Author: Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“It’s hard to make people understand something if their entitlement is dependent on them not understanding it.” —Derrick Jensen (paraphrasing Upton Sinclair)

I finished historian James C. Scott’s book Against the Grain yesterday, and it’s spun me off into a lot of thoughts about where we are as a species and where we came from. I think I’ll save longer thoughts for a more essay-ish post, but toward the end a lot of the ideas I’ve been trying to grasp at about ownership, commons, and freedom fell into place. I was reminded of a line in one of my older essays (republished in this really incredible anthology benefiting the Montana Land Reliance): “For those of the pioneer spirit, there is nowhere left to run.”

Two things about that. One is that I don’t think I believe in a “pioneer spirit” anymore. People like my ancestors were hardworking, and within the framework of their time, they were brave (it’ll probably be a lifelong project for me to weigh who they were in the best senses against the system of genocide and theft they willingly participated in) to try to make a living on land they didn’t know, but I don’t think there was a spirit involved, pioneer or otherwise. They had a lot of hope and gumption and a willingness to disregard Native people’s right to continue living with the land that was being stolen from them, but the core point about a supposed pioneer spirit is that they, like most pioneers and homesteaders, were fleeing something.

What pioneers didn’t understand (I suspect) is that they brought what they were fleeing with them.

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My post recently about Very Big Trucks was slightly misleading. I own a truck. It could even be classified as Very Big because it’s a 1979 Chevy and those things were built boxy. My spouse and I had been talking about buying a truck for years because we like to camp and paddleboard and kayak and bike (well, he likes to bike; I do not love biking because sitting in any form for lengths of time is painful for me) and we need a way to haul gear around. Strapping everything to the Subaru is what we’ve done for years, but with kids and a dog it’s . . . tight.

Anyway, so we wanted a truck. And I’d been holding out for an electric truck because when we traded our Volkswagen in for the Subaru in 2010 I was firm that I wanted it to be our last combustion engine. Surely, I thought, fully electric vehicles were just around the corner.

Well, surely not. We waited and waited and last year our friends decided to part with their ’79 truck for a nominal sum and it just seemed dumb to either keep waiting for reliable electric trucks, and/or spend a ginormous amount of money on a newer vehicle when all we needed was something to haul stuff around in.

So we bought it and we haul stuff around in it, though mostly it sits around earning its name, Rusty. I kind of weirdly love driving it because it has a Suburban engine and I spent my teenage years driving a ’76 Suburban after wrecking my parents’ used Dodge sedan.

I once mentioned to my mother the frequency of my car crashes (there have been a number) and she said (jokingly), “There’s a reason it’s called kar-ma, Nia.”

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The other thing about that pioneer spirit line is the running. There really is nowhere left to run. Yes, I do believe humans will eventually go to Mars and might even someday colonize it, and I use that word “colonize” purposefully because I don’t think we’re going to be thoughtful about it. But anyone who thinks Musk or Bezos is going to let them hop a ride and run off to a libertarian utopia under a red dawn is kidding themselves. It’s going to take an enormously long time, like decades if not 100 years, involve very few people at the outset and even then only people who can contribute certain types of expertise (like knowing how to build and maintain the machines that can mine water from sand), and life there is going to be very, very difficult. There will be no “I’m free now” homesteading, no “government can’t tell me what to do” survival prepping. It will be interdependence at its most intense because people will be trying to exist on a planet that we did not evolve on. Humans can’t even breathe on Mars, something that Mars enthusiasts seem startlingly eager to forget.

But the truth is—I was thinking this after finishing Against the Grain—there never was anywhere to run. Homo sapiens have been trying to escape state and/or elite control since states and elites first came into existence, but the need for surplus and others’ labor to invent luxury for a few was always going to crawl across the planet. Every move to a frontier was only a temporary reprieve. Which means, in the end, that we’re stuck forever in the same situation humans were in 3000 BCE Uruk or some similar “civilization”: we have to learn to live together on a finite planet with finite resources. Which means we have to learn how to work with and steward the ecosystems we live among—at scales both global and hyper-local—with an eye to actual sustainability for the very long term.

Which means giving a whole heck of a lot of things up. Like car-dependent infrastructure, and single-use plastics, and privatized water, and acceptance of chemical and oil spills, and vacation homes. And the perception that persuades us we can make a free life without interdependence, and without understanding that our running to freedom is always going to be someone else’s invasion and displacement.

Overall, just give up commodification along with the fantasy of absolute individualism. And probably my truck.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I listened to a couple of Earthfire Institute podcast episodes while driving down to meet up with one of my favorite people (with whom I subsequently discussed the frustration of having no option other than driving): One on radical change with Derrick Jensen and the other on interrelatedness with Stan Rushworth. I go back to Rushworth frequently because every interviewer asks him what advice he has for all of us living through “these difficult times,” and he always starts with “which times?” and reminds them that he was born during World War II, and then details the genocide—a 90% population loss—that his people lived through (Rushworth is a Cherokee elder) not much more than 100 years ago. It’s a reminder I frequently need.

• Said friend recently told me about a new podcast from Martin Shaw called Smoke Hole Sessions. They’re kind of fun, meandering conversations with people Shaw has worked with and it all revolves around the importance of story. They’re all interesting in their own ways and I look forward to more.

• Also via said friend, an amazing issue of Canada’s Briar Patch magazine on the topic of the “land back” movement. One line from this interview with Jo-Ann Saddleback particularly struck me: “It didn’t mean ‘this is my territory, don’t come here.’ It meant ‘I have the inalienable right to protect this land.’” YES.

• After I shared the interactive water droplet map last time around, someone sent me this global wind map, which I wish I could just turn into a screen saver. So soothing. (I note today that there is not, um, a whole lot of movement above the Pacific Northwest.)

• Pairing with Against the Grain, a pointed and comprehensive essay in Aeon by philosopher Kim Sterelny about how humans spent 97% of our existence living fairly equitably, and how we can start to reclaim that right: “Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is). Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence.”

• Another reader sent an episode of the Building Local Power podcast, which is a new one to me but which I fell in love with immediately. It’s a great complement to the Frontiers of Commoning podcast and seems to work in a lot of the areas that the Create Real Democracy group does about uprooting corporate control over life and democratic institutions. (Is corporate control the knapweed?) This episode on racial justice and the anti-monopoly fight was excellent and reminded me of where and why I started digging into the history of corporate control in the first place.

• Banning left turns could drastically reduce car crashes. Popular Mechanics reported on a study out of Penn State detailing the relationship between crashes and left turns. “People are already wising up to the idea that left turns can be brutal and should be avoided.” I’m going to post that up in my house since everyone makes fun of me for the lengths I go to to avoid turning left.

• Almost forgot! I am trying a new thing on Medium through their Partner program. Assuming I can manage to keep up with myself (hahahahaha, many of you know how long it takes me to reply to emails and know that this will never happen), I’ll be writing essays about walking on the platform about twice a month. The first one went up week before last, and I’m planning on this week’s to be about bipedalism and paleoanthropology. (I just finished Jeremy DeSilva’s book First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human and really enjoyed it.)

I wrote an essay recently that I shared with my writing group, noting that it was one “for the vault.” One of the other members came up with that phrase a few years back to refer to essays we wanted to craft and share and maybe revise and improve—an essay, in other words, not a letter or journal entry—but wouldn’t be sending out into the world for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Essays “for the vault” are often about parenting experiences, though not always. Sometimes, for me at least, one will involve an experience that affected me personally, often traumatic, but that is someone else’s story to share, or keep private. Which, really, all parenting stories are anyway.

My writing group members and I started meeting online over Google Hangout long before the pandemic—I’m thinking 2012 or 2013—before any of us had ever met in person. Most of us had written parenting essays for Brain, Child magazine, and followed the founder and former editor when she moved to launch the essay site Full Grown People. It was in a Facebook group for FGP’s writers that we met and formed an online writing group where we workshopped essays once a month and got to know one another.

At some point each of us stopped writing about our children. We’re all mothers, and it’s a strange territory to navigate, where your baby’s life and stories start out as being also your own life and stories, but, for most, eventually turns into their own life and stories. At different points and for different reasons each of us seemed to find that those stories were no longer ours to narrate. When I do drag one of my kids into an essay these days, I try to make it not really about them but about something larger—I often fail at that and always feel guilty.

Where do parental rights end and a child’s ownership of their self and autonomy begin? What kind of experiences can a parent restrict, or damage inflict, before a child’s future potential is irrevocably limited?

This question is the main reason I don’t share photos of my kids online. I did, when they were little, for about five years. Sometimes a friend will send me a screenshot of a Facebook “memory” that came up for them featuring one of my kids as a baby or toddler, even though I deleted all photos of them years before deleting my Facebook account. Facebook owned those photos the second I posted them, which I knew at the time but it still annoys me.

This is a much bigger issue than any of us realizes because most of the world has no inkling of what kind of control data mining will eventually have over our lives. The moment a prospective parent posts about being pregnant, filing adoption papers, or shares a sonogram photo or a coming-home day—from the very first post, that social media company owns part of that child’s future because they own the data, and none of us knows what that will come to mean.

On the other hand, these platforms are almost the only medium many of us have to share the milestones and experiences and challenges of life, even privately. We’re not given much of a choice even as we’re not given any control over what companies do with the data they glean. What about Facebook support groups, which can be a lifeline, for parents of children with rare illnesses or certain disabilities?

Maybe we ought to be able to share photos of and stories about our kids and the realities of parenting with people who care without that decision having detrimental effects on their future lives that we can’t foresee.

One of the reasons I get hung up on digital tech is because, after years of studying the loss of walking in America, it’s impossible for me to not see the way that car-centric infrastructure, from crosswalk design to the way we build cars themselves, damages every facet of human life. It’s a technology whose consequences weren’t predicted in the beginning, and so its shape and impact were determined by those who stood to profit, with the result that human society serves cars, not the other way around.

I see digital technology, including AI and data mining, as the equivalent of automobiles in the 1920s, when mass protests against cars’ speed, space-hogging, and deathly toll defined society’s relationship to them, until men from car companies created think tanks to serve their purposes, and eventually climbed into governmental positions to smash highways through neighborhoods, bend our lives around suburban car dependency, and then spend decades convincing society that this was the life we’d dreamed of.

The fundamental problem isn’t technology—I wrote this piece with a pen in a notebook under in an electric light before typing it on my laptop to then post it to the magical interwebs so it could arrive in your inbox, all while listening to a Spotify playlist, technology every step of the way—the problem is whether society is allowed to determine how that technology is used, or whether we exist to serve the profit motives of its owners and creators.

I don’t fully know how that will play out with digital technology, whether we’re talking about regulation of data mining or better anti-monopoly enforcement or a new vision of a democratic internet like MIT’s SOLID project or whether we’re going to lose more of ourselves and our health and our communities because nobody got a handle on the thing early enough. But I do know that for the moment my kids’ only protection against the data mining that will inevitably shape part of their future is me minimizing their online presence.*

And when it comes to children and self-determination this isn’t a tech-only problem. I first got interested in the tension between parental rights and children’s rights to own their own future selves after reading Hella Winston’s Unchosen, a 2009 nonfiction book adapted from the author’s Ph.D. thesis that followed young adults who’d grown up in a strict ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York—young adults who wanted to leave the community or at least explore the opportunities of the world a bit more, but none of whom had the educational or social skills to even know where to begin because their culture restricted their educational and social access. As I wrote in my old blog at the time:

The women the author meets have only a 4th-grade education. The men have what run-of-the-mill secular Westerners might deem a warped view of sex and sexuality. Many of the men and women barely speak English. Not a one of them is trained in any useful trade or skill beyond reading Hebrew, caring for children, or basic carpentry, this in the center of one of the world’s great metropolises of opportunity.

After finishing the book, I was left with the feeling that, by giving adults the freedom to raise their children in their own religion, and by allowing them to keep their children from contact with the outside world, we have, by societal assent, stolen these people’s freedom to choose almost anything once they become adults.

I thought about that book again recently when a friend and I were talking about a local evangelical Christian megachurch that he and his wife had attended out of curiosity, and in which they watched, horrified, as the pastor (with the usual emotion-manipulating light show, music, etc.) declared that everyone who was not saved would be going directly to hell when they died. That wasn’t the part that horrified them. What horrified them was watching a clutch of very young children race down the aisle, crying and terrified at the idea of hell, to be saved.

And I was reminded of it again when reading a thread a few months back by a Montana woman who’d grown up in a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling family. It’s really worth reading in full. This woman doesn’t know me from Adam, but I am grateful that she shared her experiences, which echo somewhat those of Tara Westover’s ultra-religious unschooling experience growing up in Idaho, though of different Christian sects.**

The point isn’t religion/not religion, but what happens to many of these people as they become adults. People whose religious upbringing demanded ignorance and the cultivation of guilt and fear, or people brought up by adults who abused them and undermined their sense of self and capability, or people brought up simply lacking the skills—whether practical, linguistic, educational, or social—to give them enough flexibility that they might maintain some determination over their own eventual lives.

What rights do our future selves have? It’s a question that perhaps every parent could entertain because our children’s needs and dependencies are going to vary massively, but it’s also a question I wish tech companies—and road designers and chemical companies and mining conglomerates—were required to factor into their designs.

It’s frustrating knowing that I can’t even share an essay “for the vault” with my writing group without Google’s Gmail program trawling it for the advertising maw, much less share a photo of my kids or any details about their lives without Facebook et al. mining that information for usable data. So I let go, a little, and don’t even know what might be lost in the choices I’m struggling to make.

The vast inheritance of digital technology at our fingertips should be designed to allow all of us to make those choices with a radically different view of freedom in mind. We should be able to use them trusting that the natural, absolutely vital human need for connection shouldn’t simply be feed for the captains of industry and profit. With the question at the forefront of business meetings not being “How can I sell you more stuff?” but “What will enable your future self’s best chance at self-determination?” Maybe all of our technologies, religion included, should be designed with that question in mind.

My group has seen our writer-parent relationships change dramatically over the years. We’ve gone through intense experiences and a lot of trauma and worry and work. We’ve put a lot in the vault; it’s in that act, maybe, that we’ve learned to begin letting go of the idea that our children are ours rather than their own, privatizing our experiences in order to let them live as fully as possible while knowing the privilege we’ve been afforded to make that choice.

*I’d still like better answers from school districts about what happens with the data from all the programs they use, from Google classroom to proprietary standardized tests to the “learning” programs like my favorites-to-loathe IXL and Xtra Math. The programs I’ve seen largely do a terrible job of supporting, for example, math education, but I wonder how much the companies that own them benefit from the data they glean from the kids’ activities. It’s not an issue that school districts, with one exception that I know of, are well equipped to ask, much less answer.

**If you want to go deeper into that rabbit hole, this thread by R.L. Stollar on a history “textbook” commonly used in homeschooling families and private Christian schools is eye-opening, as is this one about the same textbook by schoolteacher Josiah Hawthorne. Or you could just . . . not go down those rabbit holes. I don’t know what my capacity it is for knowing about things that make me want to hide my family in the woods for pretty much ever, but things like this make me think I’m reaching it. Except that I know there is no level of separation or security that can protect us from one another. The only answer is to reach deeper in and try to reduce suffering for as many as possible.

Walking composition

“When bird does wait thy absence long,
Nor tend unto its morning song;
While thou art searching stoic page,
Or listening to an ancient sage,
Whose spirit curbs a mournful rage,
                                    Forget me not.”
—from “Forget Me Not,” Ann Plato

I have to confess, I’ve never actually enjoyed gardening that much. I’m more of a hunter-gatherer than an agriculturalist. I’d prefer to both hunt and gather than to tend. But once I started to think about it not as gardening/growing things but as caring for and restoring the soil—an in between place of husbandry—it magically became something I craved. Ever since my own kids became toddlers, I’ve seen children’s tendency to collect sticks and rocks as answering a craving for groundedness, a craving we maybe learn to suppress or to answer with other, less fulfilling, things as we grow. Listening to that interview a couple of weeks ago about soil redirected my focus in profound ways that I hope will last (though I purchased and read the interviewee’s book, and it ended up being all about the divine feminine, etc., not about soil at all really, which was disappointing but made me think I should finally get around to reading Kristin Ohlson’s The Soil Will Save Us).

The thistles and knapweed continue to be overwhelming. It’s a relief to walk around town and find forget-me-nots and wild phlox in shady places making friends with aspen trees. But even with the thistles and knapweed, at least I’ve got my hands and feet in the dirt.

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In this week’s newsletter from Create Real Democracy, an historical note I hadn’t heard before on the ongoing difficulty with the corporations-are-people argument:

“1949 – Justice William O. Douglas dissents in Wheeling Steel Corp. v. Glander [337 U.S. 562] Supreme Court decision – states that corporations are not persons
Regarding the ruling that corporations are given rights as persons under the 14th Amendment, Douglas stated, ‘I can only conclude that the Santa Clara case was wrong and should be overruled . . . There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view nor was the result so obvious that exposition was unnecessary . . . If they [the people] want corporations to be treated as humans are treated, if they want to grant corporations this large degree of emancipation from state regulation, they should say so. The Constitution provides a method by which they may do so. We should not do it for them through the guise of interpretation.’”

“Santa Clara” being the infamous 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that granted corporations rights of personhood under the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Except it didn’t, quite. The personhood argument was a headnote added by a Reporter of Decisions (who happened to have formerly been the president of a railway company), and was then approved by the Chief Justice. It was never actually part of the justices’ opinion, either majority or dissenting, and yet its effects last to this day.

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Fertile soil is both a metaphor and a real-life dire need. Our soil is depleted and exhausted, but so are our imaginations. We’ve strip-mined everything, including ourselves.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• When we’re looking for extraterrestrial life, what do we mean by “life”? In Sapiens, Gideon Lasco writes that for anthropologists, the assumptions have changed drastically. “The discovery of possible evidence of alien microbes on Venus may constitute a “minimalist” version of people’s expectations of extraterrestrial life—but it is still relaunching age-old discussions about humanity’s place in the world, and our world’s place in the universe.”

• New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie talking up e-bikes and the essential work of civic engagement on the War on Cars podcast. “We’re experiencing this right now. A big, massive relief bill was passed by the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress, and the Republicans in Congress are going on about Dr. Suess or whatever. I think the right response is just not even to engage it. . . . I don’t know how much that’s going to work, but I do know that endlessly trying to litigate culture war stuff from the perspective of governance is a fool’s errand.”

• I forgot to link to this last time around: Kate Raworth’s excellent interview about her Doughnut Economics Lab on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast. I might have quietly become a fangirl solely for her focus on just getting shit done: “It’s all about action. . . . I really sincerely believe that 21st-century economics is being practiced first; it will be theorized later.”

• Pondercast on all the noise of gathering and togetherness that’s been missing over the last year.

• If you liked The Overstory, you might enjoy this interview with forest ecologist Suzanne Simard about her life’s work and her new book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

Walking composition

“It has been my experience that I am always true from my point of view, but am often wrong from the point of view of my honest critics.” —Mahatma Gandhi

I can’t remember before seeing such a quantity of Very Large Trucks (and Also Jeeps) as I’ve seen over the past month in my area. They are . . . Very Large. I know this is a recent design change to make trucks look more intimidating (insert massive eye-rolls here), and I’ve been a bit angry, I guess, at seeing such large numbers of them on the road, wondering if they’re people who moved to Montana recently looking for a mythical place where “government” will leave them alone. It feels telling but also completely prejudicial of me that I am constantly noticing their license plates, almost all of which are Washington or California.

The article I linked to above has some telling quotes from car manufacturers about this new design shift:

“The specific design trend of the massive hood sticking way out in front of the driver, with a cliff-face front grille obstructing the view several feet out in front of the wheels, is entirely a marketing gimmick. The explicit point is to create an angry, aggressive face that will intimidate others, especially pedestrians. Don’t take it from me, take it from the guy who designed the latest GM Sierra HD: ‘The front end was always the focal point . . . we spent a lot of time making sure that when you stand in front of this thing it looks like it’s going to come get you. It’s got that pissed-off feel.’”

Certainly working on me, and I have little doubt that it works for the people who choose to drive them for that reason. What we definitely need in this world are larger vehicles that make expressing superiority and killing or maiming people easier.

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Everything I wrote above is saturated with judgment, and there are far more words sitting at the end of my tongue that I either didn’t let out, or deleted. I struggle with judgment, like everyone else who’s trying to be more compassionate, empathetic, and generally just not an asshole. It’s one of the reasons I loved the book Eating Dirt so much—I kept waiting for Charlotte Gill to write just one line passing judgment on the timber companies, the Canadian colonial government, and the practice of clear-cutting that has caused so much damage. She never did, and she managed to not do it without avoiding the issue, somehow, magically, such a hard thing to do as a nonfiction writer. Her ability to write with honesty and clarity about dirt and forestry and the labor of tree-planting without explicit judgment of the forces that caused the damage kept throwing me back on myself.

Why did I want her to judge so badly? How did she manage to write of extraction and its harms in a way that felt like . . . I don’t know, like the eons-slow process of creating soil itself? Is the urge to judge and condemn, even when it’s justified, its own kind of strip-mining?

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Watching those trucks has got me thinking a lot about how it feels to be in a vehicle, which is something I pondered a great deal while writing my book. About how a car is not just an expression of identity, but an extension of our physical self. When other parents here complain about the length of the car line for dropping their kids off at school, there is no consciousness that when you’re taking yourself and/or your kids somewhere in a car, you’re not just taking your bodies and selves; you’re taking several thousand pounds of self that you deem necessary, or is necessary due to lack of transit and a walkable life, to your movement in the world. Those trucks and Jeeps are a clear manifestation of the hunger to take up more space, to declare that nobody can limit not just your chimeric-like freedom, but how you exist in this world, what you do, how much you consume, how much space you can spread your self into. Not just yourself. Your self. All its desires and angers, its needs and wants, its craving for judgment and control.

To keep that self contained barely within your own body, to subvert the need to surround it with more space, more power, more declaration of your existence and entitlements, is incredibly difficult.

I should stop saying “you.” It’s not like I don’t drive.

Is my desire to judge, my craving for righteous indignation and anger, little different than those big trucks? I can argue that it causes less harm, but that is not something I know for sure. Maybe they’re both just manifestations of a need for control.

I still think those designs should be illegal, not because they prompt anger and fear but because they truncate drivers’ sightlines (it’s hard to see past the high, straight hood, especially hard to see children) and are partly linked to an undeniable rise in pedestrian deaths over the past few years (see also: road design). So just, no. I can’t say no, we shouldn’t have this thing in this world while also refraining from judging it, can’t I? I can try.

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Some stuff to read, watch, listen to, or tinker with:

• Somewhere I stumbled across this amazing interactive map that uses USGS data to allow you to follow a raindrop from anywhere in the continental United States to its eventual spill into an ocean. I have a longstanding obsession with waterways, creeks, rivers, hydrology, watersheds, and the general unseen role of water in our lives, and plan on leaving this up to play around with whenever I feel like wasting time stalking news or poking around Twitter.

• Filmmaker Neil Halloran’s half-hour somewhat interactive (only on the website) documentary about uncertainty in climate change science is probably the first new thing I’ve seen about climate change in years. Small insights, but well-articulated ones.

• Scott Santens was one of the first people I ever talked with about Universal Basic Income, back when I was still on Twitter a few years ago. He wrote a post for Humanity Forward that does a great job of explaining why unemployment insurance isn’t the reason that business owners and managers are having a hard time finding people to work for them: “The employees they want are doing unpaid work at home that they can’t or don’t want to stop doing. People aren’t lazy. They’re working outside the labor market. . . . Second, employers are finding that by raising their wages, they are in fact able to find willing employees. It’s like this one neat trick that just seems to work.” (Emphasis in original.)

• Lucy Jones writing in The American Scholar about researching the physical and mental health benefits of spending time in nature for her book Losing Eden, and how her understanding of those benefits deepened during England’s Covid-19 lockdowns. I’m intrigued by what she says about access to nature and the biophilic city movement: “The biophilic city movement reimagines a human habitat that allows for nature and incorporates the nonhuman world into all its aspects, with walkable neighborhoods, bicycle-friendly towns, rewilded roundabouts, greened parking spaces, city forests, equal distribution of tree cover, car-free streets where children can play, meadows instead of lawns, and playgrounds and schools filled with greenery, trees, and flowers. . . . Can we balance a respect for nature, a humble reverence, an absence of arrogance, with a new kindness?”

• I’ve had Greg Jackson’s essay in The Point queued up for ages to share here as I tried to get my own head around it. It’s kind of about how politics is colonizing our humanity, but also about other things that I’m having some trouble grasping. Somewhat about how art can mitigate the colonization effect, but he also mentions that he was surprised by how shallowly art has responded to the upheavals of the last several years (one example is that the bestselling books are mostly political, and that our daily activities involve “scouring social media for fresh political stimulation,” but I wonder if there’s a lot of other art he’s missing—as in, the art might be there but you have to look hard for it—plus what about the success of books like The Overstory?). Anyway, there’s a lot in there and I obviously have no hot takes or quick conclusions, which is probably all to the good. “It is not clear that politics is improved by our relentless fixation on it” is likely true in the context that he’s discussing, but it’s not improved by our ignorance, either.

• My copy editing work the last couple weeks led me to the book The Cat Man of Aleppo, and the story of Mohammad Alla Aljaleel and the cat sanctuary he established in Aleppo during the ongoing Syrian civil war. If you want your heart filled and broken and brought back bigger for a couple of minutes.

Walking composition

“And are not men than they more blind, 
Who having eyes yet never find 
The bliss in which they move”
—from “Walking,” by Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)

I broke a bunch of Mason jars last week, nice ones, through sheer stupidity or ignorance or—my preferred interpretation—to create science lessons for the kids.

I know that liquid expands when it freezes. When I fill a container for the freezer, I leave space for that reason. But sometimes (most of the time) my grasp of physics has gaping holes, like not realizing that expansion can happen in all directions, not just into available space but also into unavailable space.

There’s a metaphor in that, but then there’s always a metaphor.

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Sometime back when I started this newsletter I wrote a piece about the flaws in the ways we teach science, how it’s too abstract and not hands-on enough and that’s a big reason why you get things like climate denial and anti-vaccination arguments and unregulated water pollution, because it is really hard to intuitively grasp cause and effect when you don’t have a hands-on experience of it. One of the most memorable books I read in the last decade was Frank R. Wilson’s The Hand, which makes the argument that the human brain evolved to be so large because we use our hands so dexterously, not so that we could use our hands. Our hands’ ability to manipulate things, he argued, drove our brain’s growth and evolution.

By putting all our learning’s weight in the brain, we shortchange our capabilities for understanding. We are missing and misunderstanding most of reality because we don’t give ourselves chances to fully engage with it, especially as children.

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I’ve been trying for years to reduce our household plastic. One of the consistent holdouts is the freezer, so when I made chicken broth recently I decided to try freezing it in Mason jars instead of Ziplock bags partly because of the plastic and partly because every single Ziplock springs a pinhole leak when I thaw chicken broth, meaning its usefulness a second time is seriously reduced and I’m convinced they make them that way on purpose. They didn’t used to spring a leak and it’s the same spot every time, in a bottom corner.

Anyway, you might know where this is going. I thought I was being smart partially filling half-gallon Mason jars with broth and placing them uncovered in the freezer. Space to expand! is what I thought. Every single one of the jars shattered in very interesting patters and I lost both the jars and the broth. At least it was a direct demonstration for the kids of what “liquid expands when it freezes” means, but I wish I’d done it with just one jar. (That had occurred to me when I was filling them, but I’m just as much of an idiot as anyone else most of the time.)

Plastic is flexible, pliable, moldable and so very, very useful. I almost never have to worry about finding pools of frozen chicken broth in the freezer when I dispense it into plastic bags. But when I look at the pools of waste and contamination that plastic leaves behind in air, water, soil, and human bodies, the space it takes up is so large I can barely grasp it.

What if all of reality is just metaphors expanding into one another’s spaces?

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Bonus photo: the evidence

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• This piece by Ian Gilligan in Aeon about how the need for clothing—rather than food—might have spurred the development of agriculture was really fascinating, and engagingly written: “The pattern of clothing in Aboriginal Australia can challenge a number of cherished theories about the origin of clothing. For one, routine Aboriginal nakedness implies that humans didn’t invent clothes due to some inherent sense of modesty. Neither, as hunter-gatherers, did we need clothes for the sake of appearance.”

• Serendipitously, someone in another newsletter forum recommended a podcast episode that then led me to this one with Erin You-Juin McMorrow, author of Grounded, a book about . . . soil. Considering the responses to that post about soil, I think a lot of people here might enjoy it. There’s a lot in the interview about the divine feminine, which you can skim over if that’s not your thing, but the parts about soil definitely made me want to read the book.

• An acquaintance sent me this Atlantic article on the role that minimum parking requirements play into the housing problems so many of our communities face. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—parking is an unseen plague and if we want vibrant communities we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it: “The trouble with parking requirements is twofold. First, they don’t do what they’re supposed to, which is prevent curb congestion. . . . Second—and more consequential—parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, by subordinating density to the needs of the car.”

• Martin Tisne writing in MIT Technology Review about the desperate need for collective data rights: “Individuals should not have to fight for their data privacy rights and be responsible for every consequence of their digital actions. Consider an analogy: people have a right to safe drinking water, but they aren’t urged to exercise that right by checking the quality of the water with a pipette every time they have a drink at the tap.” (I agree, but also wonder if the author fully comprehends that the privatization of every single thing that we rely on to survive is the overall point.)

I’ve been doing a lot of gardening recently, probably more than at any other time of my life except when my spouse and I bought our first house nearly twenty years ago and thought we’d become avid gardeners like both of our mothers. Between the heavy clay soil, ubiquitous thistles, poison ivy, and—once a friend of ours trained her lawnmowing goats in our yard and brought her horses by a few times—mile-a-minute vine, it was far more laborious and less fruitful than we’d hoped. Later, when we’d scaled back our ambition and built a few raised boxes filled with bags of soil purchased from Home Depot, the seeds of a perennial sunflower we’d planted took over and made itself into an impenetrable (if pretty) autumn jungle; aside from a small effort at tomatoes every year we gave up. I probably could have handled the labor but the heat and humidity of upstate New York did me in.

I’ve been promising our kids a garden ever since we moved back to Montana, somewhere they could grow carrots, berries, and pumpkins, but gardens are work, our summers are short, and the soil of our yard turned out to be a thick gumbo-like substance similar to the clay we had in New York. I was digging rows for potatoes last weekend and each forkful brought up a heavy mass that was less “dirt” and more a soil-like clod of slick glue riddled with thistle roots and (thankfully) worms. Breaking each chunk apart by hand showed strata and fracture lines that reminded me of shearing lava rocks when I was little. Left long enough, this soil, too, might eventually compress into solid rock.

A neighbor friend was working at a tree trimming service last year, and dumped truckloads of mulch on the garden throughout the summer, which seemed like a useful thing until a friend pointed out that most of the trimmings were cedar, and cedar leaches nitrogen from soil. Which meant we’d have to add nitrogen in the form of other soil, compost, and, in the long term, nitrogen-fixing plants like lentils or vetch.

Gardening seems to require purchasing soil or compost anyway, which was really odd to me once I started thinking about it. My mother never bought soil when I was growing up, and she cultivated bountiful gardens in nearly every house we lived in, even ones we only rented for a year. In one, we spent only one summer but had the largest, sweetest strawberries in my memory. The house was in a sheltered hollow an hour or so south of where I live now, and the soil, as I planted carrot and pea seeds under her instruction, was loamy and soft, at least eight inches of enriched glacial silt.

It’s hard to grow things in clay soil. Fruit and vegetable roots struggle to wind through thick compacted dirt, no matter how much nutrition it holds. I dug a row to grow tomatoes and peppers last year, just to get something in the ground after we fenced in an area during lockdown, and they grew sparse and yellowish, producing very little. This year, my buddy who’s been gardening most of his life told us to go down to the place on the south end of Flathead Lake that sells peat mixed with compost to till through the soil, feeding it while breaking it up. I nixed the tilling part because every time I dig in this area of the yard I bring up some substantial object, like a hammer or a kitchen knife or a length of pipe or chunk of brick. I didn’t know what a previous owner used to do here but it wasn’t gardening. (Unless they were gardening snips of wiring because I’ve found hundreds of those.) In our last yard we’d used a tiller in the garden and ended up nearly wrecking it because the soil there had good-sized rocks seeded all throughout the clay, and sometimes a large one would get stuck in the tiller’s blades. It’s an expensive mistake to assume your dirt contains only dirt.

I haven’t gone to pick up a cube of peat because I have to get my truck’s oil leak fixed first, but the whole idea of it has given me pause—to enough to not do it, but I’ve been thinking a lot about peat and topsoil and where it all comes from. I’ve bought about twenty bags of gardening soil from the hardware store in the last month, piling beds on top of hand-dug clay, and each time I haul out and rip open that forty pounds of plastic-wrapped dirt, I have to wonder about its origins. Unlike, say, trees, soil isn’t precisely a renewable resource. It’s not something you can extract and then plant again. Pretty much all of our life depends on soil, yet it’s not something we’ve really learned to make. Make up for the lack of, yes, sometimes, but not make, at least not fast or at scale.

Making soil is in essence what compost is. We take organic materials—banana peels, chicken bones, supposedly compostable plastic bags or parchment paper—pile them up to promote the creation of heat, add worms or enzymes or nothing, and wait. Given enough heat and time, the materials turn into something that can then be used for the eventual creation of tomatoes. It’s rich and effective, but is it soil? Soil at its most unmolested contains worlds that we’ve barely begun to understand, microbes and bugs and interlocked roots and mycelial networks that leave researchers wondering where mushrooms end and fungi begin.

(It’s all connected. Pause for a minute and really, truly think about that. Every single speck of existence, connected. I know it’s been said in numerous wonderful ways but it’s always worth letting yourself sink into the knowledge.)

I recently finished Charlotte Gill’s book Eating Dirt about her years working on a tree-planting crew. It came recommended from science writer and former Arctic researcher Sarah Boon, who shared enticing excerpts, but I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’ve read so many books about trees!

Whatever I expected, Eating Dirt turned out to be different from that. More. Deeper. Fuller. I told Sarah and our little group of science writer friends that it had been a long time since a book actively felt like it was slowing my mind down. Pulling me down into the dirt and getting this jumpy, too-inattentive mind of mine to settle down and enrich itself with light but held attention. Despite the fact that Gill frequently describes the speed of the work itself, as the planters are paid so many cents per seedling in the ground, the effect of her language was exactly the drawdown I look for in mindfulness practices and bonfires and books and slow walks in the woods by myself.

It was like being furrowed by a gentle hand reminding me of the richness that each of us contains in our selfs. And at the same time she refocused me on the soil as I read, since Eating Dirt made me think about dirt and soil far more than it made me think about trees:

“Even now, old-growth soil is ancient and alchemical. A world beneath our feet that’s oceanic in its unknown fecundity. Crustaceans live in it. Out of this dark fundament, life is born of inert matter, from rocks and clay and sand. Trees germinate here: light-drinking organisms that suck molecules from the air and transform them into a wondrous polymer, which is both strong and flexible. And when they are done living they disassemble and return to the earth. Dust to dust.”

The area we lived in New York is a big agricultural region. We were surrounded by corn fields and apple orchards, and just a few miles away was some of the richest soil in America, hummus so deep that fully intact woolly mammoth fossils have been extracted from it. It’s called the Black Dirt Region, tens of thousands of acres of the remains left by the glacial lake of a previous ice age. It was until recently the source of nearly a quarter of the U.S.’s onions, and the soil is so treasured—between 30 and 90% organic matter when most soil has less than 10%—that it’s illegal to sell. (Why our yard was full of compacted clay instead is another question, though I think it had been a corn field for a long time.)

Which brings me back to the question of purchased soil, just a thing we do these days. Build some boxes, start some seeds, and go buy soil. I had a friend who ran a microgreen business for a few years, and she had to buy mountains of fresh soil for her seeds. It got reused in her larger farm, but still, she had to bring it in. And then there’s my friend’s advice to follow his lead and buy big cubes of peat to work into our clay.

Peat, as I learned when living in Scotland, is a huge carbon sink and grows at a rate of about a millimeter per year. It has to be mined or extracted and growing it back can take lifetimes. The bags of soil I buy at the hardware store are probably mixed with peat, and often with topsoil, which is also mined from somewhere else. The more I poked around in the question, the more the dependence on this shipped-in resource seemed odd, or at least odd in its inexplicability, its presentation of “here’s dirt!” without a mention of its origin, its homeland. And it’s weird that the backyard gardener even has to go looking for advice on “how do I grow vegetables just in my own dirt?”

I can make compost myself, which would feed and lighten the soil over the years, and we’re fortunate to have a composting business in the area, which picks up customers’ buckets of compostable materials and drops off bags of compost in the spring. And there’s a dairy farm a few miles away that sells the sawdust it uses in the cow stalls, which supposedly makes a good gardening addition once it’s composted itself, especially for this bulky clay soil. In other words, I have options other than cubes of peat moss or plastic bags of soil. 

Robert Macfarlane has a chapter in his book Underland in which he ventures for miles in tunnels built for the extraction of potash, an essential ingredient in agricultural fertilizer and of which there is, again, only a finite amount on the planet. I thought of that chapter, an eerie realization among many in Underland, as I was pouring soil on top of dirt over the last couple of weeks in order to plant onions and spinach, potatoes and peas, that everything we wish to do, even wholesome things, is part of a massive, often unseen, shifting of resources stripped away in one part of the planet, packaged and sent to another.

I think, maybe, while I’m trying to figure out how to eradicate thistles and knapweed and protect water and build resilient communities and narratives for an uncertain future, I’d better think more carefully about building this soil, too, without depending on extraction from elsewhere. To slow down and begin seeing dirt the way Charlotte Gill does, as something miraculous, precious, and absolutely necessary to our survival.

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Bonus photo:

Hello thistles, my old friends. I’ve come to murder you again.

Walking composition

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.”
—The Magna Carta, 1215

I have a tendency to overcommit. It’s not a failing I’m unconscious of, nor am I alone. I try to hold back from always saying “yes,” yet even with my personal guidelines about where my time and energy go, I inevitably end up with too much. Sometimes way too much, as has happened recently.

Perhaps that was why I ended up finally burning all of my personal journals in a backyard bonfire on Saturday night.

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There are a number of things on my plate (at this point a soggy paper plate that’s about to disintegrate) that have taken an unexpected amount of time recently, top of the list being a one-day workshop on science writing for the public that I’m giving to groups of eighth-graders. I’ve never, frankly, taught writing before, and the amount of preparation involved was far more than I’d imagined, in part because finding appropriate material turned out to be challenging. Readable, but not fluff; interesting but not something that might anger parents (turns out most of my favorite science writers swear a lot in their work, and I wasn’t sure which social issues might be touchy); and for myself I didn’t want to load them down with too much depressing material in one hour. Climate change, water pollution, and teen depression all in one go seemed like a bad idea.

We’ll have to see how it goes. I’m not thrilled about the final formation of the workshop but I am extremely tired of preparing for it.

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The journals I burned have been sitting in a box waiting for a fire for months. Or years. About a dozen years ago I decided to give myself a decade to decide whether or not to burn all of my journals as I wrote them—this is purely personal material, no actual writing-draft notebooks. I decided, and then they sat there until we built a fire pit during lockdown last year, and I moved their box into a psychological waiting room.

I’d planned on burning them alone, but when my spouse invited some friends over for dinner and a fire, I decided to let it be a group project with the understanding that nobody was allowed to read them. We pulled out notebooks going back decades and opened them over the flames, and despite the fact that I still have too much work to do and this workshop to get through and a staggering amount of volunteer work and a new copy editing contract and the daily homeschooling to manage and still soooo many thistles to kill, I felt, the next day, lighter.

And then my sister came over and said it looked like burning my journals was fun, and I asked how she knew since I hadn’t mentioned it, and she showed me a Facebook post from one of my friends. “I’d recognize your handwriting anywhere,” she said, though the friend was careful not to post anything terribly legible or personal.

When I walked around today listening to the Futures podcast episode about our virtual selves and they talked about whether or not you can ever really die online, I thought of that moment and wondered what entangled thing our species is becoming as we knit our digital selves together. It’s inescapable, it seems. How much stronger would it be if we fully recognized the mirror interconnection in our physical lives?

None of those musings will help me teach eighth-grade girls science writing in fifty minutes—especially if there’s no swearing involved—but it does remind me what small blips we are. And what, for the moment, a relief that is. To know you are a blip, the self poured onto a page ready to fall apart in ash and grow into something new and full of life.

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Well-intentioned preservation of cave paintings in Indonesia—thought to be the oldest in the world at over 45,000 years old—might have destroyed anthropologists’ ability to accurately date them, by Franco Viviani in Sapiens.

• A very interesting essay in Aeon by history professor Douglas Boin pokes into the various tribes of peoples who were swallowed up by the Roman Empire, and the tricky, evolving idea of who got to be considered “Roman.”

• I have no idea if this is slightly disguised advertising, but did like the vision portrayed in this 7-minute film about a future of fenceless ranching that could be possible through the use of techy-techy collars for cows. It’s the kind of technology that falls more on the “serves life” side of things, maybe. The vast fencing required by ranches is very damaging to wildlife corridors, so it’s nice to see the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance trying a different approach, though I’d like to know more.

• From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a short but sobering look (if anyone needed that) at the presence of cesium 137 in honey, a legacy of 1950s nuclear testing.

• Which is a good invitation to “Earshot,” a prompting to end (or at least pause) overthinking, from the Pondercast podcast.

Walking composition

“I could stand to have my back broken if this was the way a spine could grow back.”
—Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt

I spent two hours last weekend spot-spraying Canadian thistles with vinegar. With most weeds I’m live and let live but the thistles are vicious—sharp enough to poke through shoes—and spread with gleeful abandon. If they’re allowed to flower they seed everywhere, and if you try to dig them up every bit of chipped-off taproot sprouts a new plant. Spraying them is a complete tedious pain but I told myself that this would be the year I get some kind of grip over the enormous thistle problem in our yard.

A friend stopped by later to assess our garden soil and drop off a couple of honeyberry bushes. I told him I think of the thistles as white supremacy and he said that knapweed, which we also have plenty of, was probably closer and the thistles are more like the patriarchy. The thistles, he said, eventually burn themselves out but the knapweed injects a toxin into the soil to stop other plants from growing.

And then I thought it’s kind of silly for me to make sociological analogies out of invasive weeds. It’s an ingrained tendency for a nonfiction writer, I think, but thistles and knapweed are just thistles and knapweed. They don’t need to carry the weight of problems larger than themselves.

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While I was spraying I listened to a half-hour episode of At a Distance, a podcast I usually enjoy for its thoughtfulness. I ended up frustrated with this one, though, and almost didn’t finish it because the guest and hosts riffed for a bit about how unreasonable “environmentalists” are for resisting nuclear power and genetically modified food plants.

This kind of criticism makes me weary. It’s very common and depends on strawman arguments, leaps of logic, and a stereotyping of opponents being anti-science instead of grappling with very real problems those technologies pose. Every time I hear someone defend GMOs they talk about Vitamin A rice, but they never talk about enormous increase in the use of pesticides and herbicides in the American midwest and the damage it causes to waterways, or, dicambra drift, or the GMO grass that was developed for golf courses, escaped, and is now spreading across Oregon.

And I don’t think I’ve ever heard a proponent of nuclear power truly grapple with the sacrifice zones that are necessary for both ends of that production line: places where uranium is mined, and places where waste is stored. Nor do they talk about the reality that the damage caused will extend to uncountable future generations, another iteration of what plastics researcher Rebecca Altman calls “time-bombing the future.”

It’s very easy to promote forms of energy and engineered food when you’re the recipient of them if you ignore the ecosystems and people sacrificed in the process.

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A few years ago I hired a goat lawnmowing service. The animals were very effective at chomping down the thistles (they were also super cute) but they didn’t touch the knapweed. Evidently knapweed is so unattractive as fodder that elk have changed migration patterns to avoid it.

Every time I remember I have to deal with it, the knapweed happens to be in bloom and is covered in wild, native bees. Since bees are in decline pretty much everywhere I don’t have the heart to remove this food source when they’re using it but I’m going to have to figure something out eventually. I don’t know which plants might be strong enough to overcome the toxins left behind when the knapweed is pulled out, but I’ll start with my favorite free, cheerful, edible, soft-to-walk-on and easy-to-grow plant whose dislike by yard enthusiasts I’ll never understand: dandelions.

I suppose removing knapweed and replacing it with something else will be a lifelong project, but it’ll be interesting to see if we can turn this mini sacrifice zone into something more supportive of life’s diversities.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• This Futures podcast on how brain chemicals influence your life was fascinating enough that I might read Ginny Smith’s book Overloaded. She managed to explain complicated ideas—like a possible relationship between inflammation and depression—without overselling them.

• Mary Jo Salter’s collection of “Zoom Room” sonnets for The American Scholar was a needed interlude. I don’t read a lot of poetry but enjoyed this selection.

• Sarah Boon’s Watershed Notes this week is, delightfully, about trees. I can’t wait to share her forthcoming essay on individual trees for Psyche and, hopefully someday, the longform essay she mentions about our relationship with forests.

• Michelle Nijhuis’s essay “The miracle of the commons,” in Aeon, arrived serendipitously on the same day I posted that walking composition about Peter Linebaugh’s commons research and the Magna Carta. Nijhuis, author of the book Beautiful Beasts, about endangered species, made me very happy by bringing Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on commons systems of ownership to the world with this essay, and dismantling Garrett Hardin’s too-often-quoted and logically flawed “Tragedy of the Commons.” She asks why Hardin’s work persists in our imaginations but Ostrom’s is little-known, to which my answer would be that Hardin’s simplified, pessimistic view of humans’ capacities to manage the gifts of the ecosystems we depend on serves power and profit, so of course it’s the image of ourselves that is pushed upon us.

• Neutron counts at Chernobyl’s confinement shelter have started to creep up, prompting worries about increased fission reactions that could lead to decay and radioactive dust. (Did I mention sacrifice zones?)

Walking composition

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.” —Spinoza

The light recently has been remarkable. Sometimes we get days like that, often during or between bouts of rain. Clouds rumple in a mix of gray-blue, sunlight glancing off odd angles, and the deep pine green sets off against it. One of the things I miss about walking to the elementary school is the sky-cloud vista from the playground, open and breath-full like little else around here.

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I recently listened to an interview with Peter Linebaugh, a history scholar and professor whose work on the Magna Carta and the commons I’ve followed for a few years. Coming across the interview was a serendipitous moment, as I’ve been thinking what to do with material gathered for the no-book on ownership and the difficulty I’ve had reading Linebaugh’s books The Magna Carta Manifesto and Stop, Thief! They’re extensive, vital works of scholarship on this history but they’re kind of all over the place and I kept putting them down because they’re hard to follow. Full of mind-bending tidbits, though, like how important honey and hives were as a right of the commons—not just in England where the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest were so formative, but all over the world where honey was a source of calories—and that the patron saint of England, St. George, was from Palestine and the dragon he slew was in Libya.

The interview prompted me to dive back into The Magna Carta Manifesto with all its scattered points of time and characters, like how in 1214-15 King John began stealing forests, ransoming children, and selling women (including his wife Isabella) in order to finance the Crusades as a way to bolster up his faltering power.

In the interview, Linebaugh gave some background to Karl Marx I also hadn’t heard before, that some of his economic thinking came from seeing German Rhineland peasants prosecuted for foraging wood for heat—for stealing—because large Prussian timber interests were using the wood for their own profit.

Everything old is new again.

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What do we have the right to? What do we have the right to be protected from? How does power use scarcity to divide people who would otherwise work toward common purpose?

It was only with privatization that criminality was created, said Linebaugh. “Crimes against property had been an essential part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” In The Magna Carta Manifesto he wrote about criminality and the encroachment of property-protecting law into rights of subsistence that have been eroded and reclaimed time and again over the centuries.

There is something fitting about watching the rumple-gray sky, its complexity and unpredictability, and sitting with the idea that our modern struggles against commodification and for a right to life for life go back some thousand years and probably millennia more. As I write these sentences dark rain clouds—our favorite kind—are moving in and a pheasant is squawking in my neighbor’s yard. I think of seeds I need to plant start and planning for this fall’s hunting already an eager, murky idea even as the trees I can see have barely begun to open their buds.

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Some stuff to read:

• Jeremy Adelman’s essay in Aeon about the difficulty that progressive thinkers have grappling with liberal nationalism (as opposed to globalism) made me think a lot. I’m not sure I agree with all the ideas; I’ll have to give more time to better understand them. America, as Adelman points out in his rebuttals to Jill Lepore, is complicated: “To restore the myth of the nation ‘born liberal’, to rescue it from ethnocidal nativists, means leaving others out of the story until they become ‘immigrants’ seeking shelter from illiberalism somewhere else.”

• I had less trouble getting my head around the ideas in Paula Keller’s essay in Psyche about what art history shows us about anti-feminist women. Her explanations about people who don’t understand the oppression they live under make a lot of sense, though they still don’t go far enough to answer a question I’ve been asking myself privately for a while now, most specifically since the special Alabama election in 2017 in which 63% of white women had voted for a candidate who’d been creditably accused of sexual assault against teenage girls: “What is wrong with white women?” As I am a white women, this is a question I feel compelled to grapple with as deeply as possible.

• Jordan Shapiro’s essay in Nautilus on the need for more feminist dads sounds predictable but was really . . . I was going to say “lovely” but maybe “restful”—as in “someone else is thinking about this difficult problem in compassionate and insightful ways, so maybe I don’t have to worry so much about it”—is a better word.

• (I’d like to say something revelatory about the fact that an essay on anti-feminist women and the desire for feminist dad role models showed up in my inbox in the same week, but I don’t have anything except that it happened.)

• And something totally different, a heartbreaking but beautifully written essay by Stephanie Austin in The Sun Magazine on her father’s death and a lifelong difficult relationship that I think will speak to many. “Maybe the emotional disconnect I felt with my father — that most people felt with my father — was not his fault. I started to ask around: ‘What was my dad like when he was young? Did he have friends? Did he make eye contact? Tell me about his eye contact.’”

Walking composition

“The private property society is . . . a bizarre mutation alien to most of humanity.”
—Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth

A story came across my feed yesterday regarding a court case in British Columbia that could end with almost all Crown land—land “owned” by the provincial government, otherwise known as public land—being back under guidance and control of First Nations. I’ve been trying to get my head around British Columbia environmental and property law as part of research on an ongoing cross-border environmental contamination situation involving a river, a dam, and the world’s second largest miner of metallurgical coal (the whole Teck Resources disaster for anyone who’s curious), so I’m very interested in the long-term implications of this legal ruling.

Where this BC Supreme Court decision will go is going to be fascinating, especially as, from what I understand, 95% of British Columbia is Crown land. As I crawl my way through a very readable but equally dense Buying America from the Indians, the murkiness of North American title and ownership transfer continues to show the ways in which history has been rewritten to attempt to solidify settler “ownership.”

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This research was all originally part of a book proposal I’d been working on about ownership, private property, and the future of the commons. It has, unfortunately, been turned down by pretty much every publisher my agent and I sent it to, and while that situation is disappointing, it’s also enlightening. The responses were warm to the idea and the writing, but hesitant about packaging and marketing. An easy thing to be critical of, but despite so many people—including me—wanting to dismantle the systems we’re constrained by, people still have to make a living and businesses have to stay functional. I am sure the stories will find their places when they’re meant to.

I do believe that private property, the dominant way that this dominant society owns the world we live in and among, frames many of the problems this same world faces. I’ll keep working on it in different iterations, including here, because I can’t help it. It’s an idea that won’t let go.

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I wrote something about chickadees returning a while back, and my mother emailed to tell me that chickadees don’t leave; it’s just that we start hearing their particular “cheeseburger” call in the spring.

There is so much of the world that never receives our attention. Sometimes I wonder if it’s better for it, but then realize how much damage is caused by that which we do give our attention to. I don’t usually even know, really, how to husband and care for my attention, and how to put it to best use. Does anyone?

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Some things to read, listen to, or watch:

• A fantastic dig into the nitty gritty of oil and gas leases on public lands from the National Wildlife Federation’s podcast Outdoors.

• How misinformation acts like a virus, and how information can’t protect us, by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska in Aeon: “Suppose the perfect message does find a person in need of disabusing, and even succeeds in fixing their false beliefs: will that person’s attitudes and behaviour change accordingly? If you tell people that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree about the reality of global warming, studies show that you’ll likely increase their perception of expert consensus on the subject. But whether this greater awareness translates into action – say, support for carbon-reduction policies – remains unclear.”

• Jesse Singal demonstrating the whisper-thin evidence for the influence of grit in Nautilus, which reminded me of Nicholas Tampio’s older Aeon piece about how grit might not be the educational panacea we’re looking for, and might actually be damaging to children.

• “Field of Vision-Utuqaq” or “Ice has memory,” a riveting half-hour film on climate change, Greenland, and the blind spots of visiting ice researchers, directed by Iva Radivojević (narrated in West Greenlandic with subtitles).

• Nick Martin writing in The New Republic about the difficulties that white/colonial culture and people have with interacting ethically with land. In this article, public lands, but Martin does get a bit into the commodity relationship—even when we’re “getting out into nature” to feed our souls, we’re still trying to extract something from it rather than engaging in relationship with it.