mildly, were not welcome.

Community instead began to teach itself to me via relationships, like those with some difficult neighbors, or with the organic farmer down the road whose political viewpoints were the polar opposite of mine but with whom I otherwise had a lot in common, eventually including toddlers of the same age who played together in the dirt while we picked raspberries.

(Fun aside: That particular farm was the original one settled by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, which is the only reason I heard of and read his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer. You can read his book at a number of online outlets like Yale Law School—Chapter 3, “What Is an American?” is often referenced among certain historical circles.)

I honestly had no clue then that I was being taught lessons in how community is about connection and relationships and the boundaries of trust, but I did feel how hard it was to develop any of that when all of us lived such isolated lives. Sometimes I walked the mile to the post office but with the traffic and narrow, winding country road it was sketchy, and I never passed another person outside of a car.

Somewhere in the decade-plus we lived there came a year when “say yes” became a theme or a meme or vibe or whatever. A fad maybe. I think it formed the plot of a movie at some point (clearly a forgettable one). I did care about community and civic engagement, and after years of living in big cities I wanted to make more of an effort in that small town I didn’t know we would never leave, so began saying “yes” to things when my first instinct was always (and will forever be), “No, I’d rather stay home with my cats and read a book.”

That’s how I ended up on a volunteer group for the local library and realized that a) being a writer meant people would always assume I know how to do PR (I do not), and b) I am terrible at and dislike doing fundraising. The biggest lesson, though, was that opening oneself totally to “yes” translates into burnout, irritation, and being asked to give more hours than there are in a day. It sucked. I liked the library people but did little of use and ended up low on energy for my kids, much less for myself or my spouse, and extremely cranky.

One of the things I knew in moving back to Montana (to what might be called my secondary hometown, where I went to high school and where my strongest roots are) was that I wanted my family to live in a resilient and connected community—worry about climate change had a lot to do with that and still does—but that would mean putting the work into the community in return.

But you can’t, in fact, say yes to everything. Or at least I can’t. So I decided to choose two areas that I cared most about—and to keep any volunteer activity strictly local—and give my time to those. They also had to be in-person things—showing up at my kids’ elementary classrooms to read with students rather than fundraising for the school, for example. I cannot remember why this was important but it’s been a good guideline for me, especially as, until the pandemic hit two years ago, my spouse traveled more than half the time and was often overseas, and with very young children at home my only opportunities to volunteer were during school hours. Being a freelancer gives me some flexibility in that respect but not everyone will have that kind of option.

Anyway, the two things I knew were most important to me were education—specifically math and public schools—and walking/walkability. I’ve mostly stuck with those, although public lands advocacy has snuck in there as something that I think is, like walking, vital to the future of being human. (I also have come to believe that livable communities where people want to be are crucial for the future of some kind of intact natural world and a habitable planet, but that’s another topic.)

One of the advantages of my town was that I could walk into a place that already had decades of local engagement, including developing an extensive bike and trail system during the twenty years I lived elsewhere. So when I ended up on a bike/pedestrian volunteer group for four years, the groundwork on that subject was already done, and that’s even more true for the bike/ped-oriented city committee I started a three-year term on last year. I have people to learn from and long-term projects to join and that’s a tremendous advantage. I try to keep a thirty-year vision in my head of what I want my community to look and feel like, but I was fortunate enough to come in at the end of other people’s thirty-year vision.

But when it comes to walking, there’s a reason I talk and write about advocacy groups—GirlTrek in particular—far more than I’ll ever mention Henry David Thoreau. GirlTrek began as a way to get Black girls and women walking together for their health—thirty minutes five days a week—and grew to informally encompass community engagement that meets the level needed in one’s own place. The work they do is phenomenal. When I walked with GirlTrek in Denver, Colorado, Pam Jiner taught me about the missing safe routes to the neighborhood swimming area and park, and the intersections where drivers always failed to stop, and how she takes city councilors on walking audits so they can experience the problems for themselves.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the GirlTrek leaders led our group from the National Walking Summit on a tour of the Rondo neighborhood and gave a history lesson in how the eight-lane I-94 freeway created what is essentially an impassable canyon right in the middle of the neighborhood in the 1950s-60s, destroying homes and thriving businesses, and how Rondo has spent the ensuing decades rebuilding its connections and resilience. Walking a community like Rondo gives a visceral understanding of how disastrous the decades of federal highway building was—and remains—for mostly Black communities across the U.S. It’s lessons like that that led me to my own local city council meetings last year to advocate against my state’s proposed expansion of the already extremely busy highway that runs through the center of my very small town.

Walking can be, I think, a perfect introduction to community engagement for those thirsty to get involved. Can you walk out your front door? Is there a sidewalk missing? Why? How can you find out? Whom can you reach out to about getting one? Which department handles it and how do their project prioritizations and budget work? What are the barriers to progress? Where is self-directed mobility made impossible for a wheelchair user or anyone else but the most hale and bipedal of people? (The answer to that one is most places.) What can you do about it? Why are there areas where you have to walk a quarter mile between even semi-safe crosswalks on busy four- to five-lane thoroughfares? How do you get people to stop parking on the sidewalk? (If you find an answer to that last, please tell me.)

Some of these questions come down to national transportation policy—in the U.S. and many other countries, car supremacy above all other mobility forms—but others have local answers, like repairing crumbling sidewalks or figuring out a safe route for kids to walk or bike to school. We can learn from national groups like America Walks about how to advocate (they do train advocates through their Walking College!), but the approaches will be local, dependent on your own community’s character, expectations, budget, laws, and willingness to change. Every community’s starting place is different.

Walking is also a good introduction because it really does build community in itself, through the development of what’s termed “social capital,” also known as “neighborliness.” I wrote about this idea at more length in A Walking Life:

“The academic idea of social capital has been around at least since the 1920s, although obviously community and neighborliness have been around for much longer than that. It was only when we began losing these things that we had to find ways to define and quantify and study them. . . . Dr. Cletus Moobela, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth’s School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, wrote that relatively high social capital has been shown to increase productivity and prosperity, decrease rates of depression, suicide, heart attacks, and cancer; reduce crime, child abuse, and drug abuse; and even make government agencies more responsive and efficient. It’s also characterized by high levels of trust and civic engagement. Both rampaging kids and the cranky neighbor who yells at them to get off the lawn are strengthening their community’s social fabric.”

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone describes social capital in more depth, including its origination:

“The first known use of the concept [social capital] was not by some cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era—L.J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of ‘social capital’ to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to ‘those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among individuals and families who make up a social unit.’”

Putnam hit obliquely on walkable communities again and again throughout Bowling Alone. “The car and the commute,” he wrote, “are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggest that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10%.” Driving to work an hour a day doesn’t lend itself to showing up at city council meetings, but it also doesn’t make knowing your neighbors easy, or lead to either of you investing time in the welfare of the other or in uncompensated civic engagement that benefits people you never meet:

“In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful an influence on civic involvement as education, it is more important than almost any other demographic factor. . . . Strikingly, increased commuting time among the residents of a community lowers average levels of civic involvement even among noncommuters.”

It’s in granular, often inconsequential, actions that social capital is formed, the neighborly interchanges that can only really happen in person and by chance among wide varieties of people. To make that happen, you need time for people to be in their community—not just running errands in a car—as well as urban design that makes chance and inconsequential interactions possible.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg most recently has written about public libraries as well as social capital in New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but he started by studying a heat wave in Chicago that killed 739 people in 1995. It wasn’t wealth that saved people; it was close-knit community. One of the city’s poorest neighborhoods at the time, Auburn Gresham, had one of the highest rates of survival due to its social capital:

“It had restaurants, churches, stores, and community clubs and organizations. It was a place where ‘people hung out on the street,’ and residents told Klinenberg that during the heat wave they’d known whom to check up on. Despite being known as one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, Auburn Gresham paid a lower toll for the heat wave than wealthier suburbs across town.”

Dr. Moobela’s research goes deeper into how infrastructure itself helps to build these connections and strengthen social capital, and it all comes down to walkability by design:

“While some forms of urban development can encourage social capital, others don’t, and the main difference lies in whether they facilitate physical interactions among people: pedestrian-oriented design such as accessible public spaces, sidewalks, and houses with front porches, among other features intended to bring people in contact with one another, contribute highly to social capital.”*

Walking and walkability both increase civic engagement and help to build trust among people in a community. That doesn’t mean the engagement doesn’t take work, or that trust is never broken, but when you need people to step up to help your town or neighborhood function, or when hardships come and people need to work together for survival, investment in social capital pays itself back ten times over.

And walkability forces engagement in other issues: homes in walkable, mixed neighborhoods and towns—where you can walk to a variety of services, schools, cafes, etc.—have become increasingly desirable over the last decade or so, meaning that as walkability goes up, affordability starts to drain away. Which provides an opportunity to ask, as I did constantly when writing my book, “Who gets to walk, and where?”

This is important. I don’t work directly on local affordable housing issues partly because I’m already overcommitted but mostly because a lot of excellent people are already doing that. But it doesn’t mean I can’t do work related to affordable housing. The crisis in my town has gone beyond acute, and issues of affordability and walkable design are interconnected.** Neighborhoods can’t built cohesion if most homes are owned by wealthy part-time residents or rented out for short-term units, or if an apartment building is torn down so a development company based goodness-knows-where can build luxury condominiums. Or, my personal recent favorite, “lifestyle condominiums.” I have no idea what that means but I bet it’s not cheap. (I live in a tourist destination so these examples are specific to my town; where you are might have very different issues with housing.)

Perhaps Jane Jacobs put it best in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a section pushing back on the claim that neighborhoods needed to be “ethnically cohesive” to be stable—an assumption that was common in the 1950s and 60s when she was writing, and is still too often made today:

“Neighborhoods that work, that have high levels of social capital, ‘contain,’ Jacobs wrote, ‘many individuals who stay put.’ Communities with strong social capital, especially in cities, tend to be sticky. People stay put, even at different stages of life and through changes in careers. They build trust over many years and countless interactions.”

So maybe that’s the larger goal of how I spend my volunteer time when it comes to walking and walkability: I want a place that’s “sticky”—one where enough people want to stay put, where they want to live, but also one where it’s both possible for people to stay put, and for people who’ve left to come back home again when they feel the urge.

“Walking and social capital,” I wrote in A Walking Life,

“exist in direct relationship, each strengthening the other, and that same walkability, the ways in which we perceive walking and have access to walking, has a direct effect on how well our societies function, and for whom. How public spaces are created and maintained, how we use them, and who gets to use them without repercussions, makes a difference to the health of our neighborhoods, towns, and nations. Walking is both a cornerstone of a functional society, and a deeply political act in its own right.”

So I work on walking. One could say it’s my “thing,” which is true, but I also believe in it on many levels, in its capacity to restore and uplift our lives and the planetary life our lives depend on; and believe that people’s right to access it is vital for individual health and the health of our communities.

Walking itself, as many have shown over the centuries, can be an act of citizen engagement and community building on its own. Even if you never get around to pestering city council to fix the sidewalk.

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*The exception to this is gated communities. Dr. Moobela’s research has shown an inverse relationship between gated communities and social capital, and other research has backed this conclusion up. Not only that, but it is possible for gated communities to damage the social capital of surrounding neighborhoods by undermining trust and a sense of social contract:

“Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, who published the book Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States in 1997, wrote that the social exclusion these neighborhoods foster can be dangerous for the cohesion of nearby communities: ‘without social contact, the social contract that underpins the health of a nation will be damaged. . . . We no longer speak of citizens, but rather of taxpayers, who take no active role in governance, but merely exchange money for services.’”

**On the flip side, forcing all affordable houses out to driving distances—especially in a place with little or no public transportation—has other costs. People who are totally dependent on a car to get to work, etc., use nearly 20% of their income on transportation, whereas that expense can be as low as 7-9% of income when there’s good public transit. So I also do engage in what feels like an intractable, never-ending push—it’s more like a plea—for a reliable and comprehensive county-wide public transit system as part of my “walking” portion of volunteer time.

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The next part of this essay (essays?) will be on education and public schools, specifically the various ways that I annoy people about math, but might also address time (or lack thereof). There might be a third part on trust. I promise to be more organized about all this when this newsletter shifts to paid sometime after the end of June, but for now I’ve just got a few days between copy editing assignments!

Walking composition

“I don’t know if I can explain how fundamental this is. If someone comes to your table, you feed them, even if it means you’re a little hungrier. That’s how it works.” —Psalm for the Wild Built, Becky Chambers

My father and I talk about the goose he’s going to cook that day. Friends of theirs own a small farm outside of Moscow and gave them a goose. So they planned goose for dinner, and we talk about how to cook it, and later I think of all the stories he’s told me of his childhood under Stalin and then Khrushchev and how honest conversations and trust are channeled in repressive regimes, like the canals of St. Petersburg, beautiful but strictly bounded. Made precious by their integrity.

I’ve been reading lessons for ten- and eleven-year-olds about endangered species and animal husbandry and related vocabulary. Now, every day, the damage that extractive, domination-oriented, and commodification-driven human behavior has caused (and continues to cause) the rest of the living world is wound through with thoughts of current war and oppression. Maybe it always should be, because it always is.

The previous textbook had the students learning the word captivity.

“Say the word captivity.”

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My thoughts are scattered and indistinct. I talk to my father and message with my cousin, read textbooks and think all day of reading Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily diary entry, of how I can make myself present for her life right now, and all the lives she is representing. Of her risks as she chooses to stay in her beloved city. Of my own grandmother who became a refugee in the Urals with her two young children during the Siege of Leningrad, and of my grandfather who barely escaped starvation when he stayed behind.

I told a friend this week that I’m just not very good company. I’m unfairly impatient with everyone and our first-world problems, including myself. So I’ve been trying to reground. I don’t have a goose to cook, but I ordered seed potatoes and talked with the owner of the local composting service about what we might need to feed and restore the soil where last year we grew happy peas and raspberries and miserable cucumbers.

I think of the masses of worms in the garden and of the elk head I put in the back (apologies for that image) last fall, alongside the previous year’s buck head, now cleaned entirely by birds and flesh beetles. And try to remember that winter will end (too soon for me) and the thistles and knapweed will start to grow and that I must do better about showing care for this land I’ve promised to husband.

I need to consider dirt again. Which then reminds me of Ukraine’s rich farmland and how Stalin’s collectivization drive and insistence that Ukraine export all its food led to the starvation of millions.

“Use captivity in a sentence.”

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After talking with my father about the goose, I had to get back to work. I read a book about an Asian elephant who lost her forefoot and got a prosthetic from a free elephant hospital in Thailand. She lost her forefoot after stepping on a land mine in a former war zone where she worked as a logger. I read that, and then read it again because I had to meticulously cross-check the original text with an excerpt in the textbook, and then thought, I don’t know if I can do this anymore.

How many people in the most dire situations, now and for millennia past, have thought the same? Have seen and known cruelty beyond imagining except it’s not beyond imagining because it happened. It happens. And yet somehow we have to be among it all. Have to know of the land mines that will destroy the lives of generations of humans and elephants and wonder about how to turn all this around, and still check the grammar and think about what to make for dinner and help a kid with their math homework.

Someone left a land mine for a young elephant to step on. Someone else set up a free hospital to care for injured elephants. The world is covered with people eager to repair the harms of this world. The question is whether our capacity for caring and repairing can ever overtake our capacity to destroy and harm.

“Have the students say the word captivity.”

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Bonus photo: the gates of the Summer Gardens next to the Fontanka Canal in St. Petersburg, Russia somewhere near midnight in summer 2006.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• I generally assume that anyone who reads this newsletter also follows Chris La Tray’s newsletter An Irritable Métis (and if not, you should!), but just in case, this is a fantastic 4-minute documentary of him made by teens for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

• Russian history professor Cynthia Hooper writing in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about Russians’ cultural relationship with information and misinformation: “History and psychology suggest that the issue of ‘belief’ in propaganda is not straightforward, and that the majority of Russian society cannot simply be dismissed as ‘brainwashed’ by the Putin regime. Russian people do not have a record of gullibility, but rather a long tradition of irreverent humor and coded criticism of dictatorial power discernible only by ‘reading between the lines.”’

• “The Voyagers,” by Bill Donahue in The Atavist is an excellently written and winding tale of a Ukrainian-born father who braved the Bering Strait crossing from Russian Siberia with his six-year-old son in 1945: what drove him out of the Soviet Union, how he escaped, and what came after.

• Randy Rosenthal in The American Scholar reassesses Jack Kerouac’s influence on Buddhism and meditation in America, and how to reconcile it with his less appealing legacies and the fact that Kerouac “made up” a lot of his own Buddhism and later abandoned it for Catholicism.

• Nityanand Jayaraman has been walking with a fisher elder and writing of what he learns of fisher science through their essays-in-conversation in “Science of the Seas:” “The everyday science of artisanal fishers is democratic, freely available and has its own pedagogy of embedded apprenticeship. . . . Unlike the exalted institutional sciences that produce predominantly elite and upper-caste experts, and whose expertise are accessible only to the powerful, Palayam’s expertise is subaltern, and an essential qualification for any fisher that ventures out to sea and returns home safely—with or without fish.”

• “Landed,” a four-part series on the Farmerama podcast about going back to the family farm in Scotland and daring to imagine a different vision for a more just and sustainable farming future: “This indigenous land management system is agro-ecology in action and at scale. This is both a food production system and a way of life where rewilding and re-people-ing can complement one another.” (Quote is from episode 2; I can’t link to the episodes directly; scroll down past episode 67 to the series titled “Landed.”) I thought the series would be interesting but found myself quickly riveted with the many directions the host took the question that drove him: “Is the small family farm a colonial construct?” It all comes back to the commons, and of relearning how to belong to the land we live among, and from.

• If I had an Anne Helen Petersen-style weekly “just trust me,” this piece from G. Travis Norvell in The Christian Century about reimagining church parking lots would be it, not for writing style or a particular story, but for the opportunity to follow along an insightful and grounded reimagining of what space is for: “What if a church parking lot functioned more like a bridge than a wall? What if it functioned like a plaza where the faith community re-neighbors itself to its once familiar home?” There is so much in here, from church parking lots being used as protected play spaces for kids or tiny home housing, to what happens to a church when it seeks only to cultivate a congregation drawn from outside its neighborhood.

• And totally random but kind of incredible, an hour of French pianist Sofiane Pamart playing under the Northern Lights in Lapland, Finland. (I wish during the twenty-minute interview afterward he’d answered the question of how his fingers felt. Freezing hands are my main stumbling block when hunting, or in fact being outside in winter at all. I have no idea how he just looked so . . . chill.)

Walking composition

“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire?” —Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes

I have deadlines piling up faster than I can meet them and am having a lot of trouble focusing—part post-Covid brain fog, part an inability to drag my attention away from Ukraine and Russia. In the mornings I talk with my relatives in Russia and every twenty-four hours the situation has degraded a little more; in the evenings I read Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily war diary from Kyiv. Yesterday she wrote about meeting a famous war correspondent buying detergent in a store:

“Then she told me her name. I can’t remember the name. I’ve been having a hard time concentrating lately. Then she said, ‘You can follow me on Instagram.’ The group bought a lot of detergent, almost everything in the store. I told them, ‘Good to have you with us,’ and said goodbye. But quickly an uneasiness came over me. I realized that it is not a good sign when a well-known war photographer sets up shop here with a group of escorts.”

You can follow me on Instagram. The more I think about it, the more it feels like Don’t Look Up was a metaphor for the absurdity of how modern life expects us to meet any and every crisis. I know people have many conflicting responses to that movie, but to me it felt less even a metaphor for climate change and more one about risking clean water to build an oil pipeline, or using it for fracking fluids. How can we rationalize risking clean water for anything? But that question—“How can we . . . ?”—is interchangeable for far too much.

I’m here to document the war on your country. You can follow me on Instagram.

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The corner of northwest Montana where I live is finally shifting toward spring. We grumbled ourselves together to make the last night of night skiing up on the mountain yesterday, more to catch the sunset from there one last time than to ski, as the conditions are patchy at best. I felt down and still in recovery mode from being sick, but I’m glad we made it. I love the way the sun seems to slide backward in the west, slipping past the mountains like a long, slow, theatrical goodbye. We have to take these moments when we can—winters here tend to be so overcast that for months I find I don’t even look up very often. In the mornings, when I’m fumbling around making coffee, I peer up through the window to see if a star or two is making it through, and almost every time it’s just overcast, as if the sky above the clouds isn’t even there, though it’s brilliant enough in the summer.

Last night, though, when we got back to the car, we slid around on the ice and craned up at the sliver-moon and patches of stars shining clear among the clouds.

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Ever since I moved back home to Montana (it’s been nearly eight years now, hard to believe), I’ve spent more and more time imagining what this land was like before Europeans carved it up and privatized it. It’s a different sensation, one I recommend: walk around anywhere in the world and let the land show you what it was before highways and railroads and concrete and No Trespassing signs. Letting the view wash over me as the sun sets high over the mountains gives that sensation, the feeling that this land is something other than what colonizers have made it. But also that privatization, the carving up and commodifying, is part of a longer war.

In the last episode of Third Squad, host Elliott Woods talked about the U.S. military’s pull-out from Afghanistan last autumn and the end of our country’s longest “forever war.” I wonder: What if all the wars are forever wars? What if the battles perpetuated in our time are evidence that none of the wars have never ended, and their causes run deeper than any amount of analysis is willing to examine, threading back through time as humanity batters itself in conflicts none of us fully understand?

Bonus photo: heading toward the last alpenglow of winter.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• A short video on the history of zero via Aeon. (One of my favorite things to do when I play math games with third-graders is to tell them about how the number zero used to be illegal.)

• With electric vehicles making a showing even in Super Bowl ads now, I think it’s as ever important to be reminded that the issues with cars isn’t just about the combustion engine. There is a whole spectrum of harm that happens with a car-centric world. Take the ongoing research with the damage caused by tire particles that end up in waterways.

• And related to car-centric infrastructure, there are some interesting conversations going on around finding ways to restore the Rondo neighborhood St. Paul, Minnesota, that was razed to build the I-94 freeway.

• Erin Berger in Audubon with a review of Jessica Hernandez’s new book Fresh Banana Leaves: “Among the most important ideas for Hernandez is that of nature as kin—which would preclude the utilitarian approach common in Western environmentalism, with its foundations in preserving nature’s usefulness to humans or a perceived purity of wilderness.”

• Paul M. Sutter writing in Dark ‘N’ Light magazine on the nature of time: “This is called the relativity of simultaneity, but I like to call it the death of the universal now. I have my now, you have your now, and we will never, ever agree. Yes, we can use Einstein’s math to translate from one reference frame to another, but I can never replicate your experience, your flow of time, from my point of view.”

• Cullen Murphy’s essay in The American Scholar on The City & The City and how societies fall apart made me wonder if I should go ahead and read that book: “But societies do fall apart, and there is no single reason why. One historian, years ago, decided to collect and enumerate all the scholarly explanations for the fall of Rome. He counted upward of 210 specific theories. . . . I had a decision to make. Should The City & the City go alongside Kafka and Borges or alongside Frederick Douglass and Eric Foner and other writers who made America their subject?”

• Ramin Skibba writing in Aeon on the conundrums of dark matter—nobody has yet proven it exists—and whether there might be room to consider that physicists haven’t yet developed a full understanding of gravity and its quirks: “Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde began developing a theory known as ‘emergent gravity’ to explain why gravity was altered. . . . When space-time gets curved, it produces gravity, and if it’s curved in a particular way, it creates the illusion of dark matter.”

• The final (I think), difficult and important episode of Third Squad. “Dutcher’s voice is one in a chorus of the dead who are always with me.”

Walking composition

“A mere aristocracy of wealth will never struggle while it can hope to bribe a tyrant.”
—Progress & Poverty, Henry George, 1879

There are things I can’t say.

I was talking a few days ago with friends asking about my father’s current situation in Russia and wrote that I realized “my entire life has been tangled up with a thread of knowing that there are some things you can’t talk about, even in private phone calls or messages, because of the risk to yourself or others.”

And how strange that must seem. And how a strong urge to avoid telling people what to think or how to feel (despite having strong opinions about what people should think or how they should feel) is born out of a lot of things, one of them being the experience of going about your daily business knowing there’s a government tap on your phone. Not “the government is spying on everyone” but an actual, targeted, individual tap. On your phone. Listening to your own private conversations.

Now we have end-to-end encryption for the masses, and still my cousin in Moscow publicly posts her love for Ukraine and outrageously courageous critiques, calls to resist. “I can’t seem to come to my senses,” she writes. “I am still trying to find bits of optimism in myself.”

—-

This isn’t about Russia because it’s about Ukraine, but in a way it is about Russia because as Chris La Tray wrote on his newsletter yesterday, we Americans are the Russians. But in truth we’re all Russia, and Ukraine, and Syria, and so many other places, at once. Everywhere, really. I can’t say it better than Chris:

“We are trying to view it as good vs. evil and it just isn’t that. We are part of it, whether we like it or not. It is something we do to ourselves and each other over and over again. Are we recognizing this? Will we be the ones to turn the tide? I’m not inclined to think so.”

I looked at Netflix the other day because my mother told me about the show that the current Ukrainian president had once starred in, Servant of the People, about a teacher who accidentally gets elected president. And then Netflix auto-showed me the trailer for its new show about Vikings, and I just couldn’t. I can’t anymore. With the glorified violence, no matter how long ago and no matter how well produced with actors who, as the Danish Nordic Animism scholar Rune Rasmussen has put it, “look like underwear models.” How many millions of people over how many millennia have been exhausted and damaged and killed by wars they had no choice in? No amount of dressing up broody, muscular blond men in furs changes the reality that war ruins the lives of those who least deserve it. There is no glory in that, and no redemption either.

—-

Longtime readers might remember my mentioning on a post a while back, maybe a year ago, my surprise at receiving a tiny book in the mail from a publisher called Isolarri. I’d never heard of them and still have no idea how I got on their subscription list, but yesterday got an email update that they are hosting a War Diary for one of their Ukrainian writers, Yevgenia Belorusets (author of their Isolarri book Modern Animal*), who lives in Kyiv. On Sunday, she wrote:

“The fourth day of the war is over. Half the city is fighting against the normalization of violence that is knocking on every door. War also tests us to see if we have even a touch of compassion for those sent here to murder.”

In the book I’m currently reading, Konstantin Kustanovich’s Russian and American Cultures, he writes of Fyodr Dostoevsky and other Slavophile-adjacent “Men of the Soil,” who claimed that Russians had a unique capacity for compassion because they have a unique connection to Christ born of their centuries of slavery, oppression, and suffering. Perhaps the reality, writes Kustanovich, is that Russians’ capacities for both compassion and cruelty come not from any religious root but from those very centuries of suffering.

I’m inclined to think we all have that mix in us. Poke back far enough and nearly everyone’s line has a history of suffering and oppression. Only a few, usually the perpetrators and certainly those who’ve benefited the most, are free from it, at least at a large-scale societal level. In their own homes I’m not so certain.

In Russian Orthodoxy, Kustanovich sees not Russia’s faith but its new center of nationalism, tracing the church’s religious practices back centuries to when its locus was in Kyiv and a struggle against Western influences began with a resistance to Latin and led to an enormous schism over symbols and spellings rather than essential teachings. (This was a bigger deal than I’m making it out to be; to this day there are Old Believer communities adhering to those beliefs, many of whose ancestors were driven out by tsars starting in 1652.)

“This suspicion, often even hatred, toward the West as the ultimate villain permeated Russian culture for centuries. . . . The legacy of these anti-Western attitudes remains overwhelming in today’s Russia, creating paranoia about Western intentions and determining Russian opinions and reactions in international politics.”

The battles we see are never only of their time. Every conflict has the fears and resentments and self-entitlement of a thousand years at its back.

*Isolarri is now offering Modern Animal for sale to non-subscribers, with all profits going to relief efforts in Ukraine. They describe the book as: “based on interviews that reveal the psychology and myth-making of Ukrainians living in the Donbas, it is a magical realist document of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Precisely what comes after auto-fiction.” I don’t know what auto-fiction is but I enjoyed the book.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• For no reason in particular (kidding) I reread last year’s excellent investigative report by Elisabeth Eaves for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on why the U.S. is investing billions of dollars in pre-outdated missiles and why they’re housed all over the sparsely populated American West.

• A riveting essay on Aeon by Lilian Pearce about the lead-contaminated Australian mining town of Broken Hill and what it means to have a sense of home in a place that has been so abused by industry and capital: “A strong sense of place does not necessarily correlate with pro-environmental values. Sometimes we are pushed – even coerced – into complex, intimate forms of kinship with places. Sometimes these relationships are beneficial, or benign. But sometimes they can become dangerous or deadly under the influence of global systems of capital, power and the evasion of responsibility.”

• An insurance company in Australia developed Climate Warriors, a Minecraft-based game that helps kids understand the coming consequences of climate change and lets them experiment with mitigation strategies in real time. (I hate that this is needed, but I do love what a useful tool Minecraft can be, like when people built a library for censored books in it.)

• My spouse and I were catching up on Star Trek: Discovery and got to the episode where they have to pass through the Galactic Barrier. Confession: I’d never really thought about galaxies having an “edge.” This explanation from Space Australia helped me understand the dark matter and drop-off in star density, but also made me think the Star Trek depiction was highly fanciful. (Which is fine. I love Star Trek anyway. I don’t know where I got the idea that Discovery would be more scientifically accurate, considering that they travel using a made-up spatial mycelium network and also get stuck 900+ years in the future.)

• Could we describe the relationships and proportions of the real world without imaginary numbers? Michael Brooks writing in Nautilus says that “what we’re discovering here is not some deep mystery about the universe, but a clear and useful set of relationships that are a consequence of defining numbers in various different ways.”

• The Leakey Foundation’s Origin Stories podcast has a short interview with Evan Hadingham about his book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins: “Our human ancestral line, it’s not one branch of a single tree. It’s more like a burgeoning bush or a braided stream. Just like any other species, there have been many experiments that failed along the way. Why should we expect ourselves to be any different?”

• The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a case that might overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). I recommend again the second season of the podcast This Land that goes deep into the law, why it exists, and what is behind the push to overturn it.

• Cambridge University has made its Ukraine papers free and open to the public until the end of March. Have at it.

Not-walking-anywhere composition

“It’s all bullshit.” —my dad, frequently

My family is crawling out from a double wallop of strep throat followed by our first ever Covid infection followed by one kid’s possibly allergic reaction to antibiotics prescribed for the strep throat. I cannot, truthfully, remember the last time I’ve been this sick, except way back when, when the kids were still babies and I myself got a horrible case of strep (a long history of personal horrible strep is why I’m always eager to treat it with antibiotics early, but lesson learned in this case).

Even walking the dog was hard, and that was before a snowstorm and frigid weather blew in, bringing -26°F (-32°C) wind chill. Today it’s a balmy high of 13°F (-10°C).

I hoped we’d escape effects like brain fog, and exhaustion, and crawling around the house trying to feed people chicken soup and orange juice and tea, while wanting to do nothing but huddle miserably under blankets. But here we are. Or were. I’m not sure. Thankfully—truly, said with an enormous amount of gratitude—good friends and relatives kept us supplied with essentials and good thoughts. We’re so lucky.

I didn’t escape the brain fog, though. After watching all of The Baby-Sitter’s Club again, my mind was almost up to reading Murderbot. It took so long, every scene a step-by-step challenge. By the time I finished the last novella, all I could think was a) I love Murderbot (not new news), and b) reading is hard.

—-

Most of my digital photos of Russia are lost in too many iterations of photo archives. Shutterfly spits up hordes of gray squares, and many others are stuck in old backup hard drives and iterations of when cloud storage was new and everything went into various platforms that I have no idea how to access. (Luckily, I am slightly controlling and obsessive and order prints of everything once a year before it gets lost to the ether; I hope that will still be an option in the future.) It’s hard to believe that I’ve got digital image memories twenty years old lurking grayly in Shutterfly’s servers (I switched to Snapfish sometime in the last ten years because their print quality was better).

I don’t think I need to tell anyone why Russia is on my mind, and Ukraine, and this beautiful heartbreak of a country that I have admired, felt part of, and loved all my life—most of it from afar. As a 1970s/80s child, my Russia was locked away behind the Iron Curtain, unreachable except for an occasional and incredibly expensive phone call from a neighbor’s kitchen, my father living in exile for seventeen years.

I don’t want that to be my world again, my family unreachable and my father’s country considered an enemy. I have two new nieces I haven’t even met yet. But who knows where we’ll end up. Mostly, I don’t want the people of Ukraine to have to face the stupid, insane cruelty of what’s coming.

—-

Trying to dig my mind out of Covid-dom, I finally picked up a book (very timely) that an old friend of my father’s wrote, Russian and American Cultures, by Konstantin V. Kustanovich, professor emeritus of Russian at Vanderbilt University.

Like Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians: A History, Kustanovich’s book looks to explain Russia’s unique and often inexplicable worldview and societal structures through culture; skimming parts of later chapters, it looks like he gets into more detail about how tightly repressive tsardom and the necessity of collectivist peasant society led to a difficult-to-transform dependence on authoritarianism mixed with suspicion of authority. You don’t have to read far to get to the book’s promise: the first section of the introduction is titled “What is wrong with Russia?”

Once, as my sister put it, I figure out how to navigate around the Swiss cheese holes in my thinking processes, I look forward to reading some answers, or at least ideas.

*Photo up top is of the Church of the Archangel Michael, Arkhangelskoe, Russia, on Maslenitsa 2005. The festival of Maslenitsa isn’t one I know much about—supposedly it has ancient pre-Christian pagan roots as a celebration welcoming back the sun and is now tied to the beginning of Lent—aside from copious amounts of blini pancakes to eat and the requesting of forgiveness from friends and loved ones. Please forgive me. If only the world, including Russia’s leaders themselves, could enter into that fullness of forgiveness and the asking of it for a day.

Maslenitsa this year begins on Monday, February 28.

Bonus photo: a statue of Bulat Okudzhava, folk musician of the 1960s, on the Arbat. Kustanovich opens chapter 1 of his book with a 1964 quote from Okudzhava: “It’s a pity that we dream of idols as we did before, and we still keep seeing ourselves as slaves.”

Super short list of stuff to read, listen to, or watch (although I can recommend The Baby-Sitter’s Club, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which is about where my brain has been the last week, plus I found myself more irritated than usual with anyone telling me what to think about things. I vote Baby-Sitter’s Club for president of all the countries and they also get to be the thought-leaders.):

• Before my brain shut down, I got a lot out of this incredible interview with legal scholar Mark Squillace on a water rights case in Colorado, the fight against privatization of public waters, and the case’s deep connection to the establishment of the public trust in U.S. states.

• Ditto this War on Cars interview with Jessie Singer about her new book There Are No Accidents, which starts with the story of a driver and the cyclist he hit but branches out into how hard we work to pretend that so many injuries and deaths are by accident, when in fact they’re a failure of design—often an intentional one.

• Someone in a Discord server I peek at sometimes posted this link to a video of kulning, an ancient Swedish herding call, by Jonna Jinton. I could probably listen to that all day. Jinton’s channel is a little too ethereally beautiful in a Galadriel-in-Lothlorien kind of way, but also hard to look away from. Here’s one for the life-hacking people who swear by a daily cold shower. (I buy the dunk in the ice. I do not totally buy the sitting by the small fire in wet underwear afterward.)

• Which led to someone else posting a slightly over-dramatized but equally fascinating video of the ancient whistled language of La Gomera.

• I wasn’t up to writing much of anything new, but had this interview with Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept (which I truly loved), queued up on Medium. She also recently came out with a second book, 52 Ways to Walk (under the name Annabel Streets), which I have on my shelf and am looking forward to poking around in. It’s a long interview, but I didn’t cut it down much because Abbs is smart, insightful, and delightful.

Walking composition

“If we want to understand the origins of violent domination in human societies, this is precisely where we need to look. Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure.” —The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow

Some years ago when we still lived I upstate New York, I began working at a sawmill. A micro-mill, to be specific, run by a woman (also, coincidentally, from Montana) who’d bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 and specialized in milling wood from downed and diseased trees on public and private land. It was more of an internship really, as I didn’t get paid and had asked if I could come a couple days a week. I’d recently gotten into rustic woodworking (partly because motherhood was driving me insane) and couldn’t get enough of working with the diversity of hardwoods that grow and fall in the U.S.’s northeast. I learned about the different high-end uses of maple, and how bad black locust smells but how useful it is. I learned how mold causes spalting and how beautiful its lacy effects can be. The owner sent me on a day-long chainsaw safety course, where I stood in knee-deep snow and cut down a pin oak and decided I never wanted to use a chainsaw again because I am clumsy and it was terrifying.

One day, we were milling reclaimed beams from an old barn for a client. Old barn beams are a pain because they’re often full of nails—long, heavy, rusted nails that are hard to spot. We ruined a few blades as hidden nails made it through and wrecked the metal, and finally gave up. That barn beam went back to its owner, or maybe to a scrap pile, joining the piles of beautiful wood resting around the property, testimony to one woman’s commitment to making sure its life continued.

—-

Reading The Dawn of Everything left me with more questions than answers, which I suppose was part of the authors’ purpose. I thought (hoped) that they would bring me some solid ideas about questions they posed toward the beginning of the book, notably how wealth—or an ability to take and hoard resources—translates into power over others and if there are ways to prevent that (the prevention part came up in several of their societal examples, but not in ways that I found actionable in modern times—would love perspectives if anyone else has read it).

An intriguing idea presented in the second half revolved around the “ecology of freedom,” which

“describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death.”

Which sounded a lot like why lockdown ended up being beneficial in unexpected ways for my family, and why public lands matter so much, presenting time and freedom to engage in cultivation and foraging as well as walks together as our jobs scaled back a bit. It sucked in a lot of other ways, and far more for many people without our circumstances, but that was a lesson I’ve hung onto.

This description of freedom’s ecologies expands somewhat on the authors’ idea of “primordial freedoms,” which consists of “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relationships” and leads to one of their unanswered questions:

“How could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable—in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”

There is far more to unpack there than I am prepared to do on a first reading, without sitting with this book for a great deal more time. Every definition, every idea, leads not to a safe answer but instead to another culture, another model of living and shaping society, all presented to break apart the idea that somehow our present moment is the result of any kind of linear timeline or an arguably outdated concept of civilizational progress. The original root of civilization, they point out, was in the Latin word civilis, “which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition.”

Is this just another tired form of libertarianism pretending to be utopia, or a better-worded case for anarchy? Or an argument for how government can be formed to better serve people and ecosystems?

What it is instead, I think, is a continuation of the goal stated toward the beginning of the book: to ask better questions.

That is, after all, how paradigms begin to shift. By realizing that our imaginations have been constrained by what we thought was possible.

—-

It only occurred to me today to wonder why at the sawmill that day we didn’t take the time to look for and remove the nails ahead of time, why we sacrificed several saw blades and in the end the beam itself rather than take the time to make it workable again. It obviously would have been a waste of time but the entire endeavor could be classified a waste of time, by the standards of capital and efficiency. Even though I was working for free, nobody else was, and it was an enormous amount of work simply to find markets for the wood products, much less retrieve the trees and logs and mill and kiln-dry and shape and sand it all. One guy and I once spent an entire day planing someone’s recovered stack of cedar planks. They probably could have bought something similar from IKEA for far less money than that day’s labor cost.

But that really is part of the point. What does efficiency in our lives get us? The question is like an invisible monster in the center of capitalism: if “the economy” isn’t there to serve human and ecological well-being, what is the point? If working with wood by hand gave me and others pleasure and satisfaction, and clients connection to their ecosystem and its cycles, why not engage in that kind of work? Why are we prevented simply because it doesn’t provide enough income to feed our families?

The real question is, one perhaps Graeber and Wengrow were getting at, is how do we recraft our systems to give us some kind of choice in the matter?

—-

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Jessica Handler writing in Full Grown People about how we grade ourselves and our parents, and what stays in our permanent record: “My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.”

• A short video presentation on Inka khipu—knotted strings used for communication and record keeping—from the British Museum via Aeon. The different styles of knots relate to position in a decimal system, and spaces and unknotted strings were probably used to show “0.” Which, if you know anything about the history of 0, is extra fascinating and now I want to learn more about mathematics in pre-Colombian Americas.

• Via MIT Technology Review’s newsletter (which has a “We can still have nice things” section), a website that is simply a Weird Old Book Finder. I have not played around with it yet but it looks like a fun place to get lost in!

• In Sapiens, an excerpt of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas: “If the ‘Out of Beringia’ model is correct, Beringia wasn’t a crossing point but a homeland. It was a place where people lived for many generations, sheltering from an inhospitable climate and slowly evolving the genetic variation unique to their Native American descendants.”

• W. Robert Connor writing about Thucydides and pandemic in a time of war in The American Scholar: “The effects of the pandemic in Athens, Thucydides observed, were not limited to individual patients and those close to them, but also extended into the very fabric of society.”

• Genevieve Bell in MIT Technology Review on how the metaverse is a recycling of an old idea—not Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash but London’s 1851 Great Exhibition: “Our history with proto-­metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. . . . Yet this history should also let us be alive to the possibilities of wondrous, unexpected invention and innovation, and it should remind us that there will not be a singular experience of the metaverse.”

• Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast host Hal Herring steered a pretty hard-hitting conversation about changing elk hunting rules in Montana and what it sounds about the state’s changing relationship to the public trust and its new eagerness for privatization.

• An activist and a fashion scholar talk about “defashioning the future” on Frontiers of Commoning: “We need to bust the myths of fashion. The whole system is held up by myths that are projected out to us by the marketing. . . . It’s getting at the culture of it.”

• Anthropologist Dr. Beth Singler on Futures podcast about artificial intelligence, and how we forget that part of the problem is treating human like machines: “We need a broader understanding of what intelligence is. . . . It does come with a stereotype that intelligence is putting away your childish toys. It’s humanity civilizing itself to the extent that rationality is coded out. It’s about seeing the millennia of evolution as a messy, destructive process that not much good came out of.” (They also discuss one of the more persuasive arguments I’ve heard that techno-utopianism is a religion because it’s based on faith in innovation.)

• Threshold’s new season is finally out, this time on climate change and the time to a 1.5-degree temperature increase: “Even if we go and move off to another nearby planet, we’re going to have to do a lot of work to make that atmosphere something we can work with in the same way. Science fiction literature is rife with options of what you can do in those situations. None of them are, ‘Take spaceship to Planet X, get out, enjoy life, done.’”

• Cory Doctorow was on the War on Cars unraveling starry-eyed views of Uber and Lyft: “When you’re the beneficiary of billions of dollars of subsidy, it’s easy to kid yourself that, ‘I must be missing something here.’ This is one of the things that differentiates transit from travel, is the micro-case, the individual case for how to run a transit system is completely unlike the macro case for how to run a transit system.”

• I absolutely loved this episode of Scotland Outdoors, with Steward of the Falkland Estate Ninian Stuart talking about how to reimagine community and humanity re-integrated with their local landscape, while reckoning with the histories of slavery and oppression that led to the creation of vast wealthy estates in the first place.

Walking composition

“We’re so convinced we’re moving forwards, when all I seem to do is go round and round with the seasons, certainly no wiser, and often only more sure of how much I cannot know.”
—Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells, Pico Iyer

Last week my spouse and I were driving somewhere and Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus came on the radio. I haven’t heard it in years and those cheesy beats brought on a flood of feelings. Cheesy or not, it’s always associated in my mind with a friend from long ago, an actor who was known for his dramatic, many-times-winning rendition of scenes from the 1984 movie Amadeus (about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the perspective of his envious contemporary composer, Antonio Salieri) in speech & debate tournaments. He overflowed with talent and intelligence; we used to rib each other about our opposing politics. He died so long ago it’s like another lifetime, and yet I carry him, and memories of him, with me decades later.

Grief has been written about more times than I can even begin to count, and yet it remains a private burden that can change our gravitational pull. I wonder if others can sense it, subconsciously respond to the shifts in psychic weight?

—-

The year my friend died (of illness contracted through blood transfusions for his hemophilia), I was living in a different town. I remember handing the absence slip to my history teacher and him making a quip before he opened it—I don’t remember about what—and then looking up at me in surprise after reading funeral. And because I’d moved so many times by then, I didn’t think all that much about the fact that he’d never known my friend, didn’t know of his passing, had never seen him perform Amadeus, that nobody in this new-to-me town had or would know anything of my sadness or the incalculable grief of his siblings and parents. Nobody in this town knew anything, as far as I knew, of his incredible presence, his gifts like supernovae, his capacity for friendship, nothing of who he had been and who he still was to all who knew him, and we were barely a thirty-minute drive away.

His loss was like a little earthquake fracturing the ground of the community, spreading unknown aftershocks to wider regions that knew nothing of what had happened. Even though I was only a friend, not even family, I still feel the damage left by his passing. I still light a candle for him, along with my grandparents and others who’ve gone, when I’m in Russia and wander into Orthodox churches.

The town I moved to has its own earthquake aftershocks, its own losses. Everywhere I’ve ever lived has. Now I think of all our communities, all of us interconnected, lonely people, stepping on the damaged foundations of our world and the whispers of grief from ourselves and our ancestors, walking around with the filled-in cracks and rubble left by loss.

—-

So many people have told me stories of grief when discussing walking. Its weight, its shape. Of walking weeks-long pilgrimages and finally coming to face the enormity of the boulders inside, the weight within caused by the absence without. Hearing these stories changed the way I think about grief and I wonder now, every day, what our lives would look like if we had permission to mourn the losses we bear. I wonder what that does to us, being forced to carry our griefs with no space or time to become acquainted with their shape and heft. How much longer we can walk with the losses we barely have a chance to acknowledge.

“What would grief be like,” asked Laurie Brown in a recent episode of Pondercast on the loss of her father, “if I would just let it blow through me like this wind?”

“It’s almost impossible for those who have never lost anyone close to comprehend the impact, anguish and exhaustion of grieving,” wrote Mark Liebenow in one of his many beautiful essays about grief. “It feels like a fire has burned down our home, blackened our bones and left us standing in smoldering ruins. No one understands grief until Death comes and lights the match.”

“There was nothing subtle about my reading,” wrote Sarah Buttenweiser in last week’s essay on Motherwell about open adoption and reading grief books through the fear of loss. “I wanted to learn how people managed to survive the unthinkable. . . . Anyone who has immersed themselves in grief, an experience that isn’t exactly ever of one’s choosing, knows we don’t get over a loss, we carry it forward.”

My friend passed away in 1993. It’s been nearly thirty years. I still miss him, still think of him nearly every day, but more than me missing him, I wish the world knew him. Probing the loss, the grief, isn’t so much about me but about knowing what the world lacks without him. He was amazing.

Sometimes that music comes on and it feels as if I saw him perform Amadeus yesterday.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• On Marginalia (thanks, Tait!), Robert Burton’s centuries-old answers to melancholy: “Burton was only a teenager when he was plunged into his first episode of debilitating depression — a term that did not yet exist in the modern sense, because mental health did not yet exist as a clinical concept. This “melancholy,” which often left him with “a heavy heart and an ugly head,” was so disabling that it took him more than a decade to complete his studies at Oxford.” (Until Tait sent me that lovely essay, I hadn’t known that Brain Pickings had changed its name—now Marginalia.)

• I was away this last week, and as usual brought magazines to catch up on. Got completely swept up in John Freeman’s tribute (if that’s the right word) to Barry Lopez, not just the writer but the human, in the Summer issue of Orion: “I felt myself change under the protection of his fond regard and discretion: permitted a seriousness I did not feel I had earned. Do I need to say how hard it is to find unguarded friendships with men as a man? How frequently what begins safely can become a kind of replication pattern—a mirror to the past? What if you get lost in that maze?”

• Quinn Smith Jr. writing in The Wellian Magazine on learning the history of land theft from the Blackfeet Nation that formed Glacier National Park, through conversations with Ernie Heavy Runner, and what justice and honor require of us: “Our government blamed the Blackfeet for not asserting their own claims, while at the same time upholding a system that made any form of asserting claims impossible. After winning a court case in 1973, the Blackfeet finally were granted free admission to Glacier Park. But to this day, that’s it.”

• I loved this episode of Reframing Rural, with rural sociologist Ben Winchester, on the narratives we tell and believe about our rural communities—and how we can envision a future of possibility rather than loss: “I kind of comically told my boss like Roger, like, boy, if all our small towns are dying, then am I just going to help our small towns die, like is that my job is to like really be a critical care assistant, and be like, we’re just going to help you die in a respectful way. Clontarf, Minnesota. You know, like, it’s ridiculous to think of it that way. But it was really reaffirming to me that all of these voices I heard, tended to go against that very persuasive, negative narrative that rural is dying.”

Walking composition

“From the standpoint of the theory of justice, the most important natural duty is that to support and further just institutions.” —A Theory of Justice, John Rawls

I keep meaning to write about light, about sunlight and darkness and what it feels like to watch the sky slowly lighten as the planet turns for a couple of hours, to watch Sirius move from high in the sky to behind a neighbor’s larch tree until the sky is day-bright, and to watch it slowly darken long after the sun has set. It’s something that changes between when I’m here in this mountain valley home where we never see a “true” sunrise or sunset, versus when I head over to eastern Montana and its sky and landscape that seem to go on forever.

The shifting light keeps me tethered, especially if I wake up too early and can’t sleep but also can’t work, and binds the evenings to a delicious slowness. Reminds me that life is moving and revolving at a pace that is even more incremental than geological time. The planet turns, the sky above me darkens, stars are slowly revealed. And even then, on a summer night, it takes so long to get fully dark that when we’re out camping away from light pollution, we still don’t see the full dazzle of the Milky Way until something like two in the morning. It’s stunning, every time, surreal.

—-

I’ve been reading David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. It’s written in an easy style and right away they go for the problems that I think about all the time, like how we got fixed hierarchies imposed on people, and what happened to make any human society think some people deserved more right to needed resources (food, water, etc.) than others.

I’m only partway through the book (and currently stuck on the concept of slaves-as-prey-then-near-pets being an extension of land ownership and responsibility/caregiving in parts of pre-colonial North America) but very early on, in the chapter on 17th-century Wendat philosopher and strategist Kandiaronk and his arguments about freedom, I wondered if what the authors were getting at was the fundamental question that all societies must grapple with, “freedom from” versus “freedom to.” What structure of society and polity allows people the most freedom while giving them the most protection? Freedom from hunger, for example, over freedom to commodify seeds or corn or elk or land. Wendat culture, Kandiaronk maintained, had extensive personal freedom because its people never went hungry or unhoused, unlike in France where “freedom” meant very little when most people spent their days striving for the most basic necessities of life.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about public health and personal responsibility, conversations that have no real answer but in which I keep commenting that, even though “individual versus society” has been in my head ever since I competed in high school debate around thirty years ago, until recently I hadn’t fully comprehended how completely “personal responsibility” had morphed into “I have a right to do whatever I feel like and everyone else just has to deal with the consequences.” How fundamentally “freedom to do what I feel like” and “freedom from restriction and obligation” had colonized so many minds. Not just with regards to public policy but often in our personal relationships as well.

When brainstorming a few years ago, I’d written down that at some point the desire to damage the commons for profit or other kind of personal gain—or just because you feel like doing something and don’t want to be restricted—at some point requires science denial. You can pollute water or air for a long time if you persuade people that the harms inherent in your activities are worth the jobs they bring, but even longer if you persuade them the harms don’t exist at all.

In debate, the popular saying was “My right to throw my fist stops where your nose begins,” but it’s hard to employ that technique when you can’t see where the blow is coming from or what its effects are. When its damage is real but almost impossible to trace and accountability is a mirage.

Every question of the commons has this struggle at its heart.

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I love watching the light change. Sometimes—maybe most of the time—I forget to. The trips out camping or to cabins, with their lack of artificial light, remind me what my attention doesn’t get when I’m feeding it light from my phone, or even from my kitchen. And even so, when lamenting all the artificial light that blots out the miracle of a sky, I’m reminded of Libby Purves’s lines in her 1989 book One Summer’s Grace, about her family sailing around Britain:

“You do not appreciate a harbour until you use it seriously. People say, ‘Oh, Devon, simply ruined, tourist traps, coaches everywhere’; but the sailor coming in never sees the cream teas and car parks until he has given thanks for the shelter, the clear leading lights and the calm water. A harbour is eternal, and offers the same solace to a plastic yacht as to a trawler, smack, or galleon.”

The daylight as it grows and fades in response to this planet’s orbit in vast space is its own kind of eternal harbour.

Bonus photo: We’v been doing some night skiing, and the sunsets are mind-blowingly beautiful. The photo up top is from a nearby location. The sun through icy fog was an incredible sight, but I was disappointed to see it looks a lot like wildfire smoke in the photo.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• In Forge, I published “Cultivating the Wild Inside,” an essay on how spending time in nature (skiing, specifically) can reconnect us to wildness inside ourselves; and the struggle between protecting the wild without and cultivating the wild within. (Some of this grew out of a section I cut out of my book on walking. My editor and I both liked it but agreed it was unnecessary. It took me a long time to learn that “kill your darlings” can instead mean maybe you just carefully put your darlings back in holding because they’ll eventually lead you somewhere new.)

• Speaking of the commons and freedom, the Subverse podcast has had some excellent episodes recently: what we really mean by a “just” or “green” energy transition with Uttara Narayan in “Renewable Energy: clean, green, or mean?” and a fascinating interview with author of Brutal Beauty Jisha Menon on “neoliberalism as an aesthetic project”: “Trash is just the other side of commodity capitalism.” (I can’t find a way to link to specific episodes, so just look for the titles.)

• Ed Roberson’s Good News from the American West missive alerted me to the Reframing Rural podcast. I enjoyed wandering in and around rural Dagmar, Montana, with podcast guests, especially the episode with Eddie Hentges on recentering Indigenous narratives in that part of Montana, and the one with founder of Red Ants Pants Sarah Calhoun—I struggled more with some of the perspective she presented but that’s probably a good thing. Calhoun spoke at the first AERO (Alternative Energy Resource Organization) conference I ever attended and I was impressed with her dedication to community.

• Someday I’ll get around to writing more about my first elk hunt, but in the meantime, speaking of Ed Roberson, I enjoyed his Mountain & Prairie episode about his own experience of the same.

• Someone sent me this fantastic piece about Galesburg, Indiana, with a breakdown of street maintenance, property taxes, and why the town has no money: “Some will say the government is too bloated, corrupt, and inefficient and has squandered all the money it takes from the citizens. Others will say we need to be comfortable having higher taxes in order to pay for the things that we want/need, that it’s just because we’re greedy and want lower taxes. I say it’s neither of these.”

• I have, somewhat to my sorrow because I’d rather be watching stars or even bad television, been stumbling into articles on NFTs and Web3. If you don’t know what these are (I certainly didn’t), Scott Galloway’s article in Marker has a good overview of what it is and why it’s not great, and there’s a very long explainer on a German website (written in English) that toward the end demonstrates why Web3 and NFTs are simply another way for people with enormous resources to gather and control more of them. Serious feudalism vibes here.

• However, it did allow me to appreciate this Lord of the Rings-themed NFT joke.

• An interesting interview in the LA Review of Books with particle physicist and speculative fiction author Vandana Singh: “Despite the fact that a lot of science fiction does have constraints and can be very short-sighted — it can repeat and not challenge certain types of norms and customs — this literature still has the potential to soar above those constraints to another space, and that is why I love speculative fiction. And the revolutionary part of it is that you can imagine a different way to be.”

• On the Futures podcast, a fun interview with biological anthropologist Alice Roberts about ancient DNA: “When you take the long view, you see that nothing stands still. . . . We might want to be socially conservative over a short timeframe, and politically conservative, but actually it’s always changed and there’s always been new people coming, and new ideas, and those ideas have enriched our culture over time.”

• Math! I love math. Someday I’ll get around to writing an essay about that. In the meantime, thanks to a friend for sending me this History of Mathematics post about hexagons and apsamikku, squaring the circle, and some of the oldest problems in mathematics.

“Don’t we have an obligation, a responsibility, to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?” ―The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World, Roman Krznaric

When I started this newsletter, I gave myself a year to make sure I could keep it up before thinking about going to a paid version. A year came and went last August, but after starting a copy editing contract in May, I put off thinking about what to do with the newsletter in the long run. I learned years ago that I can write and copy edit but I can’t write well and copy edit, at least not well and frequently, much less consistently.

The contract will be finished in June, and my plan for this newsletter will be to offer a paid version after that, when I can devote more time to the writing—researching in particular, as well as possibly hiring an editor and fact-checker, which is what I do for my Medium articles.

I’m not totally sure what form the paid version will take, but am open to suggestions on how to mix free versus paid offerings. All of you who do me the honor of reading this, and commenting, whether here on via private email or even in person, are people whose opinions and ideas I’ve learned to value as we’ve gotten to know one another a bit.

The ownership-related TBR pile, with the articles-and-essays accumulation of research below.

My half-formed idea is that, in addition to what I currently write on here, I will also be sharing my unpublished book with you, one chapter at a time and possibly even starting with the introductory section of the original book proposal. The book as envisioned will have an introduction followed by nine chapters on the subject of ownership and the commons. I’m unsure exactly how that will translate to an online format. Like my first book A Walking Life, this book’s chapters run around 10,000 words (or will when I’ve written them). For comparison, the non-walking composition essays I write for this newsletter hover around 3000 (the most recent on whiteness-as-property was an outlier at 4300). Ten thousand words is way too much to throw on a screen at once, so I’ll try to think of ways to break the chapters up into more readable portions at reasonable interludes.

It will be an interesting process for me. Writing a book is nothing like writing essays and articles. It happens in your own space, and between you and your editor, over a much longer timeframe without anybody really knowing what you’re doing. (Mine took two years before it moved onto several months of layout, copy editing, and proofreading, which is fairly average, though some people are able to produce work much more quickly.) Putting out a chapter at a time means I can’t wait until the whole thing is done and see if it all hangs together.

But I’ll do my best to bring it up to a high standard. Which starts, as it always does for me, with research. I’ve got a much better handle on, for example, land ownership (though I’m currently reading David Wengrow’s and David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and it’s forcing some very different questions on that point) . . .

. . . than on, say, serfdom in Russia and throughout Europe, and ownership of women. A lot to learn, and I hope you’ll find the journey just as thought-provoking as I do.

I’ll give reminders of the shift-to-paid in the coming months, and of course if you want access to the paid version but can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me when the time comes and I’ll make it happen, no questions asked. We can even use a code word. How about “tribble”? (There will, I promise, be science fiction references in the book. I find The Expanse TV show, for example, an invaluable mirror for property and resource ownership.)

Walking composition

“Earthers . . . look past that light, past that blue sky. They see the stars and they think, ‘Mine.’” —The Expanse, Season 1, Episode 5

I keep hearing chickadees trilling their “cheeeese-burger” sound near our house and walking around town. It feels like a spring sound—are you meant to hear chickadees in January? This archival recording from 1977 tells me it’s a territorial sound, so are they warning off magpies or crows or maybe people? Cornell’s Ornithology Lab page says it’s a song that males start chirping out in mid-January; maybe I’ve just never heard it this early before, or never paid attention. Thankfully other people do pay attention and can tell me if I remember to ask.

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An environmental lawyer friend and I have been talking a lot about ski resorts over the last couple of years. We’ve both been skiers since we were little, and despite the joy it brings—and skiing brings me a lot of joy—we both struggle with the impacts of space and resource use. Increasing numbers of luxury vacation houses and condominiums around the ski mountain where I live feel like a burden that neither the land nor the community (nor the water sources) can handle.

But has skiing in its modern iteration ever been something that the land can handle? The activity has been around much longer than quad chairlifts and toxic, bioaccumulative ski wax—Sigrid Unset’s novel Kristen Lavransdotter, set in 14th-century Norway, has quite a bit of skiing as transportation but also as something akin to joyful leisure. It’s a far cry from the elite or elite-adjacent activity it is today; even the fifty-dollar season passes and family run resort I learned on as a kid feel like a different world.

My parents first put me on skis at Bridger Bowl when I was two years old. I fell and got a bloody nose and hated it. I’ve been skiing off and on ever since and there are honestly few activities that make me happy quite as quickly. But I do it knowing that the swathes of tree-free mountainside, the electricity to run the lifts, the materials that go into the equipment (the skis, poles, helmets, snow pants and coats, iron-filled hand warmer packets, . . . .), the parking lots and roads—none of it is truly sustainable. And that’s without throwing in the million- and multi-million-dollar properties that get built up around desirable resorts.

So my friend was wondering about those properties and how real estate fits into the National Forest Ski Area Permit process (in the U.S., most ski areas are built on National Forest land; that is, public land), in particular the requirement to “harmonize with the natural environment” and questions of equitable access. How, my friend asked, is the development of million-dollar condominiums at the base of the ski hill much different from the plans that Disney once had to build a gargantuan ski resort in Sequoia National Park? Even if the real estate itself is on private land, how does a resort that promotes its development qualify for a permit that is meant to promote outdoor activities for all?

Which led us back, as it often does in our conversations, to whether ski resorts should or can continue to exist in the first place. In a way we both know the answer. Maybe we’re just looking for a way to keep something we love without sacrificing everything else.

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Land ownership and rights of use are a core of the commons we all depend upon. If we view land as a commons (which it is in fact no matter how we want to view it), how it is used and what it is used for must be a question posed to an entire community. That’s not even getting into the fact that all of this land, from the scrappiest one-lift family resort to the exclusive privately-owned Yellowstone Club, was stolen in the first place.

A few years ago I took up skinning, where you stick fuzzy strips to the bottom of your skis that allow you to walk uphill, foregoing the chairlift. It takes me forever—I’ve never been an athlete of any kind—but I’ve grown to love it. The quiet, the space to let my thoughts spool out instead of being trapped inside my body all the time, the physical strain. I’m not sure the environmental impact varies that much from regular skiing, as you’re using a lot of the same equipment, but at least I give more attention to the world around me. Squirrels and crows, an occasional bald eagle, the never-failing beauty of snow on the pine trees, the light and gray that shift and enchant. The terrain that looks so different when I’m up that same mountain picking huckleberries in August. Reminding myself of the people who established this resort in the first place, full of love for skiing and wanting to share with anyone who wanted to learn.

While talking of skiing, I was reminded of the end of one of Anne Helen Petersen’s interviews in her Culture Study newsletter. It was about the pyramid scheme LuLa Roe, and while I know very little about multi-level marketing schemes, her interviewee’s point toward the end of the conversation has stuck with me: “America is a pyramid scheme. It relies on people buying into the American Dream and then working hard to get to the top. But of course – almost no one does. Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor.”

What choices do I make, does each of us make, does our community or society make, that rely on the heaviest burdens being placed not just on other people, but on all other forms of life?

I will probably always be a ski bum. But it doesn’t have to look like what I’m used to seeing. It is possible to find joy differently.

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Some stuff to read, watch, or listen to:

• Kurt Vonnegut’s methods for dealing with trauma, on the Psychoscapes blog: “Vonnegut’s bedrock assumptions about the world being a safe place where good things happen to good people were shattered. Also typical for trauma survivors, his memories of these distressing events were fragmentary.  He labored for more than 20 years, attempting to piece them together, trying to find a language to express what had happened to him but, still, the missing pieces remained too radioactive.” (Reading this gave me the urge to read Vonnegut again, which I don’t think I’ve done since I was in my late teens.)

• Dan Falk writing in Nautilus on a little-known book of astronomy for children, Know the Stars, by H.A. Rey, the author of the Curious George books. Rey, evidently, was passionate about astronomy and used to host informal stargazing sessions at a local golf course for anyone who wanted to join him.

• Mark Trahant writing in Indian Country Today on Vine Deloris Jr. and the fifty-year “long-distance run” for Native American rights and sovereignty.

• An absolutely fantastic piece in High Country News by Kathleen McLaughlin on rural gentrification, Butte’s toxic Berkeley Pit and extractive art: “The initial decision to skirt around Butte made it easier to talk about the place and its problems from the outside, rather than engaging the community that actually lives with the mess. It’s cultural extraction in action — taking away bits of history and community without providing any context for it.”

• This trailer of the film Moving Upstream: Ganga from the Veditum India Foundation looks awesome. There is not a single story, not matter what form (oral, written, documentary) of a long-distance walk that hasn’t reminded me of the profound compassion and connectedness at the center of humanity. I never get tired of them.

• Financial journalist Tom Bergin writing in Aeon of economists’ slow journey to forming models based on real human behavior rather than trying to force behavior into handy and unrealistic formulas: “Until the early 1990s, the accepted orthodoxy among liberal and conservative economists was that the minimum wage killed jobs. . . . Card and his colleague Alan Krueger conducted studies that found, in a number of cases, that meaningful increases in the minimum wage had not led to lower employment in fast-food restaurants – the type of business commonly affected by the measure. The research received a lot of publicity, and near total rejection by some of the most eminent economists, . . . who likened colleagues who accepted Card’s work to ‘camp-following whores’.”