Antonia Malchik

A review of Simon Winchester’s book “Land”

The following is, as promised, a review of Simon Winchester’s most recent book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. I haven’t published a review on this newsletter before and don’t intend to make it a regular thing because I prefer to talk about books within the context of ownership, the commons, and humanity. Not that I don’t enjoy writing reviews—I do—but I avoid them for the same reason I avoid writing about feminism and misogyny: they make me full of either rage or a kind of fierce, burn-it-all-down joy, and other writers channel those feelings better than I’m able to.

I used to write book reviews for a travel website but haven’t in many years, and a long time ago decided not to write any more reviews of books I didn’t like. Land is an exception.

I’ve long admired and enjoyed Winchester’s work, from The Professor and the Madman to Calcutta to a recent essay in The American Scholar on the generosity of travel writer Jan Morris. Unfortunately, Land exposes Winchester’s persistent colonial worldview in a way that even this author of twenty- or thirty-some books can’t narrate his way out of.

While Land explores the many ways in which ownership is made possible, from surveying to cartography to imperialism, it leaves unasked the question of why humans crave land ownership in the first place. Why do societies insist on perpetuating a legal fiction that plays such a deep structural role in solidifying and widening inequality and injustice? Winchester has no answers and doesn’t seem very curious about the question.

Leaving out the initial why? creates a fundamental problem for the rest of the book. Without examining that impetus, it’s easy to gloss over the consequences of this millennia-old myth for the majority of humanity, much less for the rest of life on the planet. Winchester includes a number of stories referencing dispossession of Indigenous lands in North America and New Zealand, but the stories feel perfunctory when they should be central. He tells the facts—and very often only those—but frames them in a way that presents these histories as inevitable and, worse, Indigenous people as passive bystanders.

It is impossible to talk about private ownership of land without spending a significant amount of time on the inherent violence necessary to convert a landscape into real estate, yet somehow Winchester manages it, not only grossly simplifying complex stories of land dispossession in North America but ignoring almost the entirety of English and European land hoarding by the nobility through enforced serfdom and private enclosure of common lands.

Every review I’ve found of Land has lauded Winchester for his centering of Indigenous people worldwide. And it’s true, I think, that these stories are highlighted in a way that they seldom have been by a well-known white writer. In a way, that makes his approach all the more egregious. It makes it seem like telling the stories is enough, that no examination of the ongoing injustices needs to happen.

In Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth—a book Winchester acknowledges as foundational for his own thinking and research—the author wrote that, “The idea of individual, exclusive ownership, not just of what can be carried or occupied, but of the immovable, near-eternal earth, has proved to be the most destructive and creative cultural force in written history.” It’s this kind of perspective that is missing from Land.

Overlooking the destructive effects of private land ownership allows Winchester to ignore his own biases, which become obvious shortly into the narrative. The book is full of phrases and words that led me to plaster it with Post-It Notes on which I wrote, simply, “WHAT???” rather than a useful note-to-self to refer to later.

The language he uses to describe people, cultures, and the process of dispossession and theft are both colonial and generalized. That’s at best. I’m trying to be generous here. Winchester’s finest and most detailed writing is saved for measuring, dredging, and building, the engineering- and thing-centered subjects that he has excelled at in previous books. Dispossession, theft, and colonization are treated with a few broad strokes and more than a few stereotypes. Again, that’s at best. By page 18, I was already sending snippets to a few writer friends to see if my outrage at Winchester’s perspective was over the top:

“The relict Schaghticoke did not merely leave, however, but clung on in the naïve hope that one day, treaties would be honored and promises kept. But they never were; and today the rump of the tribe, with a few hundred others scattered wide and bickering among themselves, are reduced to living in a cluster of shacks on the flood-prone banks of the Housatonic, constantly in and out of court, pressing in vain their claims for land long ago given to a local school and the state power company.”

Relict. Naïve. Rump of the tribe. Reduced to living. Almost every bump of every sentence in this passage—and it continues for another two-thirds of a paragraph—is nailed with language that dehumanizes and demeans, and more than that, it and other passages get hammered down in absolute ignorance of history. Is it naïve to trust that a government will honor its treaty obligations? One could argue that perspective in the case of the United States (why not write, then, about how egregiously treacherous and shitty that is, about a government so dishonorable and thieving that it’s naïve to trust it? Why skip right over that part?), but even if it is, that isn’t what happened. There is plenty of scholarship out there detailing the ways in which Native American nations fought for land and people—legally, politically, diplomatically, and physically—but Winchester fails to make the slightest effort to question his own assumptions. Nor does he seem to have any knowledge of the Landback movement, which was hardly new when he would have been writing this book. Why can’t the local school and the state power company return the land? It doesn’t occur to him to ask.

Recent books such as Nick Estes’s Our History Is the Future have skillfully laid out the betrayals of the U.S. government in particular and white European colonizers in general whose “success” in “settling” North America consisted of killing off as many Indigenous people as possible whether through disease or massacre; repeatedly refusing to honor treaties that the government itself had insisted that Native nations agree to; and, when nations refused to give up land that was meant to be solely theirs by treaty right, took their children away and sent them to boarding schools until they complied. There is nothing naïve in any of this.

No matter how sympathetic his perspective, Winchester never manages to write about Indigenous people as anything more than passive observers of history. Repeated use of the world “bewildered” leaves the impression that Native people have been confused, innocent, placid, and, again, naïve. The Sioux leaders were “bewildered” during 1858 treaty negotiations, and the reservation today “forlornly advertises itself as ‘the Land of the Friendly People of the Seven Council Fires of 1858.’” Forlornly advertises. A colonial viewpoint if there ever was one.

Colonial remains Winchester’s worldview. There’s a bare smidgeon of consolation in the fact that he uses similar characterizations for tenant farmers forced off of lands in Scotland during the Highland Clearances. The Clearances were born from the enclosure movement that started centuries ago and stole the commons from the people of England; they were their own iteration of colonialism:

“Lord Stafford, as he was then still known, forcibly and cruelly removed thousands of crofters from their pitiful smallholdings and settled them, mulish and unwilling, scores of miles away from home.”

Pitiful. Mulish and unwilling.

I’ve worked with words almost my whole life—certainly all of my professional life. Being a copy editor is in some unexpected ways akin to being a poet, only in that the precision of language matters a great deal. In my own writing, I’ll sometimes stare out a window or go for a walk in search of the right word; when I’m copy editing, I do this even more frequently. I feel for the textures of words. Their nuances and the underlying metaphors. What they mean to say. What world does this word hold? is a question my copy editor self carries with her constantly.

Winchester has been a professional writer for decades at this point. He knows how to tell a story and his books are generally fun to read. He doesn’t, as far as I’ve seen, narrate in a haphazard fashion. He’s most famous for The Professor and the Madman, which is in itself a book about how much meaning any given word can hold. I don’t think he intends to be demeaning, but everything about his approach in Land is a choice that reflects how he sees the world, and that includes how he writes about people.

These choices are made worse by the fact that Winchester doesn’t seem to have interviewed a single Indigenous person for this book, and with perhaps one exception (quoting Harvard professor Philip Deloria on land-stealing treaties) failed to write any of these stories from a non-colonial perspective. I have a hard time believing, for example, that this passage would find widespread agreement even among bog-standard university historians:

“The Native Americans whose lands these once were have not forgotten, nor probably ever will. But such anger as they might justly feel has long ago ebbed, and it just simmers in the far background. The notion that the United States could ever have had the effrontery to call these acres ‘unassigned,’ when in truth the republic never possessed the moral authority either to assign or unassign them, here or anywhere else, is mostly forgotten today. The world has moved on.”

[Me on a Post-It for the umpteenth time: WHAT???]

Winchester published these lines despite the fact that the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma U.S. Supreme Court decision essentially restored 1866 treaty boundaries and reaffirmed the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s sovereignty over tribal members on that land. (This decision was appealed yet again and has found a court more friendly to continued settler-colonialism.) While the decision likely would have come after Land was already in the editing process, the case was originally heard in the Tenth Circuit in 2017 and the Supreme Court agreed to an appeal petition in December 2019. Since he had a whole chapter on the colonization of Oklahoma, he’d almost have had to work at not knowing about the case while writing this book.

To say that land dispossession had been “largely forgotten” is simply untrue. While many people might have been unaware of these cases or the issues at stake, Native nations certainly haven’t been. And they are central to anyone purporting to write authoritatively about land ownership in North America. To overlook them is simply sloppy research.

Should I give Winchester more credit for at least trying? Maybe. But every time he writes about these histories, his tone is patronizing and he seems uncomfortable. In the passage on Francis Drake landing in (probably) what is now northern California, Winchester clearly wants to frame Drake’s claiming of the “whole land unto her Majesties keeping” as an injustice inflicted on the Miwok nation. Yet that history is briefly covered in a few lines. He spends a great deal more time and detail on the queen’s knighting of Drake in 1580. It’s in describing Drake’s ship and voyage and knighting where his language flows. When he writes about the actual consequences of these actions and choices, he reminds me of me when I was writing the robotics sections of my book on walking: pained.

I write a lot about being compassionate and kind—yet another reason why I don’t like to write book reviews anymore—but I write about those because I struggle so much with them. Truthfully, I am tired to the core of giving people with enormous privilege credit for simply trying. Try harder.

The effect of reading Land is at best one of psychological whiplash. His research, while extensive in the realm of cartography, overlooks, for example, the significance of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, which stated among other things that:

“Not only has the practice of all civilized nations been in conformity with this doctrine,* but the whole theory of their titles to lands in America, rests upon the hypothesis, that the Indians had no right of soil as sovereign, independent states. Discovery is the foundation of title.”

* The Doctrine of Discovery comes from the 1454 and 1493 papal declarations that gave right of ownership over land, resources, and people to European Christians who “discovered” them

Not only did Johnson v. M’Intosh state that Europeans have title by automatic right to all North American land due to discovery; it also stated that, since Native nations supposedly had no concept of private ownership, they could never have been qualified to hold property title in the first place. This second declaration is a circular and self-referential decision that made white settler ownership of land a fait accompli no matter which way you looked at it.

More recent cases, too, such as City of Sherill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, used the Doctrine of Discovery to decide that the Oneida Nation could no longer claim sovereignty over land it had legally purchased on the open market:

“Under the ‘doctrine of discovery,’ . . . ‘fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.’”

In other words, the Oneida Nation could buy the land, but not claim sovereignty over it. That decision was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which is why, as much as I respect her work and legacy, I’m not a total fan. (The Indigenous Values Initiative has a good explainer of this case.) These cases and their lasting consequences matter tremendously in the question of land ownership. They show its foundations to be full of rot and racism, but Winchester doesn’t go anywhere near them.

All of this is before we even get to his failure to address what is purportedly the topic of the book: land ownership itself.

Winchester barely touches land ownership’s genesis. He claims at one point that ownership in England began “with the lines of furrows left behind by the ploughs of neighbors, probably fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ.” Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. Maybe this was how a form of ownership was practiced, but it’s just as likely that a form of commons land-sharing was in play, as it has been all over the world and for which there is plenty of research that Winchester doesn’t seem to care to glance at. Even though, again, he credits Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which is entirely about how land has been shared and how private land ownership destroyed various systems of commoning worldwide.

Land is a mess of a book. Which is a pity. It covers a lot of important and widely neglected histories, like the forced collectivization of farms in Ukraine under Stalin’s Soviet Union, which led to the starvation of millions in what is known as the Holodomor. It delves into how Americans of Japanese descent left the U.S.’s concentration camps after World War II to find that white people had stolen their land and businesses. It unfolds the destruction of vast areas like the Marshall Islands in the 1950s, sacrificed to the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program.

These stories are important, and I’m glad Winchester wrote about them. That doesn’t erase the fact that too much of this book is written by a man stuck in time, in a mindset and worldview that his words can’t hide. Maybe I should be more generous. But what I take from this book is instead a reminder to myself: Try harder.

In Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes makes the firm and repeated point that massacres, thefts, and betrayals of treaty obligations had one aim: to turn land into private property. The heart of ownership is that something is mine—not yours and most certainly not ours. This process isn’t accomplished, as Winchester seems to wish, by interesting endeavors to measure the planet or map geographical contours. It’s accomplished with violence. To gloss over that in a book on ownership, in this day and age, is unacceptable.

Two more gripes:

I am utterly confused by Winchester’s lines in a paragraph promoting pre-Colombian American culture and civilization: “Native Americans are all, it should be remembered, genetically related to those who twenty thousand years ago crossed by way of Beringia, the land bridge across the north Pacific between eastern Russia and western Alaska. Native Americans are, genetically, a Pacific people. They are, in essence, an Asian people.” First off, did he talk to a single Native American person about this? And secondly, try as I might, I can’t find a way to read this entire passage as anything other than Winchester saying, “These people must be civilized because they’re Asian.”

I would also like to take issue with his statement that, “No American, so far as I am aware, ever professed a deep and unsullied affection for the USGS topographical sheets that it is possible to order from the government agencies.” I’ve written about my own childhood obsession with my mother’s collection of topo maps in several places, I think even in my book about walking somewhere. I’m sure I’m not the only American who has a deep affection for those maps. Maybe, as with so many things in this book, he didn’t bother to ask.

Walking composition

“Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room"
—from "My own heart let me more have pity on," Gerard Manley Hopkins

A couple of mid-mornings ago I was sitting at a table with my younger sister, her two little girls, and my daughter, playing an interminable game of Unstable Unicorns. I glanced up from my hand with the two “Neigh” cards I kept forgetting to use, when I lost control of words and patted my daughter on the arm enthusiastically several times before spitting out, “There’s a fox on the porch!”

My daughter has been hoping to see a fox in person for ages and thought I was joking, but no. It was right there looking at us through the window. I’ve seen a number of foxes even just around our town, but she somehow always misses out.

We were staying at a Forest Service cabin in Montana’s North Fork valley, no internet or electricity or running water, and it just trotted up during our card game. We all put our cards down and padded from window to window as the fox tracked around the cabin, watching it until it disappeared back into the woods.

One of the most famous and pivotal property law cases in U.S. history, the 1805 case Pierson v. Post, involves the hunting of a fox. I have no interest in hunting foxes (I only hunt for food, and not very successfully at that), but the legalities of that particular case have staying power for a reason. They hinge on the question of what grants ownership: labor or possession? Was it Post, who was hunting the fox, or Pierson, who actually killed it, who owned the animal in the end? New York State Supreme Court reversed a lower-court decision in Post’s favor and granted ownership to Pierson. The written decision reached back through centuries of legal thinking, drawing even from the Byzantine emperor Justinian I.

Law students—and people like me who read too much about this stuff—can get hung up for ages arguing about Blackstone and Locke and whether it was the labor of the hunt or the person who had physical possession in the end that determined ownership. Labor and possession are two keystones of property law.

Yet none of us asked: What about the fox herself?

How can ownership really be debated or discussed without considering whether every entity has rights in and of themselves? To exist, to wander freely, to sniff around a porch for food humans might have neglected to store. To decide they don’t want to hang out and play Unstable Unicorns.

The five of us were staying at this cabin in my usual run-away-from-election-news routine. I have an unfortunate emotional reaction to elections. I’m sure it’s not uncommon, but it’s exhausting and also completely useless to be refreshing news every few seconds, tracking outcomes to events that I have zero control over. A couple of years ago I started booking cabins far away from internet service over election days, and hope I can keep doing that as long as Montana still has early absentee voting widely available. Which might not be long.

When we drove up to the cabin, my sister said, “Are you f—ing kidding me?” in response to the stunning view, and I said, “When do they light the beacon fires?” because it really did look like that scene in the movie version of Lord of the Rings. This is from two people who live barely an hour’s drive away and grew up here. You’d think we’d be used to the beauty. You’d be wrong.

But I don’t just engage in this ritual so that I can get away from it all and admire the view. I persist in it because I want to spend that day reminding myself of why I care. I’m not interested in politics because I’m into politics. I’m interested, and emotionally invested, because I care about this world we all share, these ecological and social and spiritual commons. Going away to a silent river valley, spending all night feeding the wood stove every hour because it’s well below freezing, watching the sun rise over the mountains, being surprised by a fox—these things remind me why I volunteer in my community, why I encourage people to attend school board and city council meetings now and then, why keeping places like the North Fork free from too much human development is important, why the political bent of my home county breaks my heart all the time, and has done since I was a teenager.

It also reminds me that my heartbreak isn’t even a noticeable microbe in the span of geological time.

A few years ago we visited Zion National Park in Utah, another place of surreal beauty. I stopped on a trail to observe the facing cliff for a while, so tall it felt unreal. All that orange- and red-tinted rock, and somewhere deep down in the face, a single, narrow band of black. How much time did that band represent in the hundreds of feet of stone surrounding it? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Everything that happened in a span of time far beyond humans’ ability to grasp, pressed into that one bit of different-colored rock, a tiny note for future observers to see: Something happened here. For millennia. And yet in the vastness of geological time it barely left a mark.

Several hours after the fox left us, alpenglow from the sunset hit the snow-covered peaks of Glacier National Park (pictured below), looking deceptively like a sunrise, and barely forty-five minutes later the full moon rose behind them (pictured at the top of this post), covering the entire valley with the kind of unfiltered sky-light I sometimes forget exists, and we all stood in our pajamas and watched it, our breath spilling out into the frozen air.

I thought about the fox’s visit, and Pierson v. Post and the question of property, and how long ago it was that some humans decided to claim ownership over others—water, wildlife, women—and then create justifications for such claims through centuries of philosophical, religious, and legal argument. What could change if we inverted that relationship? If we started from an assumption that all beings own themselves, that every being has agency and choice?

Our lives are so short. The events that shake our worlds so brief, against the timespan of stone. No matter what is forgotten of these times—eventually, everything will be, and everything for hundreds and thousands of years on either side of us, even foxes and Unstable Unicorns—it still matters how we care for one another. How we practice kindness, how we love, how we watch the moon rise and whom we share it with.

The joys and the pains are not everything, but they are not nothing.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Science writer Sarah Boon had a piece recently in Electric Literature on 7 books about trees and humans’ relationship with them written by women.

• A reader on the recent post about Simon Winchester’s book Land linked to this story about a beautiful-sounding piece of filled land in Toronto that has become a haven for birds, butterflies, and, as is true of all such places, people.

• In September’s High Country News, I really loved this essay by Madhushree Ghosh that weaves together a story about Indian restaurants that cater to Sikh long-haul truckers in the U.S., and the history of Sikhism in India.

• A two-part podcast collaboration between Reveal News and ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) about Native American boarding schools and the lasting individual scars and intergenerational trauma they’ve created: “[Basil was just six years old when he was brought to live at Red Cloud.] I was in a state of shock, traumatized. . . . I didn’t cognitively understand what abandonment meant, but I knew what it feels like. Being left at a school, I felt taken away from my parents. It was very traumatizing. You block your emotions.”

• Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard opening arguments in a case challenging the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICT reports on the background of this case, but for a deep dive, This Land podcast’s series in ICWA is invaluable and important.

• A timely, nuanced essay by my friend Sarah Buttenweiser on being an adoptive parent and what “choice” really means when it comes to adoption: “Books like American Baby and The Girls Who Went Away convey the terrible harm done through shame and loss of one’s bodily agency, because adoption was imposed upon a young, pregnant woman. Rather than being her decision, adoption constituted an aggressive and assaultive act of family separation.”

• Kind of a random tangent, but as alpenglow is always a fascinating phenomenon and not everyone will have the chance to see it in their lifetimes, it’s interesting to read about what causes it. Landscape photographer Dan Bailey has a post explaining why he thinks it’s caused by direct sunlight, contradicting than the usual explanation of indirect light from the just-set sun.

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

Last week’s Threadable reading* was a selection from Simon Winchester’s book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World: pages 101-121 (Part II: Chapters 1 and 2).

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try Threadable and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now. For anyone new to On the Commons, an overview of this 12-week project is here.)

This book is not on archive.org nor is there a preview on Google Books or anywhere else that I can find. But I’m sure it’s widely available in libraries if you would like to read the selection.

I wasn’t originally going to include Land in my Threadable selections, mostly because I deeply disliked the book. (I am working on a review of it that will explain why more fully, and will share that later this week or early next. Generally I’m a Winchester fan, but am wondering if I’d think differently of his earlier books now.) But it does go into detail about a number of land ownership and theft injustices that few others have written about, which makes it important on its own, even with its flaws: the theft of land owned by Japanese-Americans when people were forced into camps during World War II, for example, and Stalin’s forced collectivization in Ukraine that resulted in millions starving to death in the Holodomor.

The reading from Land is a crossover selection that is also going to be used in Mike Sowden’s upcoming Threadable circle on geology (he’s currently doing one on colors, or colours since he’s British, and the Rebecca Solnit selection he chose from The Faraway Nearby was breathtaking; what a writer she is). The section we chose is mostly about the Netherlands and the country’s long life in the face of a sea that wants to swallow it.

Winchester begins by discussing what he calls “new” land, such the island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland that appeared in 1963; and the many islands frequently created in the Kingdom of Tonga.

It quickly moves to human-created habitable land, like Battery Park City in New York City and the fill that turned Stonecutters Island near Hong Kong into not-an-island. I often think of parts of Boston that I used to walk a lot when I lived there, all of which were built on fill-in land. I never liked Boston much (sorry!), but liked to wander that area because a great-grandmother (or great-great, I forget) of mine once lived there and went to the Episcopal church. She seemed to have a thing for the priest, judging by the clippings in her scrapbook. Though by “a thing,” I mean she seemed very inspired by his sermons.

The bulk of this selection from Land is about the Netherlands, though, and its centuries-long efforts to keep its lands . . . land. That is, solid ground. Especially over the last century—Winchester’s most focused writing here is on the dam built to wall off the Zuider Zee and bring in people to populate and farm the newly available land. He goes into a fair bit of detail on how important it was that the land not just be populated, but privatized, and by the “right” kind of people, though he never really talks about what that means aside from a religious balance that reflects the country’s split between mostly Catholic and Protestant.

This reading selection demonstrates many of Winchester’s strengths, as well as his weaknesses. As I commented within Threadable, he’s at his best when describing these kinds of big technological projects—it’s what made The Map That Changed the World such a compelling read—but turns out to be on less solid ground when talking about impacts of these activities and choices on people and the rest of an ecosystem.

Which also brought to mind something I think about maybe far too often, which is how Singapore is slowly growing in physical size by mining sand from Cambodia, putting the lives and livelihoods and ecosystems of many Cambodian islanders at risk. (That link is to a 16-minute documentary on Aeon, well worth watching.) What does it means to “reclaim” land? Or to build “new land”? At whose cost? Not just human, but everything.

It was interesting to read about the work on the Zuider Zee and Holland’s polder system that refers specifically to land “reclaimed” from a river or the sea. What I found myself stumbling over was a lot of human-centric language and assumptions about what “progress” really means, so some questions I’ll leave you with:

• What do we mean by “reclaimed” land? It seems obvious that it means “land humans couldn’t previously live on permanently but now can,” but how would we think about this with a deeper understanding of ecology and how we might live within ecosystems?

• Winchester barely touches on how climate change might affect some of the places he discusses (having been through the book process, I did wonder if his editor prompted these questions and he squeezed in some thoughts), but it’s worth talking about more. How much do you invest—with time, money, materials, and energy—into keeping nature at bay?

That’s it! I’m going to be spreading these readings out just a touch more—more like 10 days rather than a week apart. Please tell me if you’d like even more space between these posts, too. There’s no deadline. This isn’t a class or a course. Land ownership will be here, unfortunately, long after I’m dead. And nobody benefits when I dictate a reading pace.

My part of Montana has turned snowy and bitterly cold. Just the way I like it. Unfortunately, it also resulted in a lot of broken tree limbs, downed trees, and power outages. A mixed bag. I hope wherever you are reading this, you have weather that breathes life into you.

Walking composition

“It doesn’t make you a hero just because everybody else didn’t do their job.” —A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher

Hunting season has started in Montana (rifle season, that is; archery season opened ages ago but I am not a bow hunter), which means I’m constantly distracted these days by getting ready to go into the woods, wishing I were in the woods, or being in the woods. Though that last hopefully means I’m being attentive rather than distracted.

I love hunting. Not because I love the potential moment of violence inherent in the process; I love it because the attention required is so achingly slow that it feels like it sinks into the soil with the moss and fallen leaves. It could become part of the earth’s humus if you stayed there long enough. Every step has my attention, every breeze-danced branch from the trees, every hint of tan color around the bend of a hill. The way I breathe, the way my braid brushes my coat if I’ve forgotten to clip up my hair. How cold my hands are, how heavy the rifle is on my shoulder. The twigs and fresh deer poop and carpet of larch needles underfoot. The scolding squirrels and the arrival of winter one slow-falling aspen leaf at a time.

Every now and then I come upon a flock of chickadees twittering and flickering wildly among a clutch of trees, which was what happened on a recent afternoon as I walked in the rain and the light slowly faded from the woods. So I sat on a hillside and watched them fly around until sunset neared with no deer in sight and the wet, chill air sank through my layers and I wished I could stay all night.

Light rainfall in the woods.

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

Last week’s Threadable reading* consisted of two documents:

• The original Charter of the Forest, a companion document to the Magna Carta, signed in 1217 by the regent for King Henry III and reaffirmed by Henry III in 1225; and

• Two excerpts from Pace University law professor Nicholas A. Robinson’s book chapter “The Charter of the Forest: Evolving Human Rights in Nature” (Part I: Introduction: The Forest Charter in a Nutshell, starting on page 317; and Part IV: Substantive Provisions of the Forest Charter, starting on page 339)

*(https://threadablenative.page.link/Rxp8yegeZ1vXy4u19 if you want to try Threadable and need the link! Only works on iOS/Apple devices for now. For anyone new to On the Commons, an overview of this 12-week project is here.)

Both of these documents are freely available online through the links above. The original Forest Charter is straightforward in its provisions but challenging to read due to the arcane and obsolete language; the second selection (Part IV) from Robinson’s legal paper lists its provisions in (mostly) plain modern English.

I spent some hours last week looking up and defining words like swanimote and freemen (the rights detailed in the Charter are for “freemen”—that is, not serfs, who were considered property; one medievalist estimated that only about 1 in 5 English men at this point in time would have been freemen, and I won’t go into the status of women because I’ll just get sidetracked by rage).

An entire list of these definitions would be a lot of clutter-text, so I’ll just define a few important ones. Feel free to ask for any others in the comments if you want or need and I’ll answer there.

• forest: “The Norman definition of Forest extended beyond wooded areas and was used to describe any rural area that contained useful natural resources such as wood or peat, or where animals that provided game for sport and meat for aristocratic tables resided. These areas were often enclosed and became the exclusive property of the Angevin royal family. This state of affairs existed as a result of a perversion of the Norman forest laws that had been imported by William the Conqueror and applied to his new Kingdom of England in 1066.” (This is from an article by medievalist Timothy R. Jones on the lasting importance of the Forest Charter: https://www.medievalists.net/2020/02/charter-forest/)

• afforested/disafforested: “Afforestation” was the practice of expanding Royal Forests; “disafforestation” was forcing the monarch to give up lands they’d previously claimed as Royal property. Almost a third of England had been claimed as Royal Forest by this time, and disafforestation was one of the main purposes of forcing Henry III to sign the Charter of the Forest.

• swanimote: “A court formerly held before foresters, verderers, and other forest officers to try offenses against vert and venison and to hear grievances against forest officers.” (Oxford English Dictionary; also: vert is greenery, and venison, according to one source, applied to any game animals of the forest, not just deer—rabbits, for example)

• lawing of dogs: “The cutting of several claws of the forefeet of dogs in the forest, to prevent their running at deer.” (Black’s Law Dictionary)

• demesne: “Possession (of real estate) as one’s own. Chiefly the phrase ‘to hold in demesne’ (tenure in dominico), i.e. in one’s own hands as possessor by free tenure.” (Oxford English Dictionary, definition of demesne as related to the law)

(I love the richness of words, so didn’t mind doing this and don’t mind doing more if you can’t find something. Part of me still just wants to be an etymologist.)

This note I left on Threadable gets at one of the reasons I think the Charter of the Forest is so important for people to get to know:

The Forest Charter is a crucial document because it’s an early example of how fluid private property rights can be, and how much people disagreed over claiming and enforcing of those rights even 800 years ago. William the Conqueror simply declared vasts sections of common land to be Royal Forest, starting in 1066, and subsequent kings expanded those claims. Literal bloody battles were fought to push back on royal assertions over land.

Getting Henry III to sign the Charter of the Forest (in 1225—his regent had initially done so in 1217; Henry was 9 years old at that time) and agree to disafforestation wasn’t the last of these battles. In the parts of Nicholas A. Robinson’s paper that isn’t in the reading, he goes into detail about these power struggles over the centuries. Extensive afforestation was one of the major complaints against King Charles I that led him being beheaded, for example.

Getting a good grasp of what rights of sustenance and land English people nearly a thousand years ago insisted they had feels necessary to getting our heads around the idea that, whatever the dominant culture currently thinks of as private property rights over land, they have always been subject to change. Not only that, but defining the parameters of those rights spills out into many other areas of our lives.

Robinson’s paper focuses on this legacy. He writes about how the Forest Charter informs modern environmental laws, but more importantly—to me—he focuses on the ways in which the practice of defending the Charter of the Forest and the subsistence rights it details was the means by which the more abstract human rights listed in the Magna Carta were also defended and defined. For most of the past 800 years, he says, the Forest Charter was the more well-known and important of the two documents. It was the crucible in which human rights were shaped.

Some questions and thoughts I left in the Threadable version of the readings:

• What is the relationship between physical rights and more abstract rights? How do these interactions relate to land access or lack thereof? (It seems to me that it’s hard to have rights of freedom if you aren’t also guaranteed rights of survival.)

• Related to that, where does law come from? Reading these documents, it felt to me that laws are first born out of interactions with the physical land we live on and with—and all the other people who do the same.

• How might a study of the Forest Charter change how we view property law? Should property law have embedded in it a right of survival for everyone else? What about Rights of Nature?

• Could different societies be served now by modern equivalents of the Charter of the Forest, maybe centered around management of commons?

Take your time with these. The struggles over land ownership, property rights, and rights of subsistence have been going on for an unimaginably long time, and none of them are going to come to a resolution next week. Or next year. Or next millennium, probably. But better understanding their roots might help us envision a different way forward.

Next week’s selection will be from Simon Winchester’s new book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World (Chapters 1 and 2 of Part II). After that, we’ll be delving into the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, its progenitor the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery, and the ongoing consequences of both.

A little private property trespass to start your week with.

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

Last week’s Threadable reading* was a selection from law professor Erik T. Freyfogle’s book The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good: pages 16 (starting after the section break at “What, then, are the fundamental elements of private property?”) through 36 (end of the chapter).

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

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the book on archive.org, but most of the selection is on Google Books, which has pages 16-35. There’s only half a page after that and the line that I chose this selection for, which ends the chapter: “To study property law is to gain insights into society as a whole: where it has been, what it values, and where it wants to go.”

The chapter opens with a 1993 case from Iowa, but since the selection starts after that case is detailed, I gave a brief overview of it in a comment:

(The Google Books Preview has that first part of the chapter, starting on page 11, if you’d rather just read it.)

The Land We Share is a very readable set of legal cases, starting from the earliest days of the United States’ existence and tracing the evolution of private property rights. The Bormann case referenced above is a tangled culmination of our latest legal iterations, which has allowed the narrative of property rights to be framed by those who believe in absolute private property rights—as if, somehow, one’s rights to use land and resources cannot ever affect or be affected by others—and who have enshrined the idea that private profit is almost always a public good.

The Bormanns won their suit through a nuisance law approach: by their county rezoning land to allow a CAFO, it was creating a nuisance that decreased others’ property values and eroded their own rights. “Nuisance law,” wrote Freyfogle,

“enhances and protects property rights at the same time as it limits them.

To recognize this practical fact is to see why ‘absolute ownership’—viewed by some as the baseline of private property—literally makes no sense. What could absolute ownership mean when ownership necessarily includes both a right to use land and a right to complain about interferences by neighbors?”

No property ownership or property use, in other words, ever exists in a vacuum.

I often turn back to Freyfogle in part for his extensive legal scholarship on this subject, especially as it’s so accessible for a layperson; but even more for his repeated approaches to the idea of law as a story.

Property law, he states in as many ways and through as many examples as possible, reflects the values of a society at a given time. That’s why I like the quote at the end of the chapter, “To study property law is to gain insights into society as a whole: where it has been, what it values, and where it wants to go.” I really think this is true.

Some things to think about while reading:

• Freyfogle has a continuous focus on balancing the rights of individual property owners with the community they exist in. To me, this fits in naturally with Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons-based land use systems and her idea of “nested” commons agreements. But there are a lot of different ways to think about this balance. Are there situations in your own community where it applies?

• What kinds of arguments successfully persuade large portions of a population that land ownership rights should be, or even could be, absolute?

• On the last page, Freyfogle mentions the problems posed by interpreting property rights in the abstract, instead of understanding them as tied to the ecosystems they’re located in. That is, not all rights—or uses—are appropriate for every bit of land. Are there ways that private property laws can be written and interpreted to be ecology-based, flexible according to the varied environments they’re applied to?

Trying to keep this shorter this time, so I’ll stop there! I really like this book. An environmental lawyer friend recommended it to me years ago, and it’s Freyfogle who (in Chapter 4 in this book) introduced me to Henry George’s Progress & Poverty, which has been so influential on my thinking with regards to the injustices of land ownership.

Walking composition

"But to me the exile's always wretched,
Like a convict, or a patient.
Wanderer your road is dark,
And the bread of strangers tastes bitter."
—from "I'm not one of those who left their land," Anna Akhmatova*

Last weekend I had to force myself go for a walk. After several years of writing and researching about walking, I still have to do this sometimes: make myself walk when I know I need it.

I was in a glum mood, sad and bordering on grumpy, and it was a beautiful day with no commitments. My brother-in-law had sent me an album with a melancholy but light tone appropriate to my mood and the sun-dappled day. I’ve mostly weaned myself off of listening to something while walking but felt like it that day. Sometimes the right music can short-circuit the ruminations.

And so I walked for two hours, a lot of it through parts of town I rarely visit—where there are new bike and pedestrian paths!—and along the river, where I looked for and did not see any muskrats.

Toward the end of that time, when I emerged to visit the grocery store and walk home along the highway, I felt better.

I spent years researching walking. I wrote a book about it. I walked thousands of miles. I believe in what walking can do for each of us and our communities. And somehow I still have to drag myself out on a regular basis, prove to myself once again its potential for knitting good back into our lives.

When I went away to a forest service cabin again for a couple of days this week, I found myself reading through four books on walking and movement. The themes are ones I’ve explored countless times: grounding, community, physical and mental health, and what it means to reconnect with ourselves and the world around us. It amazes me how something you’ve encountered a hundred times can still feel new.

One of the other books I finished was Orlando Figes’s new book The Story of Russia. It read as a little hurried, as if the writing and publication were rushed, and certainly not as in-depth as his cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance, but as an overview of the mythologies that have shaped Russia’s self-perceptions, it’s pretty good.

“History and myth—and the Putin regime’s use of both,” wrote Figes, “should be reconsidered if we want to understand where Russia’s story is heading.”

“People were confused by the loss of Communism as a system of beliefs and practices. They fell into a moral vacuum. . . . The need to believe in something, anything, that offers hope, is a constant thread of Russian social history, as we have seen. The harder life in Russia is, the more its people hold on to beliefs that give them faith in salvation.”

Is this, though, that different from any other culture? I’ve seen firsthand how powerful these myths are in Russia, how the penchant for fatalism (which I’m also often guilty of) combines with a belief in their own superiority to toxic effects. But I only have to look around my own surrounding communities to feel that this is a matter of degree rather than of kind.

Konstantin Kustanovich likewise focused on the mythologies Russia tells itself (and I think better) in his book Russian and American Cultures, examining the abiding power of ancient Kievan Rus along with the idea that it is up to Russians, especially the devout, to ensure the salvation of humanity. Both books make extensive reference to the elusive and ever-romanticized mythology of a pure Russian soul, and the extent to which the Russian Orthodox Church has determined the country’s self-image and social structures:

“The tsar’s authority was founded on the myth of his divine status as an agent of God’s rule in Holy Russia, the last surviving seat of the true Orthodox faith in the Third Rome anthology. In the popular religious consciousness, always a medium for political ideas, Russia was the land of salvation, a new Israel where freedom, truth and justice would be given to people by their holy tsar.”

Figes does a good job linking the ancient near-worship of tsars, the “little-father tsar” or tsar-batiushka, to Russians’ seemingly endless appetite for strongman leaders like Putin; and tracing the entanglement of Ukraine not just in Russia’s self-mythologies about the soul of Russia and the destiny of a Russian empire, but through centuries of battle with invaders and rulers from Mongolia and Europe. The Golden Horde’s 14th-century rule over Russia, I read years ago, had left a dent in the country’s psychology, and a “fear of encirclement,” that abides to this day. The theft of Crimea in 2014 wasn’t the first battle over that territory Russia has had, and the country’s view of itself as a Euro-Asian empire is something that few even in the intelligentsia understand.

It’s a complicated history, but whose nation’s isn’t?

The first city I ever spent time walking in was Moscow. I was 14 when we moved there, and my sister was 10, and we would spend hours walking the city together after our intensive morning Russian lessons.

I fell in love with the country then, with its literature and art, its music and the little notes of tradition that make up a culture—the complete lack of privacy in people’s tiny communal apartments, and their endless capacity to feed us chai and varenye—strong black tea and over-sweet jam; the way my grandmother’s apartment building in Leningrad smelled strongly of cucumber, and how everyone knew the same folk songs and poetry.

The cities of Russia are full of walkers, as is the countryside. My aunts and uncle and cousins think nothing of walking an entire long August day in search of mushrooms and berries. Sometimes I wonder: if walking is so powerful, as I believe it is, how can a nation full of wanderers be so ready to support acts of anger, hate, and violence?

But as with complicated histories, that question could be asked of any of us. What is that extra effort we could make, that extra step we could take, that could erode the ease with which we dismiss and dehumanize others and justify the worst of ourselves?

*This was the best online translation I could find of this Anna Akhmatova poem, but there are variations, and I think better translations, out there in print form.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• An interview I did in June with Wellevate Life just came out—talking about walking, of course: going barefoot a lot as a kid and the full-body joy of cracking ice underfoot, as well as some of the science of bipedalism. The host Irina Sharma reads a letter at the beginning, one she sent me about a year ago. I will never get tired of people’s stories about their deep relationship with walking.

• Your Undivided Attention podcast had Dr. Courtney Cogburn and Professor Jeremy Bailenson talking about how a humane and ethical metaverse could, and should, be built.

• Archaeologist Chris Fisher in Sapiens on the potential of high-resolution lidar and the urgent need for a full mapping of Earth with the Earth Archive Project before more is lost: “Such a project will serve both as a record of the state of the planet as it exists now, to help scientists better understand how it is changing, and as a ‘virtual planet’ that can serve as a precious gift for future generations.” (I’m not totally convinced; on the other hand, it is always cool to see some of the under-surface realities that lidar reveals.)

• Grant Piper on Medium with a short overview of Americans’ obsession with having ice in our drinks and how it all started in the 19th century with the Ice King of Boston: “In places like Havannah, Savannah, and Calcutta, an ice-cold drink in the dead of summer was a godsend. He started giving away ice for free for drinks hoping to get people hooked.” (Would be nice to see the commodity aspect, only touched on here, expanded, and a lot more about the energy demands of this luxury.)

• An overview on Motherboard of a collaborative effort to grant oceans legal Rights of Nature: “This abandonment of our human responsibility to the ocean, along with a denial that humans are completely interconnected with these systems, is also at the heart of the climate and marine pollution crises.”

• Charlotte Jee in MIT Technology Review on digital technology that allows us to speak to deceased relatives. “Are we ready?” she asks. (NO.) “Any service that allows you to create a digital replica of someone without their participation raises some complex ethical issues regarding consent and privacy. While some might argue that permission is less important with someone no longer alive, can’t you also argue that the person who generated the other side of the conversation should have a say too? And what if that person is not, in fact, dead?” (I’ve been trying to maintain some sympathy for this desire for after-life interaction. After all, my older sister is not the only person horrified that I burn all of my personal journals in the hottest fires I can build.)

• I loved listening to this interview with Lee Mills, a conductor with the Seattle Symphony, which his mother sent to me. Lee and I come from the same small Montana town—Belgrade—and our parents were good friends throughout my childhood. (His father’s auto body shop sponsored my T-ball team, and his mother sent the interview to me because the family he mentions at the beginning, who gave them a small piano, was mine.) It’s always a delight when a good person becomes successful at something they love, and Mills’s ability to talk about music’s relationship with physics was just beautiful.

• I keep rereading Chris La Tray’s poem “Radical Hospitality” on Grotto:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  "Given all of our
  wreaked havoc on the world,
  whose hospitality
  is most radical?"

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

This post is for anyone interested in reading about and/or discussing land ownership in parallel with the reading circle I’m leading on Threadable. If you can access Threadable and want to try it, I recommend diving into other circles, too—I’ve been enjoying reading Cadillac Desert with the Water Politics and the World circle; and the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case Tanner v. United States with the hosts of 5-4, a podcast about “how much the Supreme Court sucks.”

Last week the social reading app Threadable launched several reading circles, including the one I’m leading, Land Ownership: Who Owns the Earth and Why? By request, I’m experimenting with facilitating discussions here on On the Commons for those who can’t (or don’t want to!) participate in the Threadable app, particularly since it’s currently only developed for iOS (Apple devices).

Threadable uploads the texts I’ve chosen, where people can then comment on passages and discuss the reading. Obviously, I can’t do that here—copyright issues among other things—but I can tell you what we’re reading, share the ideas and questions that have come up, and, thanks to reader Jake, who told me about archive.org (how have I never come across this before?!), can also recommend creating a free account there to borrow the book online and read the selection. If you want to. I’m not a teacher, there are no grades or other assessments, and there’s no requirement to read the chapter in order to participate in the discussion.

The first text for Land Ownership is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, pages 9-23.

Linklater’s earlier books, such as Measuring America, have to do with land surveys. In Owning the Earth, he digs underneath those survey lines to look at where the idea of private land ownership started and how revolutionary, destructive, and creative it has been—though I’m not totally sold on the creative aspect. Many of the “creative” and beneficial consequences of private land ownership he points to seem to be fixes for earlier feudal systems that were in themselves unequal and unjust and just generally awful for most people (looking at you, Russian serfdom).

I chose Owning the Earth because Linklater’s overview of private land ownership is so far unequalled—where it’s taken hold, why, how it spread, and what the consequences have been. Later in the book he details many community-oriented land sharing systems that were, or still are in some cases, more commons-based, but in this first chapter he introduces us to the idea that private, individual land ownership, when it first came into being, was massively disruptive.

With that, here are some of the quotes highlighted and questions prompted in the reading—respond to as little or as much as you like, or talk about something else entirely:

• (Emphasis added to the quote below.) Discuss:

“The way you own the earth requires the agreement of your neighbors, the society you live in, and the government of your country. In a very fundamental way, it is the glue that holds a community together. And every society agrees that it cannot in fact be owned.”

• Chapter 1 starts in the 15th-century house Linklater lived in (he was Scottish) and his musing on the rumblings of private property and enclosure that led to the building of a chimney and private bedroom in the house. He writes of the original builder thinking about himself as an owner of land in a way that was completely new in societies across Europe.
  My question is: What changes in our relationship to nature and other humans, the world, when we see ourselves as owners of nature and land rather than part of it, or in relationship with it, without owning.

• A key part of Linklater’s work throughout this book is showing how many different ways there are, and have been, of owning land throughout the world. None of them are set in stone. All of them are cultural.

• Linklater describes a desire for privacy and comfort that inspired some new practices. Question: How far can a person take a desire for privacy and comfort—in the 15th century or now, for example for the introverts among us (including me)—before acting on it begins to have a detrimental effect on others?
  Below is the highlighted quote from the book with the comment from a reader:

• The focus of this chapter is to introduce the revolutionary aspect of private land ownership through the practice of land enclosure that really took off in the 1400s in England. Enclosure, by which people with means and pre-existing ownership claimed common land for their own, for profit, had violent and far-reaching effects (many of which, while Linklater details them, I feel he later glosses over in tone and a bit of a “but progress” reverence):

“In a single day in 1567, Sir Thomas Gray of Chillingham in the north of England cleared off his manor no fewer than 340, villains, cottagers, and laborers whose right to work their plots of land existed simply by tradition. Whole villages and townships were soon emptied—in Shakespeare’s county of Warwickshire alone, sixty-one villages were wiped out before the year 1500.”

• There was a period when it was legal to enslave homeless people in England, such as under the Vagrancy Act of 1547, which came out of the forced removals that made enclosure possible:

“So many peasants were driven off the manors that once supported them, they were deemed a menace to England’s emergent property-owning society. New legislation condemned homeless people without means of support as ‘rogues and vagabonds’ who were liable to branding with a red-hot iron if found begging in the highway.”

• How much modern chatter about homelessness is that different from a few hundred years ago? And how different, truly, are the causes? Below is a relevant quote from a reader from Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516:

• The concept of “home” can be visceral. Who does not crave a sense of home? And what happens when others’ ownership makes “home” tenuous? (Emphasis added in quote below.)

“Yet that was the very point of the revolution, to allow one person to profit from the land, regardless of the consequences to the community.”

• There are many lines in here that make me want entirely different essays, like this one: “Living in a private property society encourages a primacy of self,” on which I left this question:

• Owning land does not exist in a vacuum. It is dependent on the surrounding commons and people who live on them, and it affects them in turn. (This is something discussed more in next week’s reading from law professor Erik T. Freyfogle’s The Land We Share.)

• How do you get such a massive spectrum of land access that includes a Swedish- or Scottish-style extensive “right to roam” (which applies anywhere on private land and includes uses like camping and foraging) and “Trespassers will be shot” attitudes that pervade places like Montana?

• How does ownership relate to a sense of security, or fear of scarcity?

• Not within the reading or the comments, but something I’m perennially interested in because it played a pivotal role in enclosures of the commons, the Highland Clearances, and continues today in public lands grazing rights and battles in the American West: what is it about sheep?

I’d like this to be a discussion open for anyone who wants to participate, without my own narrative framework around it or paywall limitations. Feel free to share. I’ve got readings lined up for 12 weeks, including selections from a variety of books as well as original texts like the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the 1823 court case Johnson v. McIntosh that enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery in U.S. land ownership law, and the 15th-century papal bulls that make up that Doctrine.

This is a bit of an experiment, and I think of it as something we’re doing collectively, rather than something I’m leading. Do you want more time to read and think? More quotes? Fewer quotes? Just one prompt to get started? Let’s figure it out together.

I hope it’ll all be thought-provoking and that we can discuss these concepts with curiosity. Giving one another, as always, a little bit of grace.

All our lives are the commons

There are a lot of new subscribers here at On the Commons, thanks, I think, to Mike Sowden’s overly generous interview with me on Everything Is Amazing. (I’m looking forward to the second half where we geek out over science fiction because I am always ready to geek out over science fiction, which is far more interesting than any words I put out in the world. Let’s talk about Murderbot or A Memory Called Empire and who gets to define personhood, or how climate collapse and societal decay intertwine in The Parable of the Sower, or the power of enforced and self-policed speech, and even perception, in The City & the City, or resource governance and self-determination in The Expanse . . . )

However you got here, welcome. Feel free to ask anything (within reason), either in the comments here or by emailing me directly. As always, if it’s not your thing, no hard feelings. And if you want to go for the paid version but can’t pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set you up, no questions asked.

There are three basic formats to posts from On the Commons (four with the Threadable reading circle, which you can read about here; just scroll past the part about the bear that got into a neighbor’s outdoor chest freezer):
1) intermittent longer essays on a variety of subjects, from highways to authoritarianism;
2) upcoming chapters from my book-in-progress No Trespassing on private property and the commons (these will come slowly over at least two years); and
3) what I call “walking compositions,” weekly-ish, which are a kind of triptych three-section mini-essay combined with a curated list of reading, podcast, and sometimes video suggestions.

I haven’t explained the walking composition concept in a long time (have I ever?), but there’s a story behind that title.

A few years back, when I first started writing my book A Walking Life, I was lucky enough to be accepted at an interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The Banff Centre is a gift to any artist—space, time, beauty, long walks into the mountains or along the river, and really good food. I’ve attended residencies there twice and always dream of going back. Except for the part where the institution is largely funded by tar sands oil money. Which makes it . . . difficult.

I applied for this one because Pico Iyer was heading the writing portion, and the entire residency was structured around the ideas he’d expressed recently in his TED talk and accompanying book The Art of Stillness. It was an Art of Stillness-focused residency that brought together musicians, writers, dancers, choreographers, composers, and visual artists. (Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire led the music section of the residency, and, in addition to being an authentically interesting and down to earth person, managed to completely change my mind about cover songs, which I had never liked—“You mean folk music?” he said.)

The second residency I attended there was one of the writers-only ones and, much as I enjoyed it, I’d take an interdisciplinary group any day. I learned so much from the other artists in that first residency, from the dancer who would spontaneously perform for me outside my studio window, to Christopher House, the choreographer who guided a movement meditation for an hour every morning and who reminded us throughout each session that we were “exploring the deep ethics of optimism,” which I’m still attempting to achieve.

One of the composers in my group, Alex Mah, created works like nothing I’d ever experienced before. In one performance, he had a pile of words on pieces of paper, and sang a kind of dialogue with another singer as they pulled words out one by one. It sounds simple but the way he did it was not. I wish I could fully describe what he does because not much of his work is online. There are some videos, like this one, but they don’t really capture the sensory experience of watching his work, much of which incorporates pauses in a way that gives them texture, a world of their own.

As we were preparing to leave the residency at the end of two weeks, Alex handed me a sheet of paper with what he said was a walking composition for me, like a musical score.

I’d learned by then that when Alex structured words and spaces in particular ways it was for good reason—he wasn’t just decorating the paper. The composition isn’t only the instructions written down, the strolling and treading and so on; it’s the way it’s shaped on the page, how he wrote it. Which, six years later, I still struggle to understand. The only way I’ll ever be able to gain some insight is by continuing to do the practice.

I started performing the walking compositions literally: 500 steps each day, strolling, meandering, pausing once to breathe for a while, all of it. I used Instagram as a small way to share that experiment with the world and ended up pairing a quote from something I was reading or listening to with a photo I took while performing the walking composition.

When I left Instagram and started this newsletter, I pulled that practice over with me. It’s changed, mostly because my words aren’t limited to a brief social media post. But the picture, quote, and thoughts all still entangle themselves in what I experience as a walking composition.

The topics of these triptych mini-essays range freely, from gardening experiments—why won’t the beets grow? (it was the soil; thank you for the advice, elm) how do we have zero cucumbers one year and a zillion the next? and always, always, the battle with knapweed and thistles—to skiing to hunting season to Russia to books I’m reading, whether science fiction or research on private property and the commons. Pretty much anything I end up walking with.

Which often might feel tangential, aside from the gardening with its obvious seeds and soil and commodified food aspect. What does this have to do with the commons?

Part of the reason I think the commons is so important to reinvigorate is because enclosure isn’t just of land and resources but of ideas and experience. A sense of scarcity and competition infiltrates every aspect of our lives. Even the idea of opening up a country’s history to narratives and realities that had previously been oppressed, if not outright killed, is seen as a threat to survival. Of what? Of identities, of a story we’re told, and tell ourselves, about what a society is and what it can be. And so that story becomes enclosed—impervious, its defenders hope, to outside influences.

These stories are commons, too.

Every thought we explore, every cucumber seed we plant, every forest we breathe in and path we walk, every essay that goes viral, every individual experience denied for the sake of another hot take, every child struggling over a poorly-worded math problem or a grief they’re not allowed to articulate, every fence posted with a “No Trespassing” sign, every community destroyed in extraction of a commodity it lives near, every life we injure or enrich, is the commons. Simply by existing, we are in the commons and of the commons.

I touched on this idea briefly toward the end of the original essay I wrote on the commons for Aeon,

“Troubling implications of our fetish for private property abound, well beyond the question of land ownership: the rights of companies to patent and therefore privatise seeds, taking access to food out of the public realm. Battles over open-source computer programming and whether libraries should be privatised bring into question who gets access to the powers of information and creation. . . . our very genes and tissues can be collected, traded, tested, and sold as private property, a prospect many people find appalling. It’s a long road from owning a mobile phone or a quarter-acre lot of surveyed subdivision to owning your genetic information, but all of these examples fall into the question of who owns what. Arguments in favour of preserving the public commons against private interest could be made for every one of them.”

and will explore them more fully in No Trespassing (an overview of that project is here).

When I told Alex Mah after a couple of years that I was still using the composition he wrote for me, he gave me another that instructed me to walk backward for a hundred steps. Which I did, on an ocean-pounded beach in Norfolk, on my way to view a village where 800,000-year-old fossilized hominin footprints had been found before they dissolved into the sea. What did I learn from walking backwards? I don’t know. But it’s something that I remember, the press of my boots on the sand, the roar of the relentless ocean, the feel of the mud cliff walls crumbling as I pulled out a tiny piece of flint rock.

I’ve walked enough by now to know that it’s those memories full of sensory detail—traffic on a city bridge in Pittsburgh, chickadees calling outside my home in early spring, the broken cobblestones of a Boston sidewalk, the particular scent of imminent snow, a child’s scream of frustration, a lover’s glance in the sunlight—those are the memories that stick around, that make a life.

I retained the title “walking composition” because I’m still walking, still thinking, still reading, still wondering, still taking a photo and pairing it with a quote. So is everyone, even without the photos and quotes. I’d love to have us all head out right now, every day in fact, and each find our own walking composition. Isn’t that, in a way, what resistance is—finding and fighting for our own ways to be in the world? Isn’t that what living is?

Walking is always a composition. We compose our lives by walking through them, however that looks and whatever that entails. Every part of that experience is our commons.

I’ve put over 5,000 miles on these boots. We’ve meandered and wandered, trudged and trespassed. We’ve walked so many stories together, and I hope will walk many more.

Walking composition

“Walking teaches patience. It works as an antidote against fear. It erodes cynicism about the violence of fellow Homo sapiens. In its capacity to sustain hope, it makes you a baby again.” —Paul Salopek, from “Cracked World,” Out of Eden Walk

Quick note on Threadable: Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Land Ownership reading circle! And, very seriously, thank you for your patience with the link confusion (see previous post). Please email me if you’re still having trouble. Once you’re on Threadable, there are also other great reading circles to join, like “Water Politics and the World” and “Against Oppression: Black Antifascism(s).”
Our first reading is Chapter 1 of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, which is uploaded on the app and ready for reading and commenting. Next week I will come up with a discussion forum format about the text on this newsletter. From here on out, I’ll put a “Threadable” subhead on any posts related to that project so you don’t have to read about it if you don’t want to!

Last week I stayed at a Forest Service cabin within a couple hours’ drive of my house. It’s one of my favorite places to be because there’s no internet or even electricity (gas light and stove) and rarely any other people nearby; but it does have the deep nighttime darkness that provides a dazzling starscape once the moon has set.

I sorted through a huge pile of research, read books, sat by the creek for long periods, and got to explore parts of my mind and self I hadn’t spent much time with in a while.

Audio respite: a little over a minute and a half of this babbling creek.

I was sweeping the floor just before leaving the place when I noticed how deeply worn down the sill of the door was. Many of these cabins are old homestead places, but this one was built—if I remember right—by the Forest Service itself for fire crews working in the area. In the nearby campground the evening before, I’d talked with a man who told me that when he was a child the cabin was in active use all the time, people cooking indoors and tents filling the yard outside.

I couldn’t help but think of all the shoes being scraped of dirt that had worn down the wood under the door. A long, clean curve dipped down from the edges, rubbed smooth like stone steps hundreds of years old whose edges have seen lives beyond count.

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For some reason the door sill brought to mind the time my college roommate and I were driving back to St. Paul, Minnesota, after she’d spontaneously hauled me off to see the Ramones in Seattle. How she had called me out of the blue from a payphone in Glendive, Montana, the week before to tell me she’d be picking me up in a couple of hours; and I had to tell her no, it’ll be at least ten hours, and what that exchange taught me about experience and perception—she was from Kentucky and had never been further west than St. Paul. Despite its accurate mile measurements, the road map had given her no concept of how large Montana actually was, how vast the distances are in the American West. Perception is a strange thing, shifting and directing our lives and expectations in ways mostly invisible to us.

One of the most enjoyable books I read last year was Micaiah Johnson’s science fiction novel The Space Between Worlds. The unknowable space between universes, filled with vast coldness and a vigilant goddess, makes an obvious analogy to the unknowable spaces between people, but Johnson does a beautiful job of explicitly drawing out that tension—how little we often know of one another, and how much our expectations and fixed perceptions fill in the gaps.

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Our footsteps leave innumerable stories as they press the ground, the road, the sill of a door. For each foot that scraped itself against that door frame, how many of them carried longing or fear or rage or a broken heart? What of my own story did I leave underfoot every time I stepped over that sill? What ghost of a former self will greet me next time I return?

Footprints and paths, traces of others’ existences, are a delight to me, much as I crave being in places where other people aren’t. The little reminders that people have had entire lives in places I visit cast me back to my own past selves, the way we change throughout our lives and have to become reacquainted with our selves, and one another, all over again. I once drove long hours with a girl from Kentucky to see the Ramones, and we danced in the mosh pit and drove back and broke down in Wenatchee and slept in the car for days and eventually picked up a hitchhiker named Rainbow and when we got to St. Paul he read our tarot in thanks for the ride and . . . and all of that, the 19-year-old who was there, is still here, too, driving across the plains and listening to the Ramones and wondering about all the past selves everyone else carries with them. And contemplating the spaces between us all.

The top photo and this one are not from that cabin, but of a hike I took a few days before. It starts from a fire lookout that you can just barely see on one of the hilltops in the top photo. This is bear poop. The berries were weeks gone from this altitude but the poop relatively fresh by the time I walked here—I wonder where it had been eating?

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Probably my favorite online magazine to read and to write for, Aeon, just turned ten years old, and they’ve asked contributors to reshare particular essays, in my case “Riot Acts,” a 2019 essay on the misunderstood psychology of riots and the real-life injustices behind many mass actions.

• I’ve enjoyed all of Andro Linklater’s books, Owning the Earth most of all. His original interest was in public land surveys and their effects on land, people, and ownership, which he explored in Measuring America and also in “Life, liberty, property,” published in Prospect Magazine in 2002: “In fact, the concept [of private land ownership] would have confused most people in the 17th century other than the English.”

• Samuel Clowes Huneke with “Toward a queer theory of the state” in The Point. Anything that talks about Foucault and Derrida and “the dialectic” tends to be miles above my head, but I found the interrogation of state power and what a state is intriguing: “The question, then, is if it’s possible to work out a theory of the state that weds the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory to the empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be. But could any queer thinker today figure out what such a polity would look like?” He really stuck the landing on the end of this essay, too.

• Konda Mason of Jubilee Justice speaking on the Frontiers of Commoning podcast about land theft, land trusts, and food sovereignty: “The way it works in America is that it’s private property, and as private property it continues to feed into the inequality of our country. It continues to feed into what is wrong with how we do things.”

• Talking Headways podcast with an episode about transportation insecurity with two researchers who’ve been attempting not just to quantify, but to qualify transportation insecurity—fill in the blank spaces most of us never see: “So a lot of people use or rely on friends and family and neighbors and co-workers to get around. We had seen that, for people who do that, they experience a lot of stress and strain around asking people for rides. Some people say that they worry about being a burden. Some people feel like they don’t get invited places because people know they have bad transportation. And there’s also a whole other dimension that’s more sort of emotional and psychological around people feeling bad that they don’t have good transportation or feeling left out.”

• Anthropologist Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas writing about insomnia in Sapiens: “But examples from anthropology suggest that the solution to sleepless woes might be social and societal, not technological.”

• Architecture and urbanist professor Mohamad Nahleh in Places Journal with a beautiful, long essay about his month-long journey through Lebanon on foot: “A desire to illuminate the world is, in a sense, inherited from ideas of truth and rationality associated with the European Enlightenment. These ideas are also, of course, alibis for colonial administration or, in the postcolonial period, for economic development. The last thing I want is to indulge a preference for the visible, or the knowable, whether by privileging a community’s most prominent actors and institutions or by shedding unwanted light on those who find safety in darkness. My preferred method is thus to take a walk, by night, in the company of whomever I meet.”

• Jeremy Sachs, a programmer, has spent several years recreating the “green rain” style of code that became such an icon in the Matrix movies: “He said that he’s always wanted to make the digital rain, which he considers ‘probably the most widely sought after screensaver in existence.’” Sachs has provided the code freely, which means lots of people have been creating variations like this.