Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“Her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.” —The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

I wanted to write a thing about dirt. I finally got fully back into the garden this weekend, digging beds and planting a gazillion onions, and spent the time thinking about what dirt is and how it’s death and life all in one, and how gorgeous the compost pile is that got delivered from the local compost service. How it’s this soft, beautiful dirt and how weird that I know it started out as my (and other locals’) carrot tops and compostable takeout containers and bio bags and steak bones and lemon peels and coffee grounds. And given enough heat and time it all turned into dirt that will now be turned back into food. A freaking miracle.

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I’m still waiting to write about my book (the book on ownership that every publisher turned down so I’ll be publishing it on here chapter-by-chapter as I write them) more formally once I’m ready to focus more of my time on this newsletter, but it seems like a good time to share a proposal snippet from the chapter summary on ownership of people:

“When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that she wished women to have power over themselves, she was attacking their status as property, their position of being considered less human than men. Wollstonecraft reminded readers that it was impossible for women to have any rights at all if they did not first have the right to themselves.”

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a tricky (and often problematic) document to untangle and interpret over two hundred years after its publication, but it’s also just one detailing how long women have had to live without autonomy over themselves. Ourselves. Silvia Federici’s 2004 book Caliban and the Witch goes into this history in greater depth, and shows the entanglement of women’s oppression with peasant resistance against feudalism and the earliest stirrings of capitalism:

“The state has spared no efforts in its attempt to wrench from women’s hands the control over reproduction, and to determine which children should be born, where, when, or in what numbers. Consequently, women have often been forced to procreate against their will, and have experienced an alienation from their bodies, their ‘labor,’ and even their children, deeper than that experienced by any other workers. No one can describe in fact the anguish and desperation suffered by a woman seeing her body turn against herself, as must occur in the case of an unwanted pregnancy.”

And Gerda Lerner, in her 1986 book The Creation of the Patriarchy (I’m indebted to Garrett Bucks for first making me aware of this book and Lerner’s work) goes further back, four thousand years or more to the first takings and enslavement of women as part of warfare and then of ownership and debt, especially in agricultural societies:

“Women themselves became a resources, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. . . .

But it is not women who are reified and commodified, it is women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity which is so treated. The distinction is important.”

“Revolutionary thought,” she wrote, “has always been based on upgrading the experience of the oppressed.”

I know I’ve said it too many times before but I’ll probably keep saying it: any argument that society is currently at war with itself due to an unraveling of shared national narratives ignores the reality that those narratives were only shared—and imposed—by a very few people who benefited from them. And still are.

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Last weekend I dug beds and moved compost and planted onions and cut potato starts to cure and today I’m going to leave my work and screen and plant peas and carrots and then go look for some thyme and lavender and sage plants to give the raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes some company while they huddle under the snow next winter. And then listen to my kids talk about Wings of Fire lore and Fortnite moves and make dinner and while I’m at it go and read one of my favorite of Chris La Tray’s nails-it-every-time essays:

“The constant battle with despair and disillusionment that life just isn’t what we want it to be. But it never will be, it will just … be. The only thing we can control is how we engage with it. Some of us just need to get over our own bullshit. Some of us require medication, some of us require the company of good friends. Whatever we require it’s okay to require it, and it’s okay to request it. Let’s lean on each other.”

On my way home today I watched a bald eagle glide overhead and damn if that sight doesn’t make me catch my breath every time.

Bonus photo: Because

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Someone recently told me about the All My Relations podcast and I particularly enjoyed the episodes The Border Crossed Us and Beyond Blood Quantum: “DNA can be useful . . . but it’s not going to tell us a damn thing about identity.”

• Lee Nellis’s Four Bold Ideas to Save Greater Yellowstone in Mountain Journal reminded me that where there is true vision of a better world, it can also be paired with ideas of how to get there: “We have to point out that the dominant narrative is ruthless. If we don’t have the faith it requires, we must still further its ends, just to live.”

• Building Local Power had a great episode detailing the ways that corporations’ massive local and state subsidies undermine true economic development and community. (One change I’ve always wondered about is if public-private partnerships could require full disclosure. So many of these deals are done in secret or with non-disclosed terms; I don’t see why they can’t be required to be fully open if the corporations involved want to use public funds.)

• Anthropologist Alan Goodman and professor of biological sciences Joseph L. Graves Jr. writing in Sapiens on athleticism, IQ, and the myth of race: “Athleticism is a complex trait—combining strength, coordination, speed, and other skills. An individual’s athletic prowess is influenced by 120 different genetic markers found across the globe and by a wide range of environmental and cultural factors. Thus, the best explanation for the historical patterns of differences in elite competition relate to economic, social, and cultural factors, not genetic ones.”

• The War on Cars hosts went to the annual Auto Show and talked with salespeople about Very Big Trucks and Things: “He’s basically saying that the styling of the car is an incitement to violence.” One interesting shift toward the end of the episode: downstairs in the area devoted to active mobility such as e-bikes, the salespeople used words like “humble.” The difference in the way the car people versus the bike people talked about their products said everything about the way they view how a human should be in the world with other humans.

• Ed Simon writing in Nautilus on Dougal Dixon’s 1981 book After Man and what messages it carries for our evolution: “After Man’s operative aesthetic is one of scientific wonder. It reminds us that imagination can be as central as analysis in a scientific endeavor, and that our attraction to the sciences is as poetic and lyrical as they are logical and pragmatic.”

• Threshold Season 4 is all about climate change, and the last two episodes were part of a three-part series they’re doing on steel. It’s really fascinating, especially the most recent one detailing the ways in which the Industrial Revolution and America’s steel industry were built and dependent on slavery, with a legacy that continues into today’s hollowed-out communities and environmental “sacrifice zones.”

• Thanks as always to Laurie Brown and the Pondercast team for taking me somewhere different, this time on . . . time: “I’m learning to just let empty time be empty. . . . This empty time is the measure of love. Like the burning tail of a meteor, empty time is what comes after loss.”

(Trust: necessary, but not sufficient)

There’s this scene at the end of The Sound of Music* that I think about a lot, especially over the last several years. The von Trapp family, on the verge of escaping Nazi-occupied Austria, is hiding from soldiers behind a tombstone in an abbey cemetery.

*(I feel compelled to say that I don’t actually like musicals very much but for some reason have seen this movie—not usually voluntarily—several times.)

The soldiers dispatched to find them finally give up and leave, and the family emerges from their hiding place. But one soldier, Rolfe, the eldest von Trapp daughter’s love interest, had stayed behind on a hunch and spots them. Rolfe’s character had a pretty brisk embrace of Nazism over the course of the movie, so his involvement isn’t a surprise, but the family still has some hope that their lifelong connection will prevent him from betraying them.

“Rolfe, please!” cries Liesl.

Dropping his whistle, Rolfe points a gun at them. Georg (Captain) von Trapp tells Maria and the children to run while Rolfe threatens to shoot them. “You’re only a boy,” says von Trapp, and asks Rolfe to run away with them “before it’s too late.” Rolfe doesn’t shoot, and von Trapp takes his gun away. “You will never be one of them,” he says. Rolfe looks up, shocked and angry, and yells for his superior.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant, they’re here! They’re here, lieutenant.”

Anyone who’s seen the movie knows that the family escapes thanks to the nuns who helped them hide and then stole parts of the Nazis’ car engines. (The real story is that the von Trapps did leave Austria due to the takeover of Nazism, but it was openly by train to Italy.)

This is a climactic moment where Rolfe is given an opportunity to draw from a lifetime of relationship to stay silent and let the von Trapps go. But he doesn’t. Frozen for a moment until relieved of his pistol, he shouts for his fellows, choosing ideology over the pleas of people he’s known all his life.

Though Rolfe is a fictional character, this scene lingers with me because at the heart of trust is relationship but relationship is not always enough to keep trust intact. Necessary but not sufficient. Sometimes the relationship and the trust shatter together.

But sometimes they don’t. Finding the shape and boundaries of trust in a community (or in a relationship) is—I think—partly about giving that “not” the best chance possible. To give everybody their strongest connection to their deepest humanity so that when they’re tested, they choose what is right over what is easy, what is kind over what is cruel. And that we each give ourselves the same chance.

I think of that scene a lot because a few years ago, when some local disagreement turned vitriolic out of all proportion, I saw someone look at me that way. I knew we disagreed about the issue that was on everyone’s minds, though I don’t think we’d ever even spoken to each other, but until that moment I hadn’t realized how fully animosity over the issue had penetrated many of the people concerned in it.

This look was distinctive. It caught my eyes for a moment before sliding away and I realized that for that person I’d lost my right to compassion, to humanity. That person had already dehumanized me, had chosen to dehumanize me and others, over what was, in the grand scheme of things, a very minor disagreement, and before we’d ever spoken a word to each other.

People often ask how something like the Holocaust could happen, how good people with supposedly honorable values could let it happen. They’ve asked the same about the Rwandan genocide and the war in Yugoslavia where so many former neighbors killed one another in the name of “ethnic cleansing” and are asking the same now about the massacres in Ukraine.

This, I think, is partly why. It starts with a willingness to dehumanize another, to decide that they’re not worthy of your compassion. And it doesn’t have to be over religion or race. It can be for any reason, even trivial ones. That doesn’t mean a small local disagreement leads to genocide; it means that we all have the capacity for dehumanization within us. We can choose to fight it, or give into its temptations.

I ran into this line years ago and have looked for the source but haven’t found it again: Every ideology eventually leads to eugenics.

I hear echoes of this all the time: If only these people would go away; if only those people would die out, or disappear.

This is in part why I think trust is so important for building community. We have to live together. Sometimes it absolutely sucks. A lot of times it absolutely sucks. There are people whose viewpoints, at least, we wish would disappear, but unless we’re willing to wipe out the people who hold those views, or unless we are actually engaged in life-or-death situations or conflict (including the stripping away of rights), we have no choice but to find ways to inhabit our communities together, to find the small intersections where trust might be able to thrive, even temporarily.

I think about this reality all the time on several levels. On the closely interpersonal after that moment of dehumanization—which came a few years after neo-Nazis tried to rip apart my town and destroy people within it—and on slightly larger scales because, aside from national and international tensions, I live in a liberal-leaning small town in a larger county population that trends, sometimes heavily, toward aspects of the far right. I know what kinds of indoctrination many people here are saturated in, the kind that says liberal-minded people are an enemy force trying to destroy their “way of life”** and that people like me must be stopped by any means necessary.

**(Whatever that happens to mean but around here it’s likely white, Christian, straight, and decisively sexist.)

How do people who think the way I do, who want to see the kind of world I hope for, humanize ourselves in the eyes of people being almost willfully radicalized?

I have no answer to that. That is, my answer is trust and connection but I’m not persuaded that they’re enough, not when for many dehumanizing and hating others can feel so good, so justified, so righteous. Again, trust is necessary, but not sufficient. I’m not here to give guarantees. But I don’t see a path forward or through except through trust and conection, even if I can’t see where they’ll lead.

What, then, does trust mean?

A few years ago Brené Brown gave a short talk on a concept she calls BRAVING, which presents a structure of trust:

“Trust is a big word, right? To hear ‘I trust you’ or ‘I don’t trust you,’ I don’t even know what that means. What is the anatomy of trust? . . . When we trust, we are braving conection with someone.”

The elements of trust in her definition are: boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault (“we share things that are not ours to share as a way to hotwire connection with other people,” or “common enemy intimacy”), integrity, nonjudgment, and generosity.

I imagine that for everyone the importance of each of these (if they apply at all) will vary. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about boundaries and reliability from the many, many people who serve with local non-profits where I live, for example. When I asked the director of one to organize some public comment on an issue I was helping bring to city council, they talked with me about “mission creep” and explained how important it was to maintain boundaries so you can actually do the work, and then explained why my project did actually fit in with their organization’s mission and why.

We were walking outside examining a dangerous highway crossing and I realized as the director spoke that I was being flooded with a sense of trust because they were being so clear about their boundaries. And that when I personally overcommit and say yes to too many things (still a problem for me), I am failing to be worthy of trust because the reality is that I either won’t be able to fulfill those commitments or I’ll do a poor job.

Trust is a project, an exploration, a way of being in the world. I’ve wondered recently if dismantling the culture of colonialism/capitalism/empire will require that culture to redefine, even rediscover, what this word “trust” really means. We might find that it’s simply an aspect of what many, many, Indigenous leaders, elders, writers, speakers, activists, and everyone else have been telling us all along: right relations. Kinship. It wasn’t, after all, any of the Native Nations or First Nations in North America or other colonized countries that broke treaty after treaty and lied and deceived and massacred to get what they wanted.

So what does trust do? In part, it makes life possible. One of the interesting things about Brown’s talk is her quoting of Charles Feltman’s definition of trust, which is “making something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.” In the context of, for example, doomsday prepping and stockpiling weaponry in preparation for the whatever-apocalypse, you can see a society of people terrified of trusting anyone else with the safety and security of their family or their own self. Unfortunately, the only way to survive disasters of any kind is with some level of trust in others. All those billionaires building bunkers to escape into when everything collapses? Not only do they have to trust the people building them, they’ll have to have—and cultivate—long-term trust with people who help maintain them, who keep them stocked with supplies or fix water leaks or provide security.

So we can wall our own selves away (which will ultimately fail to give us the invulnerability we seek but it won’t stop people trying), or we have to take the risk of trust. And once you do that, you’re going to want community whose mutual trust has a good chance of making it through the upheavals of life, whether it’s surviving a hurricane or organizing a street fair or holding you together when grief and loss come to call.

One thing I think Brown misses in her definition is “repair.” She talks about accountability but I don’t think that’s really the same thing. Trust is going to be broken, and in a society where admitting fault or saying, “I’m sorry” is something many adults choke on, repairing broken trust seems like a a skill that’s almost quaint. Without repair, the shape of trust feels incomplete, an unspoken expectation of fulfilling those qualifications without ever stumbling, ever failing. But we will fail all the time. I fail as a parent, as a friend, as a spouse, as a daughter, as a community member, on a regular basis. Being able to find ways to repair, to say that I am sorry, feels like the only way of keeping broken trust from becoming the final form of any given relationship—as long as it’s done authentically. (If, that is, the other conditions are already met. Plenty of people use apology as a way to enable betrayal or abuse.) To have the room to make mistakes, to apologize for them, and (importantly) to be allowed to apologize and to move on, keeps trust a live, vibrant thing.

Trust is one of those things that when I step back reminds me of our embodied interconnection. In an episode of Vaccine: The Human Story, the host describes how the first large-scale smallpox vaccine campaigns in England often failed because the people they were trying to reach had very good reasons for doubting that the government had their best interests in mind. They had little reason to trust. I have to trust the person who replaces the brake pads on my car, have to trust the factory where those brake pads were made. Trust that my town actually does need to raise water rates to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant. Trust that election officials are faithfully and honestly administering elections. Trust that my coffee beans come from the region declared on the label, trust that when I publish this essay Substack won’t glitch and fail to send out the email like it did last time. My clients have to trust that when I agree to a copy editing contract I’ll fulfill its terms, and I have to trust that they’ll pay me. Everything we buy, trade, consume, or do has elements of trust mixed in with it. When that trust fails, or we break it, the journey of repair has to begin if we’re to salvage anything of the relationship.

And trust can be used to bad ends, too, by people from cult leaders and con artists. By religious heads or yoga gurus who abuse their followers. By friends who betray our secrets for personal gain, by caregivers, by politicians. It can be used to turn us against one another. To create out-groups, to dehumanize.

Trust can be broken intentionally in the interests of capital—where trust, relationship, and reciprocity fade, money can step in. In Doughnut Economics, which I’m reading at the moment, economist Kate Raworth describes several studies in which the mere introduction of monetary compensation for behavior reduces feelings of trust. It seems to weaken, somehow, the human connections that nurture relationship, a phenomenon that David Graeber and David Wengrow also noted in The Dawn of Everything when talking about one of the three basic freedoms, that of forming relationships:

“The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. . . . How could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable—in a nutshell, bureaucratized. . . .

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of math and violence.”

I wonder if a market-based or capitalist attitude toward nature not only teaches us to commodify it and forget our relationship to it, but contributes to breakdown of societal trust. One of the quotes I keep on my desk, from Jack Turner’s book The Abstract Wild, prompts thought on this question constantly, in a section discussing decline in consensus and the increasing failure of economic thinking to serve either ecological or moral needs:

“When trust erodes, personal relations, and family, communities, and nations delaminate. To live with this erosion is to experience modernity. The modern heirs of the Enlightenment believe that material progress is worth the loss of shared experience, place, community, and trust.”

What do you do, then, when you can’t trust? Right now, as a female and a parent of a daughter, I do not trust that those in control of my state government and most of my national government wish to allow us, but especially my daughter, a future of freedom and self-determination, not when those with barely concealed Christian nationalist leanings hold so much power and speak openly of a desire for women to limit our activities to the realms of motherhood and housekeeping. I can’t imagine that anyone within any traditionally marginalized community can trust that our state legislature in Montana wants to create a world where they, too, have a future of freedom and self-determination.

What do you do when you live among people who make little secret that their worldview necessitates your non-existence, or at least only existence within very narrow confines acceptable to them?

I don’t have an answer to that one either, though I think finding responses is necessary because those who wish to control or limit or erase others will not stop at the boundaries of any given region, but I also think it makes being a person of trust even more important. One of the strongest tools of authoritarianism, described by Hannah Arendt and more recently by Zeynep Tufekçi, is isolation. Loneliness. A complete inability to trust others due to fear for your life or for harm to those you love. It’s what defined the society of my father’s childhood under Stalin, and what many in Russia are remembering or learning anew right now. I wrote a bit of his experiences in A Walking Life:

“‘I remember,’ he told me as we walked around his small Montana town together one summer, picking chokecherries in the park, ‘after Stalin started going after “enemies of the people,” how fast trust was lost, even in families. Wives against husbands, children against parents.’ Trust was a precious, almost unknown commodity in the Soviet Union. People were persecuted for practicing Russian Orthodoxy, for being of Jewish descent, for being a doctor or a poet, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for having a job that someone else wanted. Denunciations from friends or colleagues or family members came thick, smothering and choking normal human relations like an invasive weed.

My father was raised in this atmosphere, but in a family that valued honesty above all else. He was lucky. He was free in one of the only ways possible in the country of his childhood, able to indulge in freedom of speech and thought in the confines of his family’s apartment in Leningrad, and free to roam his city with friends he could trust.”

When I find myself doubting my community, my state, my children’s future, I look around for the people I know I can rely on, the people I trust. These can be friends, local leaders, family, or the outspoken people writing for local papers—like brewery owner Maggie Doherty and organic farmer Mike Jopek, whose columns I rely on to remind myself we’re not alone in this community—to Forward Montana, which has dug in hard to build a better Montana by fighting for a community and future where all are welcome, and even to my local daily paper itself, which is imperfect but has repeatedly shown me its dedication to highlighting local stories that matter to the people who live here.

To be a person of trust is to keep alive a networked knowledge that we are not alone. I wrote about this at length last year (and before that here), and I think it’s crucial that we give ourselves regular reminders of this: You are not alone.

There are no guarantees that things won’t fall apart. I’m not particularly optimistic about climate change or the rise of authoritarianism in its various forms. But that’s why trust, especially trust within one’s community, matters so much. Everything I read or listen to comes back to it, and it’s where we find the wherewithall to work for a better world while learning to love what we can in the world we have.

At the end of an older interview by Patrick Farnsworth with journalists Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil, Jamail quotes environmental activist Joanna Macy saying perhaps the only thing we need to hear on the subject of trust:

“I’m doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other.”

(That podcast episode is very much in the climate collapse realm, just to forewarn anyone who might want to listen.)

The thing is, while helping to build communities resilient against that turning, I wonder: what could we be unintentionally saving in the process? Rebuilding connection and trust feels a lot, to me, like what I’ve found with walking: with each step, we might discover tiny universes of possibility and ways of being that we had no idea were there all along.

Just last night I read a chapter of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on a Changing Earth, a collection of interviews edited by Dahr Jamail and Cherokee elder Stan Rushworth. In writing of his conversation with Dr. Kyle Powys White about kinship and communication, Rushworth wrote:

“The trust is what it’s all about, and we can’t create a policy around that. We can’t institutionalize that. It’s something we have to live, and we have to want to live it.”

The concept of trust is threaded throughout White’s ideas. Kinship almost seems to be a manifestation of trust in the ways he describes both, and I think it’s here that we come back to why trust is so hard to define: we don’t know it because we have so little relationship with it. In such broken cultures defined by domination paradigms, trust feels terrifying. It lives in exile.

An enormous amount of trust was broken—and continues to be broken—during the pandemic, from trust in institutions and leaders (for those who had trust in them to begin with), to friendships and family relations. I imagine a lot of people are finding trust shaky or difficult or at least reevaluating what it means for them. As with many things, I don’t think trust is any given thing, that is has some universal quality we can pin down and aim for. It’s a relationship we are each exploring, as individuals and together. And, as with many things, I think we’ll find ourselves on firmer ground if we begin looking it fully in the face, finding its structure and shape in our lives. Turning trust into something necessary and sufficient, vital and alive, like the planet itself.

Walking composition

“Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.”
—Bewilderment, Richard Powers

There’s a word I’ve been wondering about. In the mornings before the sun is up, before anyone in my house is up, including the dog, I try to step outside and just breathe. Bare feet on the frost, and if I’m lucky the stars are visible. Sirius most often, though not I think at this time of year (I could be looking in the wrong place or the wrong time; my astronomy knowledge is pretty scanty*).

Many mornings there’s the slightest movement in the air, too subtle to be called a breeze but not motionless. Detectable against the skin yet it doesn’t ruffle the hair.

I’m sure there’s a word somewhere for this non-wind, this infant-breeze. I looked up all kinds of wind once when writing a piece about taking my in-laws on a whale watching tour and how the wind battered us and all the seasickness that ensued, but I don’t remember reading of something this slight.

This air feels like the earth is whispering a greeting. Like the word I’m looking for is the kind of sleepy, smiling, mumbled “g’morning” I get from one of my kids on a summer day.

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I finally picked up China Miéville’s The City & the City over the weekend (thanks for nudging me, Mike!), which I thoroughly enjoyed. In The American Scholar last month, Cullen Murphy wrote about the book in the context of what happens when social fabric collapses, when societies fall apart, but as I read I felt it was the opposite: it’s a parable of the lengths to which we’ll go to maintain our sense of reality even as what is actually in front of us contradicts every aspect of our beliefs about who we are and what that means.

It was impossible not to think of the kind of doublethink my father has described growing up in the Soviet Union, habits of belief, resignation, and the most cautious of trust in precious few relationships, or of how many of those habits have snapped back into place for people in Russia now, especially for those who’ve been through repression of thought and speech and art and expression before. (And also, for those in Ukraine, a visceral knowledge and memory of what they are fighting against.)

It becomes a survival mechanism to begin believing the reality that you’re told is the only acceptable one, the one that rejecting could land you in prison, just as, in The City & the City, the residents of Besźel and Ul Qoma are trained from a young age to unsee, unheard, and unsmell the other city, even as they spend their lives inhabiting the same space. Their ability to unsee the other city and identify only with their own becomes who they are, no matter how much to outsiders it’s obvious that they’re the same place.

There are lessons for us here, about the limits of facts and data, even the limits of reality itself, to compete with humans’ sense of identity, our most fiercely protected trait.

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I wonder, as always, what will be lost in a data-filled and digitized future. What nuances and subtleties. Will our identities become hardened and firmed, even less capable of shifting than they are now? Will we forget the self-ordering complexity of the living planet and what it expects of us denizens?

A friend came over weekend before last with a couple of gooseberry bushes and we planted them in a snowstorm, digging into my garden’s heavy clay soil mixed with endless thistle roots and the blue-tinted sand that had been spit up when our well was drilled hundreds of feet underground. I watered everything throughly and then freezing weather settled in again for the week, culminating in a day that started with heavy snow, shifted later to hail, back to snow, then to sleet, and then back to soft snowflakes under a cleared-up sky with puffy clouds hit with the kind of gold-shook foil light that makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.

Maybe there will be new iterations of life, some digitized version of the not-breeze I’ve come to look forward to in the mornings. But will there be friends bringing over gooseberry bushes, or gooseberries themselves? Will there be those morning moments when I can pretend the earth is saying hello with the tiniest shift of air?

I hope, whichever is the case or whatever iterations and variations show up, we’ll remember—or maybe learn for the first time—what it means to see the world as it is, not as we wish it.

*Which reminds me, if anyone knows how to interpret the information on the Aurora Alerts app, I’d be grateful. It gives all sorts of cool information about Kp values and solar winds but what I really need is to know when those numbers translate into: “Tonight would be a good bet for waking your kid up, driving an hour or so toward Polebridge, and letting her stay home from school the next day on the chance she’ll see the Northern Lights.”

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There are quite a few new subscribers here thanks, I am guessing, to the kindness of Ed Roberson—host of Mountain & Prairie, one of my regular podcast listens—in mentioning this newsletter on his “Good News from the American West” updates. Thanks, Ed!

Welcome. The main focus of this newsletter is the commons—that is, the shared world we live in and how we manage to do that living together. Not an easy task most of the time, and often involving intense conflict between private property rights and shared resources. The overarching themes of this newsletter—which includes these triptych walking compositions as well as full-length essays—can be found in this first essay reflecting on misinformation and the invasion of Iraq, an essay on commodification, and one on white nationalism, the West, and the failures of large journalism narratives. Most published writing (as in published and edited in real places) can be found through my website, and my book on walking is available in all formats. I sometimes write on Medium but have no other social media.

I also talk about car supremacy and car-centric infrastructure, books I’m reading, embodied learning, and, most of all, my despair over knapweed and thistles. Please send help.

Thanks for joining! If it turns out not to be your jam, no hard feelings. This post from January explains why this newsletter is currently free, and when and why it’s shifting to a paid version. Just remember the code word is “tribble.”

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Jessica Camille Aguirre writing in Nautilus on the oceans’ decreasing levels of oxygen: “The changes observed in the field are twice as dramatic as scientific predictions. In other words, the oceans may be suffocating twice as fast as scientists expect. ‘A lot of ecosystems in the ocean depend on oxygen, and if you cannot breathe, nothing else matters,’ Oschlies said.”

• A great longread in the Montana Free Press by Emily Stifler Wolfe on the history of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and how it’s helping Montana farmers and ranchers—including a five-year Grazing for Soil Health project through the Blackfeet nonprofit Piikani Lodge Health Institute—shift to no-till and/or regenerative agriculture.

• I found this piece on hopeful living by Zan Romanoff and what we might be misunderstanding about utopian movements to be really thoughtful: “It should not have existed. It should not have had to exist. In a just world, food waste would be redistributed by something other than a network of unpaid and untrained volunteers; in a just world, there wouldn’t be so many hungry people in need in the first place. But and also, in those moments, as we pushed together past the world as it was to the world we wanted to live in, we found ourselves in a kind of heaven.”

• For anyone wanting to read more about the absurdities of the textbook industry (after my mini-rant about them in my last essay), I dug up a perennial favorite, physicist Richard Feynman’s essay about his stint on California’s Curriculum Commission. “The books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. . . . The definitions weren’t accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren’t smart enough to understand what was meant by ‘rigor.’ They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn’t understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.” Feynman rarely disappoints.

• Erik T. Freyfogle (author of The Land We Share, which details the shifts in private property law in the U.S. over the centuries) with a lecture about how a culture of ownership damages our relationship to our ecosystems, especially with water: “Water is a communal asset, communal property. How it is used is inherently public business. Water law needs to be brought up to date by reforming it to reflect the new cultural values.”

• There’s a lot of historical detail packed into Land Grab’s first five episodes—particularly about the corruption and timber and land thefts in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley’s early years of settler-colonialism—but Episode 2 packs one particular punch: The “agreement” that the U.S. government used for decades to insist on the Salish people moving away from their home in the Bitterroot Valley was in fact forged by future president James Garfield.

• The first in a three-part series from Planetizen about traffic congestion, its causes, myths, and what, if anything, planners can do about it (chalk up another one for induced demand): “According to the study, driving, as measured in the study as the number of vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT), increases in direct proportion to the available lane-kilometers of roadways. Counter-intuitive as it might seem that building road capacity creates traffic, rather than functioning as an effective response to congestion, the researchers referred to their calculation of induced demand as ‘the fundamental law of congestion.’” (Emphasis added.)

• Episode 6 of Vaccine: The Human Story details the last decades in the fight against smallpox and the doctors who sought to vaccinate the world and eradicate the disease. I’ve found the long history of smallpox and efforts to inoculate and vaccinate in this podcast series fascinating—and only just realized that there are video versions including a lot of the source material that’s only on audio in podcast form.

• I had to sit for a long time with Lee Nellis’s piece about the limits of collaborative conservation in Mountain Journal. It’s not that I disagreed with him—I agreed maybe too quickly—but it took me a while to come to the personal thought that maybe collaborative conservation efforts are actually a tentative foray into flexing the atrophied, nearly forgotten muscles that made (and continue to make, where they still exist) commons systems of land and water relationship and use so robust. That maybe collaborative conservation is only a beginning of something better: “If we cannot give people a compelling alternative story, the narrative of domination—the story in which all values are reduced to dollars—will continue to define the space within which efforts to protect our landscapes and nurture sustainable communities succeed or fail.”

• Nityanand Jayaraman’s latest installment of his education in a fisher’s way of coming to know the world—with retired fisher Palayam—has, like all his entries, reminded me to look around at the world I live among and find ways to know it better, if it will let me: “For many years on end, summer storms have given Chennai a miss. ‘Before tsunami, not a year passed without a storm either in Chithirai or Vaikaasi (May-June). But now everything is topsy turvy,’ Palayam says, repeating a lament that can be heard across Tamil Nadu’s coast.” (I love this way of learning to see and hear and smell the world, the opposite of unseeing. There is no subscribe button for these, but interested readers can email Jayaraman directly and receive the posts: nity682@gmail.com) From the overview: “‘Science of the Seas’ is a deep dive into the knowledge systems of the seas as seen from the perspective of artisanal fishers.”

(I still don’t know, but am learning anyway)

I have a lot of opinions about education, most of them developed over a twenty-plus-year career as a freelance copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers.

That career has taken place over the period of time when the No Child Left Behind Act was signed by former U.S. president George Bush, later replaced by the not-very-different Every Student Succeeds Act by former president Barack Obama; and during the time that the Common Core standards were developed and implemented in an effort to develop some kind of consistency in education across state lines. (In the U.S., each state controls its public education; however, the federal government has some sway in its ability to provide funding for schools tied to states’ adoption of standards, methods, curricula, etc. Highway funding works similarly.)

Being in the weeds on textbook publishing gave me a granular relationship with every one of these developments and their effects on lessons, teachers, and students, especially when Common Core became widely adopted.

Overall, I don’t have much of a problem with the Common Core standards (though I think a lot of them aimed at younger grades are flat-out age-inappropriate—not due to content but due to much simpler things like how early the human mind-body is ready to sit down and read text with the required level of comprehension) but take enormous issue with their attendant standardized testing requirements. I’ve had too many tiresome arguments about standardized tests to want to go into them at length here, but for me the important point is that I’ve copy edited more K-12 tests and standardized tests than I can possibly count, for every major textbook publisher, and the majority of them are poorly written and frequently contain mistakes. Catching mistakes is my job, so it wouldn’t be such a big deal if each of those tests hadn’t already been read by several people—writers, editors, SMEs (subject-matter experts)—who are also meant to catch mistakes, and yet children are meant to get every answer right on their first pass, without help and with consequences if they don’t. Since most people assume that textbooks and tests are full of only correct information and mostly free of mistakes, this double-standard escapes almost everybody.

This is especially true of math. I stopped working on math textbooks years ago because it was frankly just too depressing. My very last project (or second-to-last, I forget, they were both so bad) was a kindergarten math workbook where the tests themselves had several mistakes in the math. The workbook had already been through six supposedly expert readers before it got to me, yet the kindergartners—who most likely couldn’t even read the problems yet—would get penalized for failing to get the answers right the first time.

Anyway. This isn’t supposed to be a rant about standardized testing and the increasing problem teachers face of having to teach to the test. It’s really about the education-related things I’ve done locally—part of this “how to build community (I have no idea)” series—because changing the grip of certain special interests on the entirety of public education is not something I’ve figured out how to do, though not for lack of trying.

As described in the previous essay, when I moved back to my hometown in Montana, I decided I would give any volunteer time I could spare to two areas: walking/walkability and education.

In a way, education was easier because the elementary school teachers needed parent volunteers for a variety of activities. Spending one hour a week reading individually with first-graders was something I could manage with my schedule, and it also meant I got to know my kids’ classmates. Volunteering with the Writing Coaches program at the high school only took two or three hours a month at most, and I got the benefit of getting to know the incredible talent and grounded intelligence of a generation about to enter adulthood. (Seriously, it strikes me so strongly that these teens seem to know themselves and take ownership of their thinking and ideas in ways that I can’t imagine doing when I was that age.)

These programs were already in place when I moved back here; all I had to do was show up.

Showing up also gave me the chance to get to know other needs in the school, and other opportunities. I used to try to have lunch with my elementary school kids about once a month, and there is nothing like sitting in a room full of first- and second-graders with their hands up in the air waiting for the too-few adults to help open their tricky lunch packages so they can scarf down food in 7-12 minutes to teach you: a) make sure to pack lunches in things a kid can actually open; and b) kids in school do not have enough time to eat.

Whenever I mentioned to administrators that most kids couldn’t finish their lunches because they only had 7-12 minutes, I was told that in the first place they had 45 minutes (which included their recess time, so even if they weren’t strongly encouraged to pack up their lunches at the end of the 7-12 minutes, these were little kids and they obviously wanted to get as much recess time as they could), and in the second they often didn’t finish eating because they were busy talking.

(At this point you can just insert another rant about the insanity of insisting that kids should eat and not talk with their friends at lunchtime when humans are social creatures and a huge part of school participation is the development of their social selves. They shouldn’t have to choose between eating and developing relationships with their age-mates.)

In my second year back home, the district superintendent created a K-12 Connect committee open to teachers, administrators, and parents, so I volunteered. We only met three or four times a year, but it was a wonderful way to get involved with the school district because it was an open format—no formal meeting with agendas and “all in favor, say, ‘aye’”—that involved discussion and our own education. We got presentations on a high school math teacher’s peer-to-peer mentorship program, and a second-grade teacher’s demonstration of the school’s newly adopted social-emotional learning curriculum.

And we got to hear from the school lunch coordinator and chef about what he does to provide healthy food and meal plans every month, along with his work sourcing food from local farms and planting the school garden. Which also meant I got a chance to talk about how good the food is and yet how little time the kids have to appreciate it.

Several meetings over two years of bringing that problem up in the committee and the elementary school eventually added five minutes to lunchtime for first-graders and kindergartners.

What I learned from that advocacy was something more valuable to me (though not to the kids who now get a little more time to eat): lunchtime is so limited not because the school is too restrictive or controlling, but because daily instructional minutes are mandated by the state, so the school schedule works within a tight timeframe to meet more needs than they’re given time or funding for. Every minute of lunchtime and recess were minutes that didn’t count for the state instructional requirements.

Which led into several years of learning that a lot of things people complain about to their local school board and administrations about come down to state funding, state mandates, state control, and living in a state whose legislature is often unfriendly to both public schools and teachers. (This was even more true in New York, a supposedly more liberal state with a deeply divisive relationship between the legislature and the teacher’s union.)

Changing that culture is a massive undertaking, and with a twice-elected state superintendent in Montana who is openly hostile to public schools and a legislature itself that would overall probably like to see charter and private schools crush our public school system, it would require a statewide movement dedicated to public schools and teachers with the kind of passion and energy that Backcountry Hunters & Anglers brings to public lands.

I am, as I’ve mentioned, not a community organizer or activist. Whoever starts that movement in Montana (and I hope they do), it won’t be me, though they’ll have my support.

So what can one do? Try to get some lunchtime added, read with elementary school kids, ask teachers what kind of help they need from parents with interest and a little spare time.

And show up to school board meetings. This is something I haven’t done much of the past two years, mostly because I was homeschooling my own kids, but did for a few years and hope to get back to it.

I don’t mean a person has to show up every month to every board meeting and work session. But I do think that a lot can change in a community if people aim for, say, two city council and/or school board meetings per year. When I started getting interested in meetings, my spouse was traveling a lot, and like other parents I just didn’t have much time in the evenings. There were several times where I teamed up with other parents so one person could go to the meeting and update others. It’s not perfect but at least it helps people stay in the loop.

Local school boards are a uniquely American institution, dating back to 1647, and while there’s been a lot of focus on them recently due to conspiracy theories and extremist politics, they remain a microcosm of American democracy. Or at least the never-yet-reached ideals of that democracy. School trustees are elected by the local community and are technically non-partisan. They’re meant to represent a community’s values and act in the interests of students.

And yet community interest in school board elections—much less in what the boards actually do—is dismally low. The first year I looked up voting statistics for school boards, the rates ran from 8-12%.

That year, my community had a feisty school board election over hyper-local issues that I don’t need to go into here. Tempers and rumors consumed anyone interested in the school or education—which in my town is probably slightly more than average. I can’t remember why I looked up voting rates for school boards, but when I saw those numbers (I think our previous election had maybe reached 16%) it was really disheartening.

It’s not just that public schools themselves are a cornerstone of democracy and should be supported and funded like we take the ideals and future and children of this country seriously. It’s also that my father grew up in the Soviet Union and being able to vote—being able to elect people to represent you—is something that matters to me. It’s one of those things you might not appreciate until it’s gone.

So that year, I organized a school board candidate forum and have continued to do it every year since except for 2020, when the pandemic shut things down fast and there was no way I was going to learn Zoom in time. (2020 also had people running unopposed, but promoting competition or any particular candidate isn’t the point of the forum—it’s about civic engagement.) An experienced moderator and I work to shape four pre-set questions for the candidates, and then she asks them questions submitted by the public. That first year, voter turnout was 23%, due to the heightened attention on that particular election and surrounding issues, and I decided a decent life goal would be to help get that up to 50% before I died.

That goal on its own is pretty depressing, but as I’ve said before, one of my mantras is to meet people where they are, and where most Americans are right now with engaging with local issues is still at a very low point, even with several national news stories about right-wing efforts to take over local school boards and community health departments. Organizing candidate forums isn’t something I’m particularly thrilled about spending my time on—being alone in the woods with books, notebooks, tea, bear spray, and hiking boots is my utopia—but it’s something I can do and if it helps civic engagement I’ll keep doing it.

What I do enjoy spending time on is something completely different: a math games program that two other women and I developed. I’d love to change the way math is taught across the entire country, maybe the world, but I’ve been following Jo Boaler’s work on that front since before I had kids and she’s made little headway and garnered mountains of abuse since publishing What’s Math Got to Do With It? in 2008. (California has recently adopted a new framework for mathematics teaching informed by Boaler’s focus on group work, number sense, and confidence, which is a big step. But the backlash has also been bitter.) And unlike Boaler, I’m not a mathematics professor at an Ivy League university, and don’t even have a higher degree in mathematics, just a BA. In other words, there is little reason for anyone to trust my opinion on this subject.

But seeing kids, including my own, start to describe themselves as “not a math person” or “not good at math” or “I hate math,” at ages as young as seven or eight just breaks me. I love math with an inexplicable passion, and seeing kids forced into a success framework based on speed drills and poorly written word problems* frankly just makes me angry. We’re losing untold numbers of kids from math and science every year because they’re being taught to value the wrong things, and as a result they assume they aren’t good at the subject.

Everyone alive is good at math. Your brain makes an estimated billion calculations a second with every step you take. Every living thing has to be good at math to navigate and exist in a living, breathing, spinning world. Math education simply teaches us the vocabulary that’s been created to describe patterns and relationships in that world. It’s not like everyone has to learn combinatorics or even calculus, but there’s no reason to make the vocabulary of math basics inaccessible by forcing children into useless speed drills, and even less to wrap a bunch of confusing, poorly written and wordy scenarios around a math problem and pretend it’s going to help them relate math to their real world. It didn’t work when I was a kid and it doesn’t now.

At one point a few years ago I was having a lot of conversations with a friend locally around standardized test scores, our school’s math curriculum, and the short presentations I’d given to the school board basically begging them to change it. Which they did eventually, after a committee of thoughtful, insightful people spent a year researching new ones. (I still don’t like it, to be honest—still too many poorly written word problems—but it’s better.)

This friend and I wanted to do more, and eventually scheduled a meeting with the school’s curriculum director to talk about our ideas, and in that meeting he told us of another woman in town, not a parent but someone who cared about kids, who’d approached him about something similar.

What happened was that the four of us spent a year meeting once a month to talk about why we wanted to help kids with math, and what to do about it and how. We all had different reasons. The curriculum director was a big advocate for deep learning. I was almost desperate to help elementary school kids get their confidence back and to, as my father puts it, “become friends with numbers.” My friend wanted to get more girls in STEM and our research showed that kids start to perceive themselves as “not a math person” as early as first or second grade. And the fourth person wanted a way to help socioeconomically disadvantaged kids with math, kids who might not have someone at home to help them with homework or explain difficult concepts to them.

What we came up with is a weekly program of math games that we play with third-graders.** We started our pilot program in the fall of 2019 and it was more successful than we could have imagined until the pandemic shut everything down the next spring. We’ve only just started up again recently, and even though I’m rusty going into the classroom it’s reminded me what a difference a few caring adults can make in kids’ lives.

The point of all of this isn’t to make the case for volunteering in schools, or even for public education and better math curricula. These are just the things I do, along with serving on the board of a local non-profit devoted to public schools.

The point is probably most about time. If communities have a hope of resiliency, whether social or physical, they need people who “stay put,” as Jane Jacobs put it, and they need people to show up.

But not everyone can show up for everything, and the reality of our lives is that most people can’t show up for anything. City council and school board meetings where I live usually start at seven in the evening and run late. Single parents, people working late shifts, and people with young kids simply aren’t going to be able to attend most of the time. I am a morning person and pretty useless in the evenings, so every time I go to one of those it’s a struggle, even if I don’t have to arrange for child care.

On the flip side, volunteering within a school takes place when most people are at work. Volunteering, broadly, is an opportunity of privilege. It’s for people who have the time to show up, which is why collaborating with friends or acquaintances can be so important. I don’t do the school board candidate forum alone; the moderator does a tremendous amount of work with me ahead of time, and other friends do things like distribute social media flyers or put up posters or help me test out the Zoom format. The math games program never would have happened without the two other women I work with—they in fact have done most of the thinking about and creation of it; I’m mostly a research person who badgers people to volunteer when I run into them while walking around town—and we’d have had a hard time getting into classrooms without the commitment of the former curriculum director.

I have friends in neighboring towns who work on school board elections in entirely different ways, and others who serve as public school trustees themselves, which is more demanding work than anything I do. A lot of my friends are teachers, doing the hardest work of all.

And, as I pointed out with walking and affordable housing, volunteering in education by necessity runs into a lot of other issues. I don’t, for example, volunteer for the food bank or the local Land to Hand non-profit that connects food need and farms because a lot of other excellent people already do that work. One of the things Land to Hand does is a Backpack Program with a big bag of food for food-insecure kids in a neighboring school district to take home on weekends and holidays, and another non-profit does something similar in my district. (Hungry kids don’t learn well.) Public schools are where a tremendous amount of need is both seen and met, from feeding children to just being there for them as an adult who cares.

Every single community is different. Maybe your school doesn’t allow volunteers in the classroom. Maybe there’s an after-school program where you can show up and help kids with homework or play board games with them. Maybe there’s a local farm-to-table program but nobody’s connected it to the school district. Maybe your local school is a charter that serves high-needs kids and could always use help. Maybe your school board trustees are drowning under criticism over something that’s not actually in their control, and they could really use letters of support from a few people who get that. Maybe your trustees are awful and need someone like you to run. Maybe a single parent would love to attend a local meeting and you could offer to watch their kids.

Maybe education isn’t your thing. But judging by the number of non-profits in my community, there are enough things for everybody.

I keep running into some variation on the phrase that people’s ability for community involvement has “atrophied,” that we’ve forgotten how to be involved in community. I’m not sure that’s really true. What I think might be true is that a lot of us, progressive-minded people in particular, are accustomed to larger structures of organization and a focus on national issues and politics. What happens locally can look . . . unfamiliar. Unorganized. Less effective. Too small.

But that is where life happens, where our society is built and shaped, in the adults who show up to read with first-graders, in the mind-numbing planning board meetings, in the school board discussions about the new social studies curriculum and how to make after-school activities more accessible for kids without money (maybe they depend on the bus to get to and from school and just need a ride home), in the decisions a state legislature makes over cutting school budgets or attaching strings to much-needed funds, in the missing crosswalk or the hungry kids trying to make it through their math homework.

Community engagement doesn’t have to be huge; it doesn’t even have to be particularly noticeable. But there’s always a place for each of us to show up.

*I cannot count the number of times one of my kids has been frustrated and upset beyond words by a math problem, only to have me read it several times and explain that it’s not them at all; the math problem itself makes no sense and I had to untangle it to even figure out what it was asking them to do. Seriously, people, can we stop doing this to kids? If we want them to relate math to the real world, let’s take them outside and do math in the real world.

**We would love to do more grades but the school schedule is extremely tight, and a town of 7500 people, give or take, doesn’t have a huge volunteer pool. But it’s a lot of fun. We use a lot of the free games designed by Math for Love, which is one of the few good math curriculum companies around. And I pull activities from Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets books; the kids get a lot out of the group work and I love things like her “wrong data” activity in which kids compare persuasive bar graphs against data sets to find discrepancies, and then create their own wrong data sets with persuasive graphs.

(The third essay in this series will be about trust, perhaps the most underrated ingredient in community. In that piece I’ll want to give a shout-out to our local newspapers, one daily and one weekly, and two columnists in particular—Maggie Doherty, who owns a (very good!) brewery in the town next to mine; and Mike Jopek, a local organic farmer who served in the state legislature—who always remind me that nobody trying to build a better world, local or larger, is alone.)

Walking composition

“To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”
—from “Poems to Czechoslovakia,” Marina Tsvetaeva

I had promised to write more about Konstantin V. Kustanovich’s book Russian and American Cultures: Two Worlds a World Apart* when I finished reading it, but I’ve been having trouble articulating the thoughts it left me with.

The main issue is that it reaffirmed and detailed what I already instinctively felt to be true of Russia. It agreed with my priors, in other words, and in fact strengthened them. That’s not to say I prefer writing that doesn’t—obviously, in searching for books about the commons and private property, I’ve been accumulating ones that will teach me more about and deepen my belief in something I already feel is true. Perhaps the issue is more that the explanation of Russian culture and character, which I felt to be accurate, doesn’t provide a way forward. I really hope that’s wrong.

—-

Winston Churchill famously said of Russia: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” He was referring at the time to Germany’s actions near the Black Sea in 1939 and how Russia would respond but the quote has been used to illustrate the enduring attraction and seemingly opaque quality of Russia to people in Europe and North America ever since. The unarticulated question these days is slightly more precise: why?

Or, as Kustanovich wrote in the first line of his introduction, “What is wrong with Russia?” How can a country so rich in resources as well as human potential and artistic achievement also be so full of corruption, so rife with income inequality, so suspicious of Europe and America, so seemingly eager to elect authoritarians?

I’ve read quite a number of pieces discussing the expansion of NATO throughout the 1990s and early 2000s to explain the current crisis, but, as with most countries and cultures, the roots of these responses and fears go back much further. It’s the development of Russian culture over the last thousand years or so, writes Kustanovich, that has shaped the national character and the way people respond to both modern propaganda and perceived threats. A lot of it has to do with how Russian Orthodoxy shaped itself in negation of the wider European Catholic Church, and its development as a repository of ritual and mystery without an attendant emphasis on teaching and pastoral care. Add to that a collective economic and agricultural system dependent on values of the communal rather than individual, and a long history of autocratic rulers (the Bolshevik revolution didn’t give the Russian people much respite from those) and you have modern Russia:

“Collectivism, authoritarianism, poor geographic conditions, and lack of religious exhortation prevented developing habits of continuous and disciplined hard work among Russians. Their life provided few chances for accumulating significant wealth and also choked individual initiative and individual responsibility for one’s well-being. It also formed a consciousness prone to striving for immediate gratification. . . . Also, mutual trust and interdependence among the members of the village commune and lack of such trust in relation to the authorities and the law combined with seeing outsiders as fair game for any unlawful actions have fostered a very strong notion of the division between us and them—insiders and outsiders—that in turn engendered such prominent features of the Russian culture as nationalism, nepotism, favoritism, and legal nihilism.” (Emphasis mine.)

An attraction to mystery, ritual, and appearance over content (maybe more than an attraction; a belief that these things are in fact closer to God than other Christian sects with Bible study groups and after-service coffee hour), combined with an us vs. them conviction born of centuries of oppression and survival mechanisms drawn from life on marginal agricultural land, leads to . . . what exactly? Deep suspicion of American-style individualism and skepticism of the values of democracy and human rights for all. Pride in the strength, and even ruthlessness, of a leader.

Not to mention the success of more than a decade of increasingly sophisticated propaganda and increasing restriction on outside media. “What is wrong with Russia?” asks Kustanovich:

“The greatest problem is that Russia is Russia. As long as it exists it will never become a Western-type liberal democracy no matter who rules it and what laws it has on paper. . . . Russia will remain an authoritarian, corrupt, mendacious, nationalist, even xenophobic country. At the same time, Russians will continue to be a warm, cordial, loving, and hospitable people capable of considerable sacrifice in relations with their family and friends.”

The only truly effective response, he writes, is for Western democracies to work much harder at actually understanding the culture they’re negotiating with, rather than assuming it will organically change on its own.

There’s a lot more in the book explaining all of this thinking, and I urge interested people to go ahead and read it because the tangle that reading it has caused among my own memories, experiences, and knowledge makes me wonder if I’m choosing the wrong passages to quote, or the wrong aspects to highlight. I am desperate to understand because I see little hope, while also worrying about my family who remain there, and about what’s at risk for the people I care about and all of Ukraine and whoever else will suffer. For me, it showed how deep the taproot of culture and character can run, how little influence a few decades of geopolitical maneuvering can have on the deeper forces at work. For you, it might strike differently.

—-

The one question that lingered as I walked around town thinking of this book and taking pictures of train graffiti was how much of the specific Russian-culture qualities discussed exist among the rest of us. I thought about the specific schisms I’ve personally experienced over the last few years, the iterations of us vs. them and dehumanization—not even the larger cultural movements at work, but instances right in front of me. Or the different ways that people approach religion and religious faith, and the suffering some are willing to inflict in the name of their religion (contrasted with the suffering many are eager to alleviate in honor of their religion).

I’m not enough of a scholar to feel confident knowing the difference between culture and character traits. But I look at the time period Kustanovich began with, the end of the tenth century when the land was called Rus’ and Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv decided on Greek Orthodoxy as the religion of the land—with an ensuing total lack of accompanying education with the exception of some upper-class literacy mostly confined to learning Church Slavonic—and wonder where in there, or before or after that period (which was followed by two centuries of domination by Mongol warrior bands), worldviews and self-perceptions on that continent began to diverge from neighboring Europe.

And how much? How different are we really? I understand the core of difference that Kustanovich and I, at least, are talking about, but what about the potential? What about the attraction to authoritarianism and xenophobia? On the more positive side, what about the growing articulations against community-fracturing individualism?

The taproot of difference is deep, but I wonder how much geographical isolation has contributed to its strength: Russia’s location allows it to more easily shut itself off from neighboring countries and cultures, and the legacy of Mongol invasion gave it strong incentive to do so (many have argued that those occupations are at the root of the country’s xenophobia). And I remember that time is long and wonder if the balance of these forces plays itself out over millennia rather than decades, or even centuries.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and David Graeber extensively lay out the case that human cultures and civilizations are capable of incredible variation, and always have been. Nothing is fixed and everything is possible. And we have choices to make.

My father and I have had many conversations about Russia and the future since he returned from Russia much earlier than planned last week. Though my culture is not Russian, I see the traits of Russian culture, both the good and the bad, all around me.

*Just a reminder, Kustanovich is an old friend of my father’s and professor emeritus of Russian at Vanderbilt University. Their connection goes back to their parents during the Siege of Leningrad. Remind me to tell you about it sometime.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• I was on the War on Cars podcast very briefly, along with Garnette Cadogan, Jerry DeSilva, and David Ulin, as part of their episode on Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “The Pedestrian” and what it means when we lose the right to walk. It’s a fun listen!

• D.J. Hobbs writing about phenomenology on Psyche—how it can shift our perception of the world and our own place in it: “Thinking about ourselves through the reduction is a radical type of introspection, one that simultaneously reveals how we are always reaching beyond ourselves to engage with a world that, in turn, gives itself to our consciousness.”

• Julia Zarankin, author of the memoir Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, has a lovely short essay about taking up ballet in her forties—a reminder that our bodies are ever-evolving companions throughout our lives.

• Giovana Martino in Arch Daily with a brief history of the kitchen.

• Jonathan White writing in Aeon on the injustice of lives and jobs structured to almost guarantee poor sleep: “Bad sleep can make bad circumstances less bearable, and is often the thing that makes them unbearable. It comes with a distinct set of risks. And it can affect people’s ability to change their circumstances, making other disadvantages more sticky.”

• I try not to post things from standard news sources, but this article about the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (a Catholic religious order) opening their Rome archives of residential school records (they operated 48 residential schools in Canada) to researchers seems really important and I haven’t seen it covered elsewhere. Much easier to ignore the realities of history when its records are locked away from the public eye.

• The Shared State podcast with an episode on the future of the Badger Two-Medicine, an incomparable place that the Blackfeet Nation has been trying to protect for decades. (Can’t link directly; scroll down for Season 2, Episode 3.) A good overview of the struggle and history, but also a reminder that many conservation groups carry a legacy of Indigenous removal and erasure, and not all have come to terms with the realities of stolen land.

• Thank you to Charles for sending me physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s Aeon piece about her (paid!) conversations with people who wanted someone in the field to listen to their ideas about physics (also known as crackpots). I found the compassion in it—and the reminder that we’re all learning all the time—heartening.

• Humpback whales have made an incredible comeback to almost pre-whaling numbers, but face further challenges due to climate change. Veronika Meduna presents the findings of several humpback researchers in Nautilus.

• Charles Truehart writing in The American Scholar on a new book about the history of the index. As a copy editor, I’ve only had the opportunity to write an index once (it’s a specialized skill and a lot of work) and loved it: “An index is a work of art, a rich echo of the text in question, a nest of clues to the essence of the work, and a source of literary fun for centuries.” Indeed!

• I really enjoyed the Ghost Train podcast miniseries, about Colorado, trains, public transit, and the very fraught processes of civic engagement. And, as always, how difficult it is to reverse-engineer our car-centric infrastructure.

• Mark Liebenow with a beautiful short essay on toasting a missing friend, and the fraught nature of life full of possibility and sorrow: “In the tired faces of people hunched over at the bar, I see the need to believe that there is more than a cold beer at the end of a long week. We want to know that despite our differences, there is enough compassion in each of us to find common ground.”

(Spoiler alert: I don’t know)

For some reason people often ask me about community—how to build it, how to get involved or engaged, what to do to make change. I’m not sure if this is because I frequently talk about the importance of community, or because someone’s read my book and there’s a chapter in there that addresses the role of walking in building community.

Either way, I’m the wrong person to be giving that kind of advice. I’m not a community organizer or even an activist. At best, I could make claims to being an advocate for some broad ideas like public schools, public lands (in ways that I hope help with rather than undermine #landback), and walkability. I don’t, to be honest, even know how to shake “community” out of the cliched buzzword that community has become. It might be that we all have to find that answer for ourselves. Communities are messy. True community takes hard work and involvement from all varieties of people and perspectives and it never ends. With some exceptions, it’s hard to get longstanding, resilient community if it’s made only of people with homogeneous opinions or ideologies, and living in that context of tension can be really hard most of the time. But humans need community—real community, whatever that ends up meaning for each of us—to thrive, and, to keep those communities going, enough people of good heart and care and civic mindedness need to stay involved.

That’s the best I got for the moment.

What I can do is talk about the things I do in my own community, and present some of the research from my book about how walking helps to build community through strengthening social capital. I’m going to break this up into two separate essays, possibly three, starting with the walking/walkability/social capital aspect because, like walking itself, those concepts spin off into a lot of seemingly unrelated things that might help us build better lives and care for a healthier planet.

I first became interested in local engagement when my spouse and I bought a house in a village of around 300 people in upstate New York. In case this evokes visions of a bucolic ideal, “village” is a legal term in New York—there was in fact no town center, only a tiny post office set off the highway, about a mile from my house, next to a mini convenience store that always seemed to have out-of-date milk. All the houses and farmlands were scattered around on comfy acreages with a lot of cornfields and forest and poison ivy everywhere, no sidewalks to be found, laced with narrow country roads full of commuters racing to and from New York City.

The first couple years we lived there, starting in 2002 or 2003, I went to a number of city council and planning meetings, where the planning board was made up of local landowners who were also developers. Newcomers’ perspectives, to put it mildly, were not welcome.

Community instead began to teach itself to me via relationships, like those with some difficult neighbors, or with the organic farmer down the road whose political viewpoints were the polar opposite of mine but with whom I otherwise had a lot in common, eventually including toddlers of the same age who played together in the dirt while we picked raspberries.

(Fun aside: That particular farm was the original one settled by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, which is the only reason I heard of and read his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer. You can read his book at a number of online outlets like Yale Law School—Chapter 3, “What Is an American?” is often referenced among certain historical circles.)

I honestly had no clue then that I was being taught lessons in how community is about connection and relationships and the boundaries of trust, but I did feel how hard it was to develop any of that when all of us lived such isolated lives. Sometimes I walked the mile to the post office but with the traffic and narrow, winding country road it was sketchy, and I never passed another person outside of a car.

Somewhere in the decade-plus we lived there came a year when “say yes” became a theme or a meme or vibe or whatever. A fad maybe. I think it formed the plot of a movie at some point (clearly a forgettable one). I did care about community and civic engagement, and after years of living in big cities I wanted to make more of an effort in that small town I didn’t know we would never leave, so began saying “yes” to things when my first instinct was always (and will forever be), “No, I’d rather stay home with my cats and read a book.”

That’s how I ended up on a volunteer group for the local library and realized that a) being a writer meant people would always assume I know how to do PR (I do not), and b) I am terrible at and dislike doing fundraising. The biggest lesson, though, was that opening oneself totally to “yes” translates into burnout, irritation, and being asked to give more hours than there are in a day. It sucked. I liked the library people but did little of use and ended up low on energy for my kids, much less for myself or my spouse, and extremely cranky.

One of the things I knew in moving back to Montana (to what might be called my secondary hometown, where I went to high school and where my strongest roots are) was that I wanted my family to live in a resilient and connected community—worry about climate change had a lot to do with that and still does—but that would mean putting the work into the community in return.

But you can’t, in fact, say yes to everything. Or at least I can’t. So I decided to choose two areas that I cared most about—and to keep any volunteer activity strictly local—and give my time to those. They also had to be in-person things—showing up at my kids’ elementary classrooms to read with students rather than fundraising for the school, for example. I cannot remember why this was important but it’s been a good guideline for me, especially as, until the pandemic hit two years ago, my spouse traveled more than half the time and was often overseas, and with very young children at home my only opportunities to volunteer were during school hours. Being a freelancer gives me some flexibility in that respect but not everyone will have that kind of option.

Anyway, the two things I knew were most important to me were education—specifically math and public schools—and walking/walkability. I’ve mostly stuck with those, although public lands advocacy has snuck in there as something that I think is, like walking, vital to the future of being human. (I also have come to believe that livable communities where people want to be are crucial for the future of some kind of intact natural world and a habitable planet, but that’s another topic.)

One of the advantages of my town was that I could walk into a place that already had decades of local engagement, including developing an extensive bike and trail system during the twenty years I lived elsewhere. So when I ended up on a bike/pedestrian volunteer group for four years, the groundwork on that subject was already done, and that’s even more true for the bike/ped-oriented city committee I started a three-year term on last year. I have people to learn from and long-term projects to join and that’s a tremendous advantage. I try to keep a thirty-year vision in my head of what I want my community to look and feel like, but I was fortunate enough to come in at the end of other people’s thirty-year vision.

But when it comes to walking, there’s a reason I talk and write about advocacy groups—GirlTrek in particular—far more than I’ll ever mention Henry David Thoreau. GirlTrek began as a way to get Black girls and women walking together for their health—thirty minutes five days a week—and grew to informally encompass community engagement that meets the level needed in one’s own place. The work they do is phenomenal. When I walked with GirlTrek in Denver, Colorado, Pam Jiner taught me about the missing safe routes to the neighborhood swimming area and park, and the intersections where drivers always failed to stop, and how she takes city councilors on walking audits so they can experience the problems for themselves.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the GirlTrek leaders led our group from the National Walking Summit on a tour of the Rondo neighborhood and gave a history lesson in how the eight-lane I-94 freeway created what is essentially an impassable canyon right in the middle of the neighborhood in the 1950s-60s, destroying homes and thriving businesses, and how Rondo has spent the ensuing decades rebuilding its connections and resilience. Walking a community like Rondo gives a visceral understanding of how disastrous the decades of federal highway building was—and remains—for mostly Black communities across the U.S. It’s lessons like that that led me to my own local city council meetings last year to advocate against my state’s proposed expansion of the already extremely busy highway that runs through the center of my very small town.

Walking can be, I think, a perfect introduction to community engagement for those thirsty to get involved. Can you walk out your front door? Is there a sidewalk missing? Why? How can you find out? Whom can you reach out to about getting one? Which department handles it and how do their project prioritizations and budget work? What are the barriers to progress? Where is self-directed mobility made impossible for a wheelchair user or anyone else but the most hale and bipedal of people? (The answer to that one is most places.) What can you do about it? Why are there areas where you have to walk a quarter mile between even semi-safe crosswalks on busy four- to five-lane thoroughfares? How do you get people to stop parking on the sidewalk? (If you find an answer to that last, please tell me.)

Some of these questions come down to national transportation policy—in the U.S. and many other countries, car supremacy above all other mobility forms—but others have local answers, like repairing crumbling sidewalks or figuring out a safe route for kids to walk or bike to school. We can learn from national groups like America Walks about how to advocate (they do train advocates through their Walking College!), but the approaches will be local, dependent on your own community’s character, expectations, budget, laws, and willingness to change. Every community’s starting place is different.

Walking is also a good introduction because it really does build community in itself, through the development of what’s termed “social capital,” also known as “neighborliness.” I wrote about this idea at more length in A Walking Life:

“The academic idea of social capital has been around at least since the 1920s, although obviously community and neighborliness have been around for much longer than that. It was only when we began losing these things that we had to find ways to define and quantify and study them. . . . Dr. Cletus Moobela, a senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth’s School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, wrote that relatively high social capital has been shown to increase productivity and prosperity, decrease rates of depression, suicide, heart attacks, and cancer; reduce crime, child abuse, and drug abuse; and even make government agencies more responsive and efficient. It’s also characterized by high levels of trust and civic engagement. Both rampaging kids and the cranky neighbor who yells at them to get off the lawn are strengthening their community’s social fabric.”

Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone describes social capital in more depth, including its origination:

“The first known use of the concept [social capital] was not by some cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era—L.J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of ‘social capital’ to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to ‘those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among individuals and families who make up a social unit.’”

Putnam hit obliquely on walkable communities again and again throughout Bowling Alone. “The car and the commute,” he wrote, “are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggest that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10%.” Driving to work an hour a day doesn’t lend itself to showing up at city council meetings, but it also doesn’t make knowing your neighbors easy, or lead to either of you investing time in the welfare of the other or in uncompensated civic engagement that benefits people you never meet:

“In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful an influence on civic involvement as education, it is more important than almost any other demographic factor. . . . Strikingly, increased commuting time among the residents of a community lowers average levels of civic involvement even among noncommuters.”

It’s in granular, often inconsequential, actions that social capital is formed, the neighborly interchanges that can only really happen in person and by chance among wide varieties of people. To make that happen, you need time for people to be in their community—not just running errands in a car—as well as urban design that makes chance and inconsequential interactions possible.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg most recently has written about public libraries as well as social capital in New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but he started by studying a heat wave in Chicago that killed 739 people in 1995. It wasn’t wealth that saved people; it was close-knit community. One of the city’s poorest neighborhoods at the time, Auburn Gresham, had one of the highest rates of survival due to its social capital:

“It had restaurants, churches, stores, and community clubs and organizations. It was a place where ‘people hung out on the street,’ and residents told Klinenberg that during the heat wave they’d known whom to check up on. Despite being known as one of the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, Auburn Gresham paid a lower toll for the heat wave than wealthier suburbs across town.”

Dr. Moobela’s research goes deeper into how infrastructure itself helps to build these connections and strengthen social capital, and it all comes down to walkability by design:

“While some forms of urban development can encourage social capital, others don’t, and the main difference lies in whether they facilitate physical interactions among people: pedestrian-oriented design such as accessible public spaces, sidewalks, and houses with front porches, among other features intended to bring people in contact with one another, contribute highly to social capital.”*

Walking and walkability both increase civic engagement and help to build trust among people in a community. That doesn’t mean the engagement doesn’t take work, or that trust is never broken, but when you need people to step up to help your town or neighborhood function, or when hardships come and people need to work together for survival, investment in social capital pays itself back ten times over.

And walkability forces engagement in other issues: homes in walkable, mixed neighborhoods and towns—where you can walk to a variety of services, schools, cafes, etc.—have become increasingly desirable over the last decade or so, meaning that as walkability goes up, affordability starts to drain away. Which provides an opportunity to ask, as I did constantly when writing my book, “Who gets to walk, and where?”

This is important. I don’t work directly on local affordable housing issues partly because I’m already overcommitted but mostly because a lot of excellent people are already doing that. But it doesn’t mean I can’t do work related to affordable housing. The crisis in my town has gone beyond acute, and issues of affordability and walkable design are interconnected.** Neighborhoods can’t built cohesion if most homes are owned by wealthy part-time residents or rented out for short-term units, or if an apartment building is torn down so a development company based goodness-knows-where can build luxury condominiums. Or, my personal recent favorite, “lifestyle condominiums.” I have no idea what that means but I bet it’s not cheap. (I live in a tourist destination so these examples are specific to my town; where you are might have very different issues with housing.)

Perhaps Jane Jacobs put it best in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in a section pushing back on the claim that neighborhoods needed to be “ethnically cohesive” to be stable—an assumption that was common in the 1950s and 60s when she was writing, and is still too often made today:

“Neighborhoods that work, that have high levels of social capital, ‘contain,’ Jacobs wrote, ‘many individuals who stay put.’ Communities with strong social capital, especially in cities, tend to be sticky. People stay put, even at different stages of life and through changes in careers. They build trust over many years and countless interactions.”

So maybe that’s the larger goal of how I spend my volunteer time when it comes to walking and walkability: I want a place that’s “sticky”—one where enough people want to stay put, where they want to live, but also one where it’s both possible for people to stay put, and for people who’ve left to come back home again when they feel the urge.

“Walking and social capital,” I wrote in A Walking Life,

“exist in direct relationship, each strengthening the other, and that same walkability, the ways in which we perceive walking and have access to walking, has a direct effect on how well our societies function, and for whom. How public spaces are created and maintained, how we use them, and who gets to use them without repercussions, makes a difference to the health of our neighborhoods, towns, and nations. Walking is both a cornerstone of a functional society, and a deeply political act in its own right.”

So I work on walking. One could say it’s my “thing,” which is true, but I also believe in it on many levels, in its capacity to restore and uplift our lives and the planetary life our lives depend on; and believe that people’s right to access it is vital for individual health and the health of our communities.

Walking itself, as many have shown over the centuries, can be an act of citizen engagement and community building on its own. Even if you never get around to pestering city council to fix the sidewalk.

—-

*The exception to this is gated communities. Dr. Moobela’s research has shown an inverse relationship between gated communities and social capital, and other research has backed this conclusion up. Not only that, but it is possible for gated communities to damage the social capital of surrounding neighborhoods by undermining trust and a sense of social contract:

“Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, who published the book Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States in 1997, wrote that the social exclusion these neighborhoods foster can be dangerous for the cohesion of nearby communities: ‘without social contact, the social contract that underpins the health of a nation will be damaged. . . . We no longer speak of citizens, but rather of taxpayers, who take no active role in governance, but merely exchange money for services.’”

**On the flip side, forcing all affordable houses out to driving distances—especially in a place with little or no public transportation—has other costs. People who are totally dependent on a car to get to work, etc., use nearly 20% of their income on transportation, whereas that expense can be as low as 7-9% of income when there’s good public transit. So I also do engage in what feels like an intractable, never-ending push—it’s more like a plea—for a reliable and comprehensive county-wide public transit system as part of my “walking” portion of volunteer time.

—-

The next part of this essay (essays?) will be on education and public schools, specifically the various ways that I annoy people about math, but might also address time (or lack thereof). There might be a third part on trust. I promise to be more organized about all this when this newsletter shifts to paid sometime after the end of June, but for now I’ve just got a few days between copy editing assignments!

Walking composition

“I don’t know if I can explain how fundamental this is. If someone comes to your table, you feed them, even if it means you’re a little hungrier. That’s how it works.” —Psalm for the Wild Built, Becky Chambers

My father and I talk about the goose he’s going to cook that day. Friends of theirs own a small farm outside of Moscow and gave them a goose. So they planned goose for dinner, and we talk about how to cook it, and later I think of all the stories he’s told me of his childhood under Stalin and then Khrushchev and how honest conversations and trust are channeled in repressive regimes, like the canals of St. Petersburg, beautiful but strictly bounded. Made precious by their integrity.

I’ve been reading lessons for ten- and eleven-year-olds about endangered species and animal husbandry and related vocabulary. Now, every day, the damage that extractive, domination-oriented, and commodification-driven human behavior has caused (and continues to cause) the rest of the living world is wound through with thoughts of current war and oppression. Maybe it always should be, because it always is.

The previous textbook had the students learning the word captivity.

“Say the word captivity.”

—-

My thoughts are scattered and indistinct. I talk to my father and message with my cousin, read textbooks and think all day of reading Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily diary entry, of how I can make myself present for her life right now, and all the lives she is representing. Of her risks as she chooses to stay in her beloved city. Of my own grandmother who became a refugee in the Urals with her two young children during the Siege of Leningrad, and of my grandfather who barely escaped starvation when he stayed behind.

I told a friend this week that I’m just not very good company. I’m unfairly impatient with everyone and our first-world problems, including myself. So I’ve been trying to reground. I don’t have a goose to cook, but I ordered seed potatoes and talked with the owner of the local composting service about what we might need to feed and restore the soil where last year we grew happy peas and raspberries and miserable cucumbers.

I think of the masses of worms in the garden and of the elk head I put in the back (apologies for that image) last fall, alongside the previous year’s buck head, now cleaned entirely by birds and flesh beetles. And try to remember that winter will end (too soon for me) and the thistles and knapweed will start to grow and that I must do better about showing care for this land I’ve promised to husband.

I need to consider dirt again. Which then reminds me of Ukraine’s rich farmland and how Stalin’s collectivization drive and insistence that Ukraine export all its food led to the starvation of millions.

“Use captivity in a sentence.”

—-

After talking with my father about the goose, I had to get back to work. I read a book about an Asian elephant who lost her forefoot and got a prosthetic from a free elephant hospital in Thailand. She lost her forefoot after stepping on a land mine in a former war zone where she worked as a logger. I read that, and then read it again because I had to meticulously cross-check the original text with an excerpt in the textbook, and then thought, I don’t know if I can do this anymore.

How many people in the most dire situations, now and for millennia past, have thought the same? Have seen and known cruelty beyond imagining except it’s not beyond imagining because it happened. It happens. And yet somehow we have to be among it all. Have to know of the land mines that will destroy the lives of generations of humans and elephants and wonder about how to turn all this around, and still check the grammar and think about what to make for dinner and help a kid with their math homework.

Someone left a land mine for a young elephant to step on. Someone else set up a free hospital to care for injured elephants. The world is covered with people eager to repair the harms of this world. The question is whether our capacity for caring and repairing can ever overtake our capacity to destroy and harm.

“Have the students say the word captivity.”

—-

Bonus photo: the gates of the Summer Gardens next to the Fontanka Canal in St. Petersburg, Russia somewhere near midnight in summer 2006.

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• I generally assume that anyone who reads this newsletter also follows Chris La Tray’s newsletter An Irritable Métis (and if not, you should!), but just in case, this is a fantastic 4-minute documentary of him made by teens for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

• Russian history professor Cynthia Hooper writing in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about Russians’ cultural relationship with information and misinformation: “History and psychology suggest that the issue of ‘belief’ in propaganda is not straightforward, and that the majority of Russian society cannot simply be dismissed as ‘brainwashed’ by the Putin regime. Russian people do not have a record of gullibility, but rather a long tradition of irreverent humor and coded criticism of dictatorial power discernible only by ‘reading between the lines.”’

• “The Voyagers,” by Bill Donahue in The Atavist is an excellently written and winding tale of a Ukrainian-born father who braved the Bering Strait crossing from Russian Siberia with his six-year-old son in 1945: what drove him out of the Soviet Union, how he escaped, and what came after.

• Randy Rosenthal in The American Scholar reassesses Jack Kerouac’s influence on Buddhism and meditation in America, and how to reconcile it with his less appealing legacies and the fact that Kerouac “made up” a lot of his own Buddhism and later abandoned it for Catholicism.

• Nityanand Jayaraman has been walking with a fisher elder and writing of what he learns of fisher science through their essays-in-conversation in “Science of the Seas:” “The everyday science of artisanal fishers is democratic, freely available and has its own pedagogy of embedded apprenticeship. . . . Unlike the exalted institutional sciences that produce predominantly elite and upper-caste experts, and whose expertise are accessible only to the powerful, Palayam’s expertise is subaltern, and an essential qualification for any fisher that ventures out to sea and returns home safely—with or without fish.”

• “Landed,” a four-part series on the Farmerama podcast about going back to the family farm in Scotland and daring to imagine a different vision for a more just and sustainable farming future: “This indigenous land management system is agro-ecology in action and at scale. This is both a food production system and a way of life where rewilding and re-people-ing can complement one another.” (Quote is from episode 2; I can’t link to the episodes directly; scroll down past episode 67 to the series titled “Landed.”) I thought the series would be interesting but found myself quickly riveted with the many directions the host took the question that drove him: “Is the small family farm a colonial construct?” It all comes back to the commons, and of relearning how to belong to the land we live among, and from.

• If I had an Anne Helen Petersen-style weekly “just trust me,” this piece from G. Travis Norvell in The Christian Century about reimagining church parking lots would be it, not for writing style or a particular story, but for the opportunity to follow along an insightful and grounded reimagining of what space is for: “What if a church parking lot functioned more like a bridge than a wall? What if it functioned like a plaza where the faith community re-neighbors itself to its once familiar home?” There is so much in here, from church parking lots being used as protected play spaces for kids or tiny home housing, to what happens to a church when it seeks only to cultivate a congregation drawn from outside its neighborhood.

• And totally random but kind of incredible, an hour of French pianist Sofiane Pamart playing under the Northern Lights in Lapland, Finland. (I wish during the twenty-minute interview afterward he’d answered the question of how his fingers felt. Freezing hands are my main stumbling block when hunting, or in fact being outside in winter at all. I have no idea how he just looked so . . . chill.)

Walking composition

“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire?” —Our History Is the Future, Nick Estes

I have deadlines piling up faster than I can meet them and am having a lot of trouble focusing—part post-Covid brain fog, part an inability to drag my attention away from Ukraine and Russia. In the mornings I talk with my relatives in Russia and every twenty-four hours the situation has degraded a little more; in the evenings I read Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily war diary from Kyiv. Yesterday she wrote about meeting a famous war correspondent buying detergent in a store:

“Then she told me her name. I can’t remember the name. I’ve been having a hard time concentrating lately. Then she said, ‘You can follow me on Instagram.’ The group bought a lot of detergent, almost everything in the store. I told them, ‘Good to have you with us,’ and said goodbye. But quickly an uneasiness came over me. I realized that it is not a good sign when a well-known war photographer sets up shop here with a group of escorts.”

You can follow me on Instagram. The more I think about it, the more it feels like Don’t Look Up was a metaphor for the absurdity of how modern life expects us to meet any and every crisis. I know people have many conflicting responses to that movie, but to me it felt less even a metaphor for climate change and more one about risking clean water to build an oil pipeline, or using it for fracking fluids. How can we rationalize risking clean water for anything? But that question—“How can we . . . ?”—is interchangeable for far too much.

I’m here to document the war on your country. You can follow me on Instagram.

—-

The corner of northwest Montana where I live is finally shifting toward spring. We grumbled ourselves together to make the last night of night skiing up on the mountain yesterday, more to catch the sunset from there one last time than to ski, as the conditions are patchy at best. I felt down and still in recovery mode from being sick, but I’m glad we made it. I love the way the sun seems to slide backward in the west, slipping past the mountains like a long, slow, theatrical goodbye. We have to take these moments when we can—winters here tend to be so overcast that for months I find I don’t even look up very often. In the mornings, when I’m fumbling around making coffee, I peer up through the window to see if a star or two is making it through, and almost every time it’s just overcast, as if the sky above the clouds isn’t even there, though it’s brilliant enough in the summer.

Last night, though, when we got back to the car, we slid around on the ice and craned up at the sliver-moon and patches of stars shining clear among the clouds.

—-

Ever since I moved back home to Montana (it’s been nearly eight years now, hard to believe), I’ve spent more and more time imagining what this land was like before Europeans carved it up and privatized it. It’s a different sensation, one I recommend: walk around anywhere in the world and let the land show you what it was before highways and railroads and concrete and No Trespassing signs. Letting the view wash over me as the sun sets high over the mountains gives that sensation, the feeling that this land is something other than what colonizers have made it. But also that privatization, the carving up and commodifying, is part of a longer war.

In the last episode of Third Squad, host Elliott Woods talked about the U.S. military’s pull-out from Afghanistan last autumn and the end of our country’s longest “forever war.” I wonder: What if all the wars are forever wars? What if the battles perpetuated in our time are evidence that none of the wars have never ended, and their causes run deeper than any amount of analysis is willing to examine, threading back through time as humanity batters itself in conflicts none of us fully understand?

Bonus photo: heading toward the last alpenglow of winter.

—-

Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• A short video on the history of zero via Aeon. (One of my favorite things to do when I play math games with third-graders is to tell them about how the number zero used to be illegal.)

• With electric vehicles making a showing even in Super Bowl ads now, I think it’s as ever important to be reminded that the issues with cars isn’t just about the combustion engine. There is a whole spectrum of harm that happens with a car-centric world. Take the ongoing research with the damage caused by tire particles that end up in waterways.

• And related to car-centric infrastructure, there are some interesting conversations going on around finding ways to restore the Rondo neighborhood St. Paul, Minnesota, that was razed to build the I-94 freeway.

• Erin Berger in Audubon with a review of Jessica Hernandez’s new book Fresh Banana Leaves: “Among the most important ideas for Hernandez is that of nature as kin—which would preclude the utilitarian approach common in Western environmentalism, with its foundations in preserving nature’s usefulness to humans or a perceived purity of wilderness.”

• Paul M. Sutter writing in Dark ‘N’ Light magazine on the nature of time: “This is called the relativity of simultaneity, but I like to call it the death of the universal now. I have my now, you have your now, and we will never, ever agree. Yes, we can use Einstein’s math to translate from one reference frame to another, but I can never replicate your experience, your flow of time, from my point of view.”

• Cullen Murphy’s essay in The American Scholar on The City & The City and how societies fall apart made me wonder if I should go ahead and read that book: “But societies do fall apart, and there is no single reason why. One historian, years ago, decided to collect and enumerate all the scholarly explanations for the fall of Rome. He counted upward of 210 specific theories. . . . I had a decision to make. Should The City & the City go alongside Kafka and Borges or alongside Frederick Douglass and Eric Foner and other writers who made America their subject?”

• Ramin Skibba writing in Aeon on the conundrums of dark matter—nobody has yet proven it exists—and whether there might be room to consider that physicists haven’t yet developed a full understanding of gravity and its quirks: “Dutch physicist Erik Verlinde began developing a theory known as ‘emergent gravity’ to explain why gravity was altered. . . . When space-time gets curved, it produces gravity, and if it’s curved in a particular way, it creates the illusion of dark matter.”

• The final (I think), difficult and important episode of Third Squad. “Dutcher’s voice is one in a chorus of the dead who are always with me.”

Walking composition

“A mere aristocracy of wealth will never struggle while it can hope to bribe a tyrant.”
—Progress & Poverty, Henry George, 1879

There are things I can’t say.

I was talking a few days ago with friends asking about my father’s current situation in Russia and wrote that I realized “my entire life has been tangled up with a thread of knowing that there are some things you can’t talk about, even in private phone calls or messages, because of the risk to yourself or others.”

And how strange that must seem. And how a strong urge to avoid telling people what to think or how to feel (despite having strong opinions about what people should think or how they should feel) is born out of a lot of things, one of them being the experience of going about your daily business knowing there’s a government tap on your phone. Not “the government is spying on everyone” but an actual, targeted, individual tap. On your phone. Listening to your own private conversations.

Now we have end-to-end encryption for the masses, and still my cousin in Moscow publicly posts her love for Ukraine and outrageously courageous critiques, calls to resist. “I can’t seem to come to my senses,” she writes. “I am still trying to find bits of optimism in myself.”

—-

This isn’t about Russia because it’s about Ukraine, but in a way it is about Russia because as Chris La Tray wrote on his newsletter yesterday, we Americans are the Russians. But in truth we’re all Russia, and Ukraine, and Syria, and so many other places, at once. Everywhere, really. I can’t say it better than Chris:

“We are trying to view it as good vs. evil and it just isn’t that. We are part of it, whether we like it or not. It is something we do to ourselves and each other over and over again. Are we recognizing this? Will we be the ones to turn the tide? I’m not inclined to think so.”

I looked at Netflix the other day because my mother told me about the show that the current Ukrainian president had once starred in, Servant of the People, about a teacher who accidentally gets elected president. And then Netflix auto-showed me the trailer for its new show about Vikings, and I just couldn’t. I can’t anymore. With the glorified violence, no matter how long ago and no matter how well produced with actors who, as the Danish Nordic Animism scholar Rune Rasmussen has put it, “look like underwear models.” How many millions of people over how many millennia have been exhausted and damaged and killed by wars they had no choice in? No amount of dressing up broody, muscular blond men in furs changes the reality that war ruins the lives of those who least deserve it. There is no glory in that, and no redemption either.

—-

Longtime readers might remember my mentioning on a post a while back, maybe a year ago, my surprise at receiving a tiny book in the mail from a publisher called Isolarri. I’d never heard of them and still have no idea how I got on their subscription list, but yesterday got an email update that they are hosting a War Diary for one of their Ukrainian writers, Yevgenia Belorusets (author of their Isolarri book Modern Animal*), who lives in Kyiv. On Sunday, she wrote:

“The fourth day of the war is over. Half the city is fighting against the normalization of violence that is knocking on every door. War also tests us to see if we have even a touch of compassion for those sent here to murder.”

In the book I’m currently reading, Konstantin Kustanovich’s Russian and American Cultures, he writes of Fyodr Dostoevsky and other Slavophile-adjacent “Men of the Soil,” who claimed that Russians had a unique capacity for compassion because they have a unique connection to Christ born of their centuries of slavery, oppression, and suffering. Perhaps the reality, writes Kustanovich, is that Russians’ capacities for both compassion and cruelty come not from any religious root but from those very centuries of suffering.

I’m inclined to think we all have that mix in us. Poke back far enough and nearly everyone’s line has a history of suffering and oppression. Only a few, usually the perpetrators and certainly those who’ve benefited the most, are free from it, at least at a large-scale societal level. In their own homes I’m not so certain.

In Russian Orthodoxy, Kustanovich sees not Russia’s faith but its new center of nationalism, tracing the church’s religious practices back centuries to when its locus was in Kyiv and a struggle against Western influences began with a resistance to Latin and led to an enormous schism over symbols and spellings rather than essential teachings. (This was a bigger deal than I’m making it out to be; to this day there are Old Believer communities adhering to those beliefs, many of whose ancestors were driven out by tsars starting in 1652.)

“This suspicion, often even hatred, toward the West as the ultimate villain permeated Russian culture for centuries. . . . The legacy of these anti-Western attitudes remains overwhelming in today’s Russia, creating paranoia about Western intentions and determining Russian opinions and reactions in international politics.”

The battles we see are never only of their time. Every conflict has the fears and resentments and self-entitlement of a thousand years at its back.

*Isolarri is now offering Modern Animal for sale to non-subscribers, with all profits going to relief efforts in Ukraine. They describe the book as: “based on interviews that reveal the psychology and myth-making of Ukrainians living in the Donbas, it is a magical realist document of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Precisely what comes after auto-fiction.” I don’t know what auto-fiction is but I enjoyed the book.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• For no reason in particular (kidding) I reread last year’s excellent investigative report by Elisabeth Eaves for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on why the U.S. is investing billions of dollars in pre-outdated missiles and why they’re housed all over the sparsely populated American West.

• A riveting essay on Aeon by Lilian Pearce about the lead-contaminated Australian mining town of Broken Hill and what it means to have a sense of home in a place that has been so abused by industry and capital: “A strong sense of place does not necessarily correlate with pro-environmental values. Sometimes we are pushed – even coerced – into complex, intimate forms of kinship with places. Sometimes these relationships are beneficial, or benign. But sometimes they can become dangerous or deadly under the influence of global systems of capital, power and the evasion of responsibility.”

• An insurance company in Australia developed Climate Warriors, a Minecraft-based game that helps kids understand the coming consequences of climate change and lets them experiment with mitigation strategies in real time. (I hate that this is needed, but I do love what a useful tool Minecraft can be, like when people built a library for censored books in it.)

• My spouse and I were catching up on Star Trek: Discovery and got to the episode where they have to pass through the Galactic Barrier. Confession: I’d never really thought about galaxies having an “edge.” This explanation from Space Australia helped me understand the dark matter and drop-off in star density, but also made me think the Star Trek depiction was highly fanciful. (Which is fine. I love Star Trek anyway. I don’t know where I got the idea that Discovery would be more scientifically accurate, considering that they travel using a made-up spatial mycelium network and also get stuck 900+ years in the future.)

• Could we describe the relationships and proportions of the real world without imaginary numbers? Michael Brooks writing in Nautilus says that “what we’re discovering here is not some deep mystery about the universe, but a clear and useful set of relationships that are a consequence of defining numbers in various different ways.”

• The Leakey Foundation’s Origin Stories podcast has a short interview with Evan Hadingham about his book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins: “Our human ancestral line, it’s not one branch of a single tree. It’s more like a burgeoning bush or a braided stream. Just like any other species, there have been many experiments that failed along the way. Why should we expect ourselves to be any different?”

• The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments in a case that might overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). I recommend again the second season of the podcast This Land that goes deep into the law, why it exists, and what is behind the push to overturn it.

• Cambridge University has made its Ukraine papers free and open to the public until the end of March. Have at it.

Not-walking-anywhere composition

“It’s all bullshit.” —my dad, frequently

My family is crawling out from a double wallop of strep throat followed by our first ever Covid infection followed by one kid’s possibly allergic reaction to antibiotics prescribed for the strep throat. I cannot, truthfully, remember the last time I’ve been this sick, except way back when, when the kids were still babies and I myself got a horrible case of strep (a long history of personal horrible strep is why I’m always eager to treat it with antibiotics early, but lesson learned in this case).

Even walking the dog was hard, and that was before a snowstorm and frigid weather blew in, bringing -26°F (-32°C) wind chill. Today it’s a balmy high of 13°F (-10°C).

I hoped we’d escape effects like brain fog, and exhaustion, and crawling around the house trying to feed people chicken soup and orange juice and tea, while wanting to do nothing but huddle miserably under blankets. But here we are. Or were. I’m not sure. Thankfully—truly, said with an enormous amount of gratitude—good friends and relatives kept us supplied with essentials and good thoughts. We’re so lucky.

I didn’t escape the brain fog, though. After watching all of The Baby-Sitter’s Club again, my mind was almost up to reading Murderbot. It took so long, every scene a step-by-step challenge. By the time I finished the last novella, all I could think was a) I love Murderbot (not new news), and b) reading is hard.

—-

Most of my digital photos of Russia are lost in too many iterations of photo archives. Shutterfly spits up hordes of gray squares, and many others are stuck in old backup hard drives and iterations of when cloud storage was new and everything went into various platforms that I have no idea how to access. (Luckily, I am slightly controlling and obsessive and order prints of everything once a year before it gets lost to the ether; I hope that will still be an option in the future.) It’s hard to believe that I’ve got digital image memories twenty years old lurking grayly in Shutterfly’s servers (I switched to Snapfish sometime in the last ten years because their print quality was better).

I don’t think I need to tell anyone why Russia is on my mind, and Ukraine, and this beautiful heartbreak of a country that I have admired, felt part of, and loved all my life—most of it from afar. As a 1970s/80s child, my Russia was locked away behind the Iron Curtain, unreachable except for an occasional and incredibly expensive phone call from a neighbor’s kitchen, my father living in exile for seventeen years.

I don’t want that to be my world again, my family unreachable and my father’s country considered an enemy. I have two new nieces I haven’t even met yet. But who knows where we’ll end up. Mostly, I don’t want the people of Ukraine to have to face the stupid, insane cruelty of what’s coming.

—-

Trying to dig my mind out of Covid-dom, I finally picked up a book (very timely) that an old friend of my father’s wrote, Russian and American Cultures, by Konstantin V. Kustanovich, professor emeritus of Russian at Vanderbilt University.

Like Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia and Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians: A History, Kustanovich’s book looks to explain Russia’s unique and often inexplicable worldview and societal structures through culture; skimming parts of later chapters, it looks like he gets into more detail about how tightly repressive tsardom and the necessity of collectivist peasant society led to a difficult-to-transform dependence on authoritarianism mixed with suspicion of authority. You don’t have to read far to get to the book’s promise: the first section of the introduction is titled “What is wrong with Russia?”

Once, as my sister put it, I figure out how to navigate around the Swiss cheese holes in my thinking processes, I look forward to reading some answers, or at least ideas.

*Photo up top is of the Church of the Archangel Michael, Arkhangelskoe, Russia, on Maslenitsa 2005. The festival of Maslenitsa isn’t one I know much about—supposedly it has ancient pre-Christian pagan roots as a celebration welcoming back the sun and is now tied to the beginning of Lent—aside from copious amounts of blini pancakes to eat and the requesting of forgiveness from friends and loved ones. Please forgive me. If only the world, including Russia’s leaders themselves, could enter into that fullness of forgiveness and the asking of it for a day.

Maslenitsa this year begins on Monday, February 28.

Bonus photo: a statue of Bulat Okudzhava, folk musician of the 1960s, on the Arbat. Kustanovich opens chapter 1 of his book with a 1964 quote from Okudzhava: “It’s a pity that we dream of idols as we did before, and we still keep seeing ourselves as slaves.”

Super short list of stuff to read, listen to, or watch (although I can recommend The Baby-Sitter’s Club, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which is about where my brain has been the last week, plus I found myself more irritated than usual with anyone telling me what to think about things. I vote Baby-Sitter’s Club for president of all the countries and they also get to be the thought-leaders.):

• Before my brain shut down, I got a lot out of this incredible interview with legal scholar Mark Squillace on a water rights case in Colorado, the fight against privatization of public waters, and the case’s deep connection to the establishment of the public trust in U.S. states.

• Ditto this War on Cars interview with Jessie Singer about her new book There Are No Accidents, which starts with the story of a driver and the cyclist he hit but branches out into how hard we work to pretend that so many injuries and deaths are by accident, when in fact they’re a failure of design—often an intentional one.

• Someone in a Discord server I peek at sometimes posted this link to a video of kulning, an ancient Swedish herding call, by Jonna Jinton. I could probably listen to that all day. Jinton’s channel is a little too ethereally beautiful in a Galadriel-in-Lothlorien kind of way, but also hard to look away from. Here’s one for the life-hacking people who swear by a daily cold shower. (I buy the dunk in the ice. I do not totally buy the sitting by the small fire in wet underwear afterward.)

• Which led to someone else posting a slightly over-dramatized but equally fascinating video of the ancient whistled language of La Gomera.

• I wasn’t up to writing much of anything new, but had this interview with Annabel Abbs, author of Windswept (which I truly loved), queued up on Medium. She also recently came out with a second book, 52 Ways to Walk (under the name Annabel Streets), which I have on my shelf and am looking forward to poking around in. It’s a long interview, but I didn’t cut it down much because Abbs is smart, insightful, and delightful.