Author: Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to see it.” —The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline

Quick note: Starting in April, I will be donating 5% of the proceeds from this newsletter to Indigenous-run organizations and nonprofits, with a focus on my local region. My intention is to donate to one organization each quarter, starting with FAST Blackfeet. I have more ideas lined up but please feel free to make suggestions, especially if it’s in my general region.

I’m telling you this less to encourage paid subscriptions than to encourage looking around wherever you live and seeing what you can do to support sovereignty in all its forms.

The last three walking compositions were open to everyone for reasons of content or photos (the most recent, on faith and atheism, had a lot of thought-provoking comments, including on the complexity of the word “faith”); these posts are usually for paid subscribers only. If you want access to paid subscriber material but can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set you up.

But if you can, and find this work valuable, give it a whirl, as my bagpipe teacher used to say.

Last Saturday morning I headed out of the house before sunrise to meet a friend on the ski mountain to go skinning, the first time in weeks I’ve been able to go on a weekend early enough to miss the ski crowds.

A crescent Moon, looking enormous and golden-yellow in the pre-dawn light, hovered over the far range that, once we got to a higher elevation, would reveal the peaks of Glacier National Park behind it.

But we never got that far. We clicked our toes into bindings and skinned up the bunny slope, past a couple of guys standing outside the high-end rental condos staring at the sky. Maybe they’re looking for late stars, I thought, until I saw the drone one of them was controlling hovering above us.

“Is that legal?” I mumbled to my friend, this technically being National Forest Service land leased by the resort.

“Probably not,” she said. I thought about saying something to them but the bone-deep weariness that’d been dragging at me for days met up with my wariness of confrontation, and I left it. I didn’t even have the energy to persuade myself the guy was probably an asshole. He looked nice enough, and how many condo renters do I ever see out enjoying the early morning?

We kept skinning until we got past the bunny slope and to the bottom of the first major hill, where we stripped off layers and I switched from gloves back into thick mittens. Even with the vigorous climb, my hands were freezing.

The first significant hill is intense. I’ve always disliked it. It’s steep and grueling, with a curve at the top around a continuous grade that seems to keep going and going. It’s where all the super-fit people first start zipping uphill past me. But that’s not why I dislike it. I dislike it because there are certain patches where the groomed snow’s often frozen enough that my skins slip. Usually, I can manage these spots by sneaking further out into the hill a little ways, where the grip is better. Saturday, though, even that didn’t do it, and I kept slipping back and catching myself with my poles until, finally, I fell over and had to stop myself sliding down the hill. Below, I saw other people struggling with the same issue, which made me feel slightly less idiotic but not less precarious.

I tried a few different methods of getting myself up to the top of that first hill, but knew that even if I made it, there were two other patches partway up the mountain that would be just as bad. Finally, while one guy wandered to the middle of the hill and struggled past us and another fell over below, I looked up at my friend and told her I didn’t think I could do it. “You go ahead,” I said, since her skins seemed to be gripping better. “I’m going to try to figure out how to get down.”

There was a magazine article I read years ago that I can’t remember the title or author of, or even the subject of, but I do remember some version of a line that stuck with me: Nature doesn’t exist for your stoke.

It felt important to read at the time because outdoorsy activities like cross-country skiing, mountain biking, trail running, rock climbing, and the like (I’m sure there are lots of others) tend to be represented as an unalloyed good, barely having an impact on the non-human natural world, especially when compared to, say, gold mining. Which, obviously, is true. Last week I signed up for a 6-day wilderness trail crew in August organized by the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance; and even though, as I’ve written before, I’m not convinced that hacking out vegetation to make room for trains of pack mules is how people should be approaching nature, I guess I’d rather be supporting backcountry campers, outfitters, and guides than, say, the bank accounts of Rio Tinto executives.

There’s really no comparison between the scale and impact of those uses. But just because there’s no comparison doesn’t mean the question shouldn’t be asked. Even plain old hiking can have devastating impacts on elk populations, if trails are sited close to calving grounds. The scale of impacts matter, but what also matters is how humans approach the world we share and depend on. Our attitudes toward it. Is it there for our use, including recreation, or for its own, to be engaged with on the terms of its own needs and desires?

In the comments on the post about John Locke, a subscriber (thanks, Stefanie!) recommended Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism, which I started reading a couple days ago. Some of the theoretical language is complex to get my head around, but Fraser’s points are clear:

“Structurally capitalism assumes, indeed inaugurates, a sharp division between the natural realm—conceived as offering a free and constant supply of ‘raw material’ available for appropriation—and an economic realm, conceived as a sphere of value, produced by and for human beings. Along with this goes the hardening of a preexisting distinction between Humanity—seen as spiritual, sociocultural, and historical—and (nonhuman) Nature, seen as material, objectively given, and ahistorical.”

Fraser went on to make the point that this divide is strengthened by a forced separation between the rhythms of human life and that of nature:

“Capitalism brutally separated human beings from natural, seasonal rhythms, conscripting them into industrial manufacturing, powered by fossil fuels, and profit-driven agriculture, built up by chemical fertilizers.”

There’s something about an outdoorsy lifestyle—which I engage in plenty of, from hunting to hiking—that constantly risks becoming absorbed into this framework, where the “sphere of value” is narrowed down to what gratifies us. At what point are we imposing our activities on the world we live in, rather than making forays within the limits and needs of our local ecosystems?

It took me half an hour to get off of that hill. Bracing myself against the slick, groomed slope, I managed to strip the skins off my skis and twist the bindings back into position, but couldn’t find a place to put them back on that wouldn’t risk the ski just taking off downhill on its own. I finally dug my heels into the frozen snow and inched across to the edge of the run, where the groomers hadn’t been and there was more friction and a couple of moguls I could use to stand my skis and then myself on. I skied down the harsh, frozen snow until landing at the bottom, where I dug a thermos of tea out of my pack and read my friend’s text saying she’d only made it a few minutes further and would be down shortly.

I was sore for two straight days after that, in all the places that those of us who don’t physically labor much usually have to make special efforts with machines at the gym to strengthen, like the top of the chest and backs of the shoulders. I don’t really recommend trying to keep yourself from sliding down an icy slope into other skiers as a reliable workout regimen, though. There are a lot of bruises.

I have to watch out for my own expectations from this world all the time, not just when trying to go skinning up an icy hill. I get frustrated with people where I live complaining about snow and winter and gray days, and sometimes remind them (nicely) that without the snowpack, the rivers and lakes suffer in summer. But I’m no better. We recently had three straight days of cloudless, sunny skies, and before the end of the first one I could feel myself starting to grumble. The sun just kept shining. But just because I personally might be happy with, say, two sunny days every couple of weeks, it doesn’t mean that’s what the ecosystem needs.

This bird doesn’t really care what I think about extended daylight hours and too much sunshine.

Walking composition

“Sing me again the saga of sin
and separation,
of humans and hierarchies;
I’ll sing you the ballad of glacial bodies
of many creatures made of water and belief—”
—from “Of Eons and Epochs” in Copper Yearning, Kimberly Blaeser

Last night my daughter and I made another attempt at seeing an aurora, this time driving up to Glacier National Park much later, around midnight, with an Enya CD playing instead of bad ’80s rock on the radio.

While she dozed, I drove through the dark, fighting off minor panic attacks at the wholesale lack of visible highway striping because winter is only just ending and those lines won’t get repainted for a while, if ever this year; and crawling through the heavy fog that frequently hangs around where the highway dips down to cross the river.

Instead of a cloudy night with Moon just behind us and a bad photo that came out like an oil painting, the sky over the lake was crisp and clear and full of stars. No aurora in sight until I took some photos and we spotted a smear of red along the horizon. The patch of sky-color, which probably isn’t visible in the photo above, reminds me of one of those 3-D optical illusion pictures that were popular in the late 1980s and early ’90s. If I open the photos on my phone and make sure the screen background is dark and am not looking at it anywhere with sunlight, I can see the red. Otherwise, it’s invisible. Is it there?

Maybe, as with so much of life, the answer is up to each person who looks at it.

Last week a subscriber asked a question in the comments related to my self-description as an atheist, a question I actually always appreciate because it doesn’t seem to me that what I mean by it is what most people mean by it. It’s never a bad thing to be offered a chance to be understood.

I’ve been thinking about the question ever since then, and find myself strangely reluctant to talk about it more in depth, partly because I am an intensely private person—there are very few friends, even close friends, to whom I’ll open up parts of what might be called a true self—and partly because I wrote a long essay about this years ago and much of what I could say would be repeating myself. It centered around seeking faith in a Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, and the longing and loneliness that comes from not having it:

“From childhood on, I have always been told that atheism is a willful choice to reject God—a choice to say there is no god, no deity—and agnosticism is simply the empiricist’s way of saying that there could be a god but we don’t know one way or the other. . . .

“It never occurred to me to choose not to believe. Who would choose such a thing? Only the most self-confident and satisfied person would choose to live like this. . . .

Atheism was never a choice.”

That essay is ten years old. Older, actually, since it had been sitting around for several years before it got published. Let’s say fifteen years. A lot has changed for me since then, but I’m not sure the English language has been able to change with it.

Since I’ve been dwelling so much on language and metaphors recently, it did occur to me this week that “atheism” might not be the most accurate word for missing faith. I know what the popular, Richard Dawkins-type characterization of atheism is: like so many other things, some privileged white guy running around telling everyone else in the world what to think.

People point out that “agnostic” is an option, but agnosticism is doubt. What I experience—and I am sure that many others do, too, even if they haven’t identified it—is lack. Like something is missing, or broken. Faith in something goes back to the earliest evidence of human consciousness and I’m willing to bet further than most of us can imagine. It’s hard to take a comprehensive look at the entirety of human experience across millennia and continents and not believe that faith is part of being human.

What does it say about those of us whose experiences might have snapped that connection? What would a person’s life have to be built of to make them incapable of believing there’s something caring in the universe, no matter how much they might want to?

I’m not looking for sympathy about that any more than I’m looking for proselytizing. It’s just something I’d like people to think about.

The popular conception of atheism is not just that it’s a wholesale rejection of faith for oneself; it’s also a determination to tell everyone else that the things they have faith in don’t exist. I’ve never believed in that. I envy others’ faith more than anything else. So maybe “atheist” isn’t the right word. What would be the word, then, for the connections that seem to have gone missing?

When I published that essay, it was a few years into motherhood and I was still haunted by an experience I had shortly after my first baby was born nearly eight weeks early and hovering around not surviving for close to two weeks after that.

“The day they called my husband and me at home to tell us that John needed a second air tube, and that he was ill enough they might need to move him to a tertiary care center, my reality ground itself into little pieces. I could do nothing for an hour but huddle on the floor and sob as I hadn’t done since I was a small child. I was so scared.

That same morning, I had woken up suddenly, just after seven, certain I’d heard John’s voice calling to me. Crying for me. I felt that he was in pain and needed me. It was only later I found out that I’d heard him, a forty-five-minute drive away, at the same minute they’d cut his chest and inserted the tube. I knew because, of course, they wrote down the times of all procedures, and I had checked the clock when I’d woken up (to see if it was time to drag out the breast pump), two hours before they called us at home. That is the part I’ve never told anyone.”

Many would call that a religious experience. Many would say “spiritual.” All I could say was that there were things in this world I could not explain.

This is where the snapped connection comes in. I’ve had other experiences like that. And there was the time I walked a labyrinth in Norwich, England, while researching my book on walking and received an incredibly powerful message that lives in me to this day. I would like to walk labyrinths all the time just to touch base with it again.

Once, last year I was sitting by a river, at a spot I love, and water spoke to me. The river had something to say, and I listened.

I don’t know that I’m comfortable anymore with the description “atheist” but I honestly don’t know what to replace it with. “Spiritual but not religious” conjures up way too many unpleasant experiences with unpleasant people, usually involving a campfire and a guitar and probably a whole lot of hamfisted and thoughtless cultural appropriation. To say that everything is connected, everything is alive, is perhaps the closest. Is there a word for that? Maybe not in English.

I wonder sometimes if English has had its day. There are languages with far more acknowledgment of life inherent in every syllable without bowing to hierarchies that burden almost all of it—life, that is, as well as syllables. Maybe it’s time to start retiring some of its less relevant words. There are, as they say, no atheists in a foxhole.

English can’t even capture last night’s aurora encounter. Did we “see” it if the only appearance of color was on my phone’s camera? And even then, the red streak is only visible if the photos are viewed under certain conditions. Have I fulfilled my promise to see an aurora, or do I need to try again? (Going to see an aurora is never a waste of time, even if unsuccessful, but the combination of night driving and the next day’s tiredness are . . . a lot.)

Maybe faith is the same. Maybe if I turn my mind slightly and look at things in a different light, under the stars, I’ll find what I’m looking for. I suspect that whatever happens will remain private, between me, Moon, the rivers, mountains, trees, and stars. Or maybe not. Maybe it will show me an entirely different way of talking about everything, including myself.

Ninepipes National Wildlife Refuge, where I spent some time the other day and heard many red-winged blackbirds but, due to the thick fog, only saw two. They were there, even if I couldn’t see them.

No list this week. I’ve got a few big deadlines coming up and have been very overwhelmed and also for some reason am not sleeping much.

I’m doing some preparation reading for an upcoming Threadable circle on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Belonging—thanks to Stefanie for a fantastic selection of recommendations!—and also have been reading:

• Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons, her research on commons-based ownership and management systems for which she received the Nobel Prize in economics.

• Steven T. Newcomb’s Pagans in the Promised Land, which was disconcerting because he leans heavily on the book Metaphors We Live By, which you might remember reading about a couple weeks ago, and I picked the book up a day after finishing that post.

• I’m making very slow progress on Abdullah Öcalan’s The Sociology of Freedom, which is well worth it. Öcalan has been a leader in the Kurdish struggle for liberation and has been in isolation in a Turkish prison since 2011.

• Wergen: The Alien Love War, by Mercurio D. Rivera, which, if you like science fiction, is I promise much better than its godawful cover indicates.

• I’m in the middle of Cherie Dimaline’s book of short stories A Gentle Habit and also recently finished Hunting by Stars, her sequel to The Marrow Thieves.

• One very short essay to recommend: Hao Jingfang’s “I Want to Write a History of Inequality,” which accompanied her Hugo-nominated science fiction short story “Folding Beijing,” both translated by Ken Liu.

• And two very kind subscribers sent me an unlocked PDF of the paper about Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique of property, which I’d mentioned in the land ownership post on John Locke. Which means I can share it for anyone who’s interested.

Walking composition

“The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.”
—from “The Vanished” (“Die Verschwundenen”), Hans Magnus Enzenberger

Last week I spent a lot of time being very cold sitting by the North Fork of the Flathead River—pictured above during a freezing sunrise—near a Forest Service cabin I try to rent for myself a couple times a year. It’s only for two or three nights, but every time I get an unexpected amount of work done and still manage to sleep a lot and spend long, long periods by this river and even just be a bit lazy. It’s a miracle of time-luxury, as if the hours spread out far beyond their known limits.

My phone had a handful of saved podcast episodes for the two-hour drive, including an interview on the Subverse with designer Dilip Da Cunha about his book The Invention of Rivers. The line separating land from water, he has written, is “one of the most fundamental and enduring acts in the understanding and design of human habitation.” He also calls this separation “the first colonialism, which took a wetness that is everywhere and turned it into a land and water binary.”

What is a river? How can we find a river’s beginning? Where would you identify that first trickle, the initial hint of flow, the moment water shifts from being rainfall or snowflakes to being river?

To get to the river from the cabin, I had to walk about a few minutes through still-deep snow, sometimes falling through the hard crust well past my knees and nearly dropping my coffee. When I got there, after greeting the sunrise, I (unwisely, considering the temperature), splashed icy river water on myself.

Rivers, I learned some years ago, are ecosystems that can spread for miles underground, unlimited to their visible flow. When I sat on the rocky bank, it seemed that the river was over there, while I was dry over here. But under the rocks, the river extended far beyond what I could see. I had snow in my hair and river water on my face; and the coffee steaming out of my cup was made with, of course, water. Where did the snow end and the river begin? At what point did the river cease being river and become an avenue for risking frostbite on my face? As the coffee steam mingled with the freezing river mist, could anyone have distinguished one from the other?

What is a line, after all, but a mathematical construct, an ideal? Human mathematics, which needs those imaginary lines, is a language for understanding life’s patterns and relationships; it’s not life itself. Yet lines have been employed for millennia to declare and then enforce boundaries that life, including human life, has no relationship with.

I caught up on nearly a year’s worth of Nautilus magazine while I was away, and one of the articles that got my attention was about research on plummeting global populations of insects.

I almost avoided that article because I didn’t want to get more depressed by reading something I already knew too much about, but it turned out to not have that effect. The writer was spending time with scientists whose theory is that insects are evolving to avoid nighttime light, and since entomologists tend to try to attract them using said light, they’re not finding the insects that are there.

It’s an early-stage and hopeful theory that I hadn’t heard before. But what interested me was my own emotional and mental responses to the writer’s approach: dread, hesitation, and worry followed by cautious uplift, curiosity, and hope. An arc that was followed in turn by wondering what effect this kind of research and article would have on other people.

There’s constant debate among science writers and people working in related fields, and scientists themselves, about how to make people care about huge existential problems that don’t always immediately affect them. Like climate change. When David Wallace-Wells wrote his New York magazine piece (followed by his book The Uninhabitable Earth; full disclosure, I haven’t read either of these) about worst-case climate scenarios, there was a lot of heated argument about how he should have presented such dire realities to evoke less fear, along with intense debates over how his approach might be effective, versus the ways in which it could backfire. My science writer friends and I talked about it at length.

Reading this piece about insects made me think about that debate again. The author, Oliver Riskin-Kutz, seemed to maintain a careful balance of informative storytelling that kept me, at least, on a thin edge of wondering, “Do I hope, or do I despair?” It was interesting to try to observe another writer’s skill in refusing to push the presentation of research one emotional way or another, while at the same time not pretending to objectivity.

The question of “Do you scare people to get them to care about things like climate change or water pollution or authoritarianism, or do you give them hope?” which Wallace-Wells’s essay and book poured fuel on, is, I think, the wrong one. The conventional wisdom that humans are incapable of considering long-term consequences of our actions is an extremely narrow-minded view that leads to misguided approaches, but aside from that, there are something like eight billion people on this planet. All of us have different compulsions, worries, hopes, experiences, and identities. Maybe one of you will read that article and find it dull, or misleading, or far more hopeful than I did.

What gives me a rare spark of hope or pushes me into despair is going to be very different from what does the same for you. It’s determined by my own feelings of identity and belonging, not just by what I value and what matters to me and who and what I love, but by my upbringing, the kind of work I’ve done, physical and emotional realities and injuries, the people who’ve affected my life in large and small ways, and countless other factors. Kindness, compassion, and trust, for example, are high values for me less because of their being common in my life than by the many ways I’ve experienced the opposite, or seen others experience the opposite, and have struggled under the effects those experiences have had.

The question of what changes people’s minds, what persuades them to be better, to care more, in the end almost feels like a shallow one while still being essential. It’s essential because, to change the paradigms we live in we need pretty much every tool and strategy—build it up and care for the falling while burning it down, as I wrote a couple weeks ago—but it’s shallow because the question both assumes a nonexistent homogeneity among human experience, and makes poor use of the power of narrative and storytelling.

Writing, and art itself, have capacities to reach into every individual in different ways, to speak to or help articulate identities and values. It can be empowering, for ourselves and for our behavior toward others. Erik Hoffer noted in The True Believer that those with a creative or artistic mindset are the only ones he saw who don’t succumb so easily to propaganda and the lure of authoritarian mass movements. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn talked about the power of art in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“Who could impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far off sorrows or joys, who could give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions which he has never himself experienced? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proof are all equally powerless here. But fortunately there does exist a means to this end in the world! It is art. It is literature.

They both hold the key to a miracle: to overcome man’s ruinous habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others passes him by without profit. Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits between men the entire accumulated load of another being’s life experience, with all its hardships, colors, and juices. It recreates—lifelike—the experience of other men, so that we can assimilate it as our own.”

Reading that piece about insects changed something for me, though I’m not sure what yet. Not anything enormous or significant, just a slight shift. Opened up a new way of looking at the world, maybe, which is one of the beautiful things that narrative can do.

Art, including storytelling, draws lessons from the world all around us, like the sunset alpenglow I got to enjoy for more long, lingering minutes with only the river’s conversation last week. But it also draws from an intuitive sense for how these sights and experiences make us feel. At least, it has the capacity to do so. Considering the varied beauty I got to experience in this one location and how badly I didn’t want to leave it even when completely numb from the cold, that’s a capacity worth exploring.

On the night of the full Moon last week, I got up as I usually do at this cabin around one-thirty in the morning (I do not know why and might write about this more, but I think it has something to do with the almost total lack of artificial light) for a while and spent a little time on the porch gazing up at Her before going back to sleep. Moonlight reflected off of ice clumps on a bare-branched aspen tree next to the porch, so brightly it was like the tree had its own starscape.

I’d watched Her rise from behind the snow-covered Rockies earlier that night just before I went to sleep, enormous and golden, overwhelming. A being to worship, just as the Sun felt coming up from behind those same mountains each morning. I took a video of the full Moonrise from when I first noticed the glint of cold, bright light shining along the edge of one of the peaks, straight out the cabin’s small, warped window panes, and later shared it with my sisters.

It was a miraculous sight that went straight to the core of everything that matters, if that makes sense, even though it’s one I’ve seen versions of many times before, including from behind those same mountains.

Art still has much to learn from experiences like this. For one thing, we need a world where they remain possible, a world where everyone has an opportunity, if they want it, to get away from the noise and demands and unwanted light of electronics, cars, and schedules. But it’s necessary for people to pay more attention to the art, too. To ask more of it, even. To ask it not just to entertain or to challenge, but to remind us of life’s promises and our own potential. To show us how unconfined life is by our boundaries and definitions, like rivers that have little need for the lines drawn on a map. Narrative that breaks down ossified paradigms. There is storytelling that does this, everywhere; it just needs more of us giving more of our attention to it.

Start paying attention, and you can see the subversive power of art articulated in countless ways. Some of them, as with a well-written science article about entomology, without pretending to subversion but only to curiosity—which has its own power of subversion—and what might be called a hope for hope. Showing us what the world can look like when an artificial line is erased. A light in the darkness, even if it’s about searching for darkness among the lights.

Some stuff to read or listen to (note that Nautilus only allows 2 free reads):

• Susan Mathews’s short introductory episode (scroll down to Episode 2) to the Subverse’s season on water, “From the stars to the tidepool,” was a beautiful meditation on where Earth’s water came from and what it means to all levels of life: “At some point, star water turns fish water.” (The Subverse links are to their website, but the podcast is anywhere.)

• Historian Sunil Abritt also on the Subverse podcast (scroll down to Episode 5) talking about hydrocolonialism, an “ecology of fear,” and his book Unruly Waters: How the Mountain Rivers and Monsoons have Shaped South Asia’s History. (I honestly didn’t know I could be this interested in monsoons.)

• Rebecca Davis Gibbons with a short piece about the justice owed to people affected by nuclear testing in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “My friend said that justice would mean returning home to a safe environment and sufficient medical care. But more important than any of that, for him, is an apology. The United States ‘is a powerful country and can do many things,’ he said. ‘But it cannot apologize.’”

• Mary X. Dennis with a difficult and introspective essay in Nautilus on trying to cope with enduring, acute grief after her brother’s sudden death: “Karin didn’t focus on the event of my brother’s death, the way the PTSD therapists had. She focused on him—not on the trauma of his death, but on the relationship I had lost. . . . My favorite version of myself was the person my brother saw me as, and she helped me to realize that even though he’s no longer here, I am still that person.”

• Also in Nautilus, Nell Freudenberger wrote a thoughtful essay on the disconnect between foreign research scientists studying coral reefs, and Indigenous Māʻohi people in Tahiti, including the scientists’ lack of local knowledge and insights about coral health remedies due to lack of outreach.

• Regan Penaluna writing in Aeon about the scholarly work of 17th-century philosopher Damaris Cudworth Masham and how Masham’s relationship with philosopher John Locke affected her life as well as her philosophy. (It’s a sympathetic essay, but Locke doesn’t come across to me as treating anyone well.)

• Thanks to my mom for this one: Frank Jacobs writing in Big Think’s “Strange Maps” on a map of the ancient Paratethys Sea, which once had a surface area of over a million square miles but evaporated between 7 and 10 million years ago, leaving behind remnants like the now equally-disappearing Aral Sea.

• And some of you might have heard of the new conspiracy theory surrounding the idea of 15-minute cities. As someone who’s written a book about walking and walkability, I find the whole resistance to changing car-centric culture utterly bizarre. So did someone who wrote a piece for McSweeney’s introducing us to the appeal of the 15-hour city: “The 15-Hour City represents what we think are all the best qualities of a modern city: a lack of social connections, a profound sense of alienation, and a constant stream of being flipped off by drivers from New Jersey.”
  (Something that baffles me about this movement is that conspiracy theorists are linking the idea of being able to walk to whatever you need within 15 minutes to—weirdly—Stalinism. In my book I wrote quite a bit about the freedom of walking that my father had growing up in Leningrad under Stalin when other freedoms were out of reach. This was . . . not what I was talking about.)

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* for Land Ownership was a selection from John Locke’s 1690 book Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V: Of Property.

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try the Threadable app and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.

For anyone new to On the Commons an overview of this project is here. Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

Locke’s Treatise is in the public domain, and there are many different places online where you can read the text. I have a hard copy (my eyes are always tired from copy editing, so hard copies tend to be my go-to), but there are online PDFs, such as this one from the University of York. The link in the first paragraph is to the Project Gutenberg ebook version.

It’s hard to know where to start with John Locke because, as with William Blackstone in the previous reading, his ideas about the basis of private property, especially private ownership of land, are both foundational and surprisingly shaky.

Locke’s idea was that men (only men, of course, and only white men I’m sure) gained ownership of land by “mixing” their labor with it: planting, tilling, harvesting, that kind of thing. Basically, once you worked the land you could claim it as your own.

That’s not actually nothing. He spends a fair amount of time dwelling on what happens in the space between, say, a piece of fruit hanging on a tree and its location in your hand, at which point it is “yours” to eat. Or is it? It’s actually a curious philosophical question. I’ve personally spent a lot more time thinking about what effect one’s private ownership of land, food, water, etc., has on other people. How much land can you claim for yourself before it deprives others of their right to survival? What property rights can you exercise before it start to erode others’ rights?

The fact of when something becomes “yours” feels a little different, more philosophical but also tangible. I can’t claim the pie cherries from my neighbor’s cherry tree no matter how many cherries I could personally pick—and despite the fact that they’re rarely in town when the cherries are ripe—because the tree isn’t mine. Yet when I gather chokecherries along the public paths in town, I transfer public claims over that fruit to my own private use and benefit. And to the benefit of whoever receives the chokecherry jelly I make.

(Also I deprive the bears of food. Or maybe they deprive me of food. I’m not sure, but publicly owned fruit trees and wildlife is an issue I’m having to think about now that I’m on the city’s Parks Board.)

So it’s not simply, as one Threadable reader pointed out, the Locke sees the mixing of labor as the first element of ownership, but the question of how one justifies claiming resources, such as food, for oneself—a claim that is necessary to live.

Locke’s perspective is one I didn’t really pick up on in the reading and it had to be pointed out to me: that the ownership claim is an extension of claim over oneself. That people* have ownership of themselves, and their self-ownership extends then to the property they own, whether land or gold or cows. “The body of a person extends to include all of their possessions with use value,” as this commenter wrote. “Limbs and lambs and land.”

*(Remember, for Locke only white men are people, and likely only white men who are property owners to begin with are people—not an uncommon view; Immanuel Kant believed that only property owners and those who held public office could be considered citizens; anyone who worked for wages was in his view disqualified. It’s important to remember here that it’s been less than 150 years since any kind of non-landowner was allowed to vote, including men. Being a woman, I would not be considered a person in Locke’s eyes.)

I kind of wish I’d included Mary Wollstonecraft in these land ownership reading selections because she has some major critiques of Locke, and of private property in general, but am saving her for when I start writing the chapter on ownership of people for No Trespassing. However, there’s a great paper on her feminist critique of property (paywalled, unfortunately; just love the enclosure of knowledge we swim in) in which the author, Lena Halldenius, makes some acute observations about Wollstonecraft’s views of property:

“Property is a selfish principle, invoked by the rich under the false name of liberty in order to protect themselves against the claims of the poor,”

a principle that not only prioritizes the lives of the privileged, but also completely excludes women from ownership of anything, since in her time women never could own themselves. They were the property of men, a state that plenty of U.S. lawmakers would like to see us return to.

On Locke, Halldenius explains his view that,

“Land, originally held in common, can be turned into an object of private right through a performative act of appropriation. Labor is his term of choice for that act whereby a thing is acquired out of the common stock and turned into a person’s property.”

It’s a pretty succinct explanation, and exposes the problems that I had with Locke’s logic, which came down to three issues: 1) Like Blackstone, Locke several times says that nobody will ever claim more property or resources (like food) than they can actually use themselves, and therefore privatizing the commons for one’s own benefit doesn’t harm anyone else; 2) his definitions of land as “unused” or “waste,” which—again like Blackstone—he uses much of North America as an example of, claiming that it’s okay for colonizers to privatize land on that continent because the people who live there aren’t using all of it; and that 3) both subduing nature (Earth) and the command to labor come from God and are therefore unquestionable.

Point (3) came up in Blackstone, so I don’t really want to belabor the point that a command from God isn’t a good enough reference point for private ownership of land. Both he and Locke really tried to press that point, and on that basis alone it’s disturbing to me that much of our modern-day conceptions of property law still rely on their philosophies. But aside from that, even if you believed in the religious claims he’s making, it doesn’t logically follow that a divine command to labor mixed with the gift of Earth from God translates into private land ownership. There’s no there there.

Locke’s claim about it being “wrong” to take more land and resources than one needs, and that it won’t happen, is flat-out frustrating. You can say it’s wrong until the sun turns chartreuse, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Referring to that and his idea of “unused” or “waste” land, he tries several times to say that private claim over them is always achieved by “common consent.” He says this without, however, ever giving any actual evidence. Whose consent? When? How? Why would anyone who didn’t personally benefit consent to private ownership and gain rather than something more equitable?

One of the reasons it was so frustrating for me to read that was because everything he wrote about letting his horse chew grass, or tilling a certain field, or gathering acorns, is easily applied to a commons-based shared-use system. No privatization is required for any of it. Aside from which, he never addresses how this “common consent” happens, only that it does. Similar, again, to Blackstone, who said that it was “on all hands agreed” that land was made better use of when it was privatized. I bet those hands were not the ones doing most of the work on that land.

What he’s saying in this above quote—“there are still great tracts of ground to be found, which lie waste, and are more than the people who dwell on it do, or can make use of”—is that if colonizers anywhere in the world see land that they perceive to be unused, they have a right to take it. Which contradicts any waffle he makes about “common consent” anyway. Whose consent? I think we know the answer, but Wollstonecraft said it succinctly:

“It is only the property of the rich that is secure.”

And by extension colonial and imperial powers.

Dwelling on Locke’s philosophical question about when something becomes yours to consume or use or simply to keep is an interesting one. But none of his ideas either defend or effectively argue for private ownership in land. Aside from all the other logical inconsistencies, he never addresses the issue of how someone can “own” land that others do all the labor on. Why don’t the people working on a farm or great English estate own the land? Because—he never says this in this section but its reality might be somewhere else in the Treatises—their labor is also owned. It’s just self-justifying hierarchies all the way down.

Neither Blackstone nor Locke nor any of the other people with their money and influence and titles and centuries of reference can answer the essential question: Where did private property begin? And why?

You can take an apple from a tree, and then it’s yours. And we can debate about the philosophy that happens between the existing and the taking and the consuming. But to justify the reams of legal principles and decisions around private land ownership—especially when we remember previous readings about enclosures of the commons, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. M’Intosh, and centuries of theft of Indigenous lands worldwide—we’re going to have to do a whole lot better.

I don’t think we can. After all these readings, “I took it; now it’s mine” is still all we’ve got going for private land ownership, and that is no basis on which to share an ecosystem, a planet, or a life.

Only two more readings left! Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass, and Mary Christina Wood’s Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age. I’m afraid neither of these are in the public domain but both are well worth reading. Hayes’s book is particularly delightful. He’s an engaging writer and doesn’t hold back his low opinion of private ownership of large English estates and the theft they originated in. He also includes his beautiful ink drawings throughout the book.

I am once again going to be offline for several days, and will respond to comments, etc., when I return. Thank you for traveling with me on this weird journey. Please enjoy this photo off into the wilderness from a ski day I took with some friends last week. The snow ghosts and cloud banks were off the charts beautiful.

Walking composition

“Scheming on a thing, that’s a mirage
I’m trying to tell you now, it’s sabotage.”
— “Sabotage,” Beastie Boys

Sunday night my daughter and I folded ourselves into the car to try to find some Northern Lights. The Kp index was at 6, well within our zone, and she’s been wanting to see the aurora for over a year. We drove up to Glacier National Park to walk by the lakeshore at Apgar about a half-hour’s drive from our house.

I’m not a good night driver. Even as a teenager I avoided it because my night vision is iffy. Walking is okay, but driving I can’t seem to process the headlight-lit information quickly enough and feel precarious. Every now and then, though, it feels good. To be out on the road at night, few other cars, ’80s rock on the radio except never the good ’80s rock, the songs you could never quite sing along or dance to but couldn’t headbang to, either. It reminds me of rare freewheeling teenage nights. Alone in my parents’ car before I wrecked it one icy day, sixteen years old and driving that same road back at night from my summer restaurant job near West Glacier. Listening to the same damn radio station.

I rolled into the parking lot and we walked out to the lakeshore under moonlight that moved in and out of clouds. It was still far too overcast to see anything but a few stars, and we kept turning around to stare at the Moon, shivering in the wind that blew across the frozen lake. We saw no aurora, but didn’t want to leave. Wouldn’t it be nice, we both said, if we could just spend the night here in the quiet under the stars peeking out of the gap in the clouds?

I took a photo, which was terrible, except I kept it because it looked like an oil painting.

“Should we try going up the North Fork?” I asked her, mindful of our mutual tiredness and my poor night vision and school the next day. She shrugged.

“Why not?” So we drove back south again, wiggled through the back streets of Columbia Falls, and headed up the North Fork, talking almost the whole time of the pains of middle school and the stupidity and cruelty of the Montana state legislature. An entity I wanted to assure my daughter I’d protect her and all the other kids and every vulnerable person from, but is that a promise any of us adults have shown ourselves capable of keeping?

Tuesday mornings almost every week, I volunteer in my daughter’s sixth-grade classroom. I thought I was done volunteering in my kids’ classes after elementary school but her teachers decided on a book clubs routine enabled by parents like me who didn’t realize they were getting into a year-long commitment. So Tuesday mornings I walk her to her entrance and then go around to the front of the school to check in as a volunteer, make small talk with the office staff while they print out a sticker that sometimes, for some reason, has my old driver’s license photo on it from almost ten years ago when I still kept my hair short and my skirts long.

I’ve worked in textbook publishing for so many years that garnering enthusiasm for rubrics or worksheets is something I can no longer even fake very well. Does it matter if students can identify the main idea or give supporting details? Not really. Half the time those questions aren’t even written well enough for students to understand what they’re looking for, but that’s not the point. The point is that nobody really gets anything out of answering questions that are only designed to get them through standardized tests anyway.

Actually, that’s not the point either. The point is something I figured out when I first volunteered to read with kids in my son’s first-grade class, and the reason that later I created a math games program for third-graders with a couple of other women: you’re almost never there to help them learn. You’re there to be an adult that they can connect with, who can help a kid be seen—especially for the kids who are so often unseen, and the ones who might not have adults in their lives who make their own existence feel safe, much less special. Ideally, you can help them build the confidence they need to read the paragraph, or add up the numbers, or decipher the word problem, or write that personal bit of narrative. That they’re competent and smart and deserve to use their voice. That they’re important to someone. That they’re worthy. Because they all are. That’s why I show up.

My book clubs group is so far all girls. It just shook out that way somehow. The books we read are old-fashioned, which makes them challenging. Some of the girls don’t like to read. We have to read but I’m not going to force them to like it. I let them chat a bit. Talk about what their mornings were like and how confusing it is to figure out what’s going on in the story. The morning we met right after a lockdown drill, I let them spend the first few minutes telling me how stupid lockdown drills were and what they’d suggest doing instead. I can’t really say adults know better because we’re the ones who have somehow let a world with lockdown drills solidify around them.

Middle school is such a tough time. I went to four different middle schools and was miserable at every single one. At the last one, I joined cheerleading, which my father recently said he thought was because I was trying to understand the dynamics of popularity, but I had to let him down: it was my fourth school in three years, and as a very nerdy kid probably on my fifth or sixth reread of Lord of the Rings, I was just trying to fit in. (It didn’t work, but at least the other cheerleaders were nice to me.)

When I gather at the table with the kids and we try to make our way through the confusing old-fashioned book, I let them wander in and out of what we’re meant to be doing. Connect with each other, laugh over something, use Taylor Swift songs to explain vocabulary words, look up birds of the Arctic on my phone since that’s where the book is set and we don’t know any of them. Some time ago, I started bringing snacks, because I remember what it’s like to be the hungry kid who’d barely gotten herself and her little sister to the bus on time.

I bring our attention back to the worksheets to write down themes and predictions and vocabulary but with uncertain feelings: I don’t know what kinds of lessons will be most useful for them in the future. Do any of us?

As my daughter talked about school and dreaded gym class and asked questions about the Montana state legislature that it pained me to answer honestly, I drove the car up the North Fork Road until we hit gravel, the snow banks on each side getting higher as the trees closed in and the snow started to fall more heavily. We wouldn’t be seeing any stars, much less auroras, but drove further anyway until we got to the curve where the valley opens out, my mind split between the dark road in front of me and the one driving our conversation. Take a flamethrower to all of it, I thought of the current legislative agenda, and all the larger structures and paradigms it relies on. Of the rage of not being heard, of all the ways there are of not being heard; of the frustration of knowing that at the same time somebody has to be methodically digging for the roots of these structures so that burning them down doesn’t result in them sprouting back stronger than ever; and that somebody has to be building something new, or rebuilding something old—better, in either case. Something alive, something able to withstand the maw that eats everything good.

I turned off the car and we got out. It was so dark and quiet we couldn’t even hear the river. The snow fell in thick flakes, hard, like it was being driven by a growing wind but there was no wind. We stood and smelled the snow and pine and after a while went home, peering up as we drove for the first sight of moonlight.

The next day the sun came out and people posted photos of the brilliant auroras on social media. The newspaper printed one covering the whole sky from the same lake we’d driven up to, but several hours later. I’d forgotten that auroras are best seen in the middle of the night.

I walked through the far side of town for two hours, near the wastewater treatment plant, and spent a while by the river listening to birdsong. I couldn’t stop thinking of the questions my daughter asked, the things that worried her. How they were the seeds of the worries that anyone paying attention carries full-grown. Of her friends and the kids in her books clubs group and all the other kids here and everywhere and how different their choices might be from what mine once were when they’re old enough to drive that road at night. Of how tired I am of adults saying that they put their hope in younger generations, when it’s we who should be fighting for a world that gives them something to hope for. And of the sunrise that morning, cast pink, and the moonlight behind the lake the night before, where I wanted to stay.

Town felt warm, ducks active on the river, magpies everywhere. (But the magpies have been everywhere all winter long. They’re more than ready to take over my house.) The next day it snowed all day and into the night, piling up at least six more inches, but that one day you could tell spring was inevitable. I hope I can hear whatever lessons it has for me, and with clearer vision.

The first insistent birdsong I’ve heard this year, standing at this spot by the river. Definitely feels like spring is coming, despite the several inches of snow we got the next day.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Brave the Wild River, by Melissa L. Sevigny, about botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter and their 1938 Colorado River expedition to document the plant life of the Colorado River, is available for pre-order. I read an early draft of this book and couldn’t believe how quickly I zipped through it. Melissa is a beautiful writer. Her book Mythical River is I think one of the best books I’ve read about water in the American West, and in addition to dealing with its complex history and the entanglement of water governance and abuse, it highlights Sevigny’s ability to thread her poetic sensibilities with her journalistic expertise. Brave the Wild River came out of her riveting essay “The Wild Ones” in The Atavist.

• Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven in Aeon with a profile of Egyptian economist Samir Amin, his criticisms of Edward Said, and the concept of Eurocentrism: “Amin’s attention to how colonial legacies have shaped the economic and social structures of the world economy in a variety of ways opened the door for a wealth of scholarship on colonial legacies, imperialism and unequal exchange.”

• Shannon Mattern writing in Places Journal about public drinking fountains and visiting the 19 reservoirs that supply New York City’s water: “The project, he argued, was animated by the conviction that water should be ‘a commons, not a commodity. . . . That drinking water should be freely available to the public, rather than being a private good, bottled in plastic by a corporation and sold for profit. I believe that’s why conservative commentators have been so critical of this initiative.’”

• The movement for car-free cities or city centers is growing, writes Patrick Sisson in City Monitor, while reminding readers that cities long predate cars, and will outlast them. (Considering that pedestrian deaths from cars in the U.S. increased nine times faster than population since Covid started and large SUVs collectively emit more carbon pollution than many countries, a shift away from car-centrism is long overdue.)

• I think I’ve shared this one before, but recently reread Lee Nellis’s piece in Mountain Journal on seemingly radical land conservation ideas for the Greater Yellowstone area, including granting citizenship rights to migrating wildlife and a nod to Henry George’s Land Value Tax, along with a shift in the stories we tell. “We cannot combat the dominant myth with facts. Those of us who want to live in a world made magical by wildness must offer a better story. We must offer a compelling narrative of gratitude, humility, restraint, and reciprocity.”

• Longtime international journalist Indra Adnan on the Planet: Critical podcast on the failures of mainstream media and the alternatives people build when democracy feels like it’s failing: “You say there’s no low-hanging fruit. This is the low-hanging fruit. The possibility of relationship between people all over the globe, which means there’s a possibility of us coming into empathy with each other.”

• Tuesday I attended a four-hour webinar on the Doctrine of Discovery that had extensive discussion of Johnson v. M’Intosh (including a phrase-by-phrase breakdown of the decision’s reliance on paradigms of domination) and more recent cases showing the pervasive influence of that 1823 case. The organizers—including Steven Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land—have said they’ll put the webinar recording online when it’s ready, but in the meantime some of the materials are available in shorter versions via Red Thought.

“Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.” —Cory Doctorow

A few upcoming talks and activities:

• I’ll be giving a research-oriented presentation on walking (and walkability) and its role in personal and community well-being at the annual MTRPA (Montana Trails, Recreation and Parks Association) conference being held April 2–5 in Whitefish, Montana.

• I am incredibly grateful to the Dear Butte board for granting me a residency with them this year. I’ll be in Butte, Montana, in June, working on No Trespassing. I’m mentioning this mostly because the residency requires a community engagement aspect (which is such a cool idea for a residency), and what I’m working on will be—I hope—a walk through Butte led by a local (not me), with discussion of how communities can center and frame their collective stories, and that’s something I’d love to see considered everywhere.
  This idea came from a middle school photography project presented a few years ago here in Whitefish. The essence is that national and international media usually tell one story about a place and people, often a misleading one. How, in contrast, would the people in that place themselves represent their stories? It’s not exactly a new idea, but it’s good to be reminded that those who don’t know your place and people don’t get to define who you are. Maybe you can run with it where you live. Or where you spend time. (How does this change in communities whose members are physically distant, or mostly online?)

• July 9–12 the international Reclaiming the Commons conference (hosted jointly by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment [ASLE] and The Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences [AESS]) will be held in Portland, Oregon, and I’ll be there giving a presentation on using narrative to reframe understanding of the commons. Not sure exactly what that will look like, but it will be similar to how I approach science and research-driven nonfiction writing.
  I am very, very excited about attending this conference. They haven’t even built the full schedule yet and it already looks amazing.

• The Threadable reading circle on Land Ownership will be wrapping up soon, though the discussions are always ongoing.

  I’ve agreed to do a second reading circle and am going for something still related to this commons/ownership work but from a different perspective: Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Belonging. We’ll be reading science fiction, fantasy, and speculative short stories that bring to life a sense of home, belonging, and identity. I haven’t chosen the readings yet, but the authors whose stories I’m tentatively choosing from include several of my favorites: N.K. Jemisin, Cherie Dimaline, Nnedi Okorafor, Hao Jingfang, Octavia Butler, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Anjali Sachdeva. I’ll provide links when the time comes!

It’s bitterly cold here in northwest Montana. I hope you’re adequately sheltered, wherever you are, and finding ways to take care of one another.

Walking composition

“Some things just ain’t easy to repair
The person who came here was broken
Can you fix it, can you care?”
— “What They Call Us,” Fever Ray

Last month I pulled a very sad box out of the garage. Three sad boxes, actually, one of potatoes and two of apples, but the box of potatoes was the saddest because those came out of my garden. I spent most of a warm-enough autumn day last year sitting in a shady patch of grass brushing dirt off of each one, and here they were frozen and thawed and beginning to mold.

We got about halfway through the potatoes by January, but the bizarre weather pattern of deep, intense cold followed or preceded by days of warmth and rain were too much for my careful winter packing to contend with. Ditto for the really excellent apples I’d bought from the seasonal produce stand near the airport. Only managed to eat half a box of those and the rest had to go out to compost.

Which means that one of my projects this year has to be figuring out better storage for the potatoes, apples, and onions (most of the onions did okay, but I think that’s because we used them up before they thawed again after freezing). I was prioritizing building a small greenhouse, since the seedlings struggled so much last year due to lack of heat, but I’ve got to figure out some form of cold-but-not-freezing winter storage or there’s little point to much of the digging and growing and weeding and harvesting.

I was recently listening to an interview with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future, who talked about the brittleness of global supply chains and working on relocalizing food and teaching more people how to small-scale farm where he lives in England, and while he talked I thought of those lost potatoes and apples and then of the root cellar by the house I grew up in—a literal but good-sized dirt hole through a trapdoor and down some steps under the lean-to outside the kitchen—and the massive crock of pickles my mom used to keep on the kitchen floor, and all the other skills I’ve had to learn or rediscover when growing and gathering food. The variations in how to store carrots; why not to put onions and potatoes together; how to keep apples from freezing. All the canning and pickling that has to get done in the very hottest weeks of the year. How you end up with years’ worth of canned tomatoes because you never use as much as you think you will, and how the jam all gets given away as gifts because nobody in the house actually eats much of it. How you need a backup plan for all the frozen meat and fruit because the power will sometimes go out. (And why does freezing take so much plastic?) What is best dehydrated instead of frozen, and how to get fermentation to succeed when your kitchen is, like mine, rarely warm enough. (Still working on that one.)

And the flip side of it all, the inside-out systems most of us can’t escape depending on, the ones that mean I don’t really need to grow potatoes or onions or store apples and carrots through the winter. The ones that rely on damaged land and extracted labor elsewhere so that I don’t have to do these things. The ones that build dependence but still fail everyone: Why can’t I find my kids swimsuits in summer, when they actually grow out of them, but can easily buy my daughter fresh organic raspberries in January? Who’s picking those raspberries? Who’s packing them? Where is the plastic shell container made? Where are all the kids’ swimsuits in August? Why did the jeans I bought less than six months ago fall apart? Why do I need to special order a little connector to fix the toilet seat that’s been broken for months? (It’s a toilet seat! How does that have specialized parts?)

It makes no sense and it’s exhausting and deeply unjust and such a waste in so many ways. What are we all doing here?

Some time back, I wrote about being tired of metaphors. Not tired of metaphors exactly, but of the ways in which many of us use metaphors. How easy it is to turn almost anything into metaphor—in my case, it was thistles and knapweed into white supremacy and patriarchy, when really the thistles and knapweed are very real problems that need non-metaphorical solutions in the form of my labor. (You can eat thistles but only so many, and knapweed not at all. Nothing can except sheep.)

And yet, working as a copy editor involves a mindset in which every single word is filled with a rich, all-of-creation’s-worth world of metaphor.

(I probably spent more time considering that word “world” as I wrote this than almost anything else. Think of what it means! What your own meaning of it contains, and what it leaves out. Look it up in an English-language thesaurus and notice which adjacent words expand its meaning, and which limit it, and how. In Russian, the word for “world” is mir, which is also the word describing the traditional [pre-Soviet] shared-resource village commune, and is also the word for “peace.” The word “world” not only contains worlds; it contains different ones in different languages, even different ones within the same language.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, since realizing that most people—even most writers—have no idea what copy editors do. Sometimes my copy editing job does involve fixing commas, though rarely. Proofreading at that level isn’t something I do often anymore, or only incidentally as I’m working. Most of the time it’s handling language like it’s a live wire. Every word weighted with meaning, both from the writer and from the readers who will eventually absorb the text (and does the writer care about the reader’s reception? That question plays a role, too. Many do. Many don’t. Many who think they don’t actually do in the end). Every word full of promise and potential and tripwires.

In their now-classic book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson unraveled the idea that language is a fixed thing, that individual words have objective meaning. Even the framing we give to a sentence holds assumptions about the way we see the world. “Argument is war,” for example, is a metaphor reflected in the way our dominant culture talks about arguments, their examples being: “Your claims are indefensible; I demolished his argument; I’ve never won an argument with them.” Or take the implications of their contrasting statements “love is a collaborative work of art” versus “love is madness.”

“If love is madness, I do not concentrate on what I have to do to maintain it. But if it is work, then it requires activity, and if it is a work of art, it requires a very special kind of activity, and if it is collaborative, then it is even further restricted and specified. . . . the meaning a metaphor will have for me will be partly culturally determined and partly tied to my past experiences.”

Think of how easy it is to misunderstand someone in face-to-face conversation, or to be misunderstood, much less over text messages or email or community chat channels. I enjoy working with language, but I might have become a copy editor in large part because I so deeply dislike having my own words misconstrued or assumptions made about my meaning, and want to save other people that pain. How we handle language with one another, in whatever medium, is about more than just the words. It’s about what the words mean to each of us, individually and together. Those meanings in turn affect how we respond, how we treat one another. Full of tripwires, as I said, but also full of potential.

In politics and social spheres, the desperation to fix meaning in place—like Lord Business with the Kragle in The Lego Movie—is an attempt to freeze all of us, life itself, into a static form acceptable to those dictating the definitions. To keep each individual experience from bringing their own meanings to language and stories. Lakoff and Johnson noted this when they were writing Metaphors We Live By back in 1980:

“The fear of metaphor and rhetoric in the empiricist tradition is a fear of subjectivism—a fear of emotion and the imagination. Words are viewed as having ‘proper senses’ in terms of which truths can be expressed. To use words metaphorically is to use them in an improper sense, to stir the imagination and thereby the emotions and thus to lead us away from the truth and toward illusion.”

This kind of belief in an absolute, objective truth often seems to me a fear of the rambunctious, glorious nature of life itself, of the way that humans simply cannot get it under control, no matter how hard they try. People who are scared of this reality try to control what they can. They’ll always fail in the end, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing plenty of damage in the meantime.

Soil makes an incredibly versatile metaphor, but, as I’ve written about before, it’s also a very real substance necessary to life and subject to increasingly intense commodification. What kinds of metaphors would allow me to feel the weight of that reality, to help others feel it? To figure out ways to garden that allow food to grow and my hands to rummage happily in the ground, but don’t require extraction of the dirt and nutrients needed for life elsewhere? Where does metaphor turn into values and choices and practice, and vice versa?

Maybe I’m weary less of metaphors than of the easy ones threaded through mainstream English. Not because of anything detrimental it does to the language, but because there is such a desperate collective need to see the world and life and possibility differently than most of us have been taught to. Metaphors in mainstream language, like so much else, feel exhausted. I’m not even sure what “mainstream” means anymore, or what I mean by it.

I haven’t thought of a metaphor for the potatoes I had to drag out to the back yard last month. Maybe there doesn’t need to be one. I’m just a bit sad about it, and focused on doing better by them this year.

A society where few of us know how to store potatoes for winter, or can’t buy jeans that last a year before falling apart (honestly, come on, that’s absurd), but where I can easily find organic raspberries in January and order specialized parts for a broken toilet seat (talk about a metaphor for a dysfunctional culture)—that’s a society that needs a different way of envisioning its relationship to words as well as to life.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Anoushka Zoo Carter with Future Natures on the history of and ongoing struggles over land enclosures and 3 examples of current, successful commons-based and cooperative land use systems: “When the concept of private land ownership dominates, so do certain values, beliefs, and assumptions of how land and life is structured in society. Owning land as a private good is often underpinned by the desire to commodify it, meaning its exchange value (usually monetary) is prized above all else.”

• Evolutionary biologist David Sloane Wilson was on Your Undivided Attention talking about the success of evolution being in cooperation rather than competition. (If you prefer reading, Wilson had a great essay about this same topic in Nautilus a couple years ago titled, “I Have Come to Bury Ayn Rand.”)

• Gary Juffa, governor for Oro Province in Papua New Guinea, was on the Planet: Critical podcast talking about illegal logging cartels, the capture of government, and how he came to see it all as a war on nature: “They came into Papua New Guinea in the 1980s and they kicked out legitimate timber companies. They’re entrenched, and they’ve taken so much control of the various state entities that are tasked with checks and balances. They’ve compromised all of them.” (The link is to Planet: Critical’s Substack page, but the podcast is on Apple, etc.)

• Political science professor Mike Albertus on the In Common podcast discussed his research on agrarian reforms in Latin America and what happens when land is privately owned but property rights are neither well defined nor defended. What happens when you own land but your rights of ownership are vague? (This was a good challenge for me with regards to the importance of private property rights where land ownership is promoted, and clearly was for the host, too, who also noted that, on the other hand, owning land in common or collectively in the United States is purposefully very difficult.)

• Kenneth sent me this interview in Quartz on the Amish relationship with technology that relates to a previous post about AI and technology in general—before adopting a technology, can we learn to first assess the damage it causes as well as the benefits it might bring? “It’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile. They particularly see those two as having a fundamental impact on their society and daily lives. . . . A huge part is that they shape our relationships with other people.”

• And Julie sent a great interview with Amitav Ghosh from Emergence magazine: “So what Black scholars and historians, especially, have been saying for a long time is now shown to be true without a doubt—that you don’t get capitalism without colonialism and slavery. The geopolitical framework for the emergence of capitalism was, I would say, temporally anterior to the emergence of capitalism, and it was essential.” (I’ve had Nutmeg’s Curse on my shelf for a while, but might read it sooner rather than later after listening to this.)

• Aeon with a 6-minute video that does a good job explaining the Prisoner’s Dilemma and how it could play out infinitely. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic game theory scenario. It’s referenced all the time and I have never understood it. I get the math; I just don’t get the social aspect. It makes a bunch of assumptions about human behavior that are based on a very particular mindset, and I’ve never been able to imagine myself opting to so readily sacrifice someone else. It’s classic, but weird. Or, perhaps, WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic).

• Poetry isn’t something I usually search out to share on here, but I really loved this selection from Kimberly M. Blaeser, especially “Poem for a Tattered Planet: If the Measure is Life.” An excerpt:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  "Each splinter of language
  bent    in complicated formulas of inference 
  of ownership
  as fog forgets  then remembers         form.
  But we find measure     in metaphor
  vibration     earth     timbre."

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* for Land Ownership was a selection from William Blackstone’s 1753 book Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, Book II: Of the Rights of Things, Chapter I: Of Property, in General.

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try the Threadable app and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now.

For anyone new to On the Commons an overview of this project is here. Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

Blackstone’s Commentaries is in the public domain, and there are many different places online where you can read the text. Several of the sources retain the original text style, though, so you get those “s” letters that are shaped like “f” and it can make the reading a little difficult. The Google Books version is a 1979 publication, which is kind of fun to read. But given the factors of style and font, I found this one most accessible to my modern and tired eyes.

Note: There is one untranslated Latin line in the link above: erant omnia communia et indivisa omnibus, veluti unum cunctis patrimonium esset. Ballentine’s Law Dictionary gives the translation as, “All things were common and undivided, as if there were a single patrimony for all.”

There’s been a fair amount of dense reading in this project, and I want to make clear again that my interest in these texts is not academic. I really want to get to the roots and damaging effects (both historical and ongoing) of the current-day private property regime. Not just what it is but how a culture thinks about it, how people are trained and taught to think about it. What most of us assume is true about land ownership.

I doubt much about private property law will change in my lifetime, if ever, but I also think there’s more hope for change if we know the justifications and rationales that underlie beliefs about private property—beliefs that are intertwined with how the dominant culture views a relationship with nature, with the rest of life.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to overstate the influence of Blackstone and his Commentaries on legal thinking in general, as well as private property specifically. At the time he was writing, English common law was, from my understanding, a mess that even experts, much less lay people, had little hope of understanding. Blackstone took the mess and organized it, with lengthy explanation and legal philosophy. He is particularly known for his examinations of liberty, justice, and the role of government, and his Commentaries were very influential in the nascent United States, including with regards to property law.

Blackstone’s legal theories, and those of John Locke (which will be the next reading), seem to be baked into the foundation of how the dominant culture we live in thinks about private property in general and land ownership in particular. (Even though their theories disagreed, their utility for private property has been complementary.) It’s important, maybe even essential, to unearth the ideas and writings that exist in the law’s DNA.

Maybe more important than the law is the psychological DNA: the conscious and unconscious ways that most people—even many who question the dominant culture or don’t like it—think about land, ownership, and private property. The reason that so many can proclaim “private property is bedrock” without question.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Blackstone himself admits straight out that there is no actual basis for private land ownership.

“There is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land.” So why, then, do we have it? And why do we continue to defend it? It’s obvious that human societies of any size need a way of managing and sharing land, water, wildlife, etc.—but it’s not obvious why private, individual ownership needs to be the answer.

Blackstone engages in a long discussion of the right of occupancy—how occupying land originally gave a kind of temporary ownership over it in the form of exclusive use during a person’s lifetime, but it wasn’t something that could be passed on as an inheritance. Nor did occupancy necessarily grant adjacent rights that in places like the U.S. today are considered part of the “bundle of sticks” of land ownership, like the right to exclude others from the land. Trespassing laws are relatively recent inventions.

In one of a series of frustrating logical leaps, Blackstone then argues that occupancy did in fact give one permanent ownership of land, if you take into account the advent of agriculture and how a landowner/user had no incentive to cultivate their land, treat it well, and make it productive if their ownership of it were not absolute. The blithe phrase here, “it is agreed upon all hands that occupancy gave also the original right to the permanent property in the substance of the earth itself,” neglects not only his own failure to make any such case, but ignores England’s battles over enclosures of the commons, which had been ongoing for centuries by the time of his writing. There would have been no Kett’s Rebellion or other uprisings if “all hands” agreed that occupying the land by extension granted title to it.

The simple need of every human to eat, I suppose, didn’t qualify as an incentive to cultivate or care for land—an echo of the points in the last reading on Henry George about how “skin in the game” in the form of ownership somehow counts as “having a stake,” but skin itself, in the form of survival, doesn’t.

There are also a number of instances where Blackstone insists that chaos would ensue and civilization crumble without the security provided by private land ownership. A security that, as one reader pointed out, is a mirage.

Even if we pass over (and we shouldn’t) the incredible violence needed to make most of today’s private land ownership possible, it has not granted protection from tumults; it has not guaranteed “the good order of the world.” Blackstone, however, doubles down on this many times, arguing that private property is necessary for civilization to thrive.

His arguments neglect, again, England’s long and ancient history of commons systems of land use, not to mention Ireland’s Brehon laws that governed common land use, which would have been fairly recent history—Brehon laws were only fully dismantled in the face of English colonization crackdowns in the 1600s. It’s hard to imagine such an eminent jurist, someone who taught at Oxford and was for a time a Member of Parliament, would have been ignorant of these realities. He even, within the text, specifically pointed out the necessity of the commons themselves remaining in the commons—forests, “waste” grounds, wildlife, etc.—for civil society to exist.

This seems to be a central theme for Blackstone. Reading and rereading a long section explaining how inheritance of property came about, I was confused about a passage that seemed to reiterate that land ownership is made up, and therefore inheritance law is also made up, which led to a brief explanation in Threadable from a reader of private property’s codependency with the state.

The argument that property ownership is a “civilizational necessity,” goes back to a central problem I see with these legal philosophies, at least as related to property law: they often seem to be written and argued—not always well—in order to lay down justifications for a regime that already benefited only a few. Blackstone has been one of the most respected legal scholars in Western history, and his writing here still reads as grasping for straws. Are all these arguments in defense of private property simply about bolstering the integrity of the state and the privileges of its nobility and other elite landowning citizens?

Not to put too fine a point on it, part of the whole issue of colonization is that plenty of societies manage land and resources just fine before someone else comes in and imposes private land ownership and commodification on them. Who’s really causing all the tumult and disorder here?

In the end, Blackstone’s case for private property reads as pretty flimsy. He has only one answer to the genesis of human ownership of land, which is, of course, in Genesis, Chapter 1 Verse 26, of the Christian Bible, which reads (King James Version):

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Blackstone follows quotation of this passage with:

“This is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things, whatever airy metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things herein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the creator.”

This is hardly a basis for what a dominant culture might deem “civilized society.” Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s all there can be. Some amorphous fog of instruction from a few thousand years ago, a line that continues to play a defining role into how this culture treats environmental concerns—life concerns—like, say, clean water. Whether it was intended to be instruction to care for life on Earth or not, or to steward it, that isn’t for the most part how it’s been employed, at least not in modern times.

Except for perhaps the most devoted Christian dominionists, Blackstone’s explanation is simply not a persuasive justification for the kind of theft and dominion-based land grabbing that has defined colonizing societies for a thousand years if not longer. And far from a private property regime leading to civil society avoiding tumult, it in fact has led to land theft and hoarding, deep inequality and violent rebellions, and probably extensive environmental devastation even long before his own time. All of which continues in exacerbated forms to this day.

Blackstone contradicts himself on the subject of colonialism more than once, claiming that land ownership can only be of “unoccupied land”—that is, you can’t claim as your own land that other people are living on—but then finds a way to justify it (or at the very least fails to fully condemn it) on the basis of the “civilizing” impulse. Is he being sarcastic or serious? I can’t tell, but he doesn’t seem to have the courage to call out colonialism for the theft that it is.

He then, maddeningly, contradicts himself yet again—twice!—in the footnotes, first in trying to answer again where ownership originates:

“But how or when, does property commence? I conceive no better answer can be given than by occupancy, or when any thing is separated for private use from the common stores of nature.”

(Or, as I’ve come to put it and you’re probably tired of hearing from me, the first law of ownership: “I took it. Now it’s mine.”)

Followed in the next footnote with an acknowledgment that the land of North America did in fact belong to the people who were already living here, and also that similar types of shared property models used to be the norm throughout the European continent:

“Among the aboriginal inhabitants of North America there was no private property in land; but the territory or hunting-grounds belonged to the tribe, who alone had the power to dispose of them. . . . Something like this is discoverable in the earliest accounts we have of the laws of the savage inhabitants of ancient Europe. Property in land was first in the nation or tribe, and the right of the individual occupant was merely usufructuary and temporary.”

So Blackstone acknowledges that land all over the world he knew of was managed in various forms of collective ownership and use. And that the only right of ownership he sees is the right of occupancy. On what basis, then, is private, individual ownership of said land justified? He says it was “agreed on all hands” that agriculture and civil society made it a necessity, but makes no real effort to back it up, or to address the disagreement between this reasoning and his other statements regarding occupancy.

I call the contradiction “maddening” because, again, this thinking is baked into both the philosophy and the reality of our private property laws. It’s tangled up with the Doctrine of Discovery, which is still legal precedent in the U.S. and many other countries of the world, and with a narrow slice of Judeo-Christian ideas about humans’ relationship with the rest of nature and one another. (For further deep-diving into the entanglement of land beliefs, Christianity, colonialism, and white supremacist thinking, I recommend Kelly Brown Douglas’s 2015 book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, which I wrote about last year.)

In other words, despite this document being kind of a mess and riddled with honest to goodness logical fallacies, its intent—to defend private property as something societies need so that they don’t crumble into chaos—has been successful.

The other side of that success is due in part, I think, to John Locke’s notion that ownership in land is validated by one’s labor on said land. Which Blackstone disagrees with, arguing, with surprising clarity that,

“for mixing labour with a thing can signify only to make an alteration in its shape or form; and if I had a right to the substance before any labour was bestowed upon it, that right still adheres to all that remains of the substance.”

But we’ll save that until we get to Locke himself. After that it’s just two more readings, Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass, which is a fun read; and law professor Mary Christina Wood’s Nature’s Trust, part of which lays out the legal basis for dismantling private property rights over nature.

At some point someone is going to ask me exactly what I expect societies to do to overturn or reform private property law if I think it’s so awful, and the answer is that I don’t know, but a combination of Land Back movements, Rights of Nature, recognizing the commons and our dependence on them, and Wood’s ideas regarding the public trust and limiting private property rights over nature (especially for corporations) seem like a good start.

If you made it this far, you definitely deserve this sunrise from my daughter’s and my walk to school the other day.

Essay

I finished my master’s degree in creative writing a couple of decades ago, when I was in my late twenties. With a few exceptions it was an off-putting experience: the program felt designed to promote competitive jealousy and a slash-and-burn attitude toward others’ work. I’m not sure why I stuck with it except that it was a ten-minute walk from my Boston apartment and at that age I still believed it was a necessary step toward becoming a writer (and that “becoming a writer” was itself necessary, rather than just writing). I’m still friends with two of the people I met there, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Everything I learned about writing came after that. I eventually met good editors at various publications who taught me how to pare down my wordiness (not a lesson that seems to have stuck) and to really think about what I was saying. To question myself and the conclusions I came to, to broaden my perspectives. Good writers might be rare, but good editors are far rarer. Those editors taught me to write.

More importantly, they taught me that writing a narrative with some meaning for readers is nearly always a collaborative process. This was not something that my master’s program ever highlighted, and not something that aspiring writers usually get advice about. It’s always “Get an agent,” “Get a book contract,” “Get your pitches accepted,” not “What allows me to do the best possible work?”

I can’t think of anything I’ve published, anything I think well of at least, that didn’t lean heavily on an editor’s input, and often also on that of a few particular colleagues whose judgment I trust. Feedback isn’t always easy to receive—writing is a weirdly personal thing, even if the subject matter itself isn’t all that personal—but it made all the difference for me. Having my own newsletter means I can follow where curiosity leads and explore ideas that aren’t trendy enough for bigger publications, but I do miss having editorial feedback from people who know what they’re doing. Enough so that, as was the case with this essay, I often send On the Commons pieces to my older sister for feedback and corrections before I post them. 

There is a group of people involved in writing that came up even less often than editors did in my MFA, if they came up at all: readers.

The interaction between readers and writers is very different in the full-on internet age of today from what it was when I finished my degree in 2003, when print still dominated and readers didn’t have such easy access to writers. Even once writing started going online, for many years the hard rule was, “Don’t read the comments.” Because they were junk or abusive or both. (They really were.)

Things have changed. I’m not exactly sure when. I remember publishing my first essay for Aeon in 2015, and how thoughtful and well-moderated the comments were, and how I was surprised to enjoy the dialogue they fostered. That essay had tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. Not one of them was a waste of my time to read, and in fact several led to further research that informed my first published book.

Something shifts when readers opt into someone’s writing, and it’s not just the tone or content of the comments. It’s the way readers’ ideas and enthusiasm and questions become, for me, part of the thinking and writing process itself.

What shows up here comes from me, the result of whatever happens in the strange internal process called creativity. But the content isn’t purely individual. It’s “my” work, but also “this” work, something that readers have a stake in. Or a voice. Or something I can’t find the words for, something collaborative but not collective, or maybe vice versa. 

Many of you send me emails with thoughts on something I’ve written, or suggestions for videos or books or podcasts, or personal stories of your own. Some of you post comments, or simply open and read the posts enough to remind me that people are giving their attention to whatever happens here. This writing comes from me—it is my mind, in a way. But that mind isn’t working in a silent bubble, absorbing books and articles and contemplative walks and conversations and churning out finished ideas. I think about you as I write. My first drafts, almost always written longhand in a notebook, are for me alone, but they can’t help but be informed by anyone who’s been reading and responding to what’s come before. The revision process also happens silently in my head, but it’s still a conversation with this group of readers and the world in general.

Where does this put ownership of the writing itself? And what changed once I started placing part of what I write behind a paywall? Who owns this work? Legally, I do—that’s what Substack and copyright laws say and let me tell you there’s a rich and tangled history behind creative ownership and copyright law—but isn’t it all of us? Isn’t this an ideas commons, too? I can’t even claim full ownership of this essay idea. It was Mike Sowden of Everything Is Amazing who presented the idea of “narrative ownership” to me.

When I switched to the paid version of Substack, I decided to make these essays free and the walking compositions paid because the “some stuff to read/watch/listen to” lists represent about a quarter to a third of what I read/watch/listen to and take me a significant amount of time to compile. Obviously, all the writing I do here is also work,* but those lists are a particular type of work that feels more like easily identifiable labor. I offer the option of a paid-subscription-for-free-on-request** because I don’t want anyone to be shut out for lack of funds, but as time has gone on I’ve also realized that it’s partly because I want people to have the option of opting into something. I’ve personally unsubscribed from a lot of otherwise good writing (mostly on Medium) because I felt flooded with content I could never keep up with. I don’t want to do that to people.

*This is a different conversation, but artists of all kinds struggle with being paid for our work. I don’t think it’s a struggle that we’ll ever resolve, even within ourselves, but it’s always worthwhile acknowledging that it’s there. And that, without art being paid for, generally the only people who can afford to do it are the already well-off. “You’re commodifying art” vs. “Then only rich people get to write” was an argument we had repeatedly in my MFA program. Capitalism isn’t dead yet, and until it is we’re kind of stuck with the trade-off.

**Your regular reminder that if you want the paid version and can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set it up.

When I described to someone last spring what I was going to do with my book No Trespassing, publish it here as I slowly write it, he asked me what would happen if a publisher later approached me about publishing it in edited book form. I told him I’d thought about that a lot, especially after analyzing my own feelings when a couple of Substack writers I subscribed to moved to big-name publications. I didn’t begrudge them that—a steady paycheck is nice!—but there was a sense of loss after their announcements. A sense of, “Hey, you invited people to support your work; I was happy to help you build that and a lot of other people felt the same.” It felt weird, like some sort of rejection, especially as I didn’t want to follow them to the publications they landed at. 

It’s an interesting feeling, not one I’m proud of or even fully understand, but one that did make me think carefully about what I was doing here. It feels akin to starting a relationship, I think, reaching out slow, tenuous tendrils that you can’t just retract on a whim if you change your mind, not without injuring both others and yourself. Whether you’re sharing writing or relationship, each tendril is made of trust, and you can’t impulsively walk away from those things without damaging that trust.

I told this person that I wouldn’t be averse to the idea, if a publisher were interested, but there’d have to be something in it for all the people who’d already been supporting this work, financially or otherwise. That I wouldn’t want to give a sense of “Thanks for your support, on to bigger and better things now.” What that would look like I don’t know and it’s purely theoretical at this point (and will probably remain so). Free copies? Acknowledgments? A promise to keep doing this work, here, together? 

It’s not a simple question, but to rebuild the commons—all the commons—it and others like it have to be answered, in some form, eventually.

No matter what, though, I can’t think of this Substack as something I myself own, that I myself am creating and can be possessive of any more than it was solely me who created any other piece of published writing with my name on it. Copyright law tells me one thing, but what I’ve learned from working with good editors over the years; and how I feel about ownership; and what I envision as a better, more reciprocal, way of doing this collective thing called life could be, is quite another.

I don’t plan on doing guest posts here, or interviews—I can barely keep up with my life and work as it is, and really isn’t everyone already overwhelmed with material to read and listen to anyway?—but I do think of this entire project as a kind of commons. I might be sitting here alone at a desk shaping narrative as best I can, but copyright law aside, nobody really owns these stories, much less the ideas that seed them. 

 What that means I’m not sure. I do know that, if you’re here with me, then I am equally here. With you.

Walking composition

“‘Things have been going wrong for a lot longer than you think,’ Alden said. ‘It’s just that they’ve finally gone wrong enough for you to notice.’” —Caught in Crystal, Patricia C. Wrede

The other day someone was showing me one of those ChatGPT artificial intelligence things that can write a letter for you given a few simple parameters. I don’t need an AI to write a letter for me, but the point was how well it performed the task: AI is learning so fast.

I snapped a little bit at the person (unfairly; it’s not their fault that I saw streams of threads about this on Twitter a few weeks ago and got heartily sick of it) because my immediate response was irritation at the ubiquitous, fascinated, admiring glee with which many people are lauding these chat AIs’ effectiveness. “You know what would be awesome?” I said. “It would be awesome if all the people falling all over themselves about the potentials of AI would direct that energy for a while to the potentials of human beings. How many kids’ minds would outstrip ChatGPT in months if we directed all that research and investment money to making sure they’re fed and get enough sleep and have safe, secure homes and neighborhoods? What about human potential?”

It wasn’t the technology that got me; it was the attention. How much of it these developments get, as if yet another technology will completely change the paradigms of the dominant human society and how we relate to one another; whereas the actual relating we do, and the actual suffering that happens both separate from and caused by many of these same technologies, is ignored.

One of my favorite childhood books was Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. I’m not sure it made its way out of the U.S., or even how many people in the U.S. have read it—though it was pretty popular—but if you haven’t, I think it holds up relatively well, with some caveats. Being both a math person and a word person (and someone who’s easily entertained), I enjoy the cities Dictionopolis and Digitopolis equally.

But my favorite city concept in the book is Reality, which became invisible because people stopped looking at it:

“One day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.”

Milo remembered the many times he’d done the very same thing; and, as hard as he tried, there were even things on his own street that he couldn’t remember. . . .

“Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.”

“Hasn’t anyone told them?” asked Milo.

“It doesn’t do any good,” Alec replied, “for they can never see what they’re in too much of a hurry to look for.”

Attention is a fascinating thing, and despite being frequently mentioned in criticisms of digital technology, I don’t think it gets nearly enough attention of its own. There’s a reason our attention plays such a big role in tech companies’ profits, and why news media dove so hard into clickbait (to get our attention). And why so many of us feel frequent urges to smash our smartphones with all their mental demands.

Attention means something. It’s not passive. Attention, and what we give ours to, has real-world effects.

The person showing me the AI’s letter-writing skill happened to be my spouse—who’s worked in cybersecurity and data protection for decades now; it’s part of his job to follow tech’s cutting edge and its inherent risks—so he took my brief annoyed digital tech rant in stride. He’s heard it before.

I’m not anti-tech. I wrote about this directly in A Walking Life. The fear that “we might become cyborgs someday” slightly exasperates me. We’ve been something like cyborgs since the first hominins picked up tools. Spoken language is a technology. So is visual art, and reading, and so are glasses and shoes and decorative jewelry and walking sticks. We interact with objects we find or make in ways that make them part of us all the time, and have done so probably since before Homo sapiens were even a species.

This doesn’t, though, mean that all technology is good for humans, much less the rest of life, or that every development serves to make our lives better. The Luddites, as I wrote about in the book, didn’t smash knitting frames because they hated technology. They smashed them because the owners of the factories were replacing skilled human operators with either machines or less-skilled operators of those machines because they could make far more profit, leaving the people without work and therefore without ways to feed and support themselves and their families. And churning out shoddy materials in the process.

I got into the subject of Luddites and technology because A Walking Life, being about walking, by extension was also about cars, car-centric culture, and how much destruction they’ve caused. The history of resistance to ceding our roads and streets to cars—which was immense in the early 1900s—has been wiped from our collective imaginations, convincing us that this is the world we wanted.

With digital technology, we’re in the very first steps of going down a similar path. I give attention to AI not because I think it’s cool, but because its development and implementation are integrated—often invisibly—with private property, ownership, and any hope of an equitable future.

Attention is not enough to control technology’s impact on our lives. It never was and never will be. But it is a necessary element, and we only have so much of it on any given day. What could change, what needs could be met, if a classroom of hungry kids and the beauty of every starlit night got the same attention given to every twitch of AI development? If every story about digital tech were centered first on the fact that no technology is going to solve our problems on its own?

Our attention plays a role in where we go from here, and where we end up. Giving attention to the wrong stories allows those in power to conceal a fundamental question: Does this technology serve us, or do we serve it?

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Speaking of attention and car-centric culture, this interview with the War on Cars podcast about a study by environmental psychologist Dr. Ian Walker on what car culture has done to us psychologically was really interesting. Especially when he pointed out that even people who don’t drive give “car behavior” a pass.

• And speaking of tech, The Markup did an analysis of how tech companies largely gutted a Right to Repair bill in New York State: “These particular TechNet edits all have a common theme—ensuring that manufacturers retain control over the market for the repair of their products.” (I was thinking about the Right to Repair this morning as I pulled out a pair of jeans I bought less than six months ago that I already need to patch. What if I were only allowed to use fabric and thread and methods approved by the clothing company that made the jeans? Or had to send them to a certified technician?)

• Kate Wagner writing in The Baffler about architecture firms’ complicity in the travesty that is NEOM, also known as “The Line,” the 105-mile-long completely enclosed and automated city being envisioned in the desert of Saudi Arabia: “The year-round ski resorts, indoor shopping malls, and bespoke manses of NEOM will be built on the backs of human suffering. They actively harm the world, not improve it. This is obvious to anyone with a conscience.”

• This episode of Building Local Power, the podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, isn’t that long but packed in a lot of information about the role of monopolies in inflation: “In 2021 these markups skyrocketed, way beyond the cost of whatever a company might need to acquire in order to sell a thing. . . . It’s the highest level on record, and the largest one-year increase on record. . . . This is straight corporate profiteering.” (I particularly appreciated the few minutes of focus on the loss of pay and worker rights in the trucking industry starting in the 1980s.)

• Iraq war veteran and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene Roy Scranton writing in Emergence magazine on what people mean when they say, “the end of the world.” “We can hardly make sense of it without attending to the realization that the world has already ended, over and over, for countless peoples and epochs.”

• My head’s been lingering in bleak places recently, so I’m immensely grateful to Sherri Spelic for sending me this hour-long conversation between Ross Gay and Clint Smith about Gay’s recent book Inciting Joy: “You scratch a little bit and everyone’s broken-hearted.” (There was so much to love in this conversation. One thing that really stuck with me was his point that there’s a lot of discussion about epigenetic trauma, but none about epigenetic joy. That literally never occurred to me.)

• And an interview on the podcast Storytelling Animals with Stan Rushworth and Dahr Jamail, co-editors of one of the more important books I read last year, We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth. (The podcast link is to a YouTube audio file, but Storytelling Animals seems to be on all podcast platforms.)