Author: Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“I want to be where all the ground is friendly.” —My Ántonia, Willa Cather

I went up to a Forest Service cabin last week, by myself, just me and a pile of books and notebooks, a few gallons of water, and a cooler of cheese and carrots and leftover ribs so I didn’t have to use the stove for anything but coffee and tea. Forty-eight hours of focused work and deep realignment, the sunrise coming slow over the still snow-covered ranges in Glacier. I walked down to the North Fork of the Flathead River, just preparing for the widening of spring runoff, and got startled by raven call.

No human voices for forty-eight hours. Sometimes when I’m up before sunrise at home, I step outside and watch my neighbor’s tall spruce. Are the trees relieved at night, I wonder? Released for a few hours from the press of human noise and human demands? I imagine them so, limbs resting in relief, never able to otherwise escape us. What demands we make of this world.

—-

When I came home and went online, a conversation thread in a newsletter steered toward the excitement of virtual reality, of some company making its VR responsive to our neurological signals, what a thrilling mind-altering experience that is, to be immersed so completely in a world.

Maybe some people need help to see the world the way it is, its vast complexity. Maybe for some people VR is like that time I watched my two college friends drop acid, and when I asked what it was like, my kindred spirit, the girl who always knew what I was thinking, said, “It’s like our world, only more.”

—-

I thought back to that cabin, the swift ice-covered creek, the river starting to swell with snowmelt, the pink alpenglow hitting the snowy peaks for a brief window, the raven call, how surreal that clear star-smothered sky might be to someone who’s never seen it, crisp with white lights like a billion spaceships about to descend, and I wonder if we’re all living in the same world.

—-

Some stuff to read, watch, or listen to:

• I don’t really have words to describe this 16-minute video of a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and his former guard.

• “Learning to Walk Again,” an essay by Hugh Crawford (who teaches seminars on the literature and philosophy of walking) about long-distance walking again after getting a knee replacement — a reminder of all the reasons walking fascinated me as a subject in the first place.

• This series of philosophy talks, starting with “Total Eclipse of Descartes—the Inheritance,” by British comedian Rob Newman, was sent to me by a relative and I’ve listened to it a few different times. It reminded me of why British humor crossed with philosophy can be get everything so right, especially about capitalism and the long influence of patriarchal and class-dominated philosophy on British (and probably American) society. And yet making me laugh out loud at the same time.

• A wonderful essay in Audubon by John Moir, about field biologist Jan Hamber, who led the charge to save condors at a time when there were very few other women working in field biology: “‘In those days women were expected to be homemakers or possibly teachers or nurses,’ she says. ‘No one imagined we could be out tramping around with backpacks.’ Much less play an important role in saving America’s largest land bird, while inspiring a generation of younger women following in her footsteps.”

• Finally all caught up on Orion, and was particularly impressed with the four-essay series on plastics edited by Rebecca Gasior Altman. David Farrier’s piece on medical gloves and the history of soft plastics; Max Liboiron on researching marine plastic waste in Newfoundland, and how hard it is to consistently sample beaches across the world; and Meera Subramanian on what is happening between plastics and life in the unmonitored ocean. Which all made me want to go back and read Altman’s incredible original Aeon essay on plastics, “Time-bombing the future.”

Before the country’s Revolution and subsequent decades under communism, Russian intellectuals were known for heading off into the countryside and monasteries in search of the “pure Russian soul”—a thing that they believed existed, and they were sure resided within the minds of the repressed and recently enslaved peasantry. They believed that if Russian peasants could be truly free, in mind and soul as well as body, the spirit of Russia would come into flower and thrive. Orlando Figes, author of Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, wrote of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol and the Slavophiles who believed a pure Christian soul, uniquely Russian, resided in the peasantry:

“Pyotr Plavilshikov [in his 1792 essay ‘On the Innate Qualities of the Russian Soul’] maintained, for example, that in its peasantry Russia had a natural creativity that had more potential than the science of the West. . . . After the triumph of 1812 the idea of the peasant’s soul, of his selfless virtue and self-sacrifice, began to be linked to the notion of Russia as the saviour of the West. This was the mission that Gogol first developed in Dead Souls.”

Dostoevsky, Figes wrote, attached himself to the writers who comprised the country’s “native soil” movement.

“They called on the intelligentsia (and on Russia’s writers in particular) to turn toward the peasants, not just to discover their own nationality and express it in their art but, more importantly, in that truly ‘Russian’ spirit of Christian brotherhood, to bring their Western learning to the backward villages. . . .

The simple Russian people, Dostoevsky claimed, had found the solution to the intellectual’s torment over faith. They needed their belief, it was central to their lives, and it gave them strength to go on living and endure their suffering.”

Tolstoy, too, has a well-documented history of relationship with Russian peasants and an abhorrence of wealth accumulation. He was evidently terrified of death, and, wrote Figes, “had long believed that the peasants died in a different way from the educated classes, a way that showed they knew the meaning of their lives.” Peasants’ acceptance of death seems to have been a recurring interest among the intellectuals, showing up frequently in literature, though not, Figes wrote, without some basis in reality: “Some put down the peasants’ resignation to a serf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release from suffering.” (An interesting quote as “fatalism” is a characteristic often ascribed to Russians even today.)

I was reminded of this history—especially the nearly three hundred years during which Russia was ruled by invading Mongolian khans—in unexpected ways recently when reading Rory Stewart’s book The Marches, about his walks along Hadrian’s Wall, the modern border between England and Scotland, and the British “Middleland,” a term coined by Stewart’s father to encompass “the geographical centre of the island of Britain,” that Stewart describes as “a land naturally unified by geography and culture for two thousand years, but repeatedly divided by political frontiers.”

(Thank you to Greg, who recommended this book after I wrote recently about choosing not to finish Stewart’s book The Places in Between, about his walk through Afghanistan.)

I admit to a longstanding fascination with the history of Romans in the British Isles—not due to interest in the Empire itself, but to curiosity about the indigenous populations they either repressed, or wiped out entirely. There is so little known about the people who inhabited those lands before the Romans invaded, and much of what is known is easily romanticized. The Marches could have used a more exacting editing knife in some places, but the histories that Stewart seeks, along with the doubtfulness of many speculations based on scant facts, are deftly told.

Early on, while walking along Hadrian’s Wall, or what remains of it, sometimes with his father but most often alone, Stewart relates the Roman Empire’s views of itself, its actions, and its conquered peoples to the ways in which the British Empire has viewed itself and its actions—specifically, the most recent “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Stewart served in the military. The comparison is not always favorable to Britain, much less to Rome. The Romans, he told his father,

“‘still seemed much more interested than American and British commentators today in describing how their enemies lived, and much better at imagining why their enemies might consider their cause to be just.’ Tacitus, for example, a prominent Roman politician, did not describe Rome’s enemies as my father sometimes described Islamist insurgents, as ‘cowardly’ or ‘pure evil.’ . . . Tacitus found the British—notwithstanding their ‘fanatical religion,’ nudity and muddy legs—engaging, dignified, and often admirable. . . .

The climax of Tacitus’ Agricola, written in AD 90, comes in the final battle with the British leader Caratacus. Tacitus constructed a speech for the insurgent, praising British courage and love of freedom, and attacking Roman imperial hypocrisy. Most famously, he makes the insurgent say of his own father-in-law’s Roman army, ‘The Romans create a desert, and call it peace.’”

I’ve heard before that Rome’s power lay in its willingness to conquer and absorb any people anywhere, and bring their culture and people into the fold of the Roman Empire. As Stewart passed the ruins of ancient Roman forts, he catalogued the shrines and gods that different garrisons brought with them from their homelands: tribes from lands that are now Belgium and Holland, Hungarians, “Aramaic-speaking Iraqis, and 5,000 Sarmatians, who were nomadic horsemen from Central Asia. And in one of the camps there were Africans who had left behind their own ethnic cooking pot—a clay tagine.” The list is a reminder, if it’s needed, of the scale and multicultural nature of the Roman Empire.

Despite the vast scope of Rome’s successes, it seems that every time they pushed north into what is now Scotland, within ten years they’d fallen back to the fortifications of Hadrian’s Wall, a reality that lends much to speculation and national pride: they manned the wall with tens of thousands of troops and yet still couldn’t “conquer” the whole of Britain. “The fundamental fact,” wrote Stewart, “which historians seemed to resist, and which Romans too perhaps resisted—was that the very existence of the wall and its forts signified failure.”

“Egypt, a much wealthier and more populated Roman province, had needed only one legion to control it. The Romans struggled to hold Britain with three legions, and a total of almost 50,000 men—the equivalent proportionality of the British and Americans keeping half a million troops in Afghanistan—and they maintained this presence for 300 years. And even this remarkable commitment was not sufficient for them to pacify the North, or create in the South local state structures that could survive their departure.”

The problem in both Roman Britain and occupied Afghanistan—and Vietnam, and Iraq—Stewart told his father, was that no numbers would have been sufficient, no “surge” ever worked, because “the occupier lacked the knowledge, the legitimacy, or the power to ever shape such a society in the way that it wished.”

Stewart’s walk is through the lands of long-lost cultures that he honors in at least remembering that they existed, even if we know almost nothing about them: the Votadini, Selgorae, Novantae, and others, along with the slightly better-remembered Scots and Picts who, a priest in the sixth century wrote, promptly swarmed Hadrian’s Wall and reconquered parts of Britain once the Romans were gone.

I couldn’t help thinking, while reading these sections, of various empires trying to claim the North American continent. The military reality, from what I understand, is that almost no Native nation ever lost a battle against American armies, a claim that one of Montana’s pre-eminent historians, K. Ross Toole, made even back in the 1980s. Invaders resorted to massacres and treaty betrayal, along with using alcohol and the theft of children as a tool, and were assisted by deadly pandemic diseases, but they did not win battles in the traditional sense of the phrase. Which makes one wonder—how might have this continent’s history differed if the lack of immunity to diseases like smallpox hadn’t been an overwhelming factor? And how might the invading European culture “lose” in the long run, even if the people stay? 

On a second walk along the Scotland-England border, Stewart dwells on later Norse-influenced kingdoms like Northumberland and Cumbria. Here, he has more chronicled history to lean on, but it’s also here that he hits a stumbling block of story and imagination, and begins to remind me of those Russian intellectuals.

As Stewart walks through Middleland, he talks with all the people he encounters, never a bad practice in travel writing. But cumulatively, they disappoint him. Even if their family’s history on these lands is ancient, they lack, he feels, an identity formed by the soil beneath them and the stories it holds.

“In Afghanistan, each village home in which I stayed had a different set of stories of an ambush, or a lost animal, or a saint: stories from two years or two centuries ago, linked to local rocks. In Britain, the people I talked to were energetically absorbed in subjects which had little to do with the soil beneath their feet—pigeon-fancying for one (he flew his pigeons from his housing estate in France); disability legislation for another; Fair Trade bananas in the Leeward Islands for a third.”

Compare this phrasing with Figes’s description of Dostoevsky’s thoughts on the Russian peasant’s soul:

“Dosotevsky’s Orthodoxy was inseparable from his belief in the redemptive quality of the Russian peasant soul. . . . In all his novels the quest of the ‘Great Sinner’ for a ‘Russian faith’ is intimately linked to the idea of salvation through reconciliation with the native soil.”* (Emphasis added.)

Stewart’s disappointments deepen and clarify throughout his walk—“My walk had often made me feel how modern Britain was: how bewilderingly mobile, how thin in identity, how unconcerned with history, how severed from its deeper past”—and he compares the people he meets and their concerns unfavorably with the depth of village identity he observed while walking across Afghanistan.

I had to wonder what it was he had expected. Idyllic rural farmers whose families had been running sheep for over a thousand years, and could show him family artifacts of their Votadini heritage and the gods they had once worshipped? No, but he was disappointed in the lack of, say, Cumbrian identity, a feeling that became tangled in his probing for feelings about Scottish nationalism (Stewart was at the time a Member of Parliament, and this walk took place shortly before Scotland’s first referendum for independence).

I don’t want to be too critical of Stewart, as I enjoyed this book and appreciated the efforts to unearth a more indigenous British history, but his reflexive disappointment seems in part to reflect Stewart’s class. He seems to yearn for something pure, something born and nurtured and alive today in the British soil, something akin to the pure Russian soul of the peasants that drew Russia’s politically active intellectual class to the countryside and created that land’s own “native soil”-dependent mythologies. In her book Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, historian Lesley Chamberlain wrote that,

“When the Russians faced up to the idea of becoming a modern country, they did so conscious of the fact that they were choosing naivety as a quality they, unlike the intellectual Germans, had never lost. They chose a myth of simplicity connected with the community and nominated ‘the people’ as their guide. . . . What the Greek vision was for the Germans, the peasant obschina became for the Russians.”

(Obschina were traditionally communal Russian peasant villages that had some slight autonomy even under serfdom.)

Stewart was born in Hong Kong and spent much of his life overseas, first where his father was posted for the Foreign Service, and then where he himself was. As a former commissioned officer in the British armed forces (if I understand his appointment correctly), he has clear views on military interventions in the Middle East. As an alum of Britain’s most elite schools—Eton followed by Balliol, the most upper-crust of upper-crust Oxford—he has robust if tattered opinions about the UK’s role in the world and its relation to itself.

He never ponders whether the “thin” nature of British identity is due to the very fact that it once strove for international empire, or if the heart of Rome might have been populated by the same kinds of people. Given the international nature of his upbringing and career, it seems odd to question others British citizens’ “bewildering mobility,” unless it’s a subconscious sense that the upper classes should travel for Queen and country while everyone else should stay home and make sure there is a reliably British Britain for them to come home to, akin to women maintaining hearth and home for adventuring or war-mongering men. To his credit, I don’t think he would consciously believe this, but I wonder if second-guessing his own expectations might have occurred to him in the years since this book was published.

Stewart wants Britain—and former Cumbria and Northumberland and the Highlands and Middleland—to meansomething, to have a clear, discoverable identity. It’s a craving that might be familiar to anyone, or at least the language is: Who is a “true” American patriot; where can we find the “pure Russian soul”; what does a “real” Montanan or Texan look like?

Humans are a species prone to intergenerational migration, and perhaps this search for identity has plagued us ever since we began forming tribes. Who are we? What are our traditions and beliefs? And how, fundamentally, is our sense of identity related to the lands we inhabit? Why do I feel so rootless away from mountains, and why is it so hard to persuade a New Englander to move away from the ocean?

This is not a light question. Perhaps it’s the deepest one of all. I’d be curious to know whether, over the past several years, Stewart has begun to look at this question at a broader and deeper planet-wide scale than simply, “Why do the people who populate what was once Cumbria not have a sense of Cumbrian identity?” The phrase “check your privilege” might be hackneyed by now, but this is a case where examining one’s privilege and experience in one specific culture might be very informative.

In the end, I came away wondering if Stewart’s real journey, one that hasn’t yet been revealed to him, was to find his own identity. He’s searching for Britain’s deep past while at the same time listening to his constituents’ modern concerns; he has a rather obvious reverence for sheep farmers and struggles to couch his contempt for “outsider” ecologists in polite language; he writes enough about his genealogical research on sites like Ancestry.com to make clear his yearning to ground his own family’s 3,000-year-old story on the soil he feels attached to. And through it all, he recounts his father’s stories, his father’s career and opinions, their walks and conversations together, and his own love for a man whose love for him in return is clear but whose approval he still seems to crave.

Stewart might have set out to search for Britain’s or the Middleland’s identity, but aren’t we all always searching for our own? Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol, in all their writings and seeking for that amorphous Russian soul, were in truth grappling with their own tortured faiths and sense of identity within Orthodox Christianity and tsarist Russia. 

Stewart wrote at one point that he found it hard to express what long walks give to him, what he finds in them. I wonder if he set out on one not to examine a culture but to journey within himself, what he might find.

*I have long thought that most Americans, indeed most Westerners, can’t begin to comprehend the power and longevity of this history in Russia. For anyone who wonders “why Putin?” or what the dynamics are that inform many of Russian leaders’ current appeals to the populace, this section in Figes’s book is a good start: “It was the root of [Dostoevsky’s] nationalism and his messianic vision of the ‘Russian soul’ as the spiritual saviour of the rationalistic West, which ultimately led him, in the 1870s, to write in the nationalist press about the ‘holy mission’ of ‘our great Russia’ to build a Christian empire on the continent.”

Lesley Chamberlain addresses this history, too: “The economic extension of the [spiritual myth of naivety] was the idyll of peasant cooperation. The Russian ideal, the native way to happiness, never invited men to become individuals and think for themselves; it actively discouraged that independence. In compensation, it invited them to belong, and feel secure, and to protect themselves from a damaged, disintegrated, aggressive West. Right up to 1991, Russia remained with its willed naivety.”

Walking composition

“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.” —Fyodr Dostoevsky

I stepped outside this morning, early, to find the beginnings of a new snowfall dissolving into mist and the spring chickadees’ song magnified by the fog. Everything was muffled except for the chickadee somewhere nearby. The snow has released the ground and trees are beginning to bud, but we are not yet released from winter (I’m not ready; the sight of the nearly bare yard is bleak).

—-

I want to disrupt all the news and information and the short-term thinking flooding into my mind with this kind of input all day long. Why don’t I? Because I have to work and shepherd kids through math and feed people and do dishes and laundry and call the dentist and walk the dog. I sympathize with those wanting to cut all the obligations of income-gathering and modern life, with those wanting to walk away or close themselves off.

To walk away, it’s always an answer, even if you don’t know the question. It’s our body’s answer and we’ve had millions of years to evolve it. Walk, rest, be.

—-

The chickadee reminded me of a documentary I watched over the weekend, Gather, about Native American food sovereignty. It follows people in different parts of the U.S. working on gathering and harvesting traditional foods—seeds, squash, fish, bison. A friend recommended it to me some months ago and I probably got around to it just when I needed it. Gather is short but bursting with all kinds of things the world needs, the stirrings of an answer to situations like those covered in Behemoth, a documentary suggested by Chris D. about the enormous human and planetary destruction wrought by coal mining and leading to the strange world of China’s “ghost cities.” As eerie as it was to see those vast, modern cities devoid of humans, it’s not a short step to cities like London or Vancouver, or even my small hometown, riddled with empty luxury dwellings owned by someone far away and wealthy beyond my imagining or desire, and absolutely beyond what the world can bear.

The chickadee isn’t far away, though. There is something comforting about their return every year, more so even than the robins, magpies, and hummingbirds. Something that says “home” in a way that makes it feel like everything will be okay. Eventually.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I’ll believe it when I see it, but the report in Transport Topics that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wants to redirect federal transportation funds to support multi-use transportation (bikes! pedestrians!!!) along with tackling the U.S.’s massive infrastructure backlog gives me a teeny tiny glimmer of hope for a more human-friendly, life-centric physical future. Please, Congress, don’t crush that feeble light.

• Alexus McCleod’s essay in Psyche on how Chinese philosophy views mental wellness and illness as a communal, not just individual, problem, reminded me somewhat of Johann Hari’s book (which I really liked) Lost Connections.

• Most readers of this newsletter seem to be experienced in quieting mental chatter, but I thought this piece in Nautilus about neuroscientist Ethan Kross’s work had some good, specific advice, like addressing yourself by name, which forces you to make a slight mental switch as if you’re giving someone else advice. (While I’m a too-infrequent meditator, this is actually a technique I’ve used for years either when dealing with a personal problem or trying to figure out a stubborn writing situation, except I do it in a notebook. I recommend it to friends sometimes if they’re stuck in their writing. “Sit down with a pen and notebook and interview yourself.”)

• A riveting excerpt from Mark Dowie’s book Conservation Refugees in MIT Press Reader, “The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans.”

• This short piece in Scientific American about “spiritual narcissism” goes a long way to explaining why all those mindfulness retreats in Big Sur don’t seem to result in a more compassionate Silicon Valley.

• “I have a small heart,” a beautiful 15-minute video about one woman’s pilgrimage in Japan and the seemingly universal lure of pilgrimage.

• Susana Fabre’s lyrical essay in Sapiens about her stony home south of Mexico City and its long, storied history is hard to describe but at some points I was holding my breath.

• This op-ed in The Columbus Dispatch—about the Ohio legislature’s efforts to overturn the state’s 1912 law of home rule—reminded me of a stark conversation I had with a Montana journalist friend recently about what we lose when most of the journalists covering the state legislature are not from here and don’t know anything about the history behind many of the issues rearing their ugly heads. Maybe they should be required to google “Copper Kings,” among other subjects, before going on assignment.

• Robert Chaney’s book The Grizzly in the Driveway might not appeal hugely to people who aren’t interested in issues intersecting with wildlife, habitat, and wilderness, but he makes some really good points at the end about being realistic in what w’e’re really doing when we’re managing something that we want to remain wild in our imaginations. If you are interested in all of those subjects, it’s a very solid and engaging read.

• A second interview on the Team Human podcast with Tyson Yunkaporta (author of Sand Talk) covered some areas I’ve been struggling with recently, like the balance between time spent on activism versus work. I liked Yunkaporta’s perspective on looking at tools that people will need for what he called the “thousand-year cleanup”: good story and good cognition.

Walking composition

“The premise of Earth asking something of me—of me!—makes my heart swell.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Returning the Gift”

Friends sometimes ask me how long I’ll stick it out in Montana. It’s natural, I suppose, to wonder why, if the politics of a place is oppressive or repressive, one doesn’t just move. And yet, when you feel that you belong to a place—not that it belongs to you, but that you belong to it—picking up and leaving isn’t a light notion. As a born-and-raised Montanan who’s the daughter of on the one hand a born-and-raised-Montanan, and on the other of an emigre and exile who was not allowed to see his family or return to his home country for nearly twenty years, the questions of home and belonging are almost always with me.

When I read or watch news stories of refugees, whether from Syria or Honduras or elsewhere, all I can think of is how bad it has to get to force a person to pick up sticks and leave. How bad would it have to get for me, for you, to turn your back on your home and know you might never be able to return? How many people actually choose to leave their homelands? What imagined countries do they carry in their hearts?

—-

I think that these subjects, of home and belonging, are trickling around the world, finding outlets in places I didn’t expect to see them. I keep coming across conversations of community and the drawbacks of fierce individualism, and the damage that absolutist private property rights cause. I bump into these concepts in random places, and just in the last few weeks an essay of mine about private property versus the health of the commons, published five years ago, went from around 6,000 Facebook shares (where it had stuck since it came out) to nearly 70,000. It’s clearly hitting some kind of nerve, though where exactly, I don’t know.

One of the recent readers of that essay shared a music video that they’d helped to make to advocate for preservation of a waterway in India, teaching me the concept of “poromboke.” In their comment, they explained:

“The Poromboke is a medieval tamil agrarian revenue term that denotes lands reserved for shared communal uses. Such lands cannot be traded or built upon, and yield no revenue to the crown or the government. The term and its legal essence have survived well into present times. But the quality and health of the Poromboke commons began its decline when the property making agenda of the British colonial masters collided with the notion of the commons. Perhaps because it was strictly not property that could be traded, it began to be seen as worthless. Today, the word poromboke has degraded culturally to refer to worthless persons or places.”

One of the lyrics of the video sticks with me: “After Ennore got its power plant, acres of ash, but river scant.” The whole ensemble reminds me of a short Aeon video I think I shared a few months back, about sand mining in Cambodia for Singapore’s expansion that ruins island fisheries. (I cannot for the life of me find that video and I seem to remember having trouble last time I wanted to share it.)

Sometimes we don’t even need to flee home. Sometimes someone steals it from underfoot. (See also: all of colonial history.)

—-

I listened to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson recently (I know, I know, I mention him maybe too much) where he talked about being a citizen of the soil. It came up partly in a discussion on individual rights—the eternal pull between “freedom from” and “freedom to”—and dovetailed strangely on my watching of Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head. There is something freeing about knowing that you can’t have everything exactly as you wish, that you owe something to the communities around you.

I know Montana has a lot of narrow-minded people and especially narrow-minded politicians. So does everywhere else. But it remains just about the most beautiful place I have ever been and I don’t see why I should let the white nationalists and uber-wealthy and resource-extractors have all of this life-richness to themselves. Besides which, most people can’t afford to just leave, and the rivers and trees and wildlife certainly can’t pick up and relocate somewhere else.

If I think of myself as a citizen of the watersheds I rely on, the dynamics of this place and its struggles look very different. It’s worth fighting for, even if we lose. The roots will remain.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• This two-hour episode of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with conservation biologist and Aldo Leopold scholar Curt Meine was so interesting I might have to listen to it again: “We’re at an inflection point because the convergence of concerns can no longer be avoided. . . . The long-term has hit the short-term.”

• Scotland Outdoors talked with a former paratrooper walking the coastline of the UK. If you need another reminder that physical and/or real-world interaction can help restore a faith in humanity, this episode has it: “What [people] do to go out of their way to want to help you is quite phenomenal.”

• I also loved this Scotland Outdoors episode on the importance of land connection for refugees. It presents a number of ideas I’d never thought about before, and reminded me of Jonathan Stalls telling me about the group of Iraqi refugee women he often walks with in Denver, and the kind of community they’ve built.

• The growing problem of rural America as a dumping ground for corporate waste, by Alan Guebert in Farm Forum.

• American Scholar has a pair of essays pinpointing the disconcerting idea that people might be willing to forego any attempt to fight for liberal democracy if given enough physical comfort, one on China and one on Russia.

• The Smarty Pants podcast rebroadcast a fun interview with historian and Women Warriors author Pamela Toler about the ample evidence for women warriors throughout history and some of the ways that past historians pretzeled evidence to erase the existence of women who were honored for their fighting abilities.

• I keep forgetting to share this piece from The Guardian cracking open the idea of the literary canon and pointing out that Māori have a canon, too.

• Using ethnography and the insights gained from the close observational skills of mushroom hunters to inform AI development and improve medical diagnostics, by Anne Harris and Lisa Herzog in Aeon’s sister magazine Pysche.

• If we needed another reminder that highways are destructive and that you can never, ever solve congestion by keeping people dependent on cars, Arch Daily has a good article about highways and their futures. (I have never been to Houston and knew it was car-centric but not that one highway has 26 lanes?! And that after it expanded, traffic increased by 30% — “induced demand” is the name for that phenomenon.)

Another podcast episode queued up, maybe this time on existential risks with Thomas Moynihan of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute; or a webinar with Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book on saving ourselves through geoengineering; or an article on the cultural implications of organic cotton farming in India. Talks and ideas and conversations about the future, the present, the past.

What am I doing with all of this? 

Often it’s just following curiosity. I’ll read just about anything on dinosaurs, Montana, tectonic plates, Jane Austen, supernovae, walking or pedestrian advocacy, or Star Trek. I try to follow content that other people in my circles aren’t reading or listening to, which locks out pretty much anything from the Washington Post or NPR but opens up a lot of other things.

Aside from curiosity, what I’m really looking for in all this content—all those long lists of “other stuff to read or listen to”—is what I imagine many other people are looking for: answers. I’m looking for a way out of the mess we find ourselves in. A way to feel better, an assurance that everything’s going to be okay. Sometimes, when I open Soundcloud and look to see if there are any new interviews with Stephen Jenkinson or Sherrie Mitchell, or go onto YouTube to see if Derrick Jensen has posted anything new since Endgame, I’m reminded of a character in an L.M. Montgomery novel opening the Bible at random, looking for an answer to any question that plagues me. Guidance, assurance, solace—if we’re not doomscrolling or rage-clicking or persuading ourselves that we need to keep on top of the news, isn’t this what most of us are hoping for?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. But judging by a number of conversations I’ve had over the past few weeks, I’m not alone in my searching.

I was listening to one of my regular podcasts the other day—it might have been a Futures episode on nostalgic feedback loops, or Tides of History on the rise of what we think of as “civilization” in Uruk in 4000 BCE Mesopatamia—and thinking about the need for guidance, a sense that somehow if we pursue enough angles we’ll collectively find a way for everything to be okay.

It’s not going to be okay. Nothing is, not climate change or mass extinctions or lethal tribalism or antibiotic-resistant superbugs or the zoonotic diseases out there waiting for humans to engage in just a little more habitat destruction, or plastics pollution or income inequality or the lack of affordable housing or the constant assaults on voting access. It’s not going to be okay.

The truth is, it never has been okay. I read an essay in Aeon recently about the philosophy of John Gray that articulated the not-okayness of existence so well I had to print it out and put it in my slim pile of essays I imagine returning to repeatedly over my life, whether for their writing or for their ideas. This one was written by Andy Owen, an author and Iraq war vet who read Gray when he was trying to reconcile what he thought the humanitarian mission of his military was, with the actual mission he found of securing oil reserves and promoting ideology. In Gray, 

“I saw the similarities between the doctrines of Stalinism, Nazi fascism, Al-Qaeda’s paradoxical medieval, technophile fundamentalism, and Bush’s ‘war on terror’. Gray showed that they are all various forms (however incompatible) of utopian thinking that have at their heart the teleological notion of progress from unenlightened times to a future utopia, and a belief that violence is justified to achieve it (indeed, from the Jacobins onwards, violence has had a pedagogical function in this process). At first, I baulked at the suggested equivalence with the foot soldiers of the other ideologies. There were clearly profound differences! But through Gray’s examples, I went on to reflect on how much violence had been inflicted throughout history by those thinking that they were doing the right thing and doing it for the greater good.”

The urge to look for a way that things will be okay, and the pitfalls that leads us into, seems similar to some of Gray’s philosophical ideas. It’s natural to want to believe, as Stephen Pinker does, that the human species is traveling on an inevitable arc of progress that leads to more freedom and security and health for all. “Gray,” though, writes, Owen, “points to the re-introduction of torture by the world’s premier liberal democracy during the war on terror as an example of the reversibility of progress.” The essay is in some ways about Owen’s journey into Gray’s philosophy as a way to be okay while knowing that things aren’t okay. 

From an ecological perspective, Derrick Jensen’s writings and speeches also seek to acknowledge and find a way to live with the not-okayness of existence. In one essay for The Ecologist, he tracks a certain urge that some humans have, a certain culture, to destroy life and call it progress back to Gilgamesh and the deforestation of what is now present-day Iraq, and how that mentality spread:

“The Egyptians and Phoenicians didn’t kill the forests of North Africa, they ‘remade’ them into navies and deserts. . . . This culture isn’t killing the oceans; it’s merely ‘remaking’ them such that there probably won’t be any fish. It’s not extirpating elephants and great apes and great cats and two hundred species per day; it’s merely ‘remaking’ them so they’re extinct. It doesn’t commit land theft and genocide against Indigenous peoples, instead it merely ‘remakes’ them and their landbases.”

Jensen has expressed these kinds of views in a variety of ways through a variety of media. This particular article was an answer to the pro-progress Ecomodernist Manifesto that deifies human progress and perpetuates the irrational belief that human life is somehow separate from the rest of nature, leading to narratives telling us, falsely, that:

“The United States has never committed genocide, but rather has fulfilled its Manifest Destiny. It has never waged aggressive war, but rather has ‘defended its national interest’ and ‘promoted freedom and democracy.’ Today, the dominant culture isn’t killing the planet, but rather ‘developing natural resources.’”

It’s not going to be okay. It might get better in some ways, if we keep paying attention and keep working hard to subvert the narratives and structures that have destroyed so much, but we’re not going to wake up one day with everything okay.

Being okay isn’t the root of our problems. Our problem is feeling alone, isolated, as we face the non-okayness of the future, of the now. This has come up over and over in conversations I’ve had with friends recently, especially people locally as our state legislature tries to dismantle everything from a bare minimum of women’s reproductive control to voting access to clean water. People feel alone in their sorrow, isolated in their resistance. It’s that feeling of isolation that erodes our future.

It’s not going to be okay. But you are not alone.

I recently binge-watched Can’t Get You Out of My Head, a six-part, eight-hour documentary from BBC journalist Adam Curtis about . . . something. The recent history of nationalism, early psychological research, and society’s loss of power through increased isolation? It’s kind of those things, though none of that really describes it or comes close to the scope of the narrative. My spouse came into my work space a number of times as I was watching and every time he asked, “What’s this about again?” I said, “I’m not sure but I can’t stop watching.” At the end I told him, “It’s kind of about how the doctrine of individualism leaves us weak and alone and makes humans depressed and paranoid, and how collective action like unions can help mitigate the effects but also about a hundred other things, too.”

I’d love to know what Curtis’s pitch was to his bosses. Can’t Get You Out of My Head includes the story of Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s fourth wife, and how her personal grievances played out during China’s Cultural Revolution; the psychology work of B.F. Skinner on radical behaviorism using pigeons; Tupac Shakur’s music and the influence of the Black Panthers on his activism; the poet and anti-Soviet dissident turned Russian nationalist Eduard Limonov; the evolution and lure of conspiracy theories, and much, much more.

Essentially, the main message seems to be that idealized individualism is a weakness that allows entrenched power structures to run roughshod over everyone else; but also that those power structures, whether it’s China’s authoritarian government, Putin’s oligarchy, Facebook’s manipulative algorithms, or neoliberal ideology*, are weaker than the dominant narratives lead us to believe.

It’s a riveting documentary despite my inability to describe it, and Curtis kept circling around or back to something I learned while researching my book, which is that making people feel isolated and alone is the greatest weapon power structures can wield. Which makes the intentional development of things like suburban life, which increases isolation and loneliness, all the stranger. Regarding the early rise of Valium use among suburban housewives, Curtis said in a podcast interview that “The aloneness is the weakness of it all.”

It’s not going to be okay. But you’re not alone. This is important to remember. It’s almost everything.

I interviewed many people for my book who’d gone on long walks—long like walking for months, not long like walking for hours. Most of those stories didn’t make it into the book. But like the ones that did make it—Katherine Davies’s walk across Europe and Jonathan Stalls’s eight-month walk across America, to name two examples—the people who’d gone on long walks, whether for pilgrimage or peace or clean water or just because, found that most people are kind, most people want a world where we care for one another. It’s scare-mongering stories of scarcity, “someone’s going to take what’s yours,” or an “other” eroding a cherished or safe way of life that prompts people to clam up, shut down, and lock the door. 

For the most part, these stories of taking and scarcity aren’t real (some are, but the ones that are wielded as weapons of control generally aren’t), but they are effective. Still, the fact that most people still want to live in a world where we care for one another is a demonstration that these stories of scarcity and others aren’t quite as powerful as the human urges for connection and caring.

It’s not going to be okay. But you’re not alone. You are not alone.

It’s not going to be okay. Climate change is dire. The attacks on democracy are real. Racism is pervasive. When the Idaho legislature recently refused to accept a federal grant supporting early child care and one legislator said, “any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going,” it should have surprised nobody. Arguing with people like that that lack of child care materially hurts my ability to work is pointless—they don’t believe I should be working. There will continue to be people like Jeff Sessions, whose gleeful expression as he prepared to announce the end of DACA I might never forget. There will be policy wonks who continue to justify the pursuit of war with the adage that “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” neglecting philosopher John Gray’s counterpoint that “You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelet.” The only thing to do is to remove people like this from positions of power, which we can’t do if we believe that we’re alone.

There are no grown-ups in some hidden room working to fix it all, no TED talks with ultimate answers, no first-class ride to Mars for any of us. (And really, Mars is a hellhole of a place to live for human beings.) The world will not get more just or respectful of life without some considerable work on our part. And even if we put our whole hearts into the work of a lifetime it might make very little difference within that lifetime. That doesn’t mean the work isn’t worthwhile—love and kindness and laughter are worthwhile even though we’re going to die someday.

It’s not going to be okay. But we’re not alone.

When I turn on the podcasts, open an article, pick up a book, play a video while I make dinner, I am looking for guidance, if not escape, most of the time. It’s all a balance in my head, though, looking for a way to make things not okay but a little better, at least, for myself and others. To feel better inside, materially improve things outside—I’m looking for a way to human better, all the time.

It’s not going to be okay. But it’s okay to love life in the meantime. Go for a walk. Breathe in your local air, place a palm on a tree, watch a cloud, listen to a bird, find a crack in concrete and remind yourself that the earth is constantly moving, living, being underneath every footstep. Play some music. Find laughter to share. Find a way to share your grief. Watch the movement of water.

There is no answer but to walk through this world, this life, be kind, and remind others that they’re not alone, either.

You are not alone. It’s going to be okay.

—-

After I’d written the first draft of this essay, I checked my email and found an update from Forward Montana, not their weekly What the Helena? legislative update but one of the other reasons I’m so grateful for this organization: they know that feeling isolated and alone makes people feel powerless as well as lonely. We don’t just need to be told we’re not alone; we need to feel it, to embody it. You are not alone.

*In an interview with the Red Scare podcast (thanks to Kim for pointing me to both podcast and the documentary’s release on YouTube!), Curtis said that he eschews concept words like “neoliberalism.” However, in that same podcast, he constantly and off-handedly referred to an undefined “left,” as if progressive thought is a monolith that is always represented by the loudest progressive voices. I find these kinds of criticisms of “the left” just as caricatured as those pushed by people like Fox’s Tucker Carlson. Even when critiqued by people who consider themselves progressive, “the left” is never defined, leaving it a handy chimeric thought bubble embodied by, I dunno, Rachel Maddow, some Washington Post columnists, and a handful of students at Middlebury College? It’s impossible to say. Critics never define “the left” that they’re so wary of, which makes it easy to ignore actual progressive work by real people. Curtis claimed in the interview that the use of the word “neoliberalism” is too loose and undefined and allows for lazy thinking. But the same thing applies to his use of “the left” throughout the rest of the interview, and elsewhere. It’s internally inconsistent to dismiss concepts like neoliberalism—which is frequently and specifically defined—while talking about an intellectualized “left” that is never defined. Besides which, the constant use of “left” and “right” is becoming as meaningless and destructive to discourse as characterizations of “red” and “blue” states. I believe it was Sarah Kendzior who wrote, “America is purple—purple like a bruise.”

Walking composition

Zombie baby? Virus godling? Zoom in on that photo above and tell me that that angry infant in a surgical mask is not one of the scarier things you’ve seen.

In last week’s essay on faith, I mentioned wanting to write about religious freedom and how America fails to honor it when it comes to any tradition that isn’t Judeo-Christian. What I really wanted to talk about was the neglect of Blackfeet traditions when it comes to conversations of delisting (from the endangered species list) and possible hunting of grizzly bears; it’s something I’ve wondered about ever since delisting was proposed. Last week I started reading Robert Chaney’s book The Grizzly in the Driveway, recommended by a friend, and he has a whole chapter on the religious conversation surrounding grizzly bears, far more comprehensive than my own wonderings. There are so many conflicting interests and points of view—only a few of which I’d heard before—that it would be hard to distill it all into a single explanation. The point he starts from, though, is stated with refreshing clarity:

“I don’t believe that a people’s tradition can be dismissed as inferior just because its culture doesn’t have a legacy of universities, courts, and libraries recording its opinions. I would not want to be the person claiming the Creator gives preferences to supplicants with scribes over those without.”

I would add that the existence of buildings to worship in, not just writings, shouldn’t be a deciding factor for whether a faith is respected or not. (Aside from the fact that the “building to worship in” aspect has a weird effect on tax policy that, for example, made a local chain of burger joints where I live wildly profitable and tax-free because they were associated with a Christian ministry.)

Fundamentally, Chaney manages to tease out a core issue, which is that the “freedom of religion” clause in the U.S. Constitution has almost always assumed an anthropocentric religion divorced from the rest of nature. To apply it to life-centric faiths is something that a large portion of American society finds threatening. I would hazard that this is because anything that limits the pursuit of profit is threatening. Add that to the Christian basis of the Doctrine of Discovery and it’s going to create conflict. You can worship whatever you want as long as it doesn’t impinge on others’ ability to make a living—or a fortune.

That’s a negative perspective on the freedom of religion, but the clause “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” like faith itself, could theoretically carry enormous potential for good.

—-

I can’t get over this study about excess mortality during Covid (caveat: not yet peer-reviewed), which looked at mortality rates in different professions in California starting in March 2020. The highest rate of increase was among line cooks. Food and agriculture workers overall saw a 39% increase in mortality from March through October of last year.

The argument for supporting local businesses by buying take-out isn’t a bad one, but if we really lived in a society that cared about one another we’d be taking an entirely different approach that didn’t send people into kitchens full of sizzle and steam for hours a day during a pandemic. See also: previous post on why is my kid’s swim team still practicing and competing, but my family has a choice about participating in a swim team, whereas if you’re dependent on hourly wages from your cooking job, you really don’t. (I know, we all know, the problems are systemic and cannot be solved by individuals or even the most resilient of communities.)

I’ll just wave up at that virus godling in the photo that someone stuck on top of their car. (Seriously, is it not creepy? I suppose it should be.)

—-

A colleague posted a submission call from a publication looking for essays on our ideas of “wild” as opposed to “civilization” in a small forum we’re in together. I was thinking about how many times this question has revolved through the literary and philosophical worlds over the past decades and centuries, and wondering if there’s anything new to say, and all I could come up with was that a world I want to live in is one where children can run barefoot.

And then I was rereading Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! over the weekend and came across these lines from old Ivar, in answer to a question about why he always goes barefoot:

“The feet, as I understand it, are free members. There is no divine prohibition for them in the Ten Commandments. The hands, the tongue, the eyes, the heart, all the bodily desires we are commanded to subdue; but the feet are free members.”

Both of which have served to remind me that the prospect of spring leaves me feeling depressed, revealing as it will the gazillions of vicious thistles in our yard and garden that I’m going to have to deal with.

I spent much of my childhood running around without shoes in the summer. Maybe the ideal of being able to run barefoot is neither wild nor civilized, but free.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to, or watch:

• Some eerie history of the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, dating back to the 7th century, at Sapiens, by Martin Carver, director of England’s Sutton Hoo dig.

• Another cool science tidbit from Sarah Boon’s blog, this time about snow worms and how little scientists know about them. They only seem to exist within an extremely narrow band of temperatures (possibly from 0 to 2 degrees Celsius). What happens to them before and after they emerge on top of the snow?

• I thought this essay on the Greek rhetorical tradition and speaking in public (by speech consultant John Bowe in Psyche) would be interesting and possibly useful, but the ending opened out into something more thought-provoking: “When we’re unable to advocate for our point of view, it’s far too easy to become sidelined, alienated and angry, to whine that ‘people are selfish’ (for not understanding us) and that ‘public discourse sucks’. A citizenry trained to speak up is a citizenry far less likely to suffer from bad politics or mass alienation.”

• (This is a listen or read. As mentioned before, I use the Curio app, which is where I meet a lot of articles and essays. But you can listen to Curio-enabled Aeon essay without subscribing to the app. There’s a “listen on Curio” button at the top of any applicable essay, of which this is one.) Psychologist Rubin Naiman’s piece in Aeon about the loss of dream connection in a wake centric culture wasn’t, perhaps, totally new, but he had a few lines that deepened my understanding on the mind-body disconnection during dream states: “The body gets a break from the supervision of the authoritative, waking ego-driven mind, and the mind is liberated from the physical constraints of occupying a body.” I don’t know why this awakened my thinking a bit, but it did. It really made me step back and wonder what the mind is doing while the body is paralyzed at night. I loved this in particular: “Mentally, dreaming is like taking off a pair of tight shoes at the end of the day: the liberated mind is no longer constrained by somatic sensory and motor processes.”

• Paleoanthropologist Jerry DeSilva edited a book about Darwin that will be coming out soon and sounds really interesting. We chatted a bit about Darwin’s racism and sexism and how he did actually know better. I’m really looking forward to the book because I always appreciate Dr. DeSilva’s clear-eyed perspectives. In the meantime, JSTOR Daily has a good review of it, titled A Most Interesting Problem: What Darwin Got Right and Wrong About Human Evolution.

• A recent episode of the Frontiers of Commoning podcast introduced me to German philosopher and theoretical biologist Andreas Weber and his ideas of “enlivenment” and “biopoetics.” Reality, he says, is a commons, a statement that I am somewhat in love with now. Also: “There are some principles at work in those cultures which we have broken in the western cognitive empire, and this is costing us our existence.”

• A short video with British Museum curator Sue Brunning on the reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo helmet and the nuances and thrill of history. “Not all of those battles were fought on the battlefield.” (Why two Sutton Hoo notifications in one week? I have no idea, they just arrived in my inbox.)

Note: This essay only addresses Christianity, as it’s the only faith tradition I have much experience of. Some of the points might easily apply to other faiths, but I’m not a religious scholar and wouldn’t want to claim something I don’t know much about.

My first year of high school, my family moved from Montana to California, to one of those cities in the mesh of municipalities that fill the Bay Area between San Francisco and San Jose. We didn’t live there long—six months—but during that time I was fortunate enough to have a social studies teacher who taught lessons that still make me stop and think thirty years later. I can’t remember his name now, but there’s one lesson in particular that every now and then comes to mind followed by the thought, “It all makes so much sense now.”

He designed a unit in which he separated the class into groups, and each group was given a piece of paper describing an island we’d been stranded on. Some islands had easily accessible fresh water, some had no shade. Each was different, which meant it had its own challenges for each group of students to collectively manage.

At some point in the unit we’d been on the islands long enough to have children, and one day our teacher handed us papers saying that someone had died. Our problem for the day: What do we tell the children about what happened to the person? What happened to their body? What happened to them, the person, whatever it was that made them an individual? Would we all die? What happened after death?

Every single group except one came up with science- and reason-based explanations that were grounded but disconnected. When the outlier group presented, they instead read a list of concepts structured around a deity they’d invented. I remember sitting there in class listening to them present and being struck with the realization that they’d created a religion in response to the need to explain death, and that that had been the whole point of the day’s lesson.

The lesson left me with questions I’ve walked with ever since, like wondering whether or not humans need religion to deal with suffering. Or how faith can be a force for good without being turned into a tool for inflicting its own suffering through domination and control. If you started a society from scratch, could you steer it forward without some form of religious faith developing? Not really, was what I took from class that day. 

I have no idea when I became an atheist, or if I’ve always been one. I prayed to God* many times throughout my childhood and one Christmas made Jesus a birthday card. But I prayed because God being a real deity was part of the water I swam in, growing up in small-town Montana. There were no questions of faith—and certainly, as far as I knew at the time, no other religions—just Christianity. I don’t remember learning much about sin, which, judging from some of my recovering Catholic friends, was a lucky break. In the Presbyterian church I attended as a child, we were encouraged to behave in certain ways for the love of God, not for fear of retribution.

Later, when we started moving around to different towns, we went to an Episcopal Church and then a Lutheran. In the Lutheran church I took communion classes on Wednesday evenings and played a version of the game Life where you won if you behaved as Jesus did and ended up with fewer possessions and less wealth than everyone else.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad experience of Christianity. There was no fire and brimstone, no guilt, and not a whole lot of hell, just community and direction to aspire to Jesus’ examples.

The first time I remember expressing a lack of faith was when I was about twelve and having an argument with my mother in the garden of the house we were renting at the time. She was shocked when I said I didn’t believe in Jesus. I specified that I believed he was a real person but not the son of God. (Twelve-year-old girls know everything and nobody should argue with this.)

I wish I could remember where that idea came from. This was the late 1980s. There was no internet. My best friend at the time was a deeply devout Nazarene in a family of devout Nazarenes. Nowhere I’d yet lived had had a library that would have stocked what might have been called questionable material. I’d almost always lived in small Montana towns where Christianity was, again, the water you swam in. Where would I have come across the idea that it was possible to not believe in God, that it was a matter of faith rather than of fact?

I have no idea. All I know is that growing up, it had never occurred to me that being Christian required faith or that faith was something people struggled with. God was. Heaven was. Hell was, even if it didn’t play a big role in the teachings I received. Faith requires grappling with knowing that you can never prove the existence of any of it. That’s the whole point. I never had faith; I had just accepted what I was told was true. Most kids do up to a point.

Early in the 2000s I heard an interview with a nun, either with Bill Moyers or on Krista Tippett’s radio show that was then called Speaking of Faith (now a podcast called On Being), who said that it wasn’t faith that was difficult, it was doubt. I’ve wondered about that tension ever since, between faith and doubt, and find myself drawn to stories by people struggling with both.

Sadly, much of what we think of faith doesn’t seem to be faith at all; it’s fear. The role of fear in religious commitment is understated. I know many former believers who still have a knee-jerk fear response to certain actions or opinions because they were raised with the threat of hell and the shame of sin. Or others who remain within their faith traditions, afraid to openly question, because to leave the faith means leaving family, friends, and the only community they’ve ever known. Some live in secret, pretending, because to admit their lack of faith would open them up to unfathomable loss. They can shed the faith but not the fear.

I ran into a wonderful essay a few weeks ago in The Point by Meghan O’Gieblyn, who was raised Baptist, about the role of hell in her faith tradition. She attended Moody Bible Institute for college, a place she describes as one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country. There, she started grappling theologically with the concept of hell seriously for the first time: 

“One of the most invidious tasks of the conservative theologian is to explain how a loving God can allow people to suffer for all of eternity. God is omnipotent and Paul claims it is his divine will that all people should be saved—yet hell exists. . . . In layman’s terms, the argument our professors gave us went something like this: God is holy by nature and cannot allow sin into his presence (i.e. into heaven). He loves all humans—in fact, he loves them so much that he gave them free will, so that they could choose to refuse salvation. In this way, people essentially condemned themselves to hell.”

Her problems began when she started thinking about the sheer number of people in the world who hadn’t yet received the good word and were therefore automatically condemned to eternity in hell. “Jesus said that ‘no man comes to the Father, but by me,’ and we had to take this word for word as the truth, meaning it included those who had no idea who Jesus was,” wrote O’Gieblyn. “Technically, I’d known this since I was a kid (after all, if the unreached could get to heaven some other way, what would be the point of sending missionaries?), but I’d never paused to consider the implications.” 

O’Gieblyn covers the evolution of hellish imaginings from Christianity’s early beginnings through the 2011 publication of pastor Rob Bell’s book Love Wins, which she describes as presenting hell not as a literal place but as a “refining process by which all of the sins of the world, but not the sinners, are burned away”—because human societies begin to deal with problems like social injustice and inequality, which Bell posits as the real hell—and the ensuing backlash from evangelical leaders who need a literal hell to ground their theology. They need it because what is Christianity, after all, without the story that Jesus’ sacrifice is what redeems humanity’s sins? If there is no threat of hell, then what is the point of salvation?

I sometimes get into these types of questions with a rabbi friend of mine, though of course for Judaism the theology is very different and not one I’m familiar with. We tend to land on the high-level stuff, like one conversation a couple of years ago where I was telling her about an interview I’d heard with a Christian faith leader answering the eternal question, “Where was God when [those children died, the bombs fell, the flood destroyed that town, etc., etc.]?” and he answered with the familiar concept of God gifting humanity with free will, which O’Gieblyn also addresses in her essay and which I’ve heard a hundred times.

The faith leader I’d heard was trying to answer a question someone had asked about the suffering allowed by an all-powerful God. So I told this story to my rabbi friend while we ate lunch and said that it was something I, too, could never get past. She said something I’d never heard before: What if God isn’t all-powerful? What if God’s just . . . God?

In which case, I wondered and I think said at the time, what’s the point? If God isn’t all-powerful, then why does anyone worship Him? Why live by His laws, especially when many of those laws themselves cause suffering? And if He is all-powerful, then He has some explaining to do.

Again, being an atheist, I don’t actually believe that God exists. These are just questions that I wonder about—specifically, wonder why people of faith don’t ask them more frequently. And then I remember how much of religion is based on fear. You’re not meant to question because you might go to hell or at least not be admitted into heaven or suffer some other form of punishment. God is love, but God is also vengeful.

Sometimes I think heaven needs a revolution but if I remember my Bible that’s how we got hell in the first place.

Much of the time it seems that faith is less about faith and more about certainty, about fear of the unknown or unfamiliar. I’ve had random strangers talk to me on airplanes about hell and what God wants of us—usually in relationship to homosexuality because that seems to trigger particular groups of Christians more than almost anything else—pressing upon me their absolute convictions. This kind of thing happens to me a lot and it makes me almost physically itchy, feeling like they’re trying to drive their need for absolutes, for a life with guidance and without questions, beneath my skin. This is your problem, I want to tell them, not mine. Stop trying to make me feel your angry, panicked faith. 

That need for certainty, for absolutes without doubt, drives many of our social, cultural, and political problems. Mass media and shallow-thinking politicians have branded this “culture wars” but it’s really just about a need for certainty clashing with a willingness to explore doubt.

The desperate grasp at absolutes erupted visibly over the last year, as the QAnon conspiracy skyrocketed into public consciousness. The conspiracy theory’s relationship with evangelical Christianity was hard to ignore. Sometime last summer I came across this piece in MIT Technology Review about an evangelical pastor struggling—and failing—to keep his flock from tumbling down the rabbit hole. It shows the difficulties of maintaining trust and faith, even with people you’ve known for years, in the face of something far more attractive and absolutely poisonous.

“Suddenly he understood that his efforts to protect his congregation from covid-19 had contributed to a different sort of infection. Like thousands of other church leaders across the United States, Frailey had shut down in-person services in March to help prevent the spread of the virus. Without these gatherings, some of his churchgoers had turned instead to Facebook, podcasts, and viral memes for guidance. And QAnon, a movement with its own equivalents of scripture, prophecies, and clergy, was there waiting for them.”

The link within that above quote is to an opinion piece in Religion News Service that’s also worth reading if you’re interested in what pastors have faced trying to help steer their flock in the face of this dazzling new distraction: 

“For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.”

I sympathize with the need for certainty and guidance. I loved that about church as a child: everything started at exactly the same time each week, the physical space was tidy and orderly, God loves you and if you live like Jesus you can’t go wrong. I knew when to sit, when to stand, and which hymns we were singing that day. The ceremony and ritual didn’t inspire awe but they did provide comfortable predictability. 

But even as QAnon’s relationship with evangelicals gets swathes of coverage, there are those who ache for something deeper, something perhaps less dazzling, something, it seems to me, more willing to face doubt’s role in the search for faith. Like this essay in The American Scholar about evangelicals—specifically, charismatic Christians, who seem to be particularly prone to a craving for drama and a sense that they belong to something glorious—stepping away from the luster of megachurches and starting to see their theatrics for the emotional manipulations that they are: “They had grown up in the megachurches of the evangelical right but could no longer stand the politics or, just as often, the services, during which they felt manipulated.” (There’s a good line about the partner of one of the interview subjects, who had done music for a megachurch and started to realize exactly how he was being asked to elicit emotion.)

I can sympathize with much of this—the need for certainty, the craving for deeper meaning, and especially for a deity who speaks directly to you like a caring parent and provides all the answers you need. I just don’t happen to believe in any of it and, maybe even more importantly, strongly object to any of it controlling my life or the lives of my family members, friends, or, frankly, anyone else.

Despite the fact that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian is falling—down over the last decade by ten points to 65%—the faith still shapes much of our lives. I’ve heard arguments that religion is going to die out or that it will disappear and good riddance, but those arguments hold no water with me. When that freshman social studies teacher elicited the creation of religion from probably the smartest group in our class, he allowed us to see on our own not only how religious myths begin but the kinds of needs they answer. I’m in the middle of raising children. The questions, “Why do people (and beloved pets) die?” and “What happens when we die?” are not something that come out of nowhere, and they can be very difficult to answer when you don’t have a faith tradition to lean on. 

I was going to include discussion of the first amendment freedom of religion clause in this essay, and how we fail to apply it to faiths that aren’t in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but this is already long so I’ll save it for another time. Instead, I’m going to end by quoting my own book, which I don’t think I’ve done before. First time for everything. From the last chapter, titled “Meander,” shortly after I’d walked a labyrinth at the 900-year-old Norwich Cathedral in England:

“The call of faith may be waning, but the place of a church or the synagogue or the mosque or the temple hasn’t yet been filled by anything else. These are the places where people see one another on a regular, frequent basis, where they meet and get to know one another in a context of assumed shared values.

Neighborhoods build similar fabric, if they’re allowed to. If people can see one another face-to-face on a regular basis, walk the same sidewalks, engage in the organic daily activities of work, life, child-rearing, food, education, leisure. . . . People build trust over many years and countless interactions.”

Communities, I strongly believe, can begin to repair our social fabrics. There’s no reason that faith, if engaged in from a healthy place of love and acceptance, rather than domination, can’t remain part of that. After all, if we were stranded on a desert island and had to shape society from scratch, we’d probably develop religion just the same, if not in the original generation then likely in the second or third. But maybe we could do it a little differently. Judging by some of the exvangelical movements and the fact that atheists like me are a little less uncommon than they used to be, we might already be starting.

*In general, I don’t capitalize the word “god” in my writing. It’s a personal style choice that reflects my attempt to use the word in a way that encompasses as many faith traditions as possible. I’m capitalizing it here because I am only talking about the specific Christian deity.

Walking composition

Text from me: “I keep feeling like I’m forgetting how to drive while I’m driving.”
Text from friend: “That’s a good metaphor.”
. . .
<<No really, like I was backing out of a driveway and suddenly thought, “I don’t remember how to do this.”>>

One of the more absurd regular reminders I have of the insanity of our pandemic situation is a weekly email from my son’s swim team. He hasn’t been to practice or the pool in nearly a year, and when I get these updates I glance at them to see what’s going on. Every single time I read one of the cheery “Here’s what you need to qualify for state!” or “Here’s how many people we have space for at next week’s meet!” missives, my immediate response is, “Why the f— are we still having sports practice and competitions?” Especially swimming, steamy and crowded and indoors and absolutely saturated with aerosols and poor ventilation. People yell up close and constantly, especially parents. If you’ve ever been to a kids’ swimming competition you’d know how insane this is.

And then I remember that the roles of society, government, and the economy are completely inside-out and in that context of course it makes sense that kids are still training for and traveling to swimming competitions. Among all the other things that shouldn’t be happening because our priorities are all wrong.

—-

I started and abandoned three books this week. I don’t mind abandoning books but was disappointed because I need something good to read in the evening, something I’m not annotating with Post-It notes.

One of them was actually a semi-interesting travel book by a Scottish guy who walked across Afghanistan in 2002. It was weird to realize that I can no longer warm to that kind of writing. I spent a long time in the early 2000s reading piles of travel literature and submitting travel essays to various magazines, and spent four years writing for a literary travel website. I love travel writing. Or have loved it. And especially love nonfiction placed in the Middle East because I have a weird longing for the place (which I’ve never been to). I used to dream about walking to Damascus—literally dream not daydream.

I kept forging ahead with the book because it’s a perfectly decent book, but finally took friendly advice and gave myself permission to stop. Somewhere early in its pages, I was struck with how weird it is to be reading interpretations of a war-torn country from the privileged position of a relatively well-to-do outsider popping in and walking around because they feel like it. It’s part of why most national journalism is unsatisfying or irritating: someone from outside a culture trying to interpret it for others.

There’s a lot for me to think about here. I haven’t read much travel writing in many years except for Kate Harris’s lovely book Lands of Lost Borders, so I’m not sure what’s going on in my own head. But I think the basic issue is that I want to hear people’s stories from themselves if they’re willing to share. Where’s the book by the person born and raised in Afghanistan who walked across their own country in the last twenty years? I want to read that.

This isn’t an absolute. I still love Paul Salopek’s walking journey across the world. But I think that very early on he managed to set that tone for his dispatches: the experience of walking and the world was his, but interpretations of the places he landed in belonged to other people. It’s not totally consistent but it feels less “otherizing.”

I’m a little sad at the thought of opening the travel literature I still have on my shelves and finding much of it disappointing or too dated, but also curious to see what kinds of stories we’ll get in a world that is becoming more open to a diversity of experience and perspective.

—-

During a walk last week, I talked with a friend and we shared our frustrations with the Montana legislature and the obvious contempt with which those in power treat dissenting voices. Another friend said that her industry’s state lobbyist has told them that if he’s wearing a mask in the Capitol building, the people in power—the Republican Party legislators—won’t even listen to him.

It’s infuriating and dehumanizing. But this is not about party, it’s about power. When I lived in New York, the party in charge was always the Democratic Party, and while I agreed with many of their policies, I was appalled at the constant corruption and the ways in which they also shut out dissenting voices.

When power becomes a driving force, especially when combined with the lure of ideology, that’s when systems that are meant to serve us fall apart (they always seem to be falling apart). It can’t be answered by different people with different ideologies wielding the same kinds of power. You just end up with similar problems. But I do think that people like Stacy Abrams provide tremendous examples of the kinds of interconnected power that can start to erode the dominant structures—healthy power based on kinship and care rather than domination.

There are networks like that everywhere, including here in Montana (like Forward Montana, whose weekly What the Helena? legislative dispatches have been a lifeline for years). We just need to find the tributaries that connect us and work to keep them clean, healthy, and connected.

There’s a metaphor here, about free-running, unpolluted rivers and streams versus highly treated and enclosed swimming pools full of loud parents and Covid aerosols, but I’m not quite pulling it together. Maybe it’s not a metaphor. Maybe it’s just the life we’re living.

—-

Some stuff to read or watch:

• One of my favorite things last week was a blog post from my friend Sarah Boon, who’s a former Arctic researcher and current science writer, looking into the question of whether or not the recent weather situation was a polar vortex. She’s got a clear scientific explanation of exactly what a polar vortex is, and why last week’s weather was more likely a sudden stratospheric warming event.

• Indian Country Today is publishing a series of stories about lives affected by pipelines—both those who try to protect water from them, and those whose livelihoods depend on them. Its first article is about the replacement of Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline in Minnesota, a strong start to necessary reporting.

• I feel like I could spent all day watching this 79-year-old Russian woman skating around Lake Baikal looking for her cows.

• Another incredible piece from Chris La Tray via Culture Study: an in-depth essay about, among related stories, tribal sovereignty and how the issue of who is considered Native American/Indian is tangled up with colonialism (but it’s really about more than that and everyone should just read it).

• In Sapiens by archaeologist Stephen Nash, something I never thought about: a so-far fruitless search for tree stumps around Mesa Verde to answer the question, “Where did Ancestral Puebloans get trees for their buildings?”

• One of the other books I gave up on this week was Camilla Pang’s The Outsider’s Guide to Humans. I like her concept of trying to explain human behavior through science, like talking about algorithms and machine learning and then explaining how she tries to construct less-rigid decision trees for herself that allow her to function in the “normal human world” (her words) as a person with autism spectrum disorder and ADHD. I personally couldn’t engage with the book, but I think a lot of people will find it either interesting or helpful.

Walking composition

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
—Willa Cather

I had a sketched-out draft of an essay on religious faith for this week, but then decided I wanted to write about math education instead, and then got to neither mostly because life and partly because I’m finding Buying America from the Indians really riveting, if slow for me. It’ll probably take me 2-3 months to finish it, but every page seems to have something noteworthy enough for a Post-It.

One thing I’m learning so far is that ideas about land ownership among European settler-colonizers weren’t consistent. In the late 1600s and throughout the 1700s there were a lot of conflicting arguments about the whole Doctrine of Discovery idea and some influential Europeans who claimed that it was beyond obvious that the only people who had the right to sell North American land were the people who already lived there. The book hasn’t gotten into Native people’s perspectives on ownership and sale themselves—I’m hoping it will because who has the right to sale and purchase is a weird question to focus on when one party has no concept of land title as private property—but it’s an important spanner in the works of the standard ownership worldview that plenty of high-profile European people didn’t think they or their monarchs had automatic right to the land simply because they had “discovered” or “improved” it. The idea that all colonizers thought the same about land is yet another story most of us have been told to accept as true.

Apologies for the extremely tangled nature of the penultimate sentence in the previous paragraph. I think you could diagram it, though, if you learned diagramming in school and had a large enough sheet of paper.

—-

A couple of Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a bill to make municipal broadband illegal. I think it was during the original battle over net neutrality that a mini-documentary came out (or maybe it was on Jon Oliver’s comedy news show) looking at Republican-controlled state legislatures that had made municipal broadband illegal even in places where companies like Charter refused to provide connections and service.

The bill has zero chance of making headway in the current Congress, but there is a strong likelihood that gerrymandering will give Republicans an opportunity to take back the House in 2022. What then?

Meanwhile, Montana’s state legislature, which has the support of a Republican governor for the first time in 16 years, is going all-out on gutting municipal independence, from making inclusionary zoning illegal (which will be disastrous for towns like mine with a high percentage of wealthy vacation homeowners) to nixing cities’ abilities to enforce things like local mask mandates.

Legislatures stripping away local control away has been a problem for a long time in states like Texas and Pennsylvania, and Colorado before it became more liberal. I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about issues adjacent to these, and all I keep thinking is that we have about two generations of people who truly believe, like it’s a religion, that the free market and privatization will provide the most good to the most people, with an overlay of people who don’t believe that but do believe they’ll profit from the process. Evidence to the contrary will have no more effect on the true believers than scientific evidence of climate change has on a denier.

What to do about it is a question I’m uncertain of, except to keep working for things that actually do good and hope that real-life effects start to sway people more than their identities as belonging to a certain political party do. After all, Arkansas’s legislature just passed legislation allowing municipal broadband because they see the need and that the private market isn’t filling it; and the chair of the Utah Young Republicans has publicly come out asking their party to start showing leadership on climate change.

And yet I keep thinking about Sarah Kendzior’s line about how those in power have no interest in governing America, only interest in breaking it down and selling it for parts.

—-

But something about the religious fervor with which Republicans in power attack everything from reproductive freedom to local broadband networks struck me differently last week. There’s the arrogance and obvious contempt with which our legislators are barely tolerating dissenting public comment, but where does that come from?

There’s something about connection and connectivity here. Something about how the connections that bind those ideologies and power plays together are absolutes that the people employing them can rely on. They’re strong connective foundations because they’re old and have been there for millennia (religion, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.).

I don’t know how to weaken those connections. But do we necessarily need to? Or do those with progressive viewpoints and desires start looking at our own connections differently and learning how to strengthen them? I think strengthening community is a big part of the answer to this question. I believe in the power of walking and walkable communities, of course, but there is so much else that spins out from the physically interconnected communities that I would love to see shape our futures.

I don’t know what that looks like but am curious to watch it unfold.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Some of you probably already subscribe to Anne Helen Peterson’s Culture Study newsletter, but if not you might have missed this wonderful interview that guest writer Chris La Tray did with Montana’s senator Jon Tester. Both Jon and Chris have given me hope and gumption when I needed it most over the last few years. This interview was no exception: “I’m always thankful for folks who think about things. That actually think about stuff and think about what’s going on in the world and how to move it forward.”

• I just finished Hilary Mantel’s novel Beyond Black. The local book clerk had recommended it with a note that it’s “weird.” It was indeed weird. I don’t think it’s the kind of book I’d usually read. There are themes in it I find incredibly depressing and usually avoid; it was so well written that I kept going anyway and found myself both downcast and full of wonder by the end of it.

• This episode of Team Human with Vicki Robin was an uplift I absolutely needed this week. I loved how she talked about the “song” of ideas and movements. I think I know what she means: “We don’t know where we’re going, we’re lost in a sea of time, and we can only be moral beings in that. That’s the only tiller we have, is our ethics, our integrity.”

• I haven’t finished the latest episode of Your Undivided Attention with Kate Raworth about her economic theory Doughnut Economics, but I’ve been following her work for a while now and so far the interview is just as satisfying as reading about her research on how to build an economy that serves human needs within ecological limits.

• This piece by Alex May on how the legal system can start serving humans and life by pursuing Interconnected Law was refreshing and thought-provoking. I sent it to an environmental lawyer friend who said, “Yes! It needs to be about tort!” I have no idea what that means but I bet there’s a reader who does.

Walking composition, freezing my face off composition

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

It is cold. Like the first time I’ve ever seen the ski report almost outright say, “Maybe it’s a good day to stay home” yesterday kind of cold. Which is weird because it’s colder today and despite projected -38F (-38.89C) wind chill at the summit, they’ve opened most of the chairlifts.

The snow has the squeaky feel and sound of pure cold. It’s a beautiful thing. I was just texting with friends this morning about how I had to put aside Amitov Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy last year because I can’t seem to read books set in warm places. What is this craving for cold and snow and ice, even in fiction? Do I just want everything to stop for a bit, let us catch our breaths?

That sounds a lot like a Twilight Zone episode I saw once. They never end well.

—-

Last summer I received the first of the palm-sized books pictured above, Isolarii, in the mail. It’s a subscription from a publishing company and I have no idea how I got on their list but it’s a delightful surprise to see in my mail box a few times a year. I mean really delightful. The size to begin with (I put coins in the photo for comparison), and then they come firmly wrapped in waxed paper like I’ve just purchased something at an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. I’m reading the one on the right, Purple Perilla, right now, a selection of three short stories by avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue.

The Isolarii website says that this form of tiny one-author book was popular during the Renaissance, and that our times ask for a revival of the form, declaring on their mission statement that:

The humanism of the past five hundred years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach is needed to re-enchant the world and establish the commonality of all life on Earth. This is not just the task of politics and philosophy. It requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful. That is, the preservation not just of environments, but myth, irrationality, autonomy, and joy—whether by direct or poetic means. New islands—of thought, literature, art—are already emerging. They are the necessary minimum for this re-beginning. We find these points of orientation, mapping a scattered community that spans continents and disciplines. To represent a world of many worlds, not a globe.

I don’t know whether any of that is true but I enjoy the tiny “island books,” as they’re described, more than I thought I would when Salmon: A Red Herring first appeared unexpectedly along with a circular from a furniture store and the community college’s fall course offerings.

—-

I was thinking more about my previous post on entitlement. Two things I think I could have clarified better:

a) To repeat myself, being wealthy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for feeling entitled (or self-entitled, thank you for the grammar correction!), even though they often correlate. As I’m sure everyone does, I know rich people who aren’t self-entitled and self-entitled people who aren’t rich. One of the books I loved most in the last few years was Joe Wilkins’s novel Fall Back Down When I Die, and one of the reasons I loved it was that he managed to excavate so well the feeling of self-entitlement that comes with being descended from homesteaders, with having been gifted land that was stolen from others and feeling that that fact somehow makes you deserving not just of that land itself but of the unfettered use of everything around you—land, animals, trees, water, people. And his characters are most definitely not rich.

b) What I see in the upper middle class Trump supporters isn’t just that Maurice Minnifield describes them; it’s as if they’re stuck in that era and that identity. They never managed to adapt or move on. When someone came along who said it was not only fine but good to be a circa-1992 well-off white man living the good life immediately after the hyperactive pro-capitalism Reagan era, it makes sense that they gravitated to him, especially with the racism and homophobia thrown in. There are people who never wanted to change their worldview or self-perception anyway, so why not have someone in power who validated the sense that the Maurice Minnifields of the world should have stayed at the top of the food chain? Especially when it’s so scary that a lot of us are suggesting that maybe structuring society as an unmoveable* hierarchy might not be such a good idea in the first place. Being Maurice is a lot safer than trying to figure out your place in a world where hierarchies are fluid or collapsed or based on values and achievements you no longer understand.

—-

I just finished reading Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police, which I devoured fast. It was eerie, atmospheric, and left me horrified and somewhat anxious the further I get from it. The plot and facts are clear, but it’s the kind of book that people could probably take from it what they brought into it. For me, I got a strong allegory of authoritarian society, a sense of the morals and values we lose when those things cease to matter as much as survival does. And it made me think ever more strongly of what it took for my grandparents to hold onto their commitment to honesty in a society—Stalin’s Soviet Union—that would have been content to kill them for it. They managed to survive, but only barely. In The Memory Police, I saw the people who managed to maintain memories of disappeared things as akin to those who hold on to the humane qualities that exist outside of our socio-political systems. When they’re found out and taken away, the rest of the population is sad but they don’t know how to relate. They’ve long since accepted their own capacity to forget.

*Auto-correct kept trying to turn the word “unmoveable” into “unlovable.” I am absolutely delighted with that idea.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Another unexpectedly riveting interview from the Futures podcast, this time with science journalist and vice-chair of WWF Canada Ziya Tong about her new book The Reality Bubble. There was so much in here that appealed to me about ownership and the ways in which we’re tricked into perceiving the world in certain ways that I might have to read that book. “We believe that we’re better than all the other species on Earth. . . . Fundamentally, the belief that we have the right to own everything around us . . . except our own waste.”

• Piloting community-owned real estate in an Atlanta neighborhood that has seen decades of disinvestment and neglect by absentee landowners. One of the many interesting models around the world for people working to create the futures of the places they live in.

• An eerie and beautifully written piece in The American Scholar by biochemist and biologist Catharina Coenen about the question of epigenetics—as she overcomes a lifelong fear of trains, is she battling a fear passed down from her mother’s childhood terror on the platform in Stuttgart?

• This one was a bit of a gut-punch for me. Shortly after I lamented our country’s resistance to some kind of public health care while barely blinking at a $700 billion Pentagon budget, this piece from the Daily Montanan was republished in my local paper, about the $100 billion being spent on outdated and unnecessary nuclear weapons, many of which will be housed in Montana’s missile bunkers. It’s worth reading the full report from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that informed the article, which gives a comprehensive history of nuclear weapons and why rural regions’ economic dependency on them makes them hard to get rid of (socialism? of course not). The penultimate paragraph is quite a kick: “What if rural Montana could have high-quality roads without the Air Force? What if a military base weren’t the only route to a dignified living? What if the range of choices available to Americans wasn’t so narrow that building a weapon of mass destruction can come to be seen as an essential paycheck?”