Author: Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“While many will agree that colonialism is wrong, they cannot imagine a future without it.”
—Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future

Last weekend I took a kiddo to Yellowstone National Park with the hope of seeing wolves. We hedged that hope, knowing that wolves are human-shy and the park is big, but a 5 a.m. wakeup was rewarded and we got to watch the Junction Butte Pack through borrowed spotting scopes for over two hours. I will never forget the look on my kid’s face, or my own feelings, when we saw a wolf for the first time, and later when we heard them howling. If I hadn’t had my hands and attention overly busy, I would have cried.

What is it about wolves?

I asked my older sister that question last winter, when our state legislature was passing bills in what felt like a frenzy of cruelty, among them newly permissive “limits” on the amount and variety of wolf-hunting. Allowing poisoning of wolves on private lands was just one method recently approved; use of snares another. There are plenty of other predators around, but only wolves (and coyotes to some extent) seem to evoke this level of hatred. And yet at the same time they have an attraction that’s almost primal, even the very idea of a wild wolf pack prompting a sense of awe and wonder, their howl enough to make twenty or so people on a frozen hillside fall instantly silent.

Other predators don’t attack livestock in the same way, my sister pointed out. It might just be as simple as that. When you’re raising sheep or cows or other meat/wool animals to support your family, losses to predation are a blow, a stewing pot for conflict. I can only guess here (based on our recent experience losing chickens to a grizzly bear), but it might feel as uncontrollable and as frustrating as water damage, or relentless wind.

Yet underneath that is the millennia-old urge to control nature, to quash it and bend it to our will. We should be able to do what we wish to and with the world and hang the consequences, right?

We used to visit Yellowstone to camp and fish when I was growing up (we didn’t live far), but wolves weren’t reintroduced until 1995, when I was in college. I don’t know if there’s a difference in how the place feels, if the ecosystem’s interoception of itself has shifted. But after watching and listening to those wolves, I don’t want Yellowstone to be without them again. I don’t want the world to be without them. How to make that a reality for the future is a purely social problem.

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Yesterday I went for a walk with a friend, and asked if she minded picking chokecherries with me. I’m late on preserving and canning anything at all this year. I’ve only this week got a batch of pureed plums dehydrating for the winter’s fruit leather, haven’t canned any tomatoes or pickles, and for the first time in over a decade have made exactly zero jars of jam. Walking past the chokecherry trees that happily populate the town in any random spot makes me feel guilty and overwhelmed, even though almost nobody in my family eats very much jam. Here’s this food, nutritious and free and forage-able and there’s plenty of it, and aside from the bears’ obvious consumption (it’s not just that lower branches are stripped clean; finding piles of bear scat full of chokecherry seeds is a dead giveaway) it’s just going to waste. Even the birds don’t seem to touch them much.

So we climbed fences and pulled handfuls to fill my Costco-sized M&M container and now the chokecherries sit in the fridge waiting for me to finish the plum fruit leather and perhaps get around to freezing the piles of shishito peppers collected from our farm shares. And then turn the cabbages into sauerkraut before they wither away.

I didn’t start canning and preserving stuff until about the month my first baby was born. He’s now a teenager, and still the process of skinning peaches and stewing tomatoes and wondering what I might be able to do with the ubiquitous mountain ash berries brings me back to that tenuous time, recovering from emergency surgery and near-liver failure, a premature baby spending weeks in neonatal intensive care. The ways in which care and husbandry and self/preservation began to define my days and then my life.

Before going walking and harvesting with my friend, I’d been listening to a podcast interview with Jamie Wheal, a writer and thinker (aren’t we all thinkers?) among several aiming to bring shape and sense back to what’s sometimes called our collective epistemic meaning crisis. Or something. Epistemology always confuses me. Making meaning of meaning. Of life. Isn’t that what we’re all attempting all the time?

Listening to “sensemakers” generally leaves me a little irritable—as any of my family members can attest to, I hate being told what to do, and that extends to how to make sense of the world, even as I’m constantly searching for ways to make sense of the world—but I do appreciate the way that people like Wheal and Daniel Schmachtenberger frame problems, if I don’t always find their proposed answers very practicable.

Somehow Wheal’s ideas blended into an interview I’d heard earlier with Eric Laursen on anarchy and the modern state. The way he presented anarchy—which I’ve never been attracted to but he made a lot of points I’ve never heard before—gave me a new frame for libertarianism as basically anarchy except with private property and all its attendant oppressions as a prime religion.

Both anarchy and libertarianism seem to be dependent on what Kate Raworth calls the unpaid or terribly underpaid caring economy, and the sensemaking crowd often seems to add the same as more of an afterthought, if at all (Wheal has been better than most on that front): the people who care for children and elderly people who need it, who teach and clean and nurture. The people who think about how to do each of those jobs better, to provide more not in material goods but in love and attentiveness. On whose backs and shoulders are built others’ personal empires.

But maybe all of our personal empires are to some extent, no matter how small. I might have picked my own chokecherries, but bees made the honey that someone else harvested for sweetener and the Mason jars and lids are manufactured somewhere, by someone.

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We were very fortunate to meet Rick McIntyre, author of The Rise of Wolf 8, The Reign of Wolf 21, and the forthcoming The Redemption of Wolf 302—none of which I’ve read but my kiddo is halfway through Wolf 8. McIntyre took the time to chat with us for a while about the Junction Butte Pack and their behavior. (I love meeting generous, down-to-earth writers.) We met other people who had come from all over the U.S., who caught the wolf bug decades ago and in some cases spend their vacation time every year going to Yellowstone to watch wolves. It was the first time I’ve ever been in a large group of people who unflinchingly share my kid’s adoration of wolves.

I haven’t told her yet that the shivers we got listening to the pack howl coincided within a day to hunters killing three members of the pack just outside the park boundaries.

McIntyre told us about a movie we might like but because I hadn’t brought pen and paper with me up the hillside, I didn’t write it down. When we got home from a six-hour drive in the rain, I poked at my laptop with variations on the keywords “wolf reindeer herding Siberia story” until hitting on the result—a French movie titled Loup, which tells the story of a young boy responsible for a reindeer herd in Siberia, but who risks betraying his people by forming a relationship with a wolf family.

While trying to find the movie, I came across several papers and stories about wolves in reindeer-herding territory—the problems that Indigenous reindeer herders in Finland have with predation, and how financial compensation can’t always make up for the mental stress, along with a totally-lacking-nuance-or-much-context-but-still-informative story about “super packs” in Siberian herding areas (caution: graphic photos) and a science article from Norway on the outdated notion of wolf “alphas” and hierarchies. Reminders that “how do we live with wolves?” is more complex than I’d like it to be.

None of it fully answers the question of the cruelty and the hatred. Like with bison in cattle-ranching areas of Montana, you can probably boil it down to an identity that has its own form of care, its own notion of how our world should function. One that doesn’t include wolves.

But it does. For now. I’m grateful for that.

Bonus photos: Just a couple of iconic Yellowstone shots to add to the bison above (they were in a huge herd but I neglected to take any herd photos because the male here was acting hilariously trying to get the female’s attention), among bugling elk and mazes of thermal pools, springs, and geysers. I’d forgotten how amazing this place is.

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Some stuff to read or watch:

• For anyone interested in learning more about “induced demand,” the reason that widening roadways doesn’t reduce traffic (discussed in my last essay), David Zipper’s recent piece in Bloomberg CityLab has a good explanation—more importantly, it explains why the answer of widening highways seems to be so intractable, no matter how many times it fails to solve the problem. One reason: “The federal government doesn’t penalize states for getting their congestion mitigation estimates wrong, as TxDOT did in spectacular fashion with Houston’s Katy Freeway, widened in 2011 to as many as 26 lanes at a cost of $2.8 billion, half of which came from federal funds. The next year, an article in the Houston Chronicle declared the project a success: ‘What was once a daylong traffic jam is now for the most part smooth sailing.’ But by 2014, most peak-hour commutes on the Katy took even longer than they had before the expansion. . . . Gas taxes further distort decision-making, because collected revenues often go straight to state departments of transportation — just as they did 90 years ago.” (Emphasis added.)

• One of the lovely things about my day job copy editing children’s textbooks is getting sent trade books with stories I might never have come across. A recent one I really liked was Tani’s Search for the Heart, by brother and sister author/illustrator team Keith and Chenoa Egawa, of Lummi and S’Klallam descent. A short video on Vimeo gives an overview of the story and their process.

• Full Grown People is back! I’m guessing many of you have never heard of this online magazine, which publishes personal essays on the messy adult years and is edited by Jennifer Niesslein, original co-founder and editor of Brain, Child Magazine, which saved my sanity in many ways in the early years of motherhood. FGP has been on hiatus while Niesslein wrote a book about American nostalgia, but has returned with an essay by Jody Mace, on dementia and mysteries and the loss of her father: “When is the exact moment that it’s best to make someone measurably safer but at the cost of making them immeasurably sadder?”

• A restful 18-minute video via Aeon on a Japanese dye and fabric producer outside of Kyoto who has spent the last few decades rediscovering natural plant dyes and their processes.

• I had to read Faisal Devji’s essay in Aeon, “What is ‘the West?’” a few times. It reminded me of a comment on a book that a colleague recommended to me a few months ago about how colonialism never ended; it’s just that it’s finally starting to affect white communities. Devji writes of Gandhi’s ideas regarding the colonial project as one that would be ultimately self-destructive: “Modern civilisation, in other words, was a kind of parasite that would grow strong and spread via its European host. Europe would enable it to globalise and attack other parts of the world. Its driving logic was not European domination: that was just a means to an end.”

• Shannon Mattern’s wide-ranging essay about the need to start truly thinking like trees, and learning from them, rather than relying on shallow algorithms to dictate our choices, in Places Journal: “Just imagine! Wouldn’t that be grand? An algorithm that could calculate how many trees would atone for the historical and contemporary inequities of urban planning and environmental injustice, that could undo processes of deforestation wrought through centuries of colonial violence, that could heal a landscape destroyed by clear cutting? . . . Or maybe not. As trees become data points, they are all too readily cast as easy fixes for profound problems.”

• We were far across the valley from the Junction Butte Pack, so photos weren’t even an option, but I found this 1-minute video from artist George Bumann of the same pack running and frolicking. It’s like prayer in motion.

Essay

Several people have sent me notices of the Wall Street Journal Facebook investigation and, although I haven’t read it yet, I do appreciate it. (I’m not putting in a link because it’s paywalled, but here is a summary from the Los Angeles Times.) In return, I recommend this recent episode of Your Undivided Attention on the subject, with Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger. What do we do, the host asked Schmachtenberger, with technology that has such enormous influence over our lives? To which he answered:

“As we follow an exponential curve of power, there’s this core governance question of, we’ve never done all that good of a job being great stewards of power, and now we have radically increasing exponential power. How do we govern it?”

The main reason I follow futurist and tech conversations like these is that, having spent a couple years immersed in research on how a car-centric worldview took over and fractured our lives, I deeply believe that in a century we’ll see similar damage caused by a failure to define the roles of digital technologies like social media. The history of the battle against car dominance is one of extensive pushback in the 1920s in particular, followed by automobile interests forming think tanks that served as feeders into government, where pro-car people were able to shape a future around cars and highways rather than people and communities.

(That’s a very sweeping description of a more detailed history—good books related to the subject include Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and more specifically Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic and Jeff Speck’s Walkable City, my own book A Walking Life, and Tom Vanderbilt’s four-part series “The Crisis in American Walking” in Slate.)

I spent a good chunk of my book writing about this, so I don’t want to repeat it all here, but when talking about walking I often find that people focus on the pleasant aspects of it—the mental health, the connection to nature, the physical release and creative depth, among the countless other benefits, all of which are real—and forget the key point, which is that in North America we have spent a century creating a world where walking as a way of life is almost impossible.

The damage this shift caused is incalculable, from the nearly 40,000 deaths in car crashes each year in the U.S. (over 6,000 of those pedestrians and cyclists, and these numbers do not count severe injuries like loss of limbs, paralysis, traumatic brain injuries, or the estimated 20,000 near misses every year) to the air pollution caused by exhaust (which likely contributes to health issues from Alzheimer’s to miscarriages to reduced lung capacity in children who grow up in high-traffic areas) to micropollution from abrasion of tires on the road to climate change. The weight of cars on our lives, on this planet, is more immense and comprehensive than most of us seem able to comprehend.

And yet the deepest damage might be one of imagination.

Our views of how we get places is so entangled with driving that it’s rare to find regular drivers who can envision a car-free life. Who can see their own community as a place where a child could roam to school or a friend’s house without fear of being run over. Our collective minds have been colonized by the car.

I was at a presentation a couple of weeks ago, online, given by the consultants and PR representatives hired by Montana’s state department of transportation to come up with a redesign for the highway that runs through the center of my town. The group was great. They’d worked hard and really thought things through. And if you didn’t have knowledge of the rigid systems that force states and cities to spend money on cars and traffic rather than promoting literally any other form of mobility, you’d leave the meeting thinking that the redesign option they came up with—which involves adding a lane each to two already busy roads—was the obvious choice. One we have to accept because it’s the only one that truly eases traffic congestion.

When we talk about problems being systemic, this approach to road and highway design is a case in point. How federal road money is spent depends on easing traffic, not on building places where people can live and work and move around under their own power. Federal guidelines are packed with rules about how roads can be built and what needs should be considered, and pretty much every single one of them is from the perspective of “how can we make driving faster and more seamless?”

One of the most useful resources in this sphere is the podcast Talking Headways, which is about transit and all of the issues surrounding it, which means it includes a lot about American society’s addiction to the car. Take a recent episode with Zabe Bent, director of design for the National Association of City Transportation Officials. If federal transportation funding were visualized as a food pyramid, Bent said, almost every single category would be full of cars, with all the other ways we get around packed into the final section.

It’s how you end up with things like this incredibly dangerous intersection in front of our local middle school and right near the highly pedestrianized town center, where I have almost been hit by drivers on multiple occasions—when people are turning left or right, they’re often doing it at speed and not paying any attention to whatever else is going on in the road.

I’ve been asking the state for a scramble crossing at this location for a few years now purely for the safety of the middle school students who have to navigate the intersection at particularly high-volume traffic times, but so far to no avail. And there’s a reason for that. Or several hundreds of pages of reasons, resulting in systemic barriers to change.

Bent and the host discussed at length the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways, a document originally published in 1971 that regulates traffic control devices on public roads, most recently updated in 2009), and brought up the recent slate of public comment on proposed changes—over 25,000 comments (mine among them), most asking for a complete revamp of the way we envision our roads. To finally prioritize mobility and safety of people over ease of car travel. A selection of those comments are compiled on America Walks’s website, the general theme being that the manual is outdated and actively prevents communities from designing safe, livable streets. “American streets are unsafe because of how they are designed,” wrote Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “And the way they’re designed often comes down to five letters: the MUTCD.” An attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center called the document a “relic.”

Whether or not those comments will result in meaningful change is up in the air right now, with no word on the feedback from the people in charge of the MUTCD, the people who have the power to improve it.

One way problems become systemic is by being written into some obscure guideline like the MUTCD where almost no normal person is ever going to hear of it, and then leaving people to wonder why, to take one example, it is so hard for pedestrians to cross a street. As Bent pointed out, requesting a pedestrian signal at a crossing usually gains no traction until five people have been killed at that location. How many people are aware of that rule? And of how little sense it makes unless you understand that traffic engineers’ number one priority is to enable speed?

I don’t know how my city managed to get a pedestrian signal at this other location, which is a popular crossing for kids going to the elementary school. I’m glad they did. But no version of beg button is going to make this already extremely busy road—a federal highway heavily used by logging trucks—safe if another lane is added to it, as is planned by the state DOT. Years ago I gave up counting the number of days my kids and I pushed the button at this crossing and then waited as people drove blithely past, often looking down at their phones rather than at the roadscape.

The number of people hit and killed by drivers in the U.S. has risen 45% in a decade. But that reality will not stop the widening of this road.

(I have little sympathy for the tendency to blame distracted walkers. A human walking, biking, rolling a wheelchair, etc., is not maneuvering several thousand pounds of deadly machinery. It’s just not a realistic comparison. And walkers could be as distracted as they liked if we didn’t have a world built for cars rather than people.)

When I went to this presentation, which I again attended in person at a recent open house evening, no matter which way I phrased the damage this would cause in our community—decreased sidewalk space, severed access to a walkable school route for large numbers of kids, increased exhaust fumes (which in our town is no joke, as an inversion layer keeps particulates at breathing level for many months of the winter), noise, the high stress levels that come from having to live in or navigate areas with high traffic, and always, always induced demand because it’s been shown repeatedly that the only long-term change you get with added highway lanes is more driving—the very capable and informed consultants and PR people answered with some version of “meeting the needs of users.” By which they did not mean “helping your community shape a livable future, which is what your steering committee said you want” but simply “making it easier for drivers to get through town.” That’s it. That’s the only true priority the state asked them to consider because that’s the only priority that gets you funded.

(A bit of an aside, but it’s maddening that fostering biking and walking isn’t considered as part of reducing traffic congestion. How many cars would be taken out of the traffic equation, making it less congested for people who just need to drive through town, if large numbers of people could safely walk or bike places within town?)

In a recent episode of his Strong Towns podcast, engineer and planner Charles Marohn read an excerpt from his forthcoming book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, in which he detailed how the values of speed and volume are baked into road design, in ways that most people will never see:

“At the foundation of traffic engineering of deeply infused values. These values are so deep and so core to the profession that practitioners do not consider them values. They bristle at the suggestion. For practitioners, these values are merely self-evident truths. . . . This would not be a problem, and we could allow the profession to retain their sacred texts and practices unchallenged by heretical viewpoints, if they could find a way to address the damage traffic engineering is doing to our communities. They cannot do this for a simple reason: The damage being done is a culmination of those values.”

The values of the traffic engineering profession, he says, in order of importance, are:

• traffic speed

• traffic volume

• safety

• cost

These values aren’t American values, says Marohn. “They’re not even human values.”

This isn’t sustainable and yet it’s what’s baked into our system, along with other designs most of us don’t notice, like how corners are often steeply curved to make it so that drivers don’t have to slow down as much when they turn—resulting, again, in reduced safety for pedestrians.

Or the super wide lanes designed to make it easy for large numbers of drivers to move quickly but resulting in an almost impossible crossing for pedestrians and cyclists:

The particular road pictured above usually has a lot more traffic, and has been a known barrier and danger for years. My city recently finished building a pedestrian tunnel underneath it using grant funding—a demonstration of the kind of infrastructure we can manage when we’re focused on a livable future rather than short-term traffic reduction.

There is a tremendous amount of writing and research out there on these subjects. Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in America gives an extensive history on how we lost the right to our streets, not because we somehow wanted a car-dependent life but because it was imposed upon us:

“In most cities for most of the 1920s, engineers fought traffic by restricting the private automobile. They treated the private car less as an intruder upon the rights of street railways than as an abuse of the street as a public service.”

The reality of car dominance—which entailed confining pedestrians to sidewalks and the formalization of car-favoring signals that eventually led to guidelines like the MUTCD—came to define our streets not because it worked for people and communities, but because it was necessary for cars to become integral with middle class American life: if driving means being stuck in traffic, buying a car becomes much less attractive. No matter how many people died as a result of speeding drivers, the automobile industry objected to any limits on speed within cities:

“An auto industry executive later explained that ‘the motor car was invented so that man could go faster’ and that ‘the major inherent quality of the automobile is speed.’”

This is the system we’re stuck with today, one structured around enabling speed for the private driver and reducing congestion, no matter what the ambient cost, even to drivers ourselves. You could widen highways enough to cover half my valley, crush the town center, and it would be considered a win if it reduced traffic congestion for five to ten years. And then what?

With the planet projected to have ten billion humans by the middle of this century, I have to wonder what people think our communities will look like if we insist that every single person get where they need to go by car.

We might want less traffic or a faster drive, but have we thought about what are we truly willing to sacrifice for it?

In another Talking Headways interview, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, authors of the book Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, discussed what it’s like to live in a city (Rotterdam in their case) that prioritizes human mobility over car access. Many articles over the years have dissected the fact that bicycle-friendly Holland used to be full of car-packed cities just as the U.S. is. But, the Bruntletts explained, a shift occurred when “shock” became too much for the Dutch system to absorb:

“The example we use of the Netherlands in the 1970s was this outside shock of an oil crisis, a gasoline shortage—six weeks of car-free Sundays and the sale of bicycles doubling, this was really a turning point where the Netherlands said, ‘A car-based mobility system, a car-dominated mobility system, is no longer acceptable for us as a society because it’s so fragile to outside shocks.’ . . . As a result now, the Netherlands is much better placed to deal with these outside shocks and fuel shortages and extreme weather and the like. Inversely, the United States, which was subject to the same oil crisis, pursued an engineering resilience and went right back to its original state, maybe even doubling down or tripling down on this car dependence and dominance.”

And as I wrote about in my book and the Bruntletts evidently talk about in theirs, a car-dependent mobility system damages the independence and freedom of both children and people who for reasons of age or disability cannot or don’t drive. It never seems to occur to complainers of “kids these days” spending too much time on their phones that we’ve built a world where children have zero option but to be driven places by their parents—why wouldn’t they connect with friends in any way they could? Many of them literally cannot walk places; there’s nowhere to go. (The Bruntletts also discuss some of the damaging mental health effects to children living long driving distances from schools or activities, leading to lost sleep, greater stress, and higher levels of depression.)

In my book, I also wrote about my grandmother, a wonderfully independent woman who lost much control over her own life when she was diagnosed with macular degeneration in her mid-80s and could no longer drive. The Bruntletts said that with our longer lifespans, people are living on average 7-10 years past the age when they can realistically drive. And yet we continue to demand a world that prioritizes the private car above all else, buying into a mirage of freedom and convenience that’s been sold to us.

“The automotive city took back much of the freedom it promised,” wrote Norton in Fighting Traffic.

“When street users are free to use cars, the freedom of all street users (including motorists) to use anything else is diminished. A city rebuilt (socially and physically) to acommodate cars cannot give street users the good choices a truly free market can provide.”

But the deepest issue here, to go back to the main point, is that the vision of ourselves as drivers rather than residents—rather even than as citizens—has embedded itself into our psyches and our bodies. When the consultants for Montana’s state DOT explain that their new highway design is necessary to ease traffic, even the most progressive-minded finds it hard to argue. This is the true damage caused by our car-centric century, that we cannot find it in ourselves to imagine the kinds of deep change that would make our communities truly livable, much less imagine ways to enact that change.

This is why chatter about the Wall Street Journal investigative series on Facebook is actually important. Digital technology is clearly going to define our lives at least as much as cars and highways have. We have little idea what kinds of effects, good and bad, it will have on future generations. But we can look at what happened with cars and act accordingly.

Returning to the Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger conversation on Facebook, AI, and digital tech in general, I appreciated Schmachtenberger drilling down to the core issue not just of governance but of democracy, and the lost understanding that democratic, representative government is meant to be government of, by, and for the people:

“The whole thing with ‘we don’t trust Washington’ is, Washington was never meant to be a thing separate from a for and by the people governance. It’s supposed to be that the state was given the ability to regulate predatory market interests while still allowing healthy market interests to ensure the values of the people that were encoded into law. . . . But the state could only check the market if the people checked the state. . . . When the people stop checking the government, the government gets captured by the market.”

(I know this is an idealized vision of democracy, maybe especially in the U.S., but the general point stands. Though I hesitate to define a time in U.S. history when the government wasn’t captured by the market, and wonder if it’s more a matter of degree.)

We’ve seen what happens when industry insiders and monied interests get to control both the conversation and the policy. We get freeways smashed through neighborhoods, humans cut off equally from access to jobs as well as to nature, almost incalculable damage to the biosphere that’s necessary for our survival, a society that serves the car rather than the car serving us. And a population persuaded that this is a life we want.

Our collective relationship to cars is, frankly, the main issue that makes me fairly fatalistic on climate change. To make any meaningful progress, car travel can still be possible but car dependency needs to go. Electric cars and autonomous vehicles will not solve the problem; as urbanist Coby Lefkowitz has written, “Simply transitioning to electric vehicles does nothing to address the underlying cause for our unsustainable living patterns in which private vehicles are the default mode of moving from place to place” (not to mention the rare earth metals needed for electric car batteries).

There’s no question on this. But if you want to get deeply involved in community change that could make a big difference in quality of life, try getting middle class parents to stop driving their kids to school. Or just listen to complaints about the school “car line” as people wait to drop off their kids in vehicles that have grown nearly to the size of a Sherman tank. Theoretically, many of my fellow moms, for example, care deeply about climate change. But not enough to try to find a way to make the school “car line” unecessary and nonexistent. Not yet anyway. And it’s not like I’m not part of this problem. Most days I walk or bike my kids to and from school because I’m lucky enough to have that kind of flexibility. But not all of them, and then my car is there, too, heaving its outsized way across a community that deserves better.

Cars have become an extension of many people’s personal identities—even mine—and driving places has become part of how we see ourselves existing in the world. Until we can begin to purge that self-image, we’re not going to make much progress on building a world that doesn’t demand car dependence.

I don’t like being stuck in traffic any more than anyone else. But what I like less is a world where I have little choice but to drive—the world I currently live in. Changing that reality, especially in areas like mine where public transportation is almost nonexistent, is going to require a paradigmatic shift in the value system of road engineering and an equally paradigmatic shift in our own willingness to change the way we see ourselves getting around. The problem is deeply systemic, and the solutions are going to have to be, too. We have to learn where car-centric planning dictates our lives, and face our own role in perpetuating it.

Change is possible. The first step is breaking our imaginations out of the driver-shaped mold they’ve been forced into.

Until that happens, we’ll continue expanding roads in the name of easing traffic. Sacrificing our health, our ecosystems, and our freedom, and making livable communities that much more out of reach for every subsequent generation.

Walking composition

“He thinks he is presenting things as they are, but what he really presents is his own essentially vulgar personality.” —Willa Cather, 1919, in a letter to her brother

My younger sister and I made a deal once a long time ago—I was maybe 13 or 14 or 15; over 30 years ago anyway—just before or after we’d moved to a new town. I think it was one of our very brief stints in California, or after we’d returned from the Soviet Union. We agreed with each other that we wouldn’t talk to anyone about our previous life, schools, or friends. We’d moved a few times by then and had learned, somehow, that most people just weren’t that interested and how painful their lack of curiosity—which feels like lack of care—could be.

It didn’t feel like a shutting down or closing off so much as coming to the realization that it was rare to meet someone who was interested in the worlds that other people carry around in their own lives and with their own minds. Maybe we weren’t interested, either, though that was harder to know since we spent several formative years adapting to new places, new people, and new circumstances. We were continually reshaping who we were according to where we landed.

We decided that this time we’d keep our precious memories, our selves, to ourselves. We pinky swore on it. One or two or a few years later I tried to draw on those memories for a high school essay and found them frustratingly locked away even from myself.

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I’ve finally gotten full-swing back into Blake Watson’s Buying America from the Indians, enough to make it halfway through. Books like this take me a lot of time to read. It’s dense and packed with information—not dense like a headache to read but just dense with information, like following the various land deals some speculator in America made for several decades leading up to 1776 and beyond. Like Lord Dunmore, who complained when he was moved from governing New York to governing Virginia because he found that Virginia looked much less kindly on his rapacious land grabbing. Dunmore partnered with land dealers who made questionable bargains with various Native tribes, and swept up ownership of as much land as he could but chose the losing side when the revolution came. Lucky him, though—in 1784, after America’s independence was recognized, he filed for and was granted reimbursement from the Crown for loss of lands in large parts of America.

Buying America from the Indians is about the crucial U.S. Supreme Court case of 1823, Johnson v. McIntosh, which decided that Indian people had no right to sell land—only European settlers could do that. In circular reasoning, the decision reiterated the Doctrine of Discovery’s* logic: only people who discovered land could own it. People who already lived in North America simply resided there; they had no right of title. (If this feels infuriating, it is, even more so because that reasoning still dictates many Supreme Court decisions with regards to Native American land rights.)

The part I’ve read up to this point lays out the groundwork for that case, which revolves around power struggles between the British Crown, which claimed that all North American land under its jurisdiction belonged to said Crown—only the Crown could grant legal title to settlers—and people (usually already fairly wealthy) who wanted to buy land land directly from local tribal nations.

A number of America’s “founding fathers” were, when you come down to it, simply land speculators. Leading thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin wrote eloquently on the right of Indians to sell land to willing buyers, not because they saw them as equal partners or even equal people but because they and others wanted that land and the Crown wouldn’t recognize their ownership. Maybe I’m not giving all of them enough credit, but reading this book it’s hard not to think of the entire American Revolution as having nothing to do with life, liberty, or even taxation without representation, and everything to do with a few powerful people frustrated that those with even more power wouldn’t let them gather up and claim as much land as they wanted. It’s particularly enlightening going back to this book after having read Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass and gaining (I hope) a deeper understanding of the kind of land-hoarding mentality people packed with them when they flocked to this continent. They badly wanted to chuck over feudalism but only because it would benefit their land speculations.

I’m bracing myself to finally getting to the court arguments and decision themselves, which, again, are more awful from knowing that not much has changed.**

—-

It’s strange, moving to new places and meeting new people. One of the things that startles me about writing is how often people read and connect with something, maybe because of those long-ago experiences of moving around and coming to terms with the fact that most people aren’t particularly curious about others’ lives.

But isn’t the mind an amazing thing? I imagine when my sister and I were having to adapt to different schools over and over, it was a time of life when we as well as other kids were simply deeply absorbed in our own selves, the growing, fumbling, seeking self that is the mind mediated through the body’s experiences of this world. These days, I am heartened and amazed by how many people are curious. Who try harder to understand lives at far remove from their own.

I don’t know if we have made progress as a species on that front, or if I just spend a lot of time with grown-ups who happen to read books, but it’s hair-curling to think of all those powerful people colonizing this continent and other continents who just wanted and wanted and wanted and took what they wanted and did not, it seems, really pause to wonder about the lives and experiences of those they were taking from. And all the people in the thousands of years before that who did the same and how many are still doing the same. Like they pinky swore to never let another’s experience make the slightest crack in their own worldview.

The mind-blowing thing is how many people try to be better than that. How many people seek out stories and experiences different from their own, simply in an effort to understand one another better. It’s really, when you think about it, about what goes on in people’s minds when they want to find points of empathy and understanding, beautiful.

*I wrote previously about the Doctrine of Discovery and Mark Charles’s book on the subject, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery in October 2020. I’m curious to see if Watson’s book makes anything of the fact that the Doctrine didn’t technically apply to Britain because it was a papal bull directed at Catholic nations. Which makes the doctrine’s use in Johnson v. McIntosh and subsequent U.S. Supreme Court cases particularly interesting—by the time Britain began colonizing North America, it had long since refused the supremacy of the pope and adopted Anglican Christianity over Catholicism. But I assume those religious differences have been convenient to ignore.

**If you want to wade further into the implications of the Doctrine of Discovery on American property law, particularly with regards to Native rights, and the ways in which it has resulted in massive injustices, Blake Watson’s 2012 law article delves into the Doctrine’s effects on various cases since Johnson v. McIntosh and the ways in which U.S. law has utterly failed to face up to the case’s ongoing repercussions.

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Bonus photo: The top photo is of my stepfather’s cabin, which we spent a couple nights at last weekend. While there we walked the property lines to find the corners, and scouted two original survey stones, one pictured below. I am a little obsessed with survey markers and the stories they tell about how we view and occupy land. That’s actually how my whole commons/private property fixation began.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Speaking of stones, a recent episode of the Scotland Outdoors podcast focused on geology, which is a subject I never get tired of. Although it always throws me off when we (I do this all the time) talk of rocks being however-many-million years old since . . . well, isn’t everything on the planet just reformed matter from when the planet coalesced to begin with? And all that simply reformed matter from the universe? Sometimes it takes a lot of digging to be reminded that we’re all stardust.

• I’m sure none of you need guidance on how to enjoy coffee, if you drink coffee, but since half my family is employed in the specialty coffee business, I get pleasure out of simple pieces like Jessica Easto’s “How to enjoy coffee” in Psyche. Having had many cupping sessions placed in front of me over the years, I can affirm that she is right when she writes that, “The first time you drink coffee that tastes like more than coffee, you’ll never forget it.”

• Archaeologist Lindsey Büster had a fascinating piece in Sapiens about the tendency—and an ongoing and inexplicable human need—of Iron Age people in Britain to hang onto objects owned by deceased loved ones, not grave goods but simply stuff that people couldn’t let go of, like bone spoons or grinding stones: “Our relationship with objects (especially those that become problematic through, for example, the death of a loved one) has surely always been complicated. Knowing that we are not, and have never been, alone in these feelings offers a degree of comfort.”

• I watched this 52-minute Aeon video because I’ve been looking for deeper explanations into why “personal responsibility” seems to have morphed from “take responsibility for my actions” into “I can do anything I want and you just have to deal with it” (please do not ask me how our county and school districts are dealing with masks unless you really want an earful). It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but as an exploration of how we think about poverty it did help reorient my perspective (especially pertinent for all of you interested in the role that individualist ideology plays in fractured society). How did we get from a sense of obligation and responsibility to one another, to its opposite?

• I don’t know where else to put this because it really has nothing to do with anything, but in a passage of Buying America from the Indians that dwells at length on Virginia’s insistence on its claims to western lands being opposed by land-locked Maryland, and how that disagreement held up signing the Articles of the Confederation for years, Watson quotes a New Hampshire delegate who wrote in a letter that, “There now remains only Maryland, who you know has seldom done anything with a good Grace. She has always been a froward hussey.” You go, Maryland.

Walking composition

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” — Georgia O’Keefe (h/t to Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept, for that one)

Walking toward home the other day, I came across this slug eking its way across the footpath. It hadn’t gotten very far, so I decided to hang out until it was on the other side, just in case a cyclist or runner or something came along and didn’t see it.

A little while later a woman strolling behind her dog stopped when I pointed at the slug, and said the week before she’d come across another one on the path close to where we were and relocated it into the grass before moving on.

So random, two strangers on a lovely autumn morning chancing across each other to recount their spontaneous efforts to save the slugs.

—

After many failures, I’ve finally managed a batch of edible sauerkraut. Sara Bir, a chef and author of the super fun book The Fruit Forager’s Companion, walked me through it during a Zoom call with our writing group; and thanks to subscriber Charlotte’s advice after I bemoaned my inability to churn out sauerkraut, I upped the salt to nearly 4%. It took about two weeks — Sara and I checked in a few times, and she figured that it was taking longer to ferment because my kitchen tends to be pretty chilly at this time of year. But we made it!

I still don’t think it should be this hard. Salt, cabbage, time. It seems like it should be far simpler than making yogurt, or sourdough bread, or decent soup for that matter, none of which I’ve ever had trouble with. Maybe I was just bringing the wrong attitude, or maybe I hadn’t cleaned my jars well enough. (I definitely wasn’t using enough salt.)

Salt is a strange thing. It’s the substance I most often think of when I wonder what luxury I’ll miss if climate change really messes everything up, followed by coffee, chocolate, and lemons. But salt is special. It plays a critical role in pickling and fermenting. It makes everything taste better — to me, at least, up to a point, after which it makes everything taste horrendous. It’s a vital nutrient for humans — my father has often told me the story of three women he knew who were driving across a desert, and one of them ended up in the hospital because she’d been virtuously hydrating with plenty of water while the other two ate chips and drank beer. She lost so much salt through sweat that she got hyponatremia. My mother-in-law is prone to hyponatremia and has to be cautious with her fluid intake. We need salt.

—

Salt is also, of course, deadly to slugs. Because slugs are mostly water and their outer membrane is porous, salt leeches water out. Not everything needs salt. It’s one of the genius things about ecosystem balance and complex systems that becomes more marvelous the more you know about it.

It was the British salt laws that prompted Gandhi’s most well-known act of civil disobedience in 1930 — not only walking in protest, but extracting his own salt along the way, bucking the British salt monopoly and breaking the law. It turns out there’s a long history of empires (China, Britain, Rome) engaging in salt monopoly. Because salt is desirable as well as necessary.

I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about land ownership, but ownership, private property, snakes into every aspect of our lives, commodifying all that we need to survive but also what brings us joy, pleasure, and solace. It doesn’t pause to keep the slugs from being trampled — will, in fact, trample the slugs willingly if it would make a profit.

It starts with land but it doesn’t stop there. It doesn’t, as far as I can see, stop anywhere, not voluntarily.


Bonus photo: sauerkraut that isn’t horrible!

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• If you haven’t heard the This Land podcast, start at episode 1 of season 1 and keep going. It’s about the Oklahoma murder case that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing that most of the state is still Native land. I don’t think I’ve read or heard anything that has done such a good job of explaining the genocide, illegal theft of land and removal of people, followed by the devastation of allotment, that has led to Native American people having legal claim to such a tiny fraction of this country. It’s hard to listen to, hard to bear knowing how real it all is, but much harder to live through. (Season 2, which I’ve only just started, is about the court cases attempting to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act.)

• Along the lines of excellent podcasts, Vaccine: The Human Story, about the history of smallpox and the vaccine that finally eradicated it, is riveting listening. There is so much to quote from this, especially the ancient history I had no idea about, but mostly I hope never, ever to see a case of smallpox. It sounds horrific.

• Vaccines, of course, lead to the realm of doubt and uncertainty. Complex systems professor David Krakauer wrote an interesting piece about doubt — specifically the difference between the kind of doubt that leads to scientific advancement versus the kind that heads down conspiracy paths — in Nautilus, and while I’ve had to read it a few times because I’m not sure how well the arguments hold together (Descartes always seems to make a subject slippery), it does evoke some graspable differences between the two: “Unlike scientific doubt that seeks to question what we know in order to make space for alternative simpler ideas, conspiratorial doubt challenges what we know with a metaphysics of inaction.”

• Jamie McCallum writing in Aeon gets to the heart of where we go so wrong when hyping work ethic versus building a world in which people have access to meaningful work: “If there was a formula for obliterating the work ethic, giving people undesirable jobs with long hours and barely paying them sounds exactly like it.”

• Thank you to Mike for sharing this excellent essay on a bear attack and our relationship to nature’s bite by Eva Holland. I used to read Eva’s work a lot when I was still doing travel writing and have somehow missed a bunch in the ensuing years. Reading her bear piece reminded me of a far more personal essay she’d written for Vela (a literary travel magazine by women) years ago. Anyone who’s ever been in a volatile relationship, or watched someone they care about go through one, might relate: “I understood abuse only as Hollywood had presented it to me: an Ike and Tina kind of thing. He was sick, I’d told myself again and again. Wasn’t he the victim, and wasn’t I the caretaker?”

• I have no idea how I feel about the fact that the billionaire founder of Diapers.com wants to build a utopian city . . . founded on Henry George’s principals of land ownership? I mean, goodonya I guess and hooray for more people reading George, but I’m afraid my answer to anyone wanting to build a utopia or intentional community (as we call them now) anywhere is, if you can’t solve social problems where you already are, you likely won’t be able to avoid them somewhere else. But I also sympathize — I, too, fantasize about haring off to some land with people I trust because righting this ship feels so daunting. Problem is, you’re still on the ship, even if you’re hiding below decks pretending autonomy from the rest. Anyway: “‘If you went into the desert where the land was worth nothing, or very little, and you created a foundation that owned the land, and people moved there and tax dollars built infrastructure and we built one of the greatest cities in the world, the foundation could be worth a trillion dollars,’ Lore says. ‘And if the foundation’s mission was to take the appreciation of the land and give it back to the citizens in the form of medicine, education, affordable housing, social services: Wow, that’s it!’” Yes, it is it! It’s called society. Also, George-related tax systems have been enacted to somewhat good effect in cities that already exist, like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

• I had the very good fortune to lead a discussion with Annabel Abbs for the U.S. launch of her book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women with Madison Street Books in Chicago. Abbs is a wonderful, engaging speaker full of delightful and insightful stories about walking. If you missed it and would like to listen, it’s recorded and available here.

• Becky Hagenston is probably my favorite living short story writer, and I was thrilled to find out that she has a new collection coming out, The Age of Discovery. Becky’s stories tend to be on the Bradbury-esque eerie side, or just a touch on the surreal, and there’s something about her writing style that pulls me right in, though I don’t usually love short stories. (I think I linked to her sci-fi Pushcart Prize-winner “Hi Ho Cherry-O” previously; it’s included in this new collection.)

Essay

A couple weekends ago my family went to a cabin at the American Prairie Reserve. For those who haven’t heard of the APR, it’s an interesting private initiative that started as a World Wildlife Fund partnership in the early 2000s with the aim of purchasing private land in eastern Montana that would connect federal wildlife refuges and other open space to eventually preserve three million acres of connected prairie, part privately owned, part public.

The initiative is described as a public-private partnership but I’m not sure it’s exactly that. It’s more open in its aims and methodology than I’m used to seeing from PPPs (granted, my knowledge of them tends to be in the highway or urban planning realm and are usually with for-profit companies rather than non-profit organizations, and the details of the deal are often kept from the public), but possibly more completely privately owned in its structure, at least for the non-public parcels.

I don’t know many public lands advocates who know exactly how they feel about the APR. The point of public lands is that they’re part of the public trust—held in trust for the people (not, as they’re often mischaracterized, owned by government, though plenty of policymakers act like they are). The APR’s lands are not publicly owned—and never will be, according to their website—though they are open to the public. On the other hand, the private lands that make up the APR were privately owned ranches for decades, and without APR purchase they most likely would have passed into other private ownership, ownership that probably wouldn’t have used them for conservation.

I’ve wanted to visit the APR for years because the project intrigued me, but also the idea of looking at and roaming in vast, intact prairie—with the chance of seeing a bison herd, though we didn’t—sounded wonderful.

And it was. I’ve never been anywhere so completely quiet. The dirt roads are tricky (in rain they’d be nearly impassable and I would not want to drive them in winter); barely any cars passed, and even flight paths seem to be mostly routed somewhere else. One lone cottonwood tree sometimes rustled in the wind, and toward evening a couple packs of coyotes howled and yipped in the near distance. No cell phone service, no internet. Just silence and stars and the gentle flow of the Missouri River. It really was wonderful.

Wonderful to me, and probably to anyone else interested in conservation and intact ecosystems. Not so wonderful to a small group of nearby property owners who have at least twice tried to make the APR for all intents and purposes illegal via bills forwarded in Montana’s state legislature.

I’ve tried to understand the objections to the APR over the years. The most vocal group mounting resistance to the APR insists that the organization harms families, communities, and the nation by taking the ranchland they purchase out of cattle production and turning it back into bison-supporting prairie. (The details of their arguments are on their website.) The most recent legislative effort involved a bill that would have banned nonprofits from buying agricultural land. The bill specified “certain nonprofits,” exempting schools and churches but limiting the purchases of land trusts and conservation organizations, and was widely understood to be aimed at the APR.

To say that the area where the APR is located is sparsely populated is an understatement—slightly under 7,000 people live in one county of just over 4,000 square miles (10,360 square kilometers). And as with Western communities who felt left behind and betrayed by the 1980s to early 1990s timber wars, the effects of watching ranching families sell up or drift away will leave significant psychological scars. When your community feels like it’s hollowing out—schools half-full, jobs sparse, volunteer firefighters hard to come by, the only hospital an hour or two or more away—people want an answer as to why, or at least reasons. And in communities where environmental concerns play a factor in constraining resource extraction or management, conservation makes an easy scapegoat. Even when the economics of farming and ranching have been well known to batter family farms (and the soil itself) into debt for decades now.

As we were driving to the APR, we began to see this sign posted on fencing that lined properties along the highway:

Save the cowboy. Like so many other things in the world, this argument isn’t truly about economics or even community: it’s about identity. It’s about how who we think we are entangles itself in how we think the world should be structured. It reminds me of Joe Wilkins’s novel Fall Back Down When I Die and how he so deftly characterized an anti-environmental resentment of nature itself, and how those attitudes were passed down from the characters’ homesteading ancestors, people who were gifted land in the first place from the U.S. government and at the expense of the people it was stolen from. 

It’s interesting to me that one of the members of the Save the Cowboy campaign said in an interview that because private donors fund the APR’s efforts, it’s “basically a takeover of this area by just a few individuals with vast financial resources.” This objection, while clear and perhaps even fair, ignores the fact that other ranches nearby have been purchased by wealthy out-of-state residents who spend very little time there and have closed off rather than opened public access as well as denied neighbors previously permitted grazing access. Nor is it unique to the area. Where I live, an enormously wealthy couple who live mostly in Texas recently bought 126,000 acres of former Weyerhauser timber land that had been publicly accessible (I have serious doubts that their expressed desire to continue welcoming hunters and walkers will last long; their other local property, 200 acres near my town where they’re building a house with umpteen chimneys, boasts the largest “No Trespassing” sign I’ve ever seen in my life). If that anti-APR rancher really wanted to get at the root of her complaint, it would be land access and control being solely at the whim of a wealthy landowner.

It’s also a description of essentially what happened with colonialism throughout the U.S., including Montana. Homesteading families notwithstanding, land speculation by wealthy individuals, corporations, and railways fueled much of the European settlement of the West, and the rest of America before that. George Washington himself was a land speculator. In addition to being the main beneficiary of lands granted to soldiers for helping to build a fort east of the Ohio River—he was gifted 20,000 acres and bought another 25,000 from fellow soldiers—he later scouted out lands west of the 1763 Proclamation Line (past which the British king declared that his subjects were not meant to settle), writing to his land agent in 1767 that:

“I can never look up on that proclamation in any other light . . . than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. . . . Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it.”

I read an interview with a local white nationalist a few years ago in which he gave a non-answer to a journalist when asked about Native American people. After he said that non-white people should “go back” to wherever they came from (not that it matters because the whole argument is nonsensical, but wouldn’t it be more straightforward for us pale-skinned people to “go back”?), the journalist asked him something along the lines of “what about Native Americans?” and the white nationalist said, “We won the war.”

This might seem like a tangent but I think it’s at the heart of these tensions. Aside from the fact that Europeans won pretty much no significant battle with Native American nations,* “the war,” whatever people envision it to be, encompasses far more than believing that hard work, strategy, perseverance, and noble self-sacrifice somehow conquered a continent. It’s a way of life, an ethos, that we think “won.” Cattle, not bison; sheep, not wolves; cultivated wheat, not shortgrass prairie; fences and property and resources, not land and life. This vision of community and neighborliness, not that one.

*(In a 1985 lecture in his Montana history series, historian K. Ross Toole said that, “When I say that we never beat the Indians militarily, I mean it. We killed the buffalo, we wrecked them with smallpox and with booze, but we never beat them militarily.” Smallpox probably played the largest role in how those dynamics played out; less “winning” than benefiting from the numbers lost to disease and massacres, compounded by treaty betrayals, residential schools, and the Dawes Act of 1887.)

There is nothing about this perspective that doesn’t in some way trace back to the Doctrine of Discovery, the papal proclamation of 1493 that gave the Christian nation of Portugal, and later Spain, right of ownership over any non-Christian lands, resources, and people they came across. It was the Doctrine of Discovery that the U.S. Supreme Court referred to in its 1823 decision Johnson v. McIntosh that declared only white people could sell North American land because Native people were incapable of ownership: “their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” (Emphasis added.) Living here for tens of thousands of years—or even just living here first—wasn’t enough. By “discovering” this continent and then putting it to recognizable use, Europeans and European-descended people were imbued with the seemingly divine right of ownership.

Efforts like the APR’s to restore both prairie and bison directly question the stability of that so-called victory. Facing the reality that it was perhaps never absolute seems to terrify many people; being scared makes people angry. We heard similar kinds of virulent objections when the National Bison Range (now just Bison Range) was finally returned to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Cherokee elder Stan Rushworth has talked about this relationship, not with bison specifically but with Western civilization and its fear of Native nations and non-commodification paradigms that often exist in tandem:

“A deep fear of Native people tilts over into anger, and I’ve seen it time and time again. . .  . What we have now with Covid, what we have with climate change, they’re the same thing—and they’re really outgrowths of a predatory dynamic that the United States and perhaps Western civilization and how that’s spread out into the world through what people call capitalism, which is one form, really, of the desire to exploit and the right to exploit people and Mother Earth. It’s a dynamic of exploitation. . . . Fear and hatred go hand in hand.”

This sensibility came up obliquely in one of the Threshold podcast’s first episodes on bison, when a cattle rancher near Yellowstone National Park was asked if she would feel differently about bison if it were proved to her that brucellosis—a disease that causes cows to abort their calves—almost always comes from elk, not bison. Her response was unequivocal: 

“I don’t think in Montana there is a place for free-roaming bison.”

“Even without brucellosis?”

“Even without.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think there’s enough resources.”

She’s referring, the host and interviewer explains, to grass and grazing lands. The resources, the fodder and habitat for animals of all kinds, belong rightfully to the cattle she and other ranchers care for. No matter how the interviewer presents the idea—only tested brucellosis-free bison and elk, only on public lands—the rancher cannot see room for bison in her world because it’s a threat to her way of life and the cattle she loves: 

“You have all these people out there fighting for free-roaming bison, and it’s a concept, it’s a vision that they have of the Old West and bison just roaming and being happy. And we’re fighting for our ability to survive here, and make a living. . . . They don’t have anything to lose in their vision, and we have everything to lose.”

There are some fair points here about who stands to lose when land uses shift, though I’d hazard that the rancher is mischaracterizing pro-bison advocates just as much as she feels mischaracterized in return. In the case of the APR, which is in a different part of the state, there might be some very valid questions about forms of gentrification that affect rural areas (Montana journalist Kathleen McLaughlin had a wonderful interview on her Substack this week about rural gentrification), but it’s all very hard to reconcile with the whole colonial reason many cattle ranchers live in places like Montana in the first place.

Introducing free-roaming bison is a huge shift, one that it’s easy to see forces enormous change on people who already have a life characterized by hard work but also somewhat reliable expectations. I sympathize keenly with people who feel that their way of life is being taken or damaged by forces outside of their control. I’ve felt it myself many times, watching Montana grow and change throughout my life, and I don’t like it when wealthy people from elsewhere buy up and all the land, either. What I don’t understand (or maybe I do understand but am just tired to death of it) is why it doesn’t go the other direction, why it’s so hard for people to see their own pain mirrored in people they don’t identify with.

Valid arguments about loss become intertwined with identity and entitlement, leaving little room to see points of commonality, or even of other people’s equal claims to survival: We belong here. We won. Any narrative or act that feels like it threatens or questions that victory—like turning cattle pastures back into the bison-dominated prairie it was before ranching came in—is a threat not just to livelihood but to identity. You can see it in the most visible campaign against the APR: “Save the cowboy.” Not “save our ranches, our communities, our jobs.” Save a mythical creature that only truly existed for a few years when cattle drives from Texas to Montana over open, unfenced range were still common, a myth that has fed American imaginations and fantasies of rugged individualism for over a hundred years. Save an image, a dream, an identity.

It’s not about cowboys or even about agricultural production. It’s about protecting people’s sense of who they are, who they have a right to be and how they envision their communities surviving. None of us are immune to this. We all crave a sense of identity that feels unshakable; that’s very human. Do we, though, have a right to preserve our identities and ways of life no matter what the cost to others? Are we required to save people from the painful realization that maybe the victory over people, over land, over bison—whatever we or they perceive that victory to be—was never final? That the “war” never ended? What about the other way around—do we have a right to impose a vision of land use on communities that never asked for it?

There’s a real estate office in the next town over from mine that has one of those “Save the Cowboy” posters on its window. Inside, it has a “Cows Not Condos” bumper sticker stuck on a fish tank. The disconnect doesn’t seem to register with anyone. Nor do the anti-APR campaign’s statistics on jobs and economic benefit truly counter the fact that the APR also provides jobs in the area, contributes to the community, and works closely with at least one local Native American nation.

I’m a deep believer in community, and in the idea that true community is built in some ways through mutual self-determination and difficult compromise, but it’s telling that in any interview I’ve read with anti-APR advocates, residents lovingly describe the area’s sense of neighborliness and tight-knit community, while making it clear they don’t see the APR or its employees to be part of that community, no matter how they behave or what they contribute. The only thing that would make them acceptable is to stop trying to restore bison and the prairie. I’ve seen the same thing in my own community—consistently described as tight-knit and neighborly, which it is, while pervaded with complaints about “outsiders” who “don’t understand our ways.”

(This is all completely aside from the fact that, according to some of the ranchers themselves, their cattle operations are set up to raise calves for sending to feedlots—no matter how good their own ranch’s practices might be, when we talk about the climate change and environmental damage caused by beef consumption, it’s largely feedlot-raised cattle that’s under discussion. You can also eat bison, and the APR grants a certain number of bison hunting permits per year through a lottery.)

If you get the sense that I’m struggling with all of this, you’re not wrong. I’m clear on my feelings about conservation, but one of my life mantras (besides “be like water” and “life is too short to wear boring socks”) is to meet people where they are. I don’t think you can solve problems if you don’t know where other people are coming from—really know it, not just assume you know it because they vote or look or act a certain way or live in a particular place. But that doesn’t mean that all worldviews are reconcilable. Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast said something beautiful about this once when talking about deforestation, about how you must grant everyone’s right to exist and to have their own views and opinions, but that doesn’t negate your right to oppose their actions. In the case of the APR, both “sides” have claims to defending or restoring something precious.

I don’t know, again, how I feel about the APR model of conservation with its reliance on private property, though I do know the prairie itself was an incredible place to be, full of starlight and absolute silence broken only by coyotes and that one cottonwood tree. And that I’d rather have wealthy people restoring places like this for the benefit of the public than locking away land as “legacy property” (as the new owners of 126,000 acres near me described their purchase), or, say, going to space. In the ownership and domination paradigm we’re currently stuck in, it feels like one of the best tools available, and it’s being used to good effect in this case, at least from my perspective. (In saving a river from mining waste or an oil pipeline, it’s been pretty useless.) The anti-APR legislation hasn’t passed the state legislature because other conservative legislators were shocked at the assault on private property rights. But even with Montana’s supposed devotion to private property rights, the current loathing for conservation is powerful enough that they might win another time. The Doctrine of Discovery is still with us today: no use of land is acceptable that doesn’t fit within its paradigm.

How you deal with identity is a question nobody has an answer to yet, at least not that I’ve seen. People know how to weaponize identity, as Eric Hoffer wrote about so vividly, but have not yet figured out how to reconcile it when expectations and values shift and evolve. A view of “how things are” resists change and must insist on a static past—in this case, a history that begins with the influx of ranchers and homesteaders, a history that must be seen as inevitable, as progress. Any unwinding of their work is a reversion to something lesser. 

We haven’t yet figured out how to ease the fears the drive aggrieved entitlement and terror of change, nor how to make injured identity whole. Perhaps that will become one of the essential projects of our time. I don’t know. I don’t know how to heal the scars of the timber wars or the resentment that will linger in coal mining-dependent and ranching communities.

I don’t even know if I’m being fair to people who want to stop the American Prairie Reserve, whether it saves cowboys or not. Nor do I know how to heal my own heart when I see the places I love ripped apart for others’ profit or private enjoyment. In the end I, too, am just trying to fit this all into a vision of how I want the world to be.

But I can say that making land whole for the non-human life that depends upon it might be the very thing we need to make a start.

Walking conversation!

“Walking prompts a cascade of changes.” —Annabel Abbs

This is going to be a short post—no links of stuff to read, for once—to share the information I just received for an event tomorrow to launch Annabel Abbs’s book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Woman, hosted by Madison Street Books in Chicago. I just finished doing a Q&A with Annabel that will be published on Medium soon and can verify that she is a delightful person full of insights and interesting stories, and talks so well about walking that I wish I’d written her book! I highly recommend reading it.

The event will be online via Crowdcast at 12 p.m. Mountain Time (1 p.m. CST, 6 p.m. GMT), and you can register for it here.

Walking composition

“The easiest way to stare reality in the face and not utterly lose your shit is to believe that you have control over it. If you believe you have control, then you believe you’re at the top. And if you’re at the top, then people who aren’t like you . . . well, they’ve got to be somewhere lower, right? Every species does this.” —Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit

Last week a grizzly bear got into my sister’s chicken coop.

That is not the most interesting part of this story. The most interesting part is the stupid part, the part where I was pretty sure I heard a bear trying to get into the coop (I heard chicken-coop-invasion noises as I was brushing my teeth by an open window—my sister lives next door to me and we knew a bear was in the area, it having been seen down the road that morning), and my brilliant idea was that I would go out with a flashlight and chase away what was surely a small-ish black bear with noise and light. No, I do not know what I was thinking. It might have been the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life, and that’s a pretty high bar.

I got my spouse to join me, grabbed a flashlight—which was sitting right next to the several containers of bear spray we own, by the way—and headed out waving the light around and yelling.

This did not drive the bear away. What it did do was prompt an ursine nose with large teeth and an unwelcoming growl to greet me around three feet from the coop. I raced back inside, called Fish, Wildlife & Parks and then the police dispatch because FWP was of course closed because it was late, and sat there wondering how I could be so monumentally stupid as to go outside at night to confront a bear. What was I thinking?

In coming decades, this will be a funny and lesson-filled story that we will all retell, but last Thursday evening it was anything but. I would have deserved it if the bear had gone after me. Devastatingly, it ate every single chicken.

I won’t blame you if you never take anything I say seriously again. Honestly, who makes a decision that dumb? I really hope it’s the stupidest thing I ever do in my life.

—-

Some videos of flooding subways in New York City reminded me vividly of riding out Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy or whatever it was, in barely upstate New York, and how many people lost homes and heat and the gas lines and our flooded road and who remembers what else as the storm made the city—and our barely-upstate town—almost unlivable for at least a couple of weeks. Unlivable because of infrastructure, of the way we’ve built our world, dependent on roads and electrical lines and extensive systems to pump out water.

The fragility of our life in New York was brought home to me before that hurricane, in a strange, wet snowstorm that killed the power and stranded me when I was alone and pregnant with a 2-year-old. Nothing about being pregnant or alone with a toddler made my life precarious in that snowstorm. It was the dependence on the roads, and power lines, to access anything that made life possible.

We keep trying to control the world around us, and it keeps reminding us that no, we’re not in control.

—-

After I called dispatch for the bear, two police cars showed up and one officer walked close enough to the coop to inform us that we were dealing with about a 2-year-old grizzly, and then high-tailed it back to hang around their cars waiting for FWP. Who, since they are likely understaffed and underfunded like almost every other public agency, had nobody to send out.

The bear eventually exited, after an hour and a half or more, through the hole you see in the photo above, and ran off down the road. FWP set out a trap the next day, caught the bear, and relocated all 200 pounds of her far off in the mountains. She had raided another chicken coop nearby the previous day and was clearly set on setting up house for a while.

The weekend was quickly followed by local area people having bitter fights on NextDoor over bears and coexistence—not this bear, mind, other bears in areas nearby. Which made me sad but also tired. I like having wildlife around. I’ve never been really scared of bears until now (mountain lions always gave me more of the visceral chill). I know we need to be more responsible, like picking our apples and keeping trash indoors and installing bear-proof fencing, if people like me want to insist that we need to live with the wildlife that’s native to the area. Domination versus partnership, coexistence versus suppression and commodification. The transition is hard, but it seems harder to continue on the way we have been.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bright idea to go chase a bear away with nothing but a flashlight. I think about coexistence a lot, but have clearly forgotten that it should involve some cultivation of common sense. And a reminder of what I often mention, that any notion of rights needs to come with a healthy balance of responsibilities.

Bonus photo: not all that clear, but another neighbor got a shot of the bear in our yard before FWP set up the trap

—-

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• This interview with professor of Russian and East European studies Kristen Ghodsee on “Red nostalgia”—Eastern European longing for the reliability of communism—on the Last Born in the Wilderness podcast was very interesting (and engaging; Ghodsee wrote a book called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and is a fun speaker). Having family in Russia (and since my father has run a business in Moscow since 1992), I certainly paid attention to the rocky years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but can’t say I thought deeply about the long-term psychological effects: “The countries of Eastern Europe after 1989 . . . and then after 1991, they all went through a depression in the ’90s that was longer and deeper than the Great Depression in the United States in the ’30s. . . . A lot of countries still, in 2021, do not have the standard of living that they had under communism in 1991, 30 years later.”

• This article from Shelterwood Forest Farms on the Lost Forest Gardens of Europe sparked all kinds of little curiosity nodes in my brain. How did the author learn about cultura promiscua, or mixed cultivation agricultural systems in Italy? Or the importance of hazel trees in Mesolithic Europe? This seems like a fruitful field to explore.

• I wish Montana Quarterly had more online offerings. John Clayton (author of the book Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America’s Public Lands) has two essays in the most recent two issues I’d love to recommend, including one on a much-referred to 1800s mountain man diary that turned out to be a fabrication and how it informs the complexity of believing in fixed historical narratives; and another (which is online) on Dashiell Hammett’s time with the Pinkerton Detective Agency and how Butte, Montana, influenced his hard-boiled detective novels.

• I recently started catching up on my backlog of Montana Outdoors—it’s easy to forget what a well written and edited magazine it is (thank you to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks for 50 years of excellence there). Several articles stood out as I worked my way through 2020’s issues, including one on the modern disdain for catching and eating fish (as opposed to catch-and-release), a debate I didn’t even realize existed, having eaten every (legal) fish I ever caught in my life until this July—it’s on page 28 via this link to the issu layout.

• I’ve only watched part of this documentary, but a local physical therapist recommended a Netflix movie to me on mushrooms, titled Fantastic Fungi. Merlin Sheldrake’s book on mushrooms, Entangled Life, is still on my shelf to read, and probably will be for a long time, so this is looking to be a nice placeholder until I get to it.

Walking composition

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.” —Ada Lovelace, 1815-1852

I am reading a tremendously good book, one of those books that reminds you (or me at least) why books exist—Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Woman, by Annabel Abbs.*

I’ve been creakily writing about walking for Medium, with some essays getting ready to come out in the next 4-6 weeks, and reading Windswept reminded me what I found so compelling about walking to begin with. Abbs follows the trails and stories of several women who were regular walkers or did long-distance walks (like Frieda Lawrence, who had left her husband and three children to join D.H. Lawrence as his lover and muse; Simone de Beauvoir, and others I’d never heard of like painter Gwen John), interspersing her own walks with their stories, and weaving in neuroscience and evolution with understated deftness. It’s a compelling, wonderfully written book that has reminded me of the integral role this miraculous, falling-forward act of motion plays in human freedom, independence, sense of self, creativity, and belonging.

It’s good to be reminded of why you loved something to begin with.

—-

The photo above is of what looks like an old root cellar—I thought dugout at first, but it might be too small for that and too solidly built for an old kid’s fort. It sits on a little hill just off an in-town path that I’ve tromped hundreds of times. I’ve never noticed that building before. That door. It feels eerie, somehow, to have walked by something so many times, even picked some of those ash berries along with thimble berries growing closer to the ground, and never registered its existence. Like living with a ghost.

—-

It’s also good to be reminded of why I didn’t want my book on walking to be about the usual subjects: the Stoics, Beethoven, Darwin, and Rousseau (Abbs writes so well of Rousseau, and the five children he forced his partner to abandon). Walking is so central to human evolution, to our existence, that I wanted to know what it means for the rest of us. It’s easy to say that Tchaikovsky walked for forty-five minutes before working and for two hours afterward and that practice was central to his genius and output—I’m more interested in what would happen if we all had that opportunity. Everyone, everywhere. If we could all walk safely and without hurry wherever we needed to go. Would anything shift within us?

I loved reading of these women, who walked where and when and how they weren’t meant to go. It reminds me not just of walking, but of how many women throughout thousands of years of history have been unable to suppress their brilliant minds, or their yearning for independence. What walking and art and thought could give them that society couldn’t. And of what else is waiting out there under structures of constraint that bind us.

*Windswept was sent to me by the author’s publisher. It will be released September 7th. I will join Annabel Abbs, fingers crossed, for a Zoom launch event for Windswept on September 8th with Madison Street Books in Chicago—I only say “fingers crossed” because it’s something I agreed to immediately after reading some about Windswept, but I’m also on deck for possible jury duty locally for “sometime in the next six months” starting September 1. I’ll post a link on the newsletter when the event details are finalized.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Building Local Power had an intriguing interview about the importance of small-scale manufacturing to towns and cities, how it’s been zoned out of cities and how we can reintegrate it.

• Manos Tsakiris writing in Psyche at the loss of touch during the pandemic and what that means for our emotional health and societal acceptance of one another: “What if the threat of COVID-19 infection comes under control, but a significant number of people refuse to go back to the carefree tactile habits of our pre-pandemic world?” (Kudos for a reference to Lakoff and Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By, which is a bit of a touchstone book for me.)

• Perri Klass writing in The American Scholar on what we can learn from past cholera pandemics: “At this pandemic moment, we need to remember what we have learned from past pandemics: that humans everywhere, in the 21st century as in the 19th, are more closely connected than they sometimes want to believe.” (This is a long-ish piece but very well-written—cholera sounds absolutely awful, and I hadn’t noticed before that its actual symptoms aren’t usually described.)

• I think I shared this when it came out, but I came across David Sloan Wilson’s essay “I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand” in Nautilus again recently and enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time around: “Something happened around the middle of the 20th century that resulted in a sea change of thinking, from ‘society as an organism’ to Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip ‘there is no such thing as society’ in 1987. When I encountered it as a budding ecologist in the early 1970s, it offended my sensibilities.”

• In Science News: 15 years after Pluto’s planetary status was downgraded, the question over what defines “planet” is still far from settled: “Ceres and other asteroids were considered planets, sometimes dubbed ‘minor planets,’ well into the 20th century. A 1951 article in Science News Letter declared that ‘thousands of planets are known to circle our sun,’ although ‘most are small fry.’ These ‘baby planets’ can be as small as a city block or as wide as Pennsylvania.”

Walking composition

“People are constantly forced to choose between having freedom and having success and stability; freedom with suffering or happiness without freedom. The majority choose the latter.” —Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union

I’ve had a lot of conversations this week along the lines of “why . . . ?” “how can . . . ?” “what should . . .?” I wish there were answers. Why do people believe things that aren’t real so deeply that they’re almost willing to battle over them? How can we find ways to work with people whose values are so different from our own? What should we do with our lives, with our community, to save the world? Why do humans inflict so much suffering on one another?

Where are our limits? Where are everyone else’s? How do we find ways to respect our own boundaries when so many things are falling apart? Is that even possible? How do we do this human thing together when a lot of people want to skip the “together” part? The questions exist because there are no other choices. Even isolated, we’re interconnected.

—-

For some reason I got caught up with the rereading of Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, which started last week when I was having trouble sleeping a few nights. It’s less engaging than I remember, or maybe just has a lot more characters I’m having trouble keeping track of—so many philosophers and poets and musicians and angry populists!—but the main theme of “this upheaval and anti-‘elite’ anger has happened so many times in so many places over so many centuries that you have to look at the deeper forces behind it” is about what I remember it being. It’s certainly not an uplifting book, especially when I consider how many times I’ve heard some version of “we just need a revolution/breakdown so we can start all over and fix things” over the last few years. Which was one of the points of that 6-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis I talked about a while back (thanks again to Kat for that one—I don’t know where you can watch the full thing now, but it’s definitely a mind-twist). It also reminds me, as so many things do, of Octavia Butler’s 1995 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower and how prescient she was about how societal erosion would track alongside climate degradation.

Which leaves us where? I have no idea, but it’s encouraging how many people I hear from or meet who want something more than to burn it all down. Who understand that burning it all down just causes suffering to people who have the least ability to escape the burning, and that the forces that cause the most problems can withstand a temporary societal collapse. That is, burning everything down to start over fixes exactly nothing.

—-

For some reason all of this reminds me of how the “walking composition” idea first started. It wasn’t mine at all. I was at an interdisciplinary residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in 2016, and at the end of the two weeks a composer from Vancouver who writes all sorts of interactive compositions (I’m not even sure what they should be called) handed me a sheet of paper with a “walking composition” on it. It’s a piece of art, the way he wrote instructions (notes?) to, “over the course of five hundred steps,” tread, stroll, pace, meander, step, and pause to breathe once in a while.

I followed (performed?) that composition for a long time, and at some point it turned into a practice that I put on Instagram, to walk and think about one specific thing. And then to here, where I thought the walking compositions would be similarly short, to provoke an idea, but instead seem to have tapped into a part of my mind that wanted to unravel at length.

I should probably just let it. Unravel, that is. But also find my way back to the original composition, because it’s what led me deeper into the idea of embodiment, and the knowledge that how we physically interact with this world we’re on helps determine—in some inexplicable and definitely unpredictable ways—how we interact with one another. Maybe what we’re doing is a walking composition on the scale of nearly eight billion people.

Walk. Breathe. Walk. Breathe. And let the questions go for a little bit.

—-

Bonus photo: I can’t even with these cucumbers. They started out really well and there are fruits on them, but they’re basically dying on the spot. We’re on a well and our water is high in iron. Could that be part of the problem? I’ve been feeding them all our coffee grounds in case it’s low nitrogen. Have I mentioned I suck at gardening?

—-

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• One subscriber sent me this lovely 40-minute Patagonia-produced documentary on trees featuring legendary tree researcher Suzanne Simard as well as Japanese tree doctor Konami Tsukamoto. It made me sad because much of the beauty presented is already being lost, but it was also a reminder of what immersion in the non-human world can give us (though it also made me look up how many days until ski season starts).

• I really appreciated this essay by Cort W. Rudolph in Psyche on the non-existence of specific generational cohorts. It reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a friend about that very subject, where he posited that the only legitimate claim to be a generation with specific attributes might be people born around the time of a fundamental shift, like the end of World War II, or the internet suddenly being a fact of life everywhere you go (that is, digital natives). It’s an idea, anyway: “My colleagues and I have advanced the argument that generations exist because they are willed into being. In other words, generations are socially constructed through discourse on ageing in society; they exist because we establish them, label them, ascribe traits to them, and then promote and legitimise them through various media channels.”

• A brief remembrance of “comet hunter” Carolyn Shoemaker from Arizona Public Radio’s Melissa Sevigny. If you can get the audio to play, it’s worth it—her laugh is delightful—but the transcript is there to read.

• The Threshold podcast led me to Outside/In’s episode on climate migration. I appreciated their focus on the question “Where should I live?” because I don’t know about you but for those of us who’ve taken climate change seriously for a long time, the question of somewhere “safe” from the effects of climate change is just wearying. They didn’t talk about the importance of building resilient community rather than trying to find somewhere to hunker down, but I wonder if a future episode might.

• One of the most interesting things I read early in 2020, before the pandemic had fully hit Europe and the U.S., was an article about how soap and water break apart virus particles. But I didn’t know until seeing this paper on the fluid dynamics of hand-washing that there has never been a robust study on how hand-washing works. It’s a bit challenging to read, but honestly I think it’s worth it. I’d never thought about how a virus is usually mixed up with other particles (salts, lipids, etc.). It’s just . . . cool.

• Interview with me: This link will lead you to an unnecessarily giant picture of my face, but more importantly to a podcast episode I was incredibly excited to do—with Ed Roberson of Mountain & Prairie. Ed is not only a gracious and voraciously curious human being, but he is also one of the best interviewers I’ve had. He threw me off immediately by going straight for the “so tell me about this time your family moved to the Soviet Union” question, which I was in no way prepared for (knowledgable people will catch that I claimed to live there “before the Wall fell” but of course I meant before the Soviet Union fell apart and the Iron Curtain came down; the Berlin Wall fell in 1989) and we went from there. If you do happen to listen, feel free to ask any follow-up questions.
  Thank you, Ed!

Walking composition

“Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Friday afternoon I was working on a textbook that was teaching 5th-graders about suffixes. I like my copy editing job most of the time, but dealing with suffixes and prefixes is a headache because I have to check all the little hyphens and commas to make sure the appropriate stuff is italicized, and slow down and carefully read all the little letter combinations. It’s easy to go too fast and miss when -sion turns into -ion. These weeks remind me of when I first started copy editing textbooks about 20 years ago and cycled through K-2 phonics lessons for a long time (phonics are a bear to copy edit—all those diacritical marks need checking and there’s more than one phonics system). Except in those days we used red pens, Post-Its, and big printed layout sheets. It was easier on the eyes.

Peering at a screen for hours reading text is hard no matter what* but when I started reading several lines over I realized I was done for the day even though I’m behind in my work right now. Being a freelancer does grant the small luxury of being flexible (I make up a lot of time on weekends and early in the morning), so I logged off and took my daughter huckleberry picking for a couple of hours.

I’m never more grateful for our access to wild food than on those summer days when I can close my laptop, fill water bottles and grab bear spray, and head out to eat berries and preserve their gifts for winter.

—-

Last week the local paper had an article about how the extreme (for northwest Montana) heat is affecting huckleberries, though it focused more on how the decreased crop is making prices spike for local businesses—like places that make jam for the tourist trade, or restaurants that serve huckleberry pancakes—and I was more curious about the effects on the berries themselves. Which of course made me worry about our climate change future and whether or not huckleberries will survive it.

I interviewed a local wildlife biologist a few years ago for some articles (she studies grizzly bears, and spent a few years studying huckleberries since they’re a main food source for grizzlies), and one thing she found was that the bushes are rejuvenated after wildfire, but that the hotter, more intense kinds of wildfires we’ve been seeing can destroy entire rhizome systems and they don’t recover from that.

But as my daughter and I headed into the woods, my concerns were more about commodification. The bushes closest to the road had been stripped; I couldn’t tell if it was from commercial pickers, but I’d seen picking rakes in vigorous use at other locations, and the damage looked similar. It’s perfectly legal to pick wild berries for profit, and possible to use the rakes without doing much damage to the bushes, but I’ve been wondering for a few years now how much for-profit picking these lands can take. For now, and for the near future, there’s enough for everyone. It seems abundant beyond belief, impossible to imagine running out.

Settler Americans used to think that about beavers, too. And passenger pigeons. And buffalo. And water. There is nothing magic about huckleberries that could save them from the ravages of commodification if the price were high enough.

—-

We did find berries with just a little extra footwork (and agreed that my choice of Tevas was a poor one, knowing the terrain we’d be in). And they didn’t seem to be smaller or less abundant than last year, even with the heat.

I needed that break—from work for the sake of my eyes, and from wrapping my mind in socio-political discourse and worry, which is constant. Recently I had a few nights when sleep was elusive, and I started rereading Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, which had been helpful for my “worry about everything falling apart” compass in 2017 when it came out. (Age of Anger is about, loosely, populist uprisings worldwide over the past few centuries, and how they often erupt out of frustration, globalization, and a sense of placelessness as well as impotence.) Whenever I pick up that book I know that I’m worrying (either consciously or not) about several possible crises at once. (For balance, the same urge also has me re-watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy in the evenings.) It’s like how—I don’t know if anyone else ever experiences this—I don’t like orange juice much because it’s too sweet, but if I drink some and it tastes tart I know I’m coming down with a cold, even if there are no other symptoms.

These are the things I have to keep reminding myself to hang onto, to circle back to the real-life, physical, in-the-world grounding that I believe is vital for our well-being. Picking berries, looking forward to my first elk hunt this fall and the snow that will eventually cover up all the sins of my gardening (the peas did great! the cucumbers look like a formerly healthy teenager who suddenly took up smoking and staying up all night), spending time with friends and family locally. Trying to care for said friends and family, feeling out the resonant shifts of reciprocity, with the land and with one another. Reminding myself and others over and over, as often as it takes, that we are not alone.

Walk often, placing these feet upon the planet that sustains us, let the paces spool out our caged thoughts. Build community, human and non, care for one another in any way we can, try to ensure a future of huckleberries and the time to pick them.

*I can hear someone about to suggest Flux as I’m typing. I have Flux—it’s great!—but I can’t use it when I’m copy editing because the color washes out the proofreading marks from other editors. Unfortunately, I need to see those.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• It’s been a while since I linked to a Pondercast episode, and I really enjoyed this one on tabula rasa. What do we really mean, host Laurie Brown asks, when we talk about a “clean slate”?

• A cool episode of Talking Headways (an urban planning and transit-oriented podcast) with UCLA geography and urban planning professor Dr. V. Kelly Turner about urban heat islands: “Public health is about shade. When you’re talking about the outdoor environment, heat island is about that reflectivity.” (Incidentally, if anyone ever wonders where I find all these random articles, the host of Talking Headways, Jeff Woods, has a subscription service called the Overhead Wire with a selection of the hundreds of articles he reads every day. I’ve been subscribing to it ever since I first started writing about walking.)

• This essay about Scottish naturalist and author of Design in Nature James Bell Pettigrew and his obsession with the ubiquitousness of the spiral form in nature was a nice interlude: “Overwhelmed as he was by the world’s archetypal whorl, he was sure of one thing — these marvelous spiral arrangements could not be of purely physical origin.”

• Poet A.E. Stallings writing in The American Scholar on “the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up of 150 pair-bonded male couples,” a fighting force that overcame Sparta and remained undefeated for 30 years.

• Final installment of the four-part series on AI in hiring from MIT Technology Review’s podcast In Machines We Trust on deep fakes, AI interviews, and getting a grip on tech before it cements its grip on us.

• Building on that, the most recent episode of Your Undivided Attention takes a crack at what we mean by “choice” when it comes to tech, manipulation, and ethics with philosopher L.A. Paul: “If I know enough, I can just set things up so I’m not influenced by these bad sorts of technologies. Or now that I know about it I just won’t be influenced in that way. The problem is, it just doesn’t work that way. . . . Part of the picture is that this beautiful experience is both corrupting you mentally in some sense, it’s changing what you prefer and how you think, and also you’re not able to recognize that that’s what’s happening.”

• Archeaologist Anthony Sinclair writing in Sapiens about the research on the hominin species Homo longi asks if this might be a close human relative.

• David Gessner fans might enjoy this bittersweet homage to his friend and fellow author Brad Watson, in The American Scholar: “If you asked Brad, ‘How are you?’ you better have some time on your hands.” I have friends like that; it makes a phone call that much more valuable, an intentional spending of time with a relationship as well as a person.