The bacon was frying slowly and the water wouldn’t boil. I was poking at both over the camp stove, rain beating the tarp overhead, when my sister asked me something. “I was just thinking,” I answered her, “about how this stove is getting old, and how cold it was the other night, and how I’m stiff from the hike yesterday. I can’t get warm by the fire unless I stand in the rain, and we’re going to have to suck it up and pack all our gear away wet.”
It had dipped below freezing the previous night as we lay huddled in our tents, and I’d been up since 3, tired but still soaking in the full double rainbow that had spanned the narrow valley a little after 5 that morning. I rambled on in that vein to my sister for a minute and then said, “And how much I love all this.”
I’ve always enjoyed camping, ever since childhood. It’s something else to be standing wet and tired and cold over a semi-functional camp stove, and realize you’re happy. I do. I love it.
The more I do these things, the less I want anything the digital world provides—other conveniences, too, like central heating and electric lights, which bring comfort and ease but also are frustratingly disconnected from whatever rhythms and routines my 48-year-old descendant of millions of years of hominin evolution craves. I want less of that and more waking up stiff and sore, a rock digging into my hip, to hear the birds start up and wait for Sun to soak the mountains while Moon is still shining in the south and a rainbow forms and a cold river welcomes my feet, all of it so beautiful it feels like a miracle. It is a miracle; is there anything more natural than worship of stars and Moon, trees and animals?
I recently gave up my smartphone. It was a long process that started in my head over a year ago, and in action sometime last February, when I spent too much time in Reddit forums trying to find a mobile phone that didn’t support apps and wouldn’t allow me to go online.
There used to be a podcast called Note to Self that was one of my favorites until it abruptly disappeared, and with its guidance I had all notifications except for calls and texts turned off, and my phone in grayscale, by the end of 2016. I’d deleted all social media and email apps, the internet browser app, and anything else unnecessary, and corralled all the other apps into tightly controlled categories, where they remained until sometime in June, when I factory reset the phone, removed its number from Apple ID and iMessages, and handed the device over for someone else to make use of.
I was a late smartphone adopter, but quickly became addicted and spent far more time trying to manage my phone use than I ever thought would be necessary. I’d gotten a better grip on time spent staring at that screen over the years, but none of the usage tweaks had been enough and I still needed some kind of phone. I’m fortunate to have work that doesn’t require me to have a smartphone, but I have young kids. Being unavailable in emergencies isn’t usually an option.
The first draft of this was written sitting by a creek listening to a mountain chickadee, waiting for my hair to dry in the sun and being distracted by a small blue butterfly—two blue butterflies, who seemed to enjoy hanging out around the mud at the edge of the creek, buttercups nodding overhead. A month ago I would have had my phone with me and tried to catch their fluttering, but the camera I replaced it with is heavy enough to make me think twice about carrying it around, and so there I was, idly noting the butterflies’ presence in a notebook with a pencil that was growing dull.
Over the last few months, preparing to let the device go, I thought carefully about what sociologist Zeynep Tüfekçi in her book Twitter and Tear Gas called “affordances”: In what ways is a technology useful or enabling of personal freedom and societal democracy? In what ways is it at best a distraction or, worse, a tool for oppression?
I was in a meeting recently where I had to listen to a presentation on the use of what’s called artificial intelligence in the classroom. I’m not going to go into AI. I don’t find it an interesting subject or even an interesting technology. What I find interesting is its use case for lessons on ethics, along with labor and wage theft. I’ve written before about the theft of my first book for the profit of ChatGPT’s owners.
As I told the group in this meeting, a technology isn’t a thing. It’s a philosophy, a structure used to change the way humans live and work together and with the rest of life. A fence isn’t some abstract, objective material, or even a noun. It’s a form of relationship, one used to either work with life in balance, or subject it to domination and control, usually in the form of ownership.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about what my smartphone afforded me that was useful (voice memos), what was nice but unnecessary (Merlin Bird ID, iNaturalist), and what was an annoyance that degraded my life (Apple News). I made a list, worked out what was replaceable and what I could live without, bought a camera and a dumb phone, and, once I’d ported my number to said phone, tried to remember if texting had always been so maddeningly slow.
My new Sane Phone, from Light Phone.
I have only 24 emojis. I miss the rest of them. But so far, it’s been worth it.
The whole process reminded me of when I first started dedicating my life, and my kids’, to walkability. Walking them to and from school every day, biking in the rain and snowstorms, teaching them to do the same themselves, building in extra time to get to meetings, trying to find myself a yoga class that didn’t require a drive to get to.
It all took work and time. As with all technologies, there come points when some people have that luxury and most don’t. Without our agreement or desire, we’re forced into dependence on technologies that are expensive and have disastrous consequences for both the living planet and for human social connections. Over time, societies are taught to forget those harms. The forgetting is intentional. That’s what happened with cars, their pollution and theft of public spaces and greediness for our income buried under the narrative that people chose to create their lives around car culture. With digital technology it’s simply happening on a faster timeline. A percentage of people benefit, a tinier portion profit hugely, and the vasty majority either suffer or are given no choice or both, and life continues to be subject to extraction for something that is mostly unnecessary.
No technology is without cost. The energy use of data centers for cloud storage is monumental and rarely reported on. We cannot say that we have true choice in its adoption unless that cost is weighed into its manufacture and use—the cost to everyone, not just in the balance of our own personal comfort or convenience.
There are no absolute right answers. There never have been at any time in human history. But there are better directions, led by the health of waterways, the diversity of bugs and plants, the visibility of the stars, the nurturing of empathy and compassion and relationships, and the restoration of our own fractured attention.
I’m glad to have some of mine back. When I first sat down to start writing this, it was in a cabin that my mother’s husband built in the 1970s. A creek runs past banks of willow bushes. There is no electricity, and water comes from a spring piped through a hose.
Making coffee can take an hour, building a fire in the old cast iron cookstove and waiting for the fire and then the water to heat up. But even waiting for the coffee is its own pleasure, sitting in a chair by the stove, reading a book and enjoying the fire’s heat while rain and hail hammer the roof.
Cooking by wood stove, dishes by candlelight
It is something in this world, to be able to spend as much time offline as I’m able to, watching yellow warblers in the willow outside the door and hearing Swainson’s thrushes start up after the last of the night’s snipes have finished calling, to not see the sight of a digital screen for days, or hear the sound of digital music or voices. To go to bed with Sun and embrace boredom and reach occasionally for the field guides on the bookshelf while two marsh hawks soar and cry above a meadow. To linger in memory of the clearly visible Milky Way and confetti of stars covering the sky in the middle of the night.
To face ourselves without distraction, temptation, numbing, even other humans’ company, is one of humanity’s most consistent terrors, as well as one of its most consistent needs. Who are you, who am I, without the demands of a routine, schedule, the pressing obligations of work or caregiving, and the ability to check out? The allure of distraction is constant because to face ourselves is so terrifying. It’s also, in a time when our minds are offered or force-fed distraction at almost every turn, an odd kind of privilege.
If we know ourselves, we might have to be ourselves, and the dominant culture has spent thousands of years ensuring we can’t do, and even learn to avoid doing, either.
Spot the sandhill cranes?
My last morning at the cabin, I was walking through a meadow after a final dip in the creek, feeling sun-warmed and a little lazy, and almost walked smack into a pair of sandhill cranes. I stopped twenty feet from them as they called and wandered down-field. The marsh hawks were soaring and screeching as I passed through, and two whitetail deer bounded off into the woods, pausing, tails raised, to watch me.
In that moment, I had nothing with me to record the calls or take any photos. But all of that life was present, vivid and vibrant, along with the wind in the lodgepole and songbirds calling from the willows, and so was I, present. As I was a minute later writing this paragraph in a notebook leaned against a wooden fence rail, under two friendly pines. In the hope that if I stay in these moments then you, too, can find yourselves present within them.
Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.
After nearly a year of collaborative work, High Country News has published my essay on the transition from land relationship to land ownership through the theft of the commons. I’m a longtime reader and sometime contributor to HCN, and am thrilled that an essay about this idea made its way to their readers. You can read “The theft of the commons” here.
The following essay, about mass movements and true believers, was first published nearly two years ago. Like Eric Hoffer’s book The True Believer itself, the ideas within are unfortunately relevant again. The commons include land, water, and air, but also ideas and imagination. As Ijeoma Oluo wrote recently, “we have the power to effectively fight this.” But as with the stories of ownership that keep us entangled in systems of domination, knowing how we got here—and what keeps us stuck—is key to knowing how to get out.
Thirty years ago I had a high school history and government teacher who forever changed the way I think about the power of identity, especially group identity, in affecting human behavior. In my senior year of high school, in the early 1990s, he taught a section on Nazi propaganda that I’m sure these days would be posted to social media in a hot minute, for good or ill. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder if on some level he hoped through this course to inoculate his students against the kind of groupthink that characterizes movements like Nazism.
In addition to having us watch and analyze Nazi propaganda videos to learn about the power of dehumanization along with the lure of group identity and belonging, one of the books he assigned to us was Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer.
Hoffer, for those who haven’t heard of him, was a lot of things. Born, he said, in 1902 in the Bronx to German immigrants who died young, he worked as a migrant farm laborer and spent time on Los Angeles’s Skid Row before ending up working as a longshoreman after being rejected from Army enlistment in 1940 due to a hernia.
All of this information comes from Hoffer himself, and there remain some questions bordering on controversy about how much of his early life is true and what he might have fabricated.
He definitely did write ten books, however, and spent a few years as an adjunct professor at Berkeley. The True Believer became a bestseller after President Dwight D. Eisenhower mentioned it in a press conference and it remains Hoffer’s most well-known and widely read book.
The True Believer has cropped up here and there over the past several years in mass media mentions of seemingly inexplicable or out-of-nowhere mass movements and political forces. One of the intriguing things about the book is that one’s interpretation of who constitutes a “true believer” can be bent according to perspective or ideology. But no matter how readily its characterizations are construed to serve any political interpretation, the main messages regarding the appeal of mass movements remain the same. They’re lessons that have stuck with me for three decades.
Mass movements are more, and less, than what we think they are. Fostered and promoted by what Hoffer calls “men of words” (Hoffer’s “men of words” are people who prime the populace for radical change through language, but who are not leaders of change themselves—pundits, maybe, or, these days, social media influencers), these movements rely on charismatic leaders with little need for truth or integrity, but who have, among other qualities:
“. . . audacity and joy in defiance; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; . . .”
along with
“a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. . . . The uncanny powers of a leader manifest themselves not so much in the hold he has on the masses as in his ability to dominate and almost bewitch a small group of able men.”
All of which sounds awfully familiar.
Mass movements, when presented with the right kind of leader, catch fire with a populace that is bored and somewhat self-disgusted, possibly angry but not completely downtrodden. Pointing to examples like the French Revolution, Hoffer posits that mass movements are far more likely to occur when people have seen small improvements in their life conditions than when they have very little and expectations of less. These movements also rely heavily on “inventing memories of past greatness” to persuade true believers that the present is a miserable state of existence. The movement must then go beyond the mirage to “make a misery of the present” in order to keep followers fixed on a prize that is always just a little out of reach.
To get there, though, mass movements need to rely on unifying forces and unifying messages. Hatred is the obvious choice, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents.”
“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
There is nothing so easy as shared hatred unless it is shared contempt.
Hoffer has a lot to say on the subject of hatred. Reading his assessment struck me in particular because in the year I reread The True Believer, Montana’s legislative session saw the characterization of people as “mean” mentioned more than once. Never in recent memory, I heard both privately and publicly, have people seen a group of lawmakers so bent on cruelty, so eager to use their power to punish those they deem an enemy, or just plain abhorrent. Never so desirous of finding an outlet for an emotion that gets as close to hatred as you can without saying it out loud.
This essay was originally published in 2021, and I can only say that 2023’s legislative session (Montana’s legislature meets every two years) was far worse.
Where, Hoffer asks, does this hatred come from? My own thoughts had landed on a general fear of and resistance to change, but Hoffer’s ideas are perhaps ahead of his time, a kind of gut-thrust into the human psyche:
“They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others—and there is a most determined and persistent effort to mask this switch. . . . Even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice.”
The unifying force of the mass movement, then, realizes itself eventually in its vilification of the present, mirages of past and future greatness, shared hatred of a manufactured enemy, and, finally, a leader’s ability to control the movement, its members, and its loyalties.
A few years ago a leader in my state’s legislature published an editorial complaining about members of what at the time was called the Common Sense Caucus—a group of a particular party, say Party A, of legislators willing to vote with the other party, Party B, over what they saw as common sense legislation that benefited Montanans. I wish I could remember what the exact wording of the letter was, but it boiled down to the idea that Party A members were not doing their job unless they voted in lockstep with the nationwide Party A’s priorities. Nevermind what legislators’ local constituents wanted of them; what mattered was following the Party line.
The merging of individual identity with Party identity—and a subsequent leader’s control over that group identity—is an early characteristic of mass movements:
“Stalin succeeded in turning proud and brave men into cringing cowards by depriving them of any possibility of identification with the party they had served all their lives and with the Russian masses. These old Bolsheviks had long ago cut themselves off from humanity outside Russia. . . . There was for them neither past nor future, neither memory nor glory outside the confines of holy Russia and the Communist party—and both these were now wholly and irrevocably in Stalin’s hands.” (Emphasis added.)
The submersion of an individual’s identity into the mass, into a group identity, is the main thrust of Hoffer’s thesis. He repeatedly makes the point that people do not turn to mass movements because they are inspired or because they are stupid, but because they are bored, searching for a way to exist that allows them to escape an unsatisfactory or unfulfilling “self”—to escape themselves. The particular ideology doesn’t always matter—Hoffer points out that there was plenty of ship-jumping between Nazism and communism during World War II, a common theme among adherents to hardline or extremist ideologies that is no less true today. It’s not the movement itself but the sense of belonging that matters.
In other words, any of us could fall in with a mass movement, an understanding that I believe might have been the purpose of my high school teacher’s lesson on Nazi propaganda. The attraction of escaping yourself and being part of something bigger, grander, could lure anyone, given the right time of life or right circumstances.
Interestingly, Hoffer also makes the repeated but less emphasized point that creative people—fulfilled creative people; Hitler was not alone among Nazi leadership in being a failed, frustrated artist—are less prone to subsume themselves in mass movements. Not because fulfilled creative people are smarter or more successful or wiser, but because they have a way of being secure with themselves, within themselves, and their work that negates the need for finding an outside identity. I would at that creativity in general can do much to undermine the attraction of a mass movement, through fostering imaginations and increasing empathy.
Sadly, he doesn’t provide a method of cultivating this kind of groundedness among the greater populace. But it was in fact Ijeoma Oluo’s recent essay on the social and political futures staring America in the face that reminded me of The True Believer, due not to the dire facts she rightfully set forth, but to her inclusion of joy and strong relationships as necessary for getting through what is to come:
“Cultivate joy. Remember, we’re not just fighting against fascism, colonialism, and oppression. We’re fighting for us. We’re fighting for our lives, for our freedom, for our communities, for our children. There are so many ways in which our lives can be taken from us, and they can be taken from us while we are still living. How we live matters.”
I often talk and write about my Russian grandparents. They were born during the Russian Empire, were as Jews confined to living in the Pale of Settlement and had limited rights. They married and raised children during Stalin’s purges (during which millions died) and under increasing anti-Semitism. Not to mention surviving the Siege of Leningrad. Through lives that never had much of what we might call hope for a better future, they stayed true to values of honesty, ethics, and integrity. They laughed, they loved, they lived, even when they had much to fear.
My grandparents didn’t escape the Soviet Union or overthrow authoritarianism. Most of us don’t. And still, how they lived mattered. I can only hope to be as good an ancestor to others as they have been to me.
Once someone has fallen in with a mass movement, facts cease to become persuasive, if they ever were in the first place. It is the certainty of belief that matters, never reality:
“The effectiveness of doctrine should not be judged by its profundity, sublimity or the validity of the truths it embodies, but by how thoroughly it insulates the individual from his self and the world as it is. . . . the effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.”
In an effective mass movement, the true believer’s yearning for identity finds a place. A sense of belonging is fulfilled, and individual responsibility is then taken out of one’s hands. The movement, and its leader, decide what’s right and wrong. All one needs to do is stay with the movement and the whole gnawing existential issue of what is the point of this life; what am I doing here? is lifted blissfully off of one’s shoulders.
That’s what I got from those long-ago lessons on Nazi propaganda, anyway. It’s hard to get my mind around the fact that millions of people are able to find belonging and hatred compatible, even easy, but then I think of The True Believer and remember that the question is how many people are capable of releasing their own moral responsibility.
Though the last sections of the book talk a bit about Gandhi and Lincoln and other mass movement leaders who managed to channel the energy of true believers into change for good, The True Believer spends more time on Nazism and Soviet communism (it was published only a few years after World War II ended) and isn’t what I’d call a hopeful book. I was left feeling that there is little anyone can do to stop a mass movement once it has gathered enough true believers, even if the movement hasn’t yet reached a point of no return. The minds are locked away and there’s little anyone can do but try to survive it.
I really don’t want to live that way, much less think that way.
There are a few things to consider here that make me feel a little less hopeless. One is research I did a few years ago for an essay on riots in Aeon magazine. I suspect, though I don’t know for certain, that Hoffer took some understanding about human nature from late-1800s theories about common people, riots, and the thought that people (commoners, that is) lose their individuality when in a crowd, acting as a destructive mass. More recent scholarship (much of which I wrote about in that essay on riots) undermines this understanding. Even when I asked one of the researchers in Britain about the phenomenon of football hooliganism, he pushed back: alcohol and euphoria are at play there, but many football riots have been found to have outside actors prodding violence. Where the line is between manufactured violence and “real” violence I don’t know, but much of what we believe about crowd groupthink is both incorrect—this is backed by research going back decades—and, seemingly, intractable.
While lacking or despising one’s sense of self, and the unifying force of hatred, certainly ring true as foundation stones for mass movements—the early-1990s genocide in Rwanda comes to mind—I don’t know that the inevitability of them is as certain as the book left me feeling. Maybe that’s just me; maybe it’s part of my belief that we have to change the narratives of what we think humans are capable of in order to change our societies and our future, but I remain persuaded that humanity is capable of more, and better, even if we don’t always know how.
One of the essays I share and recommend more than just about any other is also from Aeon, on echo chambers and epistemic bubbles by philosophy professor C Thi Nguyen. I keep returning to it because it gives me an in-depth understanding of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers—and the differences between them—but also of what works and what doesn’t in escaping them, or trying to help someone else escape them. “We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed,” wrote Nguyen. “But echo chambers are a far more pernicious and robust phenomenon.”
“Does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber. . . . Epistemic bubbles are rather ramshackle; they go up easily, and they collapse easily, too. Echo chambers are far more pernicious and far more robust. They can start to seem almost like living things.”
These needn’t be purely socio-political-religious phenomena. Nguyen uses Crossfit exercise devotees and adherents to the Paleo diet as brief examples. But the researchers he discussed also use the late right-wing talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh as an example of an effective echo chamber:
“Limbaugh uses methods to actively transfigure whom his listeners trust. His constant attacks on the ‘mainstream media’ are attempts to discredit all other sources of knowledge. He systematically undermines the integrity of anybody who expresses any kind of contrary view. And outsiders are not simply mistaken—they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy Limbaugh and his followers. . . . The result is a rather striking parallel to the techniques of emotional isolation typically practised in cult indoctrination.”
As with Hoffer’s description of mass movements, facts cease to matter. What matters is what the echo chamber or movement’s leaders make of those facts. Unlike an epistemic bubble, “an echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth,” wrote Nguyen; “it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions.”
That sounds a lot like the kind of mass movement that Hoffer detailed. And while Nguyen doesn’t offer a cure or a fix for these phenomena, there are at least ways to think about them that might be helpful.
The main method is through what Nguyen describes as a “social-epistemic reboot”: Whether you’re following René Descartes’s arguments in Meditations on First Philosophy or imagining a “hapless teenager” who’s grown up in a cult, what’s required is abandoning what they believe about pretty much everything and starting from scratch. Which honestly sounds terrifying for the average person and is probably why these positions are so hard for people to shift out of.
What makes the difference is having at least one person outside of the echo chamber whom you can trust. Nguyen brings in the example of Derek Black, who was raised by a neo-Nazi family to be a neo-Nazi leader. He wasn’t looking for a way out of his indoctrination—he was in fact hosting a neo-Nazi radio show while in college—but a way found him in the form of a Jewish student at his undergraduate college who began inviting Black over for Shabbat dinners.
“In Black’s telling, Stevenson was unfailingly kind, open and generous, and slowly earned Black’s trust. This was the seed, says Black, that led to a massive intellectual upheaval—a slow-dawning realisation of the depths to which he had been misled. Black went through a years-long personal transformation, and is now an anti-Nazi spokesperson. . . .
“Why is trust so important? Baier suggests one key facet: trust is unified. We don’t simply trust people as educated experts in a field—we rely on their goodwill. And this is why trust, rather than mere reliability, is the key concept. Reliability can be domain-specific. The fact, for example, that somebody is a reliable mechanic sheds no light on whether or not their political or economic beliefs are worth anything. But goodwill is a general feature of a person’s character. If I demonstrate goodwill in action, then you have some reason to think that I also have goodwill in matters of thought and knowledge.”
People do leave cults and exit echo chambers, and although Hoffer didn’t talk in The True Believer about what could prompt people to leave mass movements, I don’t think it’s impossible for a movement to dissolve for various reasons—whether members come to terms with the harm that’s being caused, or trusted family members or friends leave some room for welcome, or some other inexplicable tipping point is reached.
I don’t necessarily know how to do this. I’m just as angry and frustrated and exhausted as anyone else, especially recently as a variety of forces and factors seem hell-bent on proving just how selfish humans can be, just how hell-bent an entire society can make itself on causing others suffering if enough people persuade themselves that there’s an enemy to defeat, even when that enemy is your neighbor or your family.
But I’ve got a lot of influences in my life, including my Russian grandparents, to remind me that self-protection doesn’t have to be one’s only driving force.
And I had this teacher, close to three decades ago, whose parents had, if I remember correctly, been German scientists brought over during World War II to work for the U.S. government, and he used his life to teach adolescent minds what it looks like when a society becomes mindless.
That teacher, and writers like Eric Hoffer who see much (though not all) with clarity, and researchers and thinkers who continue to work on compassion and cognitive empathy, remind us, once again, that we are not alone. Our resources are strained, our compassion is constantly challenged, and yet as a species humanity has been through far, far worse and has still not given up trying to be human.
In the spirit of anti-enclosure movements and the reality of our interconnectedness with life, On the Commons remains unpaywalled. These essays are informed by years of scholarship and research, and the practice of writing. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to support this work.
Welcome, commons-ers! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.
Pre-orders are open for Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature: “The Elementals series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?”
I have an essay titled “Trespassing” in Air, alongside some writers I admire so much I stalled out writing my own draft for months, like Báyò Akómoláfé, Ross Gay, and Roy Scranton. Other volumes include writing from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, Joy Harjo, and many more. As with their previous series Kinship, I know this anthology will bring healing and guidance to a world sorely in need of both. Elementals is published September 3, 2024. Pre-orders help get the word out!
“It feels healing,” I told the guy pointing a camera at me, every joint and muscle aching and my forearms scored with cuts. “For the land, I mean. Trail work is harder, but taking down all this barbed wire? It feels like it’s healing something.”
I feel like a dork saying such things, even when I know they’re true, and even when I know my words, if I can find the right ones for honest sentiment, might persuade a few more people to sign up for volunteer work like this, spending two full days in the sagebrush terrain of southwest Montana removing miles of barbed wire fencing for the purposes of easing pronghorn migration corridors. To wake up to birdsong and near-freezing temperatures and gather just past 7 in the morning to carpool (or truck-pool; even my sturdy Subaru couldn’t handle the two-track dirt ruts we had to drive) to the work site and don work gloves heavy enough to withstand the fierce jabs of old barbed wire.
The cameraperson asked me about my bleeding arms and I said I should have worn a long-sleeved shirt. “This is called poor choices in safety equipment,” I said.
I was desperately tired at that point, as well as bleeding. We were nearing the end of the 2.3 miles (about 3.7 km) of fencing, and I’d spent most of my time rolling up reams of 5-strand wire after others on the crew had gone ahead clipping it from fenceposts and those behind were using a hydraulic jack to remove stubborn T-posts (those are metal fenceposts, as opposed to the wooden ones, many of which came out easily or were broken from rot). It didn’t seem like much, walking through tough sagebrush while winding springy, cantankerous barbed wire around itself, but the hours and miles piled up.
While my own body wanted to rebel against the work and the eventual heat of the day, wanted to jump into the rushing creek and rest under the aspens growing alongside it, watch the camas grow and the water flow, it did, still, feel healing. While we worked, a couple pronghorn in the distance slipped under barbed wire fencing. Pronghorn, as I wrote about when I first did this kind of work three years ago, won’t jump fences. They slip underneath, and that bottom strand of sharp barbed wire often results in injury. Taking out the fencing, or replacing that one strand with smooth wire, removes a barrier in their migration corridor that they’d never asked for and hadn’t agreed to.
It felt good to know that after over a century of damage and abuse of this land, we were doing something, even a small thing, to improve the lives of those who live on it. I can’t think of many better ways to spend my not-quite-free time.
Earlier in the spring, before what I’m starting to think of as my personal “grueling volunteer labor season” began, I was at a Montana Master Naturalist gathering, with short classes on botany, geology, and meteorology (which is where I finally learned how graupel—a hail-like snow that’s always intrigued me—is formed). During a walk with a professional botanist, we smelled the butterscotch scent of Ponderosa pine’s bark and came across young camas not quite in bloom, and I got distracted by varieties of forget-me-nots, a flower I have a special, very personal, affection for.
The botanist didn’t make a lot of commentary, but while we were focused on the camas leaves, he told us about how nearby Blackfoot Valley had once been covered in camas. Entire peoples could gather there, he said, and be fed.
“Then Europeans came and turned that entire valley into cow food.”
Much as this story isn’t new or surprising, that line still hit like a blow. I’ve driven through that beautiful valley more times than I can count, tried to rein in grief and anger at the ubiquitous fencing, the “No Trespassing” signs, the dammed river, the cattle. Imagining it without said fencing, signs, dam, and cows. Imagining it, now, covered in purple camas spread widely enough for nobody who comes there to go hungry. As a place of gathering, celebration, community harvesting and cooking, sharing, and safety.
On the trail maintenance crew I worked on in designated wilderness a few weeks later, the crew leader and I came across abandoned wire—smooth, not barbed. I tripped over it. “Telephone wire,” he told me as we gathered some of it up. “The Forest Service used to be responsible for maintaining a phone line all the way from here to Ovando.” I thought of the vast mountains between Ovando and where we were, our long, harsh winters, and the seeming insanity and waste of trying to keep an operational phone line between the two.
This society we live in operates on such insanity. Survey markers, fences, hard borders, and laws separate life, and technologies like phone lines and highways reconnect, but only in the narrowest, and often most destructive, ways. As if we keep trying to meet some innate, unavoidable need but using all the wrong methods. I can’t reconcile the theft and conversion of the Blackfoot Valley from shared camas to private cow food, with the fact Ovando, which is in that valley, was for a few decades connected by telephone across a mountain range.
Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) descendant and cofounder of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, wrote about private land ownership’s multi-generational destruction of community and survival in her book The Land Is Not Empty:
“Private property is an erosion of community and collective identity, survival strategies core and fundamental to humanity. Private property is divisive for all people. Private property disconnects us from each other and from responsibility for each other. This is true for all people groups, not just for the Yakama, not just for Indigenous peoples.”
The answers are right in front of us, if only the barriers in our minds, barriers forwarded and maintained by power and insatiable want, could find ways to dissolve. Make their ways back to seeing generosity and care, and shared responsibility, over manufactured scarcity and perceived fear as not only preferable, but perfectly possible.
It was hard not to think of that line about camas and cow food during my weekend removing fencing. We removed two different sections of fence, and near both of them I saw camas in bloom, most of it on private land. Which means that this beautiful little purple flower, this source of nutrition, sustenance, and ceremony for many, is all too often and through no choice of her own, barricaded behind legal and physical lines of private property—property most often used to raise cattle.
I wrote a piece about borders a few months ago that probably had more and longer comments than nearly anything I’ve written here. For those who have been around this conversation-heavy newsletter a while, you know that’s saying a lot. Borders are physical, but they are also emotional, social, psychological, and cultural. And legal. The strongest borders of all might be in our own imaginations, in the belief that any of us have a right to own anything at all, especially other forms of life, and especially that any of us have the right to deny access to life, to survival, to anybody else.
How do you get a culture that believes in barbed wire fencing and private property rights but not in a right to survival? This question has come up in this newsletter more times than I can count, and I doubt that will change. It’s an ancient struggle fed by an ability to accumulate power and resources, and resistance against the same.
I brought home a short cut of barbed wire and put it on my desk to remind me of the purpose of this work: to find ways of helping us all see a world where that kind of technology has no place.
Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.
Book update: Apologies for the continued “wow it’s been many months since I intended to have this chapter out” delay. I have taken apart Chapter 1 of No Trespassing for the fourth time, but this time because, when I was describing my difficulties with it to a friend, she gave a piece of advice that showed me what I’d been missing. It’s finally coming together as it was meant to.
New podcast interview: “Land, democracy, identity” with UK-based Future Natures.The path from writing about walking to private property and ownership, how they each intertwine and conflict with freedom and senses of identity, and how craving for land relationship can drive both love and extremism . This has been one of my favorite podcast listens over the past couple years, and the larger projects of Future Natures have become a go-to resource.
5% of this quarter’s On the Commons revenue will be given to the Flathead Warming Center, the only low-barrier houseless shelter in my general region.
There’s a place I’ve been taking my family camping for nearly ten years. It’s a campground around an hour’s drive from where I live, on the far side of a reservoir whose waters hold some fond decades-old memories of lingering with boyfriends, along with a couple regrettable memories involving fire and the irresponsibility of teenagers. (The fact that nobody was hurt aside from lost eyebrows was sheer luck.)
To get to this campground, we have to drive to the far end of the reservoir and then thirty miles along a gravel forest service road. It’s a place where every summer my and my friends’ kids stuff themselves with huckleberries and spend hours in the water and nobody can access text messages or online games, much less email. For four days or so I wake up hours before everyone else and sit with coffee and the calls of Swainson’s thrushes as Sun makes his slow way up from behind mountains so tall and close they almost feel looming (isn’t that a great word? looming), but in a comforting way, like a protective uncle.
The surrounding forest backs against the Great Bear Wilderness to the east, with Glacier National Park a little ways north. When I’m there, I manually direct my brain to these facts because for some reason I’ve never been able to understand, I feel very turned around for the days I’m there, as if I don’t know where I am in the world. It’s not uncommon for me to get lost, especially when in a city and nearly always when driving somewhere for the first time, but in non-city areas I usually have a pretty good sense of place, if not direction. It’s one of the things that makes maps so delightful, being able to trace a finger along terrain or position and feel the embodied reality of one’s own self within that represented space, feel the feet tingle in the knowing of here I am. I have a hard time feeling that sense at this campground.
For years I’ve wondered if my place-confusion there might have something to do with being on a huge reservoir. When we’re on the water, paddleboarding or kayaking or just swimming, there’s an eeriness that is unrelated to my phobia of deep water. This is a drowned river, is what comes to mind as I try to ignore the growing conviction that deep-water monsters are going to pull me under.
A drowned river. It sounds nonsensical. It’s all water. But rivers have spirit and shape and purposes of their own, all of which is smothered when a dam is built to stop their flow and extract their energy.
A friend reminded me recently that I’d been meaning to look for old maps of this area from before the dam was completed in 1953, to see where the river, the South Fork of the Flathead, flowed when she was free. So earlier this week on our way north on a day of sleet, snow, and fierce wind, my younger kid and I stopped in at the forest service’s ranger station, where there turned out to be no old maps or any idea where I might find them. But it was a slow day and someone’s interest was sparked enough to spend time poking into CalTopo online for historical maps until she found what I’d been looking for.
And there she was, the South Fork, undulating through a narrow valley as mountains spilled streams and creeks into her, receiving snowmelt and rainfall as she headed down to Flathead Lake. Next to her, the modern reservoir looks less like an expansive lake we play on every summer, less like a monumental feat of engineering, and more like many technological outputs of modern humans: a little grandiose. And temporary. The reservoir is fun—and of course it’s still water, with its own voice and energy—but it doesn’t have quite the same sense of wholeness, the this-lifeness, of the river. I look at that old map and feel oddly relieved. Like I finally know where I stand.
On the left, the modern landscape of Hungry Horse Reservoir. On the right, the South Fork of the Flathead River before it was dammed.
During the Q&A session after a recent online presentation, someone asked me about the chapter titles in my book A Walking Life—nine iterations of “Stumble,” “Lurch,” “Stride,” and so on. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that before, and it took me a minute to remember that I had originally used similar section headings—variations on “walk” and ideas related to it—for the first essay I ever wrote on walking, years ago, for the small literary journal Lunch Ticket, titled “Wander, Lost.”
It was in that essay that I first linked freedom of movement with freedom of thought. It was also, as far as I can remember, the first time I thought of both as, tangentially, related to the movement and constraint of rivers.
“As our freedom to walk becomes ever more constrained, as air quality and housing developments and busy roads force us to spend more time in our homes and cars, we might lose even the words of movement that reflect every land-tethered animal’s most basic motion. Ramble, meander, rove, roam, wander, deviate, digress—will they slip into disuse, become arcane ideas? As we forget that they ever applied to our physical bodies, to our ability to get from here to there or from here to nowhere in particular, will our minds lose the ability to do the same? What happens to our ideas and bodies when neither can wander aimlessly, get stuck in the mud, backtrack, reconsider, keep moving until we find ourselves in a place beyond our knowledge? . . .
. . . like a river that’s been straightened and reinforced with concrete, exploding every now and then in an anger of floodwaters but never again allowed to meander. My mind has begun to feel the same.”
I think constantly about the relationship between freedom of movement and freedom of the mind. I have an unpublished essay on the subject lurking in my files that might or might not ever see the light of day, structured around the movie WALL-E, which I’ve watched about twenty times, and it came to mind again recently when reading Thomas Pluck’s novel Vyx Starts the Mythpocalypse, as Vyx’s parents are taken by the government’s Ice Men who then stalk their path as they travel the land in search of safety, running into awakened mythological beings along the way. Control of thought—including the freedom to live as our true selves—and control of movement go hand in hand.
“Wander, Lost” also provided the seeds for the sections of A Walking Life about my father’s life in the Soviet Union and the ways in which interpersonal and public trust can make or break a society, especially when it comes to government suppression of speech and protest, and how personal relationships are weaponized in its enforcement.
Trust is, like the freedom to wander, an invisible force whose degradation can make visible the erosion of liberties to those who had always thought themselves free. What one once might have thought endless and inviolable is revealed to be that which can be taken, and lost. Kind of how degradation of a river ecosystem can’t help but be reflected in the health of every single life touched by its waters.
I’ll probably never get to meet the river buried under the reservoir we camp at. Hungry Horse Dam is one of the largest in the country, and seen as essential in a network of electricity-generating hydropower dams along the Columbia River watershed. But there’s something about seeing a map of where she was, the free river, that might help orient me next time I’m up there.
At the very least, when the kids race down to the little peninsula where they watch the sunset, I can remember that while the placidity of the water is a human-made artifice, the beauty remains wild and free, and something of the river reaches up to meet that evening glow, to say the river is not gone—her stillness won’t be forever. It might be generations in the future, but she will one day find her familiar curves, playgrounds, and resting spots again, running her way through the mountains as she was meant to. Free to roam.
If we’re lucky, someday our freedom to wander, too, will be un-lost.
Imagine yourself in a cabin, curled up on a beaten couch in the corner of the small room shared by a couple of bunk beds, a table, a counter and stove, and you. It’s night out, and an almost-full Moon was rising in the south when you went out earlier, a boreal owl barely audible from the woods.
The propane-fueled fireplace is warm but doesn’t give off quite enough light to read by. But you sink into the pages anyway, take them slowly because you’re in that kind of mood. You watched a whole flock of bluebirds for an hour earlier, and as you drove up to the cabin, a bald eagle flew overhead. There are no people nearby. You are fed and tired and ready for bed; to slip into it via firelit poetry feels perfect.
As you turn the pages, something happens, a quiet internal earthquake. It’s not one particular poem or line or turn of phrase, but the accumulated effect of their weight: quiet and light, like snowflakes, carrying that same balance of power and delicate beauty. The poems each strip away a layer of something, you’re not even sure what, and by the end of it you look up at the flames slightly irritating in their gas-powered sameness and think, That’s where I’ve been hiding.
A few hours earlier, I’d been standing by the side of the road watching bluebirds. I have never seen so many bluebirds in one place. At most I see one or two of them a year, their impossible bright colors a flash of delight. There were at least ten, maybe fifteen, flying among last year’s grasses, barely pausing on the dry branches waving in the wind. I truly could not believe my eyes. At the far end of the field, a couple of elk romped together among their herd, and snow-clung mountain peaks stopped up the horizon like a postcard for Montana.
My feet ached to wander into that field, wiggle toes into the soil that could draw so many bluebirds.
My friend
Amanda B. Hinton and I were talking recently about the ease I feel when letting my feet rest in running water, the concept another friend had proposed of feeling “grounded in flow.” Maybe, Amanda wondered to me, you pray through your feet. That idea tasted like a fresh wild huckleberry on a hot hike when I’ve run out of water, reminding me of something
Which is how I ended up writing about ownership, private property, and the commons in the first place. Because too many places I yearn to walk, like that field of bluebirds and elk, are inaccessible not due to terrain or danger, but to the simple fiction of ownership.
It’s a friendly No Trespassing sign, the orange almost cheerful, the font relatively friendly, and no hint of being shot at—far too common in Montana—for crossing the barrier, but it’s a barrier nevertheless.
In his book Enlivenment, the German philosopher Andreas Weber writes of the enclosures of the commons throughout Europe as not just a denial of physical sustenance and survival, but of a spiritual severing. Enclosures and the rise of the market economy
“not only governed the allocation of land, but also redistributed the spaces of our consciousness. In reality, the forced separation between that which gave life (the biosphere) and those who were gifted by life (the commoners) was an act of violence on the part of the landlord, who excluded members of the ecosystem from their rightful positions and thereby damaged these participants, the ecosystem itself, and the unifying experience of self-organizing coherence.”
Commons, Weber had written earlier, is a system in which there are no users or resources, “but only diverse participants in a fertile system, which they treat in accordance with a higher goal: that it continue to give life.”
When the land was no longer commoned, when it was stolen for the purposes of private ownership, it could also no longer be related to. People were denied access to that most fundamental yearning, to relate to the land we live with. Their minds were bent, by force—the number of bloody rebellions against enclosures of the commons might be surprising to those who assume private property came about naturally—to see themselves as separate from nature, disconnected from land and a living world, and able to survive only by working for someone else—the genesis, commons scholar Peter Linebaugh has said, “of the j-o-b.”
We know how well all of that has turned out.
Dismantling the story behind private land ownership, and exposing the lack of foundation for laws defending it, is necessary to finding a way out of it. But so is restoring a shared relationship with all of life. I wanted to walk that field because I am alive and the field is alive and the bluebirds were so beautiful I wanted to cry and it means something to know that, and to know it’s true and right to feel that way, even if the No Trespassing signs stop me acting on it.
The book I read that first night at the cabin (for those who’ve been around a while, this is the same cabin I stayed at about a year ago where the heat didn’t work and I turned around on a hike after coming across a fresh grizzly bear track) was by someone I was fortunate to meet recently, poet, essayist, and woodworker Charles Finn. He’d generously given me a copy of each of his books: Wild Delicate Seconds, a book of short essays, and On a Benediction of Wind, a collaboration between Finn’s poetry and the black and white photography of Barbara Michelman.
It’s tempting to spend the rest of this space quoting numerous lines that I keep going back to, like
“Above the geese the soft colors of the afternoon deepen into a tremendous wound and a gibbous moon is birthed, shadows crawling over the snow to dissolve into the river”
from Wild Delicate Seconds, but like most reading for pleasure and insight, how anyone receives those passages will be personal to them. There’s a quiet reverence for the world that invites rather than demands the reader’s attention, both to the writing and to the lives it honors. I read On a Benediction of Wind all in one sitting that first night, which I don’t think I’ve ever done with a book of poetry, and at the end I closed it and stared at the fire and went out to visit with Moon and felt, for the first time in a long time, a steadied feeling of being at home—in the world, and in myself.
The next day I chose a trailhead at random and walked barefoot for two miles on dry pine needles along a waterlogged trail, the nearby river free to stretch herself over the ground. I spent hours by the lake after gasping into its snowmelt cold, watching the waterfall far across the valley, crashing snow from its mountains’ embrace through a ravine and brushing into my dripping hair snowmelt and sunshine, a wolf’s nose nudging a track, a wolverine’s strand of fur, the promise of berries still sleeping, and the call of the loon diving under spring’s early waves.
Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.
If you’d spent most of your life under skies like this, might gray be your favorite color, too?
In a week or two, a few yards of compost will get dumped on the edge of my garden. This is arguably one of the events I look forward to most all year. The ground is still too cold to work in it much—it snowed again yesterday and nights are back below freezing. (I accidentally typed “freezling” there and I like it so much better. Freezling has delightful possibilities.) At this point in the year, the garden’s emerging green prompts only eager possibility, before the pressure of weeding quack grass and thistles gets to me, before we head into when my year truly starts, the hot days of August when I’m strategizing huckleberry-picking days and tomato-canning sessions and keeping an eye on when the chokecherries are ripe.
Compost delivery speaks of warm mornings watching tree swallows in the nesting box while I pick strawberries and snack on peas, talk with sweetgrass, which I checked on as soon as the snow mostly melted, and was taken aback by how many new plants are peeking up. Some of them are undoubtedly quack grass, but there are plenty of telltale red-tinged tips. I cannot wait to smell her in the warmth of June, gently coax her strands into braids.
Our local compost service is one of the best understated things about where I live. Every week my five-gallon bucket gets picked up, more or less full of cucumber ends, pizza crusts, moldy cheese, steak bones, coffee grounds, overripe avocados. It gets taken to bear-proofed land not far from here and joins similar bucketsfull from households all over the valley, along with larger bins from local restaurants, to heat up to the point when a variety of bacteria begin to break all of it down and turn it into dirt, helped by viruses, fungi, and of course worms, slugs, nematodes, and all the other tiny creatures less immediately attractive than, say, apex predators, but no less vital to keeping a living planet alive.
Every year, when those yards of compost slide out of a truck in my garden, I get a little thrill thinking of how contained it all feels, how efficient, to see consumption turned back into something fertile and full of life instead of tied up in a plastic bag and added to the mountainous landfill just outside of town. That growing mountain of trash, and the fact that when I was a teenager thirty years ago the landfill was not a mountain, but a pit in the same location, makes me want to try harder to live close to home, to take more responsibility for this place I love so much and all those who depend on its vitality. To eat more huckleberries and spruce tips gathered from the surrounding mountains and far fewer avocados shipped thousands of miles from places whose dire water situations I’m too well aware of to pretend ignorance.
Putting my hands in compost prods me to make fewer choices that make other communities’ lives harder, but what I like about it is that it does so by reminding me how much joy there is to be found in loving and taking responsibility for the life I live among.
There’s something I learned years ago that often haunts me in the hours of darkness when sleep is elusive: when the Three Gorges Dam in China was completed, controlling the flood cycle of the Yangtze River, it altered Earth’s rotation enough to add 0.06 milliseconds of daylight hours to the planet.
I read something similar, though not as drastic, about depletion of the aquifer under California’s agricultural region, one of the things that contributed to my mostly giving up almonds.
Trade and exchange have been around essentially forever. How much is too much, though? How far is too far? How do the critical quantities of phosphate mined in the Western Sahara and sent to fertilize farms all over the world compare with peat moss harvested fifty miles from me and used to feed gardens like mine? What keeps my sleepless hours company isn’t some nightmare scenario where humans screw things up enough to throw the planet completely off her orbit; it’s more of a philosophical question. One at the core of most of what I write: how do we live together? Not just humans, but all of life.
If there’s a balance, it’s one that shifts constantly over time but one thing I think is certain: if that balance is to be in service of life, it must be determined by kinship and care, not by what one region wants that another happens to have. It must be determined by a deep sense of right relationship, not by who has the power to take and who lacks the power to say no.
It’s hard to undo built-in consumption practices, much less to escape the systems that enable them. The meat my family eats is almost all local and a lot of it is wild, brought home through my own efforts and the generous gifts of the land I try to live with. But the bags of lemons I bring home from Costco aren’t. I grow the strawberries we eat, but not the frozen blueberries in winter. Knowing too much about the environmental and social costs of the floral industry, I rarely buy cut flowers for people, but I still use coconut oil for my homemade lotion.
All of these end up in my compost in one form or another. I like that I can think of food eaten in my home cycling into dirt and transforming into food again, but as much as it helps decrease the growth of that landfill outside of town, how much weight has it also shifted from other places on this planet I might never see but that are beloved by those who live among them? How much of the soil I use to grow strawberries and potatoes carries with it the gravity of others’ hardships?
The compost will be delivered, and I’ll ask the driver about her now-toddler while we rake it out of the truck, and she’ll leave and I’ll stand in my muck boots and stare at the pile and think of what will grow from it. I’ll wish, as I do every year, that a strong friend or two would come by and help me shovel it all onto the garden beds in time to get the potatoes in.
That would be a gathering, wouldn’t it? Skip all the writerly readings and presentations and workshops and you all could come over and help get the garden started or just hang out watching flickers and tree swallows, and I’d cook big pots of things for every variation of eater and we’d lay wood in the fire pit and sit around muscle-weary and well-fed, and drink water from the aquifer my well draws from, and tell stories while the sky slowly melts to dark and the stars come out and the air turns freezling and Moon comes out to join the party.
A gathering like that would be something like compost, where there are no hierarchies or leaders, no unnecessary suffering, no waste, and everyone has a part to play, a contribution to make, simply by existing. We could create our own human ground where the potential still remains for so much to grow.
Welcome back to On the Commons! For those of you who are new here, On the Commons is a newsletter exploring ownership and its inevitable injustices, investigating centuries of philosophical and legal arguments made in defense of private property for a much simpler explanation: theft. Or in other words, “I took it; now it’s mine,” and the consequences both large and small for our shared world.
Both top and bottom photos are of No Trespassing signs on the fence of land owned in my town by the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe railway company.
The Boston Tea Party is one of the defining stories of America’s founding as a nation. I remember learning about it year after year in school in the 1980s. Probably every American kid does. What was never said in those scrappy little classrooms across Montana is that the story of the Boston Tea Party is also one of the sharpest tools wielded in defense of the mythologies that make up the American ideal. The fact that it was an illegal riot that destroyed private property doesn’t just get glossed over; it’s never presented that way, not in the U.S. anyway. To present it that way would fly in the face of the American ideology that private property is bedrock. Instead, the story is presented as noble: the little nation that could refusing injustice imposed by a far-off monarchy.
What also gets glossed over is that the impetus for the riot wasn’t simply taxes; it was taxes imposed by government in order to benefit a private corporation.
The struggle over taxes in the British colonies of North America had been ongoing for years. The tax on tea, however, had a second purpose besides enriching King George III: the British Parliament wanted to keep the tea tax as a symbolic acknowledgment that the government maintained its right to tax the colonies, but they also wanted to help the East India Company claw its way out of debt. The story of the Boston Tea Party, the real one, points to the longer history of government enabling corporate power and profit until it essentially becomes an arm of the corporation itself.
The East India Company had its own private army. It in effect controlled all of India at one point, nominally representing Britain’s interests but serving its own.
Swarnali Mukherjee has written extensively in Berkana about what the British Crown and the East India Company’s actions meant for the economy of India. I encourage you to read the entirety of her essay on this subject, to understand the importance of the point she makes:
“The construction of railways was funded by Indian taxpayers, and the economic benefits often flowed back to Britain in the form of profits pocketed by British shareholders. The total wealth drain of India under British rule, in today’s value is an estimated $45 trillion.”
“The EIC remains history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state. . . .
For just as the lobbying of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was able to bring down the government in Iran and United Fruit that of Guatemala in the 1950s; just as ITT lobbied to bring down Salvador Allende’s Chile in the 1970s and just as ExxonMobil has lobbied the US more recently to protect its interests in Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan, so the EIC was able to call in the British navy to enhance its power in India in the 18th century. And just as Facebook today can employ Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, so the EIC was able to buy the services of Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered Yorktown to Washington.”
It’s a long but excellent article (and unfortunately I think now paywalled), detailing the Company’s permission to wage war, and instances of forced privatization across the world at the Company’s behest. It also points to England having isolated itself from the rest of Europe due to wars over religion (I assume the author was referring to the abandonment of Catholicism and establishment of the Church of England) as a factor prompting the country to look for markets outside of Europe, a vital ingredient for colonialism:
“The English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield, and to do so they had no compunction but to use, for the first time in history, unbridled corporate violence.”
One of the questions I keep asking myself is if government, of almost any form but particularly of the nation-state, has always existed to serve private interests. Its main claim to enforcement of law is a monopoly on state violence, most often employed in the name of protecting private property, rather than protecting citizens from harm.
This is obvious when you look at laws and police actions against something like constructing an oil pipeline. The pipeline is private property built in pursuit of profit; therefore, it qualifies for legal protection from the state even though it threatens clean air, water, and soil—even if it takes others’ private property in turn. The U.S. government’s power of eminent domain, after all, was first used for private gain when railroads were being built across the continent, and has continued to be wielded in the name of private profit ever since—the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) and the Pennsylvania District Court case granting eminent domain to a pipeline builder over the objections of a family of maple tree farmers in 2016 are only very recent examples of a longstanding pattern.
What to do about it is another question. Even democratically elected representatives are eager, as we see all too clearly every day, to promote corporate interests over that of their constituents if it assures them a safer and longer place in a seat of power. We need democracy and the right to vote, but those tools aren’t enough to assure a livable planet and lives of dignity. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient.
There’s a tendency to just say, f— it, burn it all down and start over. But that’s been done more than once throughout history, in several places within living memory, and all it results in is a lot of suffering and the same cycles starting over again. It’s as if there’s something broken at the center of humanity, or at least a sizable portion of humanity, and we’re never going to find a better way to live together until we clearly define the shape and scope of that brokenness. As long as we* accept structures that prioritize private profits over life and health, pollution and structural injustice is all we’ll get.
If I believed in the devil, it would be someone in a sharp suit promising me two or three generations of decent jobs in exchange for the water, soil, and air I depend on, with the added bonus of sacrificing my kids’ health and senses of themselves as free human beings. It is the purest kind of evil to smile and hand out some cash while snipping the threads that link us to life.
The stories we tell and accept about ourselves and others have tremendous power. If we can change the stories, maybe we can begin to change something about our lives.
Instead of trying to burn it all down, plenty of people focus on building from the ground up—better systems, better ways of doing and being and living: this profile of a local food and farm co-op in Washington is a reminder that even when things feel like they’re falling apart, there are people and networks all over the world trying to piece them back together. Montana’s Alternative Energy Resource Organization (AERO) has been working against corporate agriculture for decades, from lobbying for a different kind of Farm Bill that works for people and food rather than commodities, to producing the bulk of the country’s organic lentils and heirloom grains like kamut. Oakland’s Unity Council has also been working for decades on affordable housing, higher-quality food access, and integrated public transportation in Fruitvale, one of the city’s poorest areas.
There are plenty more. I’m reminded of these organizations and people every time I work on a story about urban planning, affordable housing, or pedestrian advocacy. They are everywhere. They just never get featured on cable news or the podcasts of so-called “thought leaders.”
Changing our systems to serve people involves all of these efforts. And they don’t have to be scaled up—they have most power and efficacy when they stay connected to a particular place and community. Instead of scaling up small, workable, place-based systems, we need to take out the support systems that keep oppressive conglomerations afloat, from tax subsidies to weak interpretation of anti-monopoly laws (which should always include what monopolies truly cost life). And of course to change the way a large percentage of human beings see themselves as co-existing with the rest of life, which is no small task after millennia of negating and oppressing this reality.
During a recent U.S. election cycle, my state elected a governor who ran on the tired trope of lowering taxes, “creating jobs,” and being a successful businessman. People in my state are actually very good at “creating jobs.” Small business owners sometimes feel as common as pine trees. Many of those jobs—upwards of 70,000—are dependent on a healthy commons in the form of clean rivers full of fish and public lands that provide the kind of solace and clean air that no job could touch.
It’s often hard to get people to acknowledge the existence of these jobs and the kind of healthy shared commons that make them possible because our idea of a “job” is so starved of meaning and hamstrung by identity and self-perception. (Journalism jobs have fallen by 65% in the last 20 years, for example, while coal jobs have fallen by 61%, but we don’t hear much about the former.) Working in a lumber mill is a job; working as a fishing guide is, too, but also somehow isn’t the kind of job you’re talking about when you’re voting for “job creators.” Real jobs means lumber mills, slaughterhouses, car factories, oil pipelines, tech engineers. It means hundreds of people, massive profits for the bosses, and a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to environmental destruction. Maybe it’s the type of job or maybe it’s the number of people employed at each operation, but there are plenty of small businesses that somehow don’t count when it comes to political rhetoric.
This is just a story we’ve been told, one that people then tell one another. But we are capable of telling different stories. We just need more people doing so, and then acting on them.
The East India Company and various colonial governments were very effective at telling stories. They’ve left legacies of imperial pride that still resonate and warp people’s thinking today, and blind us to the dangers of corporate power. As that Financial Times article pointed out:
“We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London.”
The company did so with the support of the British Crown, and when the EIC was facing further debts from their activities and obligations worldwide, the Crown stepped in once again to help them recoup losses through a monopoly and tax on tea in what they saw as their “possessions” in America. To quote from the Boston Tea Party’s own museum:
“The British East India Company was suffering from massive amounts of debts incurred primarily from annual contractual payments due to the British government totaling £400,000 per year. Additionally, the British East India Company was suffering financially as a result of unstable political and economic issues in India, and European markets were weak due to debts from the French and Indian War among other things. Besides the tax on tea which had been in place since 1767, what fundamentally angered the American colonists about the Tea Act was the British East India Company’s government sanctioned monopoly on tea.”
The East India Company is one of many lessons throughout history of the dangers inherent in encouraging the mutual support of corporate and state power. There are countless examples to explore, like the land stolen throughout North America and given by the U.S. government to railway companies, with profits for the railway and timber industries continuing even to the present day. The timber company Weyerhaeuser, for example, first bought 900,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railway in 1900, and now profits off of not just the trees grown on land they own, but on the land itself, which the combination of state and corporate power has turned into “real estate.”
Phrases like that—“real estate”—carry their own stories, their own burials of what land has been, could be, and is.
We can change what we believe, starting with what we think we know about history and the real, live world around us. We can tell better stories about what is possible and what we’re capable of. We need to, because corporate growth and greed will not stop taking and commodifying and destroying all that makes life worthwhile, nor will it stop fabricating stories that make vast numbers of people believe it’s inevitable, unstoppable, and probably for the best. We need more stories, better stories, and we need them everywhere in hopes that those stories can, over time, change what is.
Change takes a lot of time and a lot of work. We can start by finding and amplifying as many instances as possible of people doing real work in real communities to make their worlds better. We can commit to finding, and believing in, different stories—the ones that make us realize a different world is possible, and then making it probable.
*“We” is a word I frequently stumble over and have begun to specify more clearly since this piece was first published. Fundamentally, I think English just needs a different word, or a few different words, to bring about more nuance when talking about societal thinking that shouldn’t be characterized as “us vs. them” while also finding ways to make it clear who is meant by every varied instance of “we.”
On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property, commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.
Alpenglow-lit clouds at sunset, above the western peaks of Glacier National Park.
Last August I wrote about my time on a volunteer trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness here in northwest Montana, about the river we camped next to and the trail we worked along, what it means to serve land and try to build a relationship with both river and Earth, and how, when I’m in areas where I have no phone or internet access, time itself becomes fluid.
“To sit on a charred log eating trail mix and hearing nothing but air in the foliage-less trees and a persistent woodpecker somewhere out of sight. To watch the light shift along those mountainsides. To spot snowberries and poke at the masses of Oregon grape, and to watch a river that slips through the valley like time itself.
Or it might be that time is slipping through us like the river. That’s what being out there does for me: it turns time into water.”
I felt that again last week, during my three nights at a U.S. Forest Service cabin I like to stay at by myself a couple times a year. This cabin is near the North Fork of the Flathead River, and ever since I started staying there a few years ago, I’ve found myself spending less and less time working and much more time hanging out with the river.
This trip, I intentionally brought very little work with me: Chapter 1 of No Trespassing, which I’m sorry to say I’m unsatisfied with, a couple of books to read, a raw essay draft I’ve been sitting on for over a year, and some half-baked ideas.
I touched almost none of it until the day I had to leave, and was okay with that. Instead, I devoted chunks of the afternoons to sitting by a fire, and otherwise spent hours by the river. A couple of hours before and after sunrise, coffee in hand, another hour in the evening to catch the alpenglow, and at least a couple hours in the middle of each day, when the sun was just hot enough to keep me from going hypothermic after (probably stupidly but I can’t help it) dipping in the freezing water.
A boulder under my head, I lay there listening to the water and an occasional robin, blinking at a dusky daytime crescent Moon in the northeast and Sun at a complementary angle, both high in the sky. Sometimes Canada geese flew over. Sometimes a thought passed through my head that I could, or should, go back inside the cabin and do a little work. I told the thought to gently carry itself off downstream.
To be completely at peace with that spot, occasionally asking the river a question, makes me wonder if it’s something of what place-time and space-time feel like if we could ever fully shake off imposed structures of time, deadlines, progress, and profit enough to find these moments of simply being. I feel like I got a hint of it there during those hours by the river, what it might be like to be wholly alive in a world that itself also feels whole, and there was—and is—nothing I want more than to stay within that awareness.
For a few hours last week I was able to fully release anxieties about being productive, getting work done, earning a living. Bundled up against the temperatures near freezing, lying on a bed of river rocks, listening to water flow—it was like a recuperation regimen for the mind. It didn’t feel lazy. It felt necessary.
In their book The Prehistory of Private Property, authors Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall repeatedly go back to the main difference that they see in a private property society versus one where private ownership of, say, land, much less water and food, is unknown: freedom to leave. That is, if you want to walk away from your people, or your place, can you do so and still support yourself? Can you walk away and find or make food, shelter, and clothing? In non-private property societies, the freedom to walk away and still live just fine is the norm. In private property societies, it’s almost nonexistent. You have to work to make rent. Land-rent, you might call it. Someone else owns the land, and you have to pay to live on it.
The extent to which this reality runs counter to most of our existence, even if we’re just counting the few hundred thousand years that Homo sapiens have been here and not the millions of years of hominin evolution before that, is mind-bending. There have been territories and civilizations and controlling empires for thousands of years all over the world, but for most of our species’ existence, most humans had some kind of freedom to live on, with, and from land without needing to pay someone else for the privilege of existing. Until relatively recently.
We can’t all spend our time as we would wish not just because capitalism allows a few humans to hoard an increasing amount of money and power, but because the planet’s dominant societies force land to be privately owned, and make access to food and clean water something we have to pay for. Priscilla Stuckeywrote a beautiful and very informative piece about the bizarre concept of land ownership recently:
“It’s a strange idea if you think about it, the idea that we can own land. Because land is not like, say, a shirt or a table or other objects we own. Land is something else altogether. Land provides the material that makes the shirt. Land grows the trees that make the table. Land brings forth everything—all our food, all plants and animals, all the forests and creeks. And us! Land has brought us forth too!
So it’s absurd to think that we could ‘own’ land.”
Around a year ago, I wrote about this same cabin, and explorations of time and attention, and how much I truly like working, how I could spend hours losing myself every single day in writing and research, and even copy editing work.
“I like other kinds of work, too, like chopping wood and digging in the garden and pulling knapweed and spending whole days hunting in the freezing rain, or hiking miles to spend a couple hours picking berries and then processing whatever I’ve brought home or gathered from the garden, thinking about what’s needed to get my family through the winter and early spring.
I do those things because I enjoy them and can make the time for them, but the reality is that as long as a few people at the top of the capital pyramid keep sucking up the richness of the world, including human labor and time and ingenuity as well as land and what are called ‘resources,’ none of those activities will ever amount to much more than hobbies, even for me.”
Add to that the question of land access. We have to pay to live on land, and at the same time people with far more money and resources can buy and cut off access to the lands where berries, roots, animals, free-flowing water, and trees exist. Can you walk away and survive has become, for me, a key question of freedom. In a world where you have to pay rent for your footsteps, freedom isn’t possible.
During these times when I run away from the online world and my domestic obligations, I’ve become accustomed to waking up in the middle of the night and spending some time with the stars. They were at their brightest this last week. Nights so clear it was like I was breathing a poem of air, and, with Moon setting earlier, the starscape hovered low, rich and full, our galaxy’s path clearly visible and the sky so transformed I wondered if, if every human could see the sky like this every night, smothered in starlight, we could all remember what it is like to walk among a living spirit world.
I met up with a friend a few months ago who has been through significant trauma, and now runs trauma workshops and mindfulness training. We were talking about grounding, and I told her I’d realized recently that when I feel out of whack and need grounding, the only thing that works is to put my bare feet in running water, no matter what the weather. “So you find grounding in flow,” she said.
I love that. Flow is where I ground myself, and it’s this river that has taught me that lesson most often. We should all have access to food, shelter, air, water, and medicines, but we need this, too: the freedom to find what brings us closest to home, to our selves.
I take gifts to the river when I go, and to the creek that lies hidden behind the cabin. No matter what I bring them, or how much of my coffee I share in the mornings, it never feels like enough for what I walk away with. All those hours by the river being reminded: you are alive, with all that could possibly entail if we had both the courage and freedom to embrace it, draw it into ourselves and walk out into the flow of existence we live in, remembering that time, and this water, are one and the same.
From Yellow Bay State Park, Flathead Lake, Montana
I desperately want quiet. That kind of quiet you get in the midst of a forest where even the pervasive whine of traffic is too distant to penetrate. I’ve spent all week wanting nothing but quiet, as I attended meetings and bought fidgets for someone’s birthday and cooked dinner and did dishes and woke up so, so early and hugged the quiet, candlelit hours to myself like an infant who’s finally drifting off to sleep.
In those hours, the need for quiet crashes in. Sometimes—often—the online world is so noisy that I feel like I need ear plugs. Mind plugs? Even without social media, the nudges for attention from online fracture my thoughts and focus and capabilities. I told someone once that being online reminded me of parenting toddlers, with every minute broken by some version of “mom, MOM, Mom.”
I grew up without television service, without even a telephone in the house until I was almost ten. I didn’t have a regular email address until my late twenties (one of my brothers-in-law worked at Google at the time, which is why I’ve had the same email address since Gmail was in beta—20 years now) and staved off switching to a smartphone for nearly a decade after they were released to feast on people’s time and attention. And yet here I am, 47 years old, with one kid nudging adulthood, metaphorically whimpering in a dark corner to get some mental space away from my devices and the needs of online.
Not everyone has these problems. I keep having this conversation with people, who often recommend turning off notifications—I did that in 2017 and never turned them back on; it’s been years since I allowed anything but texts and phone calls to nudge me—and don’t always seem to understand that the addictive design of these devices is all too effective for some of us. It doesn’t matter how many apps we delete.
I spent too much money purchasing a dumb phone last month, the only one I could find that works only in grayscale and doesn’t accommodate any apps. As I’m slowly weaning myself off of turning on my smartphone (the camera is still an issue), I remind myself of what my mornings were like when I didn’t feel its tug. For years I’ve turned my phone completely off at night, as I do the WiFi on my laptop, so that I can get up in the early hours and do all the little things that make me feel whole and connected without staring into the face of that bright screen first, but I can still feel its presence stalking me around the house.
It’s more than the smartphone. Online communication and interaction manages to completely drain me on a regular basis. This was one of those weeks, where I couldn’t get offline because that’s where my work is and increasingly felt like I was at a loud party full of flashing lights, bad music, terrible drinks, feeling desperately tired and thirsty because the water fountain was broken, but I wasn’t allowed to leave.
Next week I have three nights alone at my favorite forest service cabin, offline and away from electricity, and all I can think about is not how much work I might or might not get done, but an almost desperate need to sit by the river and not think or do anything. To watch the long, slow shifts of light at sunrise and sunset. To spend the middle of the night awake hour staring at the stars and Moon if She’s visible.
I have all sorts of strategies to manage my relationship with digital technology, put in place years ago for my sanity, creativity, and, as I’ve written about before, because my humanity is more important to me than finding conventional writing success, and I don’t like the human I am when interacting with social media.
None of those strategies are really enough, or maybe recently I’ve been feeling the press of it all more. I had a wonderful, long conversation earlier this week with a good friend and colleague about this particular platform, and ended up realizing how much more difficult I find to use ever since Notes was rolled out and the social media-ness of it has increased. That doesn’t mean I’m leaving it (I tried setting something up elsewhere a couple months ago but simply don’t have the technical expertise), but figuring out how to open a tab on my browser and look at it, even to read other newsletters I like, without feeling instantly disheartened and drained, has been difficult. I’m bolstered by writers like Amanda B. Hinton writing about which newsletters she reads for nourishment, and all the tremendously good writing and research and interesting ideas I’ve seen, and even friends I’ve made, that I never would have without this platform existing. There are ways to be in this particular space without feeling like it’s taking more than it’s giving. At least, I hope there is. I just need to figure out my own balance.
But it’s also important, I think, to keep in mind that no technology is value-neutral. How it’s created, built, deployed, used, and discarded matters. I saw a comment elsewhere recently that said we’ll learn to live with and benefit from digital technology “just like we learned to live with and benefit from cars” and I refrained from answering that comment only because at this point it makes me very tired. I wrote a whole book about what we’ve lost to cars and car-centric infrastructure, how much damage we live with because of cars and the loss of walkability. It’s a very good book, and I think an important one.
Funnily enough, when I sat down with my notebook to draft this, my intention was to mention my fractured attention and communication overload, and not write much at all but to share some photos of recent activities that keep me feeling alive and engaged with the world as I want to be in the world.
In a way, that’s the crux of humans’ evolving relationship with technology—all technology, but digital in particular. In what ways can we manage to function with what’s demanded of us—and I use those words intentionally, because some people might succeed and even thrive in relationship with technologies, but there are always vast consequences unseen or unacknowledged or unimportant to people who benefit from them; most of life is simply trying to survive it—while being alive? Completely alive. Aware, conscious, attentive.
Every time I go to one of these cabins for days offline, or spend time in the wilderness, or go for a long walk along the river after school drop-off and before checking email, or spend wonderful, attentive time with a friend or few, it’s a fight not just for my own life, but for all of life.
Aside from sharing research and ideas on private property, ownership, and the commons, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here: share with you a love of life. The hilarious turkeys I can hear outside right now, and the very noisy magpie staring at me through the window, the way sunset last night melted its way through rumples of gray and blue-silver clouds, how the Milky Way has been visible the last three nights. The way the air doesn’t yet quite smell of spring and I’m holding on a little longer to my favorite season of cold and dark, the hours we’ve spent together in quiet aliveness. So maybe I’ll just be quiet for a bit and share some of that.
My brother-in-law and I recently took a wildlife tracking course together through Swan Valley Connections. As we approached the meeting spot, we slowed down for the awesome sight of a juvenile bald eagle feeding on a deer right by the side of the road. No photos of that (we were driving and he flew off), but we got to watch some bald eagle shenanigans for a few minutes before meeting up to go track wolves, mountain lions, mink, muskrat, and a ridiculous number of squirrel feeding sites (mounds of shredded pine cones), which I was so entertained by I neglected to take photos.
That same day, one of my college roommates, who happens to be one of my favorite people in the world and whom I haven’t seen or even talked with in about eight years, came to town with her boyfriend for a week, so I took some time off to drive them down to the Bison Range and around the entirety of Flathead Lake, which is gorgeous at all angles.
Doing things like these keeps me in touch with how I want to be spending my time. Not as an aspirational goal or some kind of self-improvement resolution, but because that’s what makes me feel alive. And isn’t that what life wants of us, really? To live with this world like we care about it.
Several people have asked how No Trespassing, this book I’m writing, is coming along. It is, it’s coming along, I promise! Many months later than I’d planned, but given that I have a job (for those who don’t know, I work as a copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers) and am the primary caregiver in my household, I should have planned more flexibly. I thought tinkering out this first chapter on land ownership would be straightforward, since it’s what I’ve researched most, but that might be part of the problem. It keeps sprawling, with always another book to read, on top dealing with of a number of personal situations over the last couple months. You know, weeks of scrambling around some half-emergency but also doesn’t everyone want to know just a little more about how much John Locke tailored his philosophy to justify colonial land theft?
I can research forever, it’s a problem.
I’m finally feeling like it’s taken form enough to get back in touch with my generous beta readers about their timelines and availability. The second chapter, on water, was written for my original book proposal, so it should take far less time to get in shape (famous last words). Thank you for your patience and interest in this work! I think it’s important, and I’m grateful that you do, too.
A couple of weeks ago I met someone I’ve revered for years: Lucy, named Dink’inesh in Amharic, meaning “you are marvelous.” Dink’inesh is of the species Australopithecus afarensis, one of Homo sapiens’ many hominin ancestors, and lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. Paleoanthropologist Jerry DeSilva, whom I interviewed about bipedalism for A Walking Life and who invited me to Dartmouth College to talk with students recently, showed me around his lab and there she was—a replica; Lucy herself is safely in Ethiopia, her home—resting on a foam bed sculpted to fit her bones.
It’s hard to describe how thrilling this kind of meeting is for me. I wrote about the feeling in A Walking Life, when Nick Ashton at the British Museum handed me a cast of fossilized footprints found on the Norfolk coast and estimated to be between 800,000 and 900,000 years old; it’s the depth of time that gets me, that immense geological knowing of planetary life.
Thrill is the best word I can think of to describe these encounters. A shiver down the spine, the sense of being in the presence of wonder and mystery, life that puts every one of my own existential worries into the context of time so vast that it’s a miracle we’re even aware of our own existence.
On that same trip, I got to meet up and walk with several people whose conversation and company put those same existential worries into a different kind of context, the one brought by reminders of our interconnections and relationships. The contexts that make human life beautiful and worthwhile for me and remind me what I learned while researching A Walking Life: most people want the best for others. Sometimes it can feel like that “most” barely scrapes 50% of humanity, but it’s there nevertheless. I’ve learned it over and over, probably because I’ve had to learn it over and over. It’s too easy for me to believe the opposite.
I got to meet, in person for the first time ever, two women I’ve been in a writing group with for well over a decade. We were meeting over Google Hangouts once a month long before online gatherings became the norm! To be able to hug them both, walk through Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while we talked, and share food and more hugs, meant more to me than I realized it would. These people have been special to me through half of my writing life and almost my entire parenting life, and I’m grateful, even, for all the hard times we’ve shared together.
Before I met with Jerry DeSilva and his students, field biologist Bryan Pfeiffer, who writes the excellent nature-focused newsletter Chasing Nature, went farther out of his way than he should have so that we could go for a walk together on part of the Appalachian Trail and into an ice-covered hemlock forest, looking for mosses and lichens and talking about writing, books, the trials and tribulations of digital media platforms, and what I could use to take better pictures of Moon if I give up my smartphone (something I’m thinking about). I’ve learned so much about birds, dragonflies, buds, and photography from Bryan’s writing, it’d be hard to describe it all, but it doesn’t come close to hanging out in person for a few hours.
From there I had a fly-through visit with an old friend from graduate school, and then took a bus and then a train to Philadelphia, where JJ Tiziou let me stay at his place so I could participate in his Walk Around Philadelphia, which is in its third year. I was really looking forward to this walk because I love that kind of thing but even more so because writers Thomas Pluck and Chad O live in the region and had told me they signed up for it.
I wrote a whole book about walking, I might have mentioned a few times, and I wholeheartedly believe in its gifts for us as individuals, for our communities, for nature and our sense of belonging in this world. But I feel like I’m always relearning those same lessons. I was looking forward to talking with Chad about his
Scientific Animism work, and meeting Tom and telling him how much I enjoyed his posts about the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and his thriller The Boy from County Hell, which I’d read on the plane (as I said to him, I don’t usually read thrillers because I don’t handle violence well, but I fell for the characters immediately and it made a welcome break from forcing myself through chapters of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism), and when we were all gathered at the meeting spot I met reader Caroline (hi!), who’d come up from Washington, D.C., and whose work in Kazakhstan I still want to know more about.
It was in walking with these people and having these conversations that I remembered all the things I believe about walking, that it connects us to one another and to ourselves, that it reminds us that we’re animals evolved on a living planet, that it makes our interactions richer, that it brings us face to face with a world that our species has been co-evolving with even before Lucy and her people lived what I’m certain were loving, fraught, rich lives on the land that is now called Ethiopia.
Tom has a great post on his newsletter about this walk, which has more and better photos—including a selfie of the two of us—and Chad found me an almost completely faded “No Trespassing” sign that I’d overlooked while wondering if I should crawl through a hole in the fencing.
When A Walking Life was being published, I told the marketing people that I’d wanted to write a book for the “everywalker.” I was tired of reading about philosophers and writers wandering through pristine woods and up remote mountain peaks. This is our world, I’ve said. We have the right to walk it, in all its glory and grit.
Being reminded of these realities matters to me. These connections and relationships matter to me. All of it: walking with old friends I’d never met in person, walking with a friend and colleague in a gorgeous frozen forest, walking with new friends and acquaintances along the sometimes ragged-looking borders of a city beloved (hopefully) by a million and a half people.
I carried Lucy with me that day, walking the border of Philadelphia. In his descriptions of the walk, JJ asks participants to consider borders and boundaries, including within ourselves. Where are our own mental and physical limitations? How do we negotiate decisions, like which half-formed path to take in a woods unknown to any of us, or when to stop at the end of the day?
After miles of walking through woods and on concrete, my left knee let me know how much it disapproved of all this motion. The group tried unsuccessfully to find a place for a cold drink and possibly hot food; Tom and I lingered back, talking and, in my case, wondering when I could give my knee a rest.
When paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson first found Lucy in 1974, he found her left knee crushed beyond repair, destroying a key piece of evidence about her bipedalism.* But her spine, pelvis, and foot bones, along with other evidence from nearby fossils of her species, confirm that she walked upright on two legs. If I remember correctly what Jerry DeSilva has told me, signs in her vertebra also point to the possibility that she lived with pain.
Lucy tells us a tremendous amount about how we came to be what we are. One of the reasons I find the presence of her kind of deep time so thrilling is that these details of evolution tell us just as much about who we are, if we let them. Lucy likely experienced pain, just like I did walking miles around Philadelphia. Did she ever ask her group to slow down, take a break, as I perhaps should have?
Walking with a group, especially when I’m tired or hungry or need a bathroom or am in pain, reminds me of something else I learned when researching walking: the hominin fossil record has many examples of people with various disabilities, whether from injury or birth, being valued and fully equal members of their communities. The weight of scientific evidence points to the reality that we evolved to be interdependent, and to care for one another—a reality innate to our development, not an offshoot of it. The more recent proposition that humans evolved to be individualistic and competitive is contradicted by millions of years of hominin history.
I was more than happy to come back home, catch up on sleep (and a backlog of laundry, homework, and decaying food in the fridge), go for a walk with a couple of close friends and another longer walk by myself, and coddle my aggrieved knee. But getting out and meeting people, slowing down and walking with them instead of corresponding over texts and emails, brought me back to what this is all about, the writing, the walking, the living, the multi-dimensional relating, the negotiating of physical and emotional needs: it’s about one another, and how we manage to live, and walk, together.
We exist. It’s a miracle. Time is vast, our lives are brief. Remember: you are marvelous.
*There is a particular angle the knee develops in upright walking, called a bicondylar angle, a tilt in the femur caused by downward pressure as babies start to walk. Jerry DeSilva wrote about these details, and his work with Lucy and many other hominin fossils, in his excellent bookFirst Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human.
Antonia Malchik 