Border control

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Border control

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

I live in a train town with a gorgeous sky. It’s endlessly interesting. Came across these cars full of crushed scrap metal while on a walk with a friend.

I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted instead of read. I still remember the first time I managed to say “thank you” correctly in a small town in Turkey; and plunging my wrists one summer day under freezing cold fountain water on a hill outside of Budapest, where the heat felt like it might crush me and our friends woke us daily with tiny glasses of espresso and brandy.

To hand my passport over to a border agent once brought a tiny thrill. To a person brought up in a small Montana town where daily rhythms were determined by the train howling nightly as it passed by the Con Agra grain tower and the church bells I sometimes got to pull after Sunday school, borders were to enter a world unknown, a world made large.

Borders haven’t felt like that in a long time. When my spouse and I prepared to move to Australia from Austria, I was 22 years old. We spent exhausting hours at the Australian embassy in Vienna filling out forms and answering questions and submitting to lung X-rays to check for tuberculosis and compiling massive customs forms in two languages for our scant two boxes of belongings. We flew out on my 23rd birthday, which in Australia time had already passed. My spouse had a job in Sydney, which was why we were moving; my first three months in the country were a slog of employment applications and residency requirements and trying to find out how to get a birth control prescription. Living there had its wonderful moments—most of them spent in the ocean, though I maybe wouldn’t count the ocean moments trying to avoid bluebottle jellyfish—but those were wonderful despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them.

Last year, I spent a few days in Canada cross-country skiing and cooking with some longtime friends. I have lived in proximity to this border, between America and Canada, for almost the whole of my life. The closest crossing to me is an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve driven over it so many times it’s as familiar as the footbridge I usually take to walk into town.

It wasn’t that long ago—only decades, and what is that in geological time? not even a fingernail’s worth—that other friends and I would get the idea to go to Canada at some stupid hour of the night just to jump into a lake we liked visiting. We didn’t need passports back then, and the border guards were mostly bored.

Going to and coming back from Canada with my friends last year involved little stress. We presented our passports or passport cards. I, as the driver, answered questions about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons in the negative or semi-negative as not all of us were non-smokers. Our carful of mothers in their forties was waved through easily.

And yet there was nothing about that interaction that didn’t put me on edge, nothing about it that didn’t remind me of threat, of what can be denied. If not denied to me personally, to plenty of other people who have just as much right to traverse this man-made barrier as I do.

The entire interaction of crossing the border, beginning with the slowdown to the border gates and the scramble of finding passports, and through the questioning that brings up vivid memories of previous border crossings involving full-on stripped-out car searches and quizzes split between me and college boyfriends about what color our toothbrushes were, makes obvious the crushing power of borders. They are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, wildlife, or human relationship, yet maintain the say of life, death, and the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied.

Borders have the power to strangle our travel, our relationships, our communities, and our work. They impart the conviction that anyone on one side of a border or another has the power to judge, to condemn, to dispense death.

My friends and I were just going cross-country skiing as part of a tradition to celebrate one person’s birthday. What if we’d been fleeing genocide? What if our entire personhood were suddenly made illegal?

My paternal grandparents were Jewish people in the Russian empire, subject to strict rules about religious and cultural practices, limited work opportunities, male children’s compulsory conscription into the military (as young as the age of 9 depending on the tsar), and, like in much of Europe, forbidden from owning land. Not to mention being confined to living in shtetls within the borders of what was called the Pale of Settlement. My immediate family history is defined by who is allowed to live, work, travel, and wander, where.

To show my passport and be waved through a border says everything about the kinds of freedoms I have, and how easily they can be taken.

When I published the original version of this piece, Kristin DeMarr left a comment that included a link to an essay on borders I hadn’t read before, by Leslie Marmon Silko, whom I’d always only known as a fiction writer.

“I will never forget that night beside the highway,” Silko wrote.

“There was an awful feeling of menace and violence straining to break loose. It was clear the uniformed men would be only too happy to drag us out of the car if we did not speedily comply with their request (asking a question is tantamount to resistance, it seems).”

Silko wrote that essay in 1994, of a border—in the U.S.’s southwest—that has been increasingly militarized since at least the 1980s. Over half of U.S. citizens live within the jurisdiction of border patrol—which was extended in the early 2000s to cover 100 miles within any land or maritime border. Consciousness of that barrier’s power pervades how all of us behave and perceive ourselves and our freedom to varying degrees.

Shaina Fisher Galvas wrote a small poetry collection on borders last year, partly in response to that borders essay but unfolding out into ideas of perception and belonging, the way that borders of the mind and body spill into each other.

“The mind
constructs
borders
but bodies
cross them.”

she wrote in the poem “Border stories.”

Borders are physical, but they are also psychological and emotional. There is a great deal about my life and myself that I don’t include in this newsletter because doing so could have consequences that would make my life at best difficult. I don’t include yet others because they are not my stories to tell. Those are borders I mostly created and maintain myself. I will dismantle them when I feel ready, which is probably never.

Borders are social and cultural. When I enter a mosque or a Russian Orthodox Church, I cover my hair. When certain people come into my home, I take down and hide the sign above the coffee grinder that reads “Keep Your Fucking Shit Together” because I know it would offend them. I don’t walk through other people’s yards even though I don’t believe that private property boundaries should exist.

My views on the importance of free speech are boundaried by the reality of its lack for the half of my family living in Russia, but also by an understanding that words can cause just as much harm as physical violence, a perspective that puts me strongly at odds with an absolutist view of free speech. (I wrote about my town’s experience with neo-Nazi troll storms, including some of the messages I received personally and what effect it had on me, here.)

My stepbrother and his family weren’t able to come camping with us the past couple summers because they are Russian and can’t readily leave a country that’s been waging war on a neighboring one. They, and my cousins, friends, and other relatives in Russia, can disagree with the war all they want, but the border created by geopolitics doesn’t care what they think, or desire, and it’s illegal for them to say anything about it publicly.

These are very different kinds of borders with vastly different consequences. Not all of them require a passport; many of them still require a form of passing, or of shaping oneself to accepted expectations.

One of the books that I’ve learned most from over the past few years is Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule. Since reading it, I’ve watched several of her online presentations and webinars, and am often inspired by her expansive view of what borders are, what they do to us, and how dismantling them requires also dismantling the systems of oppression that they enable, as she wrote about in this interview:

“A no border politics is expansive. It includes the freedom to stay and the freedom to move, meaning that no one should be forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and that people should have the freedom to move with safety and dignity. Those two freedoms may seem contradictory, but actually they are necessary corollaries. The crux of a no border politics is nestled in the broader politics of home. How do we create a world where we all have a home?”

It’s an answer to something brought up repeatedly in Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall’s book The Prehistory of Private Property. The essence of freedom is contained in the answer to one question: Can you leave?

Can you? Can I? Could I just pick up and walk north until I reach the border and then, like the rivers that run down from Canada full of selenium pollution from coal mining, ignore it?

The answer is no, obviously, and it might serve us all to ask more frequently why not. What borders constrict our lives and how much of a choice we have in their construction and enforcement.

When I lived in Austria, I had to apply for a meldetzetl, a residency visa for foreigners. To get it, I had to go to a special foreigners’ police station. I had lived in the country for two months and had been taking intensive German lessons for two weeks. I arrived in good time for my appointment, only to find that nobody there spoke English, or in fact any language other than German. At the foreigners’ police station. The officers ridiculed and belittled me in words I barely grasped, and told me to come back with a translator.

I was 22 years old and had used my last speck of savings from waiting tables to pay for a root canal at the dentist. I was scared and sad, but had a multi-lingual friend who worked for the BBC and came back with me to translate and also threaten the police with press exposure if they didn’t follow their own damn rules. I got my residency visa purely because of her.

Within a couple years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York City and elsewhere, my spouse and I were stopped by border patrol about 70 miles from the Canadian border. My spouse, who only became a U.S. citizen a few years ago, is English. Our friends who were going hiking with us were also stopped. The wife was American, while her spouse—one of my husband’s oldest friends—was from Northern Ireland. We were taken to an immigration center, sat down with a whole lot of other people, and told in no uncertain terms that the males of our parties, the non-American spouses, could be deported immediately because they weren’t carrying their identification and green card papers.

The border agents were dead serious and it was scary as hell. Close to that time period, a colleague of my spouse’s avoided her own husband’s deportation by moving back to her country of birth—she was Japanese and her spouse was Italian; the renewal of his U.S. residency visa had been denied and for neither of them, suddenly, was it possible to live and work on land where cranberries grow and turkeys roam wild and where they had employment.

The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did. He had to leave the country within ten days of his visa denial, and so they did. Permanently.

I look back on all of these interactions, and more, like the innumerable run-ins I’ve had with the police in Russia trying to get a bribe out of me, and see a world laced with borders. Borders are not, as Harsha Walia wrote, “fixed lines simply demarcating territory. They are productive regimes firmly embedded in global imperialism, and border controls exist far beyond the territorial border itself.”

Coming back from Canada last year, my friends and I passed several herds of grazing bighorn sheep, and slowed for a flock of pine grosbeaks reluctant to leave the road. We got through border security easily, drove forward, and then paused to debate if we were allowed to go back and ask the guard about using the bathroom. We were allowed, but sat there for a minute literally asking one another, “Do you think we’re allowed to go back and ask him?” with an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear created on purpose by the psychological architecture of the place.

My younger kid and I recently spent a few days in Canada for their spring break, in a small town similar to our own where we did little but walk by the river in between sitting in a coffee shop reading books. Our border crossings were uneventful and took seconds. That same week, my kids’ father and our son were crossing the border with Canada by train and bus north of Seattle; their experience in both directions was harsher.

Borders are physical, social, cultural, and emotional, but what they are most is a form of power. When I hand my passport over, it’s with the knowledge that my freedom to go, to wander this Earth and love it freely, can always be denied.

I encourage people to go back and read the comments in the original version of this piece from last year, the range of chilling and threatening experiences people have had crossing, or trying to cross, borders. Share your own here. Read one another’s. This is an experience that affects everyone, even those of us who think we have the privilege to remain unaware until something happens.

This is a reality I’ve lived with my entire life—my father grew up in the Soviet Union, a country he was not allowed to leave for a long time. When he was finally given permission to emigrate with my mother and older sister, both American, he was given 3 days to leave the country and told not to return. He was almost 30 years old. He lived in exile for 17 years and never saw his own father again.

The original version of this essay probably had the most comments of any I’ve written on this platform, which longtime subscribers know is saying a lot, and it’s not without reason. The experience of borders is like air pollution full of poisons and invisible heavy metals, seeping into every aspect of our being.

A world of boundaries and respect, but no borders, could truly be one where traveling smells of freedom, a way of being in a world that can be read and known through our footsteps, this shared planet the only true book, one to be experienced rather than read, and whose air shifts like poetry as we traverse every curve of her spine.

Wealth knows best

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Wealth knows best

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

Resistance often starts with property

My first semester of college, I had a neighbor who had a nice stereo system. I don’t know anything about stereo systems so I had to take her word for it that it was nice, or at least expensive.

My neighbor set up her CD player and speakers inside her closet, against the interior wall that separated it from my closet, and when she played music loudly, which she liked to do, especially at night, it thumped right into my room. Sometimes I asked her to turn it down, and at one point asked if, in general, she could not turn the volume so high because it was just as loud in my room as it was in hers. Or if she could even just keep it off at night.

Her response was one of my first encounters with the particular kind of entitlement that comes with having money: “What’s the point of having a nice stereo system if you can’t play it?”

I remember struggling with a vague feeling of injustice, of thinking about shared space and why her right to play her pricey stereo system shouldn’t come at the expense of my right to quiet, or sleep. I didn’t have vocabulary for that feeling until many years later, not until I’d lived overseas for a while, gotten married, and moved back to the U.S. to bumble around inarticulately and angrily liberal during the entirety of the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. I’m still liberal and often angrily so, but I hope more articulate.

Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that one person, or group of people, has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people. It is often accompanied by an expansive idea of ownership, a feeling that the fact of possession, whether of property or money or achievement or identity, implies a right to the unconstrained use of the thing possessed, no matter how the possession was gained or at whose expense it’s employed.

Being wealthy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for entitlement—some of the people I know who act most entitled do so due to their status, professional success, identity, or sense of grievance—but they do often seem to correlate. Wealth entitlement infects our civic and social life and the functions of our political and social systems at every level. Why buy an expensive car if you’re not allowed to drive as fast as possible wherever you like? Why own land if you can’t mine it, or build a plastics factory on it, or claim ownership of all wildlife who happen to live on it? Why finance a politician’s political campaign if you can’t use their influence to forward your own interests?

Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History podcast and related newsletter, was on an episode of TrashFuture a few years ago talking about some of these issues, and he said quite a few things about wealth entitlement that have stuck with me:

“It’s very hard for them to accept the fact that the system that produced them and made them people who matter, people whose needs and whims are catered to and who feel like they have some positive role to play in society—the idea that the systems that put them where they are might somehow be bad or might have negative consequences . . . it’s very hard to wrap their heads around.”

Wyman and the podcast hosts were discussing a kind of capitalism divide prevalent in the January 6, 2021, attempted U.S. insurrection and the movements leading up to it, which they said were partly a result of two different kinds of wealth opposed to each other: “the Davos guys versus the boat dealership guys,” a “revolt of the regional elites, the regional gentry.” An opposition that seems to have dissolved in the past couple of years in favor of shared purpose and the acquisition of unbelievable political power.

Who comprises regional gentry rather than the international über-wealthy is something Wyman got into in a newsletter he wrote about the kinds of wealth you see in the power players of small North American towns and mid-sized cities—not the ilk of the Koch and Mercer families, or the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but people who run McDonald’s franchises or large local construction companies. People who are much better off than you’d think but who also work hard. People like car dealership owners, which made sense to me—the owner of the local Subaru and Chevy dealership where I live seems to be incredibly well off, and there’s no other place within hours to buy a Subaru. He’s also the former head of the Montana Republican Party, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t become more vocally right-wing and anti-democracy over the past several years.

These are people, Wyman pointed out, who derive their wealth from ownership of actual, physical assets rather than from salaries like a doctor or lawyer or hedge fund manager would. Their wealth is still more tied, if with thin and fraying threads, to their local communities than that of the billionaire class.

“Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. . . . We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. . . . It’s not hard to spot vast apple orchards or sprawling vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, or the kind of riches the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield might generate.”

It’s ownership, Wyman said, that creates the basic divide between the two kinds of ruling capital. “To what extent is ownership central to your identity? The more central ownership is, the more likely you are to fall on the right side of that spectrum.”

Wyman drew a solid line between different kinds of ownership—physical assets like an orchard versus, say, savings in a Swiss bank account—but that line has never really existed. Wealth and ownership morph into each other, both feeding the possessor’s sense of entitlement. Of deserving more than, being more than, other people, much less the rest of life.

I’m reminded of 19th-century British novels, Jane Austen in particular, and the class divide that the landed nobility tried to make between themselves and those who’d become wealthy through “trade.” It’s a line drawn through socioeconomic class that tries to maintain entitlement only for certain types of wealth: inherited wealth. But the truth is that all kinds of wealth provide opportunities to purchase and hoard power.

A real-life example of ownership, wealth and entitlement closer to the Davos end of the capital class was covered in a feature in High Country News in 2021: When Gunnison County, Colorado, tried to exile non-resident homeowners in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, those property owners (who tend to extreme wealth; David Koch owns a vacation home there) fought back with a breathtaking display of entitlement, rather than relying on either the law or a cooperative attempt to address the community’s concerns.

Whether banning non-resident homeowners from staying in their homes was a wise or legal choice for the county isn’t something I know enough about to comment on, but the homeowners’ responses reflected not arguments for what would be best for the community or even what their own legal rights were but what they personally felt entitled to no matter the consequences to anyone else.

In addition to setting up a PAC (political action committee, a non-profit created to fund political campaigns) to raise money to unseat county commissioners and replace them with more congenial candidates, a group of non-resident owners set up a private Facebook group as they worked against the ban, and some of the comments that have become public were . . . telling.

“‘People who rely on others for their livelihoods should not bite the hand that feeds them,’ wrote one second-home owner.”

“‘Where is the appreciation and gratitude for the decades of generosity?’ wrote another.”

“‘Maybe don’t run your mouth so much on social media when you depend on those people to help pay your bills,’ one Facebook commenter wrote.”

“According to the second-home owners,” wrote the author of the article, Nick Bowlin, “Gunnison County’s economic survival and most of its residents’ livelihoods depend on their economic contributions and continued goodwill.”

It’s easy to see the logic of this thinking, but it also shouldn’t take that much work to pause, for a moment, and comprehend more fully the expectations of those who see themselves not as integrated members of a community, but as generous and gracious people of means to whom local residents should be grateful—but also for whom the health of that community itself is a matter of choice and leisure rather than necessity. People who have no bonds to the community but still feel it owes them something.

When I buy books from the local bookstore, I don’t expect the clerks or owner to be grateful to me. I am part of my community, interdependent with it; the continued existence of the bookstore and the coffee shops and the library and all the small downtown businesses also make my life whole. I am grateful to them. It is their existence that makes our community thrive, along with the hard work and many non-monetary contributions of people who live here. When the non-resident homeowners of Gunnison County lambasted a local restaurant server who’d publicly disagreed with them—“One of those big mouths is slinging drinks for tips—I’ll be sure to leave her a little tip,” wrote one of the Facebook group’s members—it was clear that what those residents expected was not service but subservience.

Escaping this kind of landed gentry vs. villein, serf, or tenuous and beholden tenant relationship was exactly what originally drove so many people like my ancestors out of Europe and into North America.

We’ve been recreating feudalism under the guise of property rights right here, and it’s only getting worse.

Bowlin tried to talk about the wealth divide in Gunnison County with Jim Moran, who launched the PAC to attempt a takeover of the county commission and whose vacation home in Crested Butte was worth, according to Zillow (referenced in the article) at the time, $4.3 million:

“I pointed out Gunnison County’s housing shortage to Moran, who, from 2008-2011, was an advisor of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds—the biggest buyer of distressed mortgage securities in the world after the 2008 financial crisis. After the crash, the firm acquired billions in bad mortgages and aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes, according to The New York Times. I asked Moran if, compared to locals who struggle to pay rent, people who own two or more properties should be considered wealthy. ‘I think that’s wrong,’ he replied.”

Once you’re in a position of wealth and power and mostly surrounded by people who are the same, it can be very, very difficult to see yourself as wealthy, or powerful, much less to understand how your position affects the lives of everyone around you. “These people exist in a world that caters to them,” Wyman has said.

That characterization applies to both types of capital classes and most of the spectrum in between. I don’t think my former neighbor in college was from serious wealth, but from my vantage as someone who grew up on food stamps and who was in college by the grace of that institution’s generous financial aid program, she was pretty well off. She had a bank account. With savings in it. Nobody in my life had ever come near such a thing. Maybe it’s ungenerous of me, but I could easily see her going from insisting she had a right to turn up her music to becoming one of those non-resident homeowners making disparaging comments on Facebook.

“So what do we know about them, these vocal second-home owners?” wrote Bowlin in High Country News. “They worked hard for everything they own. They are clear on this. Their critics, they believe, are often motivated by jealousy. “‘I’m certainly not ‘rich.’ I’ve worked for my entire life to have the properties I own,’ wrote one group member.”

Properties. First of all, owning more than one property of the type described in the article, in a country where millions of children go hungry every day is, yes, rich, no matter how hard you’ve worked. Secondly, we have a problem when the very fact of ownership becomes its own justification. How is that wealth gained? At whose expense? And what impact is one’s ownership having on the local community?

As someone who also lives in a resort town with a high percentage of non-resident homeowners, these are not a minor questions to me. Wealth that translates into property ownership frequently has a terrible and nearly immediate downstream effect on the affordability of homes for people who live and work in that community full-time. Those effects cannot be counterbalanced by tipping generously when you go out to dinner.

Ownership in and of itself is not a value-neutral position. Its injustices compound over time, as the wealthy gain power, influence policy, and use both to acquire yet more wealth. My state’s current multi-millionaire governor, Greg Gianforte, not only used his millions to fund his several political campaigns but last year, with the conservative-dominated state legislature’s help, quietly lowered taxes on the wealthy and raised them on the poor and middle class—a direct wealth transfer from those who have the least, to those who already have the most and are now guaranteed to have more.

The arguments in favor of these kinds of tax policies—that somehow the benefits will “trickle down” to everybody else—wore thin decades ago, as real wages and salaries declined while the wealthy bought more vacation homes. And yet the mindset persists: making the wealthy wealthier will eventually be good for everyone. Someone with wealth can use those assets to benefit the community, if they desire.

But they often don’t desire, and if they do, it often comes with demands that reflect the power wealth has bought. My own community saw this play out less than two years ago, when a billionaire who’d built what looks like a literal palace overlooking the town objected to a zoning adjustment that would have allowed a new development to include affordable housing. The intricacies of that development’s proposal are less important here than the fact that that billionaire went to the town’s community foundation and told them that if the proposal passed city council, the local housing non-profit would never see another dime from him. His wealth, he thought, gave him the right to decide what was best for the community as well as for himself.

“Equating wealth,” wrote Wyman,

“especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class. They stand at the apex of the social order throughout huge swathes of the country, and shape our economic and political world thanks to their resources and comparatively large numbers, yet they’re practically invisible in our popular understanding of these things.”

Entitlement whitewashes wealth’s questionable values within the owner’s own mind. It makes all that one does and thinks automatically valuable. It grants people, they believe, the absolute right to do whatever they like with their property regardless of the consequences to others. And just like the problems of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, entitlement isn’t the sole province of high-profile stories located in a few specific enclaves. It’s everywhere.

The fact that there exist wealthy people who don’t buy into the sense of entitlement in a way proves the point: it’s not a requirement of wealth. It is at some level a choice. There are plenty of examples of people with wealth who would prefer less of it in favor of a society where everybody thrives. Musician Brian Eno, for example, has recently spoken out and advocated for higher wealth taxes in Britain, saying,

“I don’t like the thought that half of the population are struggling, and I don’t think there’s any need that they should be struggling. . . . wealth doesn’t trickle down to anybody. I trickles up, actually. . . . Rich people really piss me off.”

People like Eno, and others who quietly do whatever they can with their money to benefit the rest of life, are far outnumbered by, say, those covered in the High Country News article, those who believe that nobody should tell them what they should or can do with their wealth, and very definitely that their wealth shouldn’t be taxed, no matter how detrimental extreme wealth is to a society or how ethically questionable the accumulation of that wealth has been. Only those who own the wealth are entitled to determine what they’re allowed to do with it.

And if the rest of us do benefit from the choices the entitled make in how to employ their wealth and property? Well, we should be grateful that they’re willing to share—or, at the very least, grateful that they’re begrudgingly willing to turn down their music once in a while and throw a few tips our direction.

Maclay Flats just outside Missoula, Montana. I sat right here to record the audio version of this essay. Nothing like running water for some much-needed restoration. I forgot to mention in the audio that it’s a place with a tremendous number of ponderosa pine trees, just behind where I was sitting. My part of Montana further north is not rich in ponderosas and I always like spending time with those big-shouldered relatives when I’m down there.

There were wolves in the woods – and we both belonged

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on There were wolves in the woods – and we both belonged

Welcome (or welcome back!) to On the Commons. Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: Why are 3 little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, and freedom? How can a night of firelit poetry and some barefoot walking bring a person back to herself?

Alpenglow on the peaks of Glacier National Park above the North Fork of the Flathead River, March 6, 2025, 7:27 p.m.

I’ve taken so many pictures of this particular curve of this particular river I couldn’t begin to count them. Pictures of sunrise from behind those mountains, of the rocks and ice where I sit to watch that sunlight grow hour by hour before finally flashing above the peaks, my scorching coffee pouring heat back into what a frozen early-morning river dip has snatched away.

Pictures of alpenglow, that rose quartz soaking the snow and rock, the late-struck sunlight from the west slipping slowly up and off the mountains as the sky behind turns purple, then indigo, then something dark and rich that takes hours to reach anything like true black, drizzled with stars and blanked by the light of a half-full Moon high in the western sky.

The last two years, I was there this same time but over a full Moon, watching Her rise slowly from the same spot in the east where Sun comes up hours later. I still have a four-minute video of one of those nights, when I sat in the Forest Service cabin embroidering under the single propane-powered light and listening to mice run around the walls.

Full Moon rising over the peaks of Glacier National Park, March 7, 2023, 7:25 p.m.

During my Master Naturalist course a couple years ago, we learned about phenology journals, a way of tracking sightings, behaviors, noticings, and movements of the natural world over the seasons and years. To be able to compare Moon phases and birds, temperature and river’s ice coverage even over three or four years is a little thrilling—for a modern person. For the vast span of human history, in any part of the planet, it would have been expected and shared knowledge, a matter of survival as well as of culture. Such a short time of industrialization, and in that time how much has been lost, how much there is to relearn.

There is something about reminding myself of the Moon phases and bird encounters from last year, and the year before, that has begun to give me a settled sense of belonging to this place where I’ve spent most of my life. A sense of responsibility, even, that I’ve been quietly working on ever since moving back home to Montana in 2014—serving the land and lives I live among starts with knowing them.

While at this most recent offline, off-grid cabin visit, I reread a couple of books I read last fall: How Wealth Rules the World by Ben G. Price (more about that in a future essay), and Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, edited by Nick Hayes (of The Book of Trespass) and Jon Moses and written by people involved in England’s Right to Roam movement.

Wild Service takes its ethos from the serviceberry tree, an intersection of both worldview and metaphor with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry—the service is native to both England and North America, and is similarly under-valued by modern industrial culture.

In the introduction to Wild Service, Nick Hayes speaks to the concepts of kinship and belonging, and the book’s overriding theme that there is no “saving nature” (however one interprets that) by placing it in some sort of walled garden never touched by humans. Humans need to re-relationship with nature, re-kin, reconnect. Recommon.

“Recommoning is how we can change this. Recommoning is the idea that all humans can and should have the collective responsibility to care for nature.”

To learn the lands and waters of one’s home, ask permission and feel one’s way into a sense of welcome and belonging, is one of the best antidotes I can think of to a culture and power structures that seem intent on destroying every single bit of good and beauty in the world.

I started going to these forest service cabins, and often camping by myself in the woods, to, frankly, get work done. The life of a caregiver is, as anyone who does it knows, even in the best circumstances characterized by nearly nonstop interruption. When I’m somewhere alone, and especially without internet or phone access, I suddenly have time to read a book, sort through research, brainstorm ideas. Write, edit, revise, edit other people’s work for my copy editing job. Write again.

But over the last couple of years I’ve started to let myself spend that time—usually two or three nights—to just be. The last two times I was at that cabin, I lay by the river for up to four hours a day doing nothing but listening to the water run and watching the shift of Sun through the spruce and pine trees. Catching an occasional glimpse of raven or bald eagle, northern flicker or chickadee.

This time, all four were present, along with a pair of Canada geese and some Canada jays (Canada seemed to be in the air, go Canada).

And one day, there was a wolf.

I had lingered by the river at sunset, as usual, and that night it snowed. The next day, toward sunset again, at that same spot, I almost walked right over fresh wolf tracks in the fresh snow. Struck still in amazement—we must have been there within hours of each other, if not minutes—I followed them down to the river, where the wolf had probably taken a drink of water not twenty feet from where I’d been sitting much of the chilly afternoon.

The next morning, I followed the tracks a little way back into the forest, toward a spot I’d camped above the river one hot weekend the previous August. I didn’t go very far, not wanting to disturb or stress the wolf or wolves, since they prefer to keep their distance from humans when given the choice.

I’ve been going to that cabin and river for years and though I know wolves live in the area—the packs there originally repopulated those mountains from Canada over 40 years ago, as local wildlife biologist Diane K. Boyd writes about in her recent memoir A Woman Among Wolves—it’s a vast, mostly unpeopled, region and I’ve never seen tracks anywhere near that cabin.

A wolf came by. Being a brief part of a wolf’s story is the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened to me there, even counting full Moonrises over Glacier and the time one of the packrats ran off with my best tea strainer.

There is something about these experiences to bring back home, something that eases the chew of guilt at even having the privilege of time itself to go sleep by a river alone for a couple of nights. Of having two flexible freelance careers, a reliable co-parent and an able-enough body and kids who don’t need round-the-clock care. These times make me whole, they keep me human. But due to a combination of early training against any hint of selfishness, and a tradition of service to others from both sides of my family, it nags at me to luxuriate in them.

I tell myself I can do my work more effectively by spending these times away, by having hours and days where influences and rhythms are given by starlight and free-flowing water rather than clocks and news cycles and dinnertimes and the finicky washing machine. I tell myself that, because it helps me feel better about simply doing and being what I want to do and how I want to be for a few days.

I recently read Pico Iyer’s new book Aflame, about the monastery in California he’s been spending time at for decades, and found much to connect with in the conversations he had with people over the years, their struggles with mortality and service, how we live with one another and the world. I keep going back to one line toward the beginning, about the writing Iyer does while staying there:

“The point of being here is not to get anything done; only to see what might be worth doing.”

Which reflects the shift over the years in how I, too, spend my time in these places. There’s a lot I stop caring about or stressing over. Priorities are shaken loose and values realigned. I’ve got one life. How do I care for, and even treasure, the stardust that makes up each of its days, each of its moments? Where is the balance between attending to oneself and attending to the world?

What I often come to on these trips is that anything approaching balance is found in accepting that those two things are often one and the same—a tricky idea with many complications, not least of which is a warping of “attending to oneself” into a wellness culture that too often encourages our own personal little walled gardens and No Trespassing signs.

“Protect your peace” is vital advice, and at the same time a slippery slope. When does self-care turn into selfishness? Yet how much giving or service is too much? At what point does providing support turn into taking away others’ agency? When does focusing on “internal stability” rather than “external security”—which is another way of phrasing Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s insight that the final freedom is in choosing one’s attitude to external circumstances—turn into accepting injustice? The very real value of self-sovereignty can be weaponized against societal and cultural change the way the idea of “grit” has been in education.

Do any of us have any idea what we’re doing here?

Probably not.

Many times over the years, people have told me that they would not want to imitate these trips, because the prospect of being that alone for that long is too daunting. As someone who’s always been most comfortable in the company of only herself and nature, I try to sympathize, to enter into what it feels like to not crave this alone time as badly as I crave sleep, as I crave gulps of water taken straight from the river, as I crave quiet. I’ve got some frustrating issues going on that have limited more far-flung ventures recently, but in general it’s no feat for me to do this, go to the woods and be alone for a few days, barely a hardship. I sleep best far away from other humans.

Which always leads back into a circular wondering of how selfish taking this time is. I know that coming to these places, holding this time sacred for whatever relationships exist between me and the river, me and the trees, me and the ravens, me and myself, me and that wolf, makes me somehow more human, more real, more alive, and much more capable of managing all the obligations and cares in my life. But I need it, and isn’t it selfish, to take time for what we need?

I know most everyone reading this is generally kind and sympathetic and will say of course not—at least, those of you who comment and email—but it’s a haunting question, embedded in my psyche, that I’ll probably never be fully rid of, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Wild Service refocuses these questions, forcing readers to ask how much we can truly do for the world, or even love the world, if we don’t understand it, don’t know it. While it’s true that over a century of car-centrism and living indoors and, now, digital lives have increasingly disconnected humans from nature, private property and private land ownership did so centuries before, by removing people from their relationship with lands. Recommoning means re-belonging.

“Service is the foundation stone of belonging. While ownership imposes a simplistic, one-way relationship with the land, easily transferable in the passing of deeds, legal spells that confer dominion, belonging takes more work. . . . Belonging is the democratic antidote to despotic ownership, and it requires active engagement with the land, lived experience, knowledge and shared stories.”

If the only answer I can ever find to my own personal quandary is not in words, but in actions—in spending time with family and friends, in laughing and struggling together—and a great deal more in simply learning to belong, letting myself belong, with rivers and starlight, wolves and ravens, basking in Moonfall in the middle of the night under a bare-branched cottonwood tree shaking ice shards and Orion’s Belt off her fingers, in learning to serve the world, and especially the place I live and love, as it is, then I can’t imagine, when I get to the end of my life, I’ll regret having done so, having spent some time to see what, in each of those moments, was worth doing.

Half-Moon barely visible high over Glacier National Park, where I stopped to watch a bald eagle soar for a long time on my drive out of the North Fork.

History is won by those who live it

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on History is won by those who live it
Say hello to my little friends.

Over half a lifetime ago, I was walking with some friends along the harbor road of Ephesus, once an embattled, storied, and thriving city of Ionia (and then Greece and then Rome and various lesser-known empires in between and after), and now an archaeological ruin in Turkey with just enough intact or restored architecture to hold our then-20-year-old selves in awe.

The harbor road, we were told, had once ended at the sea, which was now miles away after thousands of years of change and silt. We walked along the broad, flat stones and one of my friends said, “3,000 years ago, people were walking this same road, flirting with each other. Can you picture them?”

I’ve been picturing them ever since—people, just like you and me, full of hopes and heartaches, their particles sifted amongst the harbor’s silt for thousands of years, even their names forgotten for generations beyond anyone’s count. Someone worried over their child’s illness, another holding back tears at the cruelty of a former lover.

I’ve been working on an essay about the unholy marriage of power and wealth. I keep stalling on finishing it because every day brings another example that leaves me wondering: isn’t it obvious now? How wealth buys power and they feed off of each other? To write about Alexei Navalny’s long and eventually ill-fated battle against oligarchs and corruption in modern Russia, or the sacrifice of 18th-century Poland by prosperous nobles who cared mostly for their own comfort and position, or countless other instances of the ruin brought by unchecked wealth and its hold over unchecked power, feels . . . well, yes, obvious.

I could write for years about the compounded injustices and cumulative wealth inequality engendered by private land ownership alone—and in fact have been writing about it for years—but to find something different to say about it when the results are playing out not just in the daily news cycle, but almost the hourly, feels a bit like trying to hang onto a soap bubble.

While I try to find ways to keep that soap bubble intact—describing its shimmers and form without popping it into nonexistence—I’m going to republish a revised version of a related essay on wealth and entitlement (the psychological kind) in a few days.

Over the last couple weeks, as I kept asking myself how to bring some more foundational purpose to that essay on power and wealth, I took a break and started some vegetable seeds for this year’s garden.

I don’t usually start seeds. I don’t have a greenhouse, my kitchen isn’t generally warm enough even for fermenting sauerkraut, and it’s usually so overcast in winter here that there’s barely enough sunlight to keep a spider plant alive. But my brother-in-law gave me an old grow light to try to keep a medicinal tobacco plant growing over the winter (it did! it’s small but still living! the aphids love it) so I thought I might as well try to get a start on the garden, since where I am in Montana we don’t get enough warm summer days most years to coax a tomato plant from seed outside, much less pumpkins or melons.

Sorting through my box of seeds turned out to be one of the most hope-generating things I’ve done in a long time. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking about “well, life goes on” or “no matter what, people still need to eat.” It was the seeds themselves, like they were wrapping little tendrils of magic light around my fingers as I tried to figure out what I’d need to buy and what I had too much of. They took me completely out of myself and the most recent text threads of news from family and friends. Life. No narration or clever turns of phrase, just a few moments of life, of feeling alive and part of it all.

It felt really good.

Some days later, I was driving toward home and a truck with the U.S. Forest Service logo stamped on the side—not an uncommon sight where I live, among well over a million acres of wilderness and non-wilderness land overseen by the USFS—turned through an intersection in front of me and I started crying.

Among the insanity of what’s going in the U.S.’s ongoing hostile corporate takeover of a government, the professions and lives wrecked and overturned, and uncertainty and fear of Forest Service and many other employees, the goal of selling off and profiting from public lands is clear. It was an aim in 2017 and remains one. It’s why I wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about the commons and the kind of freedom held in public lands in 2019.

All land “owned,” public or private, has in fact been stolen, and it can be stolen over and over and over again. As I wrote shortly before the 2024 U.S. presidential election of my relatives in Russia, “Nobody in my family takes democratic freedoms for granted, but perhaps it takes living under dictatorship or oppression to realize that even the right to fight for something better can be stripped away.”

Which is just as true of nature, of the more-than-human world, of clean water and freedom to roam, of foraging for huckleberries and sleeping by wild rivers, as it is of the right to protest and to vote. This week I am going once again to my favorite Forest Service cabin, and wonder now if it might be for the last time, if I might never again be able to walk into the freezing waters of one of the only free-flowing and minimally polluted rivers on this continent, might never again listen to the packrats thumping around at night.

The day after I cried at the sight of a Forest Service truck, for all my friends and acquaintances who had lost their jobs or were worried about losing them, for the lands and waters that gift us so much, I gave a talk to an audience largely composed of public lands and wilderness advocates.

The talk was half about walking and evolutionary biology, and half about the commons, the stark injustice of privately owned land, and the vital role that public lands play in ensuring freedom. (It was recorded; I’ll post a link to the recording when it’s available.)

It felt right to give that talk, to say what I thought needed saying, but it also felt like a bit of mustering before a battle, when few besides those in the room knew what was to come, or how to prepare for it.

The residents of Ephesus lived and died, planted seeds and fought for what they loved, for over a thousand years. The city was ruled by tyrants and overtaken by emperors eager for land, spoils, and subjects, including Alexander the Great and later, at various periods, as part of the Ottoman Empire.

They are forgotten, almost every single one of those people. Every seed they planted, every hand that worked a chink into the Library of Celsus or wrapped a cloth around a newborn baby. Every bit of laughter echoing along the harbor road, every flirtatious side-glance and jealous narrowing of the eyes. “History” wants to leave us only with Mithridates, king of Pontus, not the 80,000 Roman citizens throughout Asia he ordered murdered. It wants us to to credit the emperor Titus with building the Colosseum, not the tens of thousands of Jewish slaves who were forced to do the actual work.

Most people who have ever lived are forgotten.

So will I be forgotten, and almost every single one of us. But how we treat one another, and the stands we take against injustice, and for a better world, still matter.

The past few nights I’ve watched the thinnest slivers of Moon low, and on subsequent nights higher, in the western sky, and thought about where my particles will be, what soil I’ll have been fortunate enough to fertilize, in a few thousand years when other eyes are watching that same Moon, Venus low and bright nearby, perhaps kept awake by a lover’s betrayal, a child’s worrisome cough, next month’s bills, or the battle of eons against the power of tyrants whose wealth has made them seem unstoppable.

History might be written around the names of those who destroy, and take credit for others’ labor, but it is lived, lost, and sometimes won by the rest of us. Those who plant seeds of all kinds, who nurture and care. In truth, history is never fully won or lost. It is a living record, the concerns and tasks that wend through our days, the neverending struggles for justice and against oppression. History is lived. It is life. It starts over again every time we plant something new.

When I went to Turkey in 1997, I had a cheap little travel camera and only found out after the pictures were developed that I’d grabbed black and white film instead of color. Below is Ephesus: the Library of Celsus, a stone carving detail, and the harbor road from a vantage up in the ampitheater.

The time that is given to us is not for us to choose

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on The time that is given to us is not for us to choose
Faint but there: Moonbow

In late 2016, a . . . situation, let’s call it, battered my town. A neo-Nazi site had picked up a disagreement over a local building’s ownership, and the result was months of online and telephoned threats to many people in town, one family in particular, and a threatened armed march that we all prepared for but that never materialized. Possibly because it was never going to but also possibly because that was a bitter winter; if I remember, the day of the proposed march was -17°F (-27°C).

Reporters covered the situation so thoroughly that for a long time you couldn’t google my town without white supremacists being the top story.

The targets of the attacks were pretty much all Jewish, or even seemingly Jewish. At least one business in town was attacked until the neo-Nazi site’s owner found out the owners weren’t Jewish. The “troll storm” (a term I dislike; it makes it sound like a game and attacks like that are anything but a game) was vicious, and left scars that will probably never disappear.

As the attacks started, a friend asked me for help figuring out if there was a way to protect the identity of one of the victims. I’m not a cybersecurity person or even an investigative journalist, but I tried. I spent a night crawling through 4chan and 8chan threads (I do not recommend this for anybody ever) but it was too late to stop personal phone numbers and names from getting out.

That same week, by sheer coincidence, an op-ed I’d written was published in the Los Angeles Times, tangentially related to the already-ongoing situation. I’d written it because one person had already made my hometown synonymous with white supremacy and, since I’m a writer and had an editorial contact at the paper, writing was all I could think of to help.

That op-ed turned me into a target, too. What I experienced was absolutely nothing like what other people went through. I describe it as receiving barely a splash from a tsunami that hit others with full force. I wrote about that in more detail a couple of years ago, including screenshots of the Twitter posts directed at me, in an essay about the digital commons and the ignorance in thinking that what happens online has no true real-life consequences:

I still had a Twitter account then and kept screenshots of some of what was sent my way, which wasn’t notable for its level of hate, but for the fact that the person writing the posts knew my nickname (which I’d almost never shared online before), my phone number (ditto), and my family’s routines. Which meant they either knew me or knew someone who did. I’ll never forget walking to the elementary school playground day after day, wondering who?

Who had given my phone number and my family’s personal details to white supremacists? It was someone who knew me.

Even before someone posted my phone number on Twitter, before I had much of a personal reason for fear, I was scared. The relentlessness of this “troll storm,” the sheer hate and dehumanization behind it, still makes my skin crawl seven years later. I was scared for my friends and acquaintances, my community. I was scared for what it said about what kinds of forces were being empowered worldwide.

I’m not the only person who coped by drinking a lot, by spending time only with people I trusted absolutely.

I stopped being able to sleep much. I mostly consumed chicken wings and booze. I had been walking or biking my kids to school day in and day out for two years, morning and afternoon, ever since my son started first grade, and was suddenly terrified to be physically outdoors, with them, visible. Being a target myself was bad enough; I didn’t want anybody to know who my kids were.

The day of the march came. None of the threatened participants showed. The town had shut down in preparation anyway, so as to withdraw as much attention from the attendees as possible, and a group hosted a matzo ball soup gathering in an emptied downtown. I wasn’t there. I can’t remember what I did that day—watched The Lego Movie with my kids, maybe, for the tenth time (my choice, not theirs; I enjoy that movie). I think we had a fire going in the wood stove all day. Hunkered down in warmth and seeming safety, even if safety is always a mirage, a veneer. Temporary.

The troll storm faded away but the fears and damage didn’t. Everyone, I imagine, learned something different from that time. Everyone, I imagine, learns something different from all such times.

I’m under no illusions that the threat has faded. Anti-Semitism is perhaps, except for misogyny, the oldest and most universal prejudice on the planet, stretching back through massacres, wholesale expulsions from entire countries, theft of children, and vast, structured oppressions for nearly 2000 years. There’s a reason Daniel Goldhagen titled his book about anti-Semitism The Devil That Never Dies. My grandparents in Russia lived that history. Anton Treuer, known most for his work on Ojibwe language and culture revitalization and his YouTube channel featuring an Ojibwe Word of the Day, but whose father was Austrian Jewish, has said that the scope and scale of this history should make Jews, of all people, most acutely aware of the injustice and horror of oppression and genocide.

If it’s not anti-Semitism, there are plenty of other targets for hate, fear, and power-hungry greed, as likely everyone reading this already knows.

Everyone, I said, learns something different from these times, is damaged differently and finds different ways to cope. I’m not here to tell you how you should feel when times are frightening or worrying, or that your fears or worries are greater or lesser than another’s. I can only share my own story. Really, that’s all any of us can do.

The troll storm and threats happened just a couple of months after I signed the book contract for A Walking Life. That time had a lot to do with the parts of the book that focus on social capital, social and interpersonal trust—including their fragility and how authoritarians can weaponize them—and the ways in which authoritarian regimes use loneliness and a sense of isolation to fracture the power of resistance, a dynamic that Hannah Arendt covered decades ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

In times like these—in all times—trust is essential. But it is easily broken and easily coopted, especially with the reach of the online world we now live with. One of the things that came through during those months, for me at least and this is part of why I wrote about community and interpersonal trust so much in my book, is that the voices I’d followed online, or in national or international news, were most often almost powerless to help my community, and in some cases caused more damage than good, even when well-intentioned. And not all of them were well-intentioned.

Lauren Hough recently wrote a brilliant piece mentioning the creation of “an entire industry of resistance grifters” after the 2016 election, and Dr. Len Necefer, founder of NativesOutdoors, also recently wrote something addressing that idea more directly:

It’s worth pausing to ask yourself: Why do you follow the influencers you do? This question isn’t about what they say or how they frame their ideas but about the underlying mechanics of why they have your attention in the first place.

I added the emphasis in Necefer’s because it strikes me as an essential question each of us needs to ask ourselves, especially when we’re living with uncertainty and looking for direction.

Both those pieces are necessary reminders of the power of attention, how it can be manipulated, and how it can be used to others’ advantage.

They’re also reminders that not everything or everyone you already agree with, or who seems to care about the same things you do, is acting with anyone’s interest but their own in mind.

In times like these, it’s tempting, it’s human and natural, to look to others for guidance. But as helpful as that can be, there are risks inherent in it, too. More than once I’ve been an avid follower of a writer who seemed to articulate my own thinking to me, who seemed to care about the things I cared about, only to watch that person grow in success and lose their mask, become more truly themselves—prejudiced in various ways, desirous of power over others, unwilling to promote a cause or event unless they were its main star. I don’t know whether enormous ego is born from mass attention and some level of success, or if ego is drawn to the same and feeds off of it, but I’ve watched it happen to enough people whose work I used to like and ideas I used to look up to—during that “troll storm” and again as Covid spread over the world—that I began to question my own judgment. I see it happening again now.

Voices and people we trust can be corrupted by the lure of power and influence, by the attention of masses, and they can forget, if they ever knew, why their work, words, and influence matter. It can happen to anyone. Be wary, is what I’d say, of anyone telling you they’re on a divine mission, especially if they’re asking you for money.

We are all unique, brilliant beings with our own purposes, full of hope and doubt and hidden shadows most of us don’t like to acknowledge. If any one human has a divine mission, we all do. But maybe none of us do. Maybe being alive, being able to touch and smell and love the world, is enough. And no matter how charismatic, how compelling, how persuasive, nobody can be you for you any more than anybody can take you from you. Finding a way to believe and understand that with one’s entire being might be an essential survival skill—collectively as well as individually.

There are some books that helped me in the last eight years, books that I turned to to regain perspective and that I might pick up again: We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth; The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler; Walking the Ojibwe Path, by Richard Wagamese, Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, bell hooks’s Belonging, and The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexeivitch. They’re books that at least try to eschew generalizations, that insist on the specific, the individual, narratives that question and explore rather than demand or insist. They remind me, in fact, of why I’m such a big fan of good science fiction writers like N.K. Jemisin, Arkady Martine, and Martha Wells. Stories that remind readers that we often know far too little of any other person’s story and motivations, that caution us against assuming we know anything of their lived experience, of who they are.

But I can still only be me, with my own story, so I go back to my ancestors, especially my grandparents, all of whom I’ve been spending more thought-time with recently, looking for guidance and resilience that I know will never truly be found outside of myself.

My ancestors didn’t gift me with much tendency toward hope, and, despite my Russian grandfather being sent to fight on the German front in World War II with one rifle and no bullets shared between three people, not much of a fight instinct. But they did leave me with a kind of determination and—I feel extremely lucky in this—a strange capacity for joy and humor even in the darkest times. One of my favorite quotes, “Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused,” by an anonymous author, is a personal mantra.

On the nights I allow myself to crumble into tears, fear, and despair, I think of my Russian grandmother as a refugee from the four-year Siege of Leningrad, in the Ural Mountains, her hands bleeding from hoeing potatoes to keep her children and mother-in-law alive, and I look at the pictures I have of her, her soft smile and eyes kind after a lifetime of oppression, prejudice, and hardship. I think of my grandmother in Montana, the decades she spent in Great Falls working as the director of public assistance for three counties, her compassion and absolute dedication to public service, the lives she touched, and the quiet ways she lived out one of her favorite lines: “Those of us entrusted with positions of power must remember never to abuse it by failing to respect those who seek help.” I remember how unassuming and intensely private she was, how much she loved dogs, and the way she smiled, with her whole being, when amongst friends.

I don’t know what the next months or years will bring. But I know what my community has shown itself capable of withstanding and standing up for over the decades, and I know that chicken wings and booze will not erase my fears when they overcome me. Nothing will. (No judgment here—for someone else, chicken wings and booze might work just fine.) My fears and heartbreaks can only be faced with as much strength and compassion as I can muster in between the fallings apart. And with that fragile trust built within actual relationships with actual people. And maybe the occasional basket of tater tots and my newfound addiction to watching tarot readers on YouTube.

Gandalf’s words when Frodo said, in The Lord of the Rings, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” are never not apt: “So do I. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The Substack version of this essay has a recording at the end of my father reading his translation of Aleksandr Kushner’s poem “We Don’t Get to Choose.” I haven’t yet figured out how to include those audio recordings here–apologies!

Trespassing, or air that smells of home

by Antonia Malchik2 Comments on Trespassing, or air that smells of home
Early morning after nearly 36 hours of rain at North Birch Creek in the Bob Marshall Wilderness near the Badger-Two Medicine, trail crew camp, August 2023 (my tent is the green one)

The following is a reprint of my essay “Trespassing,” published in the Air volume of Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature.

You can read other republished selections from the anthology by Eiren Caffall in Orion,  Andrew S. Yang in Bioneers, Robin Wall Kimmerer also in Bioneers, and register to join the second of five virtual book clubs, with contributors to Air, Vol. 2, Wednesday, February 19th, 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, hosted by Point Reyes Books.

It was late September, and the aspen trees were just beginning to yellow. They grew thick on the hillside, a broad grove giving way to small meadows that sloped upward, transitioning after less than a mile to heavy stands of spruce and pine. The group I was with rambled along an old logging road just south of the eastern side of Glacier National Park while a biologist among us talked about the ecotone we were walking through: a mingling of prairie and forest that stretched all down along the Rocky Mountain Front, the eastern-facing slope of the Rockies, where the mountains spill onto the prairie. A light wind blew constantly.

As we left the aspens and walked into evergreens, the wind became a whispering—psithurism, a sound that’s like a rustle and a shush at the same time. That sound characterized almost my entire Montana childhood, but I never consciously noticed it until a few years ago, shortly after moving back to my hometown. One day, a few months into my return, I was walking home through town and stopped to listen to the wind blowing through a stand of tall lodgepole pines bordering the path. That sound, I thought, remembering its company in the Rockies on many a family hike that I had dragged my feet on as a child, and later on treks as a teenager with friends. That sound is home.

***

The place along the Rocky Mountain Front I was hiking that late September day is a two-hour drive east from the valley where I grew up. In another region, it might not be considered anywhere near my home. But this is the American West: expanses are vast, yet their very vastness and sparse human population are part of the intimate familiarity that welcomes those of us who live here. Montana is often called a “small town with very long streets.” The psychological network of what I think of as my homeland encompasses the Rocky Mountain Front. For a white settler like me, a fifth-generation descendant of Montana homesteaders, the question of homeland and belonging is constantly shifting. But there is one constant: wherever my feet happen to be, my heart has always longed to be right here, among the cold mountains and prairie grasses.

Hiking along the prairie-forest ecotone, every aspect of the air felt like home—the smell of pine, the sound of wind in the evergreens, the way the sun was almost warm enough but the air kept me chilled. That same air had wound itself eastward from the valley I live in through a pass in the Rockies and unfurled here, to race down the foothills and speed its way across the prairie and farmland to the little agricultural town of barely two hundred people where my mother is from.

Although I never lived in my mother’s hometown, or even on the kind of spread-out farmland she knows so well, the air of her childhood landscape calls to me almost as insistently as that of the stream-saturated peaks I was raised in: I can smell it now, sitting at my desk on the other side of the Rockies in a mountain valley with its different kind of big sky. I love the way virga strolls across the miles of prairie and farmland like it’s got all the time in the world, how I can watch it for hours, how my skin tightens slightly at the drop in temperature, and how I can still smell the ozone of rain’s promise, with its dust-tang, months later in the back of my nose. I can’t understand why that air also smells like home to me, why I can look at those houses surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat and feel in my gut what it is to be a child growing up with your eyes on that far horizon, nothing between you and the rainstorm but the air and wind who make constant companions. Companions who can issue either invitation or warning, for those who listen closely enough.

There is one stark difference between these places, a difference that I too often take for granted and that most people might not notice: where I live, I’m not far from access to millions of acres of designated wilderness and national forest areas and a national park, places where my feet are as free to roam as the air itself. However, when I go out to eastern Montana, my mother’s home ground, everywhere I turn is blocked by fences. You can drive for hours and see little else but weather-beaten houses huddled together on the prairie, their siding bitten with winter and the fierce, scorching sun of August. These vast counties, where you can drive past more visible wheat silos than homes and only the occasional hawk or pronghorn, are squared out and fenced off with countless miles of forbidding barbed wire.

My body can’t pass through these fences without permission, but the air has no such limitations. It’s a freedom that has an underacknowledged impact: No Trespassing signs are ubiquitous in America (in Montana, Trespassers Will Be Shot is a threat I always take seriously), yet at the same time, air pollution trespasses into our bodies every moment of the day. When I walk around my hometown, it’s impossible not to breathe in vehicle exhaust, especially on days when an inversion layer holds it close to the ground. Out where my mother’s from, on those expanses that feel like they host some of the cleanest, most unadulterated air on the planet, on any given visit I might see a crop-dusting plane emptying loads of pesticide or herbicide over the fields and still smell the strange, metallic tang in the back of my nose the next morning.

Trespass can be turned back on us. With bodies and lungs and circulatory systems porous to the air, neither humans nor the rest of life have much defense against the kinds of airborne attacks that other people have unleashed upon us. And I don’t use the word attacks lightly. Air pollution from vehicle traffic can decrease children’s lung capacity by 20 percent and significantly affect cognition in their growing brains; recently, it has been found that carbon pollution from car exhaust crosses the placental barrier and affects fetal development and even ovarian egg production in women. Living near a landfill raises a person’s risk of lung cancer due to the hydrogen sulfide that’s released from decaying trash. Fully 95 percent of the world’s human population lives with levels of air pollution considered unsafe. Air pollution is one of the leading causes of premature death worldwide.

Without clean air, humans are denied an inherent right to health and flourishing. If billionaires’ dreams of colonizing Mars were ever to be realized, the first mission, the second mission, the millionth mission, the missions for generations far beyond our imaginations would be to secure water and breathable air. Air is so vital that a common right to it was recognized in legal code as far back as the Roman Empire. “The following things are by natural law common [to] all—the air, running water, the sea and consequently the sea-shore,” declared the Institutes of Justinian in 535 CE.1 In 1972, after decades of relentless air and water pollution, aided by political corruption paid for by the powerful men of industry known as the Copper Kings, Montana’s legislature passed a new state constitution that guaranteed a “clean and healthful environment” as an inalienable right, including the right to clean air.

Air is a shared commons: it’s an entity we all rely on for survival, and it moves freely across the world. The air I breathe that smells of dry pine needles and early snow was somewhere else a few hours ago, a few days ago, a few weeks ago. Maybe it was bringing some other hikers the smell of their own woods, or picking up sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and soot from a coal-fired power plant, whose particulates are now seeping into my lungs, unasked for and unwanted on a cool September day. We all depend on and all share the air, and yet the ability to pollute it is treated as a private property right. Legal systems around the world make air the recipient of industrial waste; in turn, that means that all of us are, too. Air knows no international boundaries, and neither does the pollution it carries.

When I think of trespass, what first comes to mind is the Lord’s Prayer, which I recited with my parents and sisters Sunday after Sunday in Episcopal and Lutheran churches, and often around the dinner table, throughout my childhood. The lines “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” refer not to who crosses whose property lines but to committing sins that the deity has forbidden. The word trespass occurs many times in the New Testament. In some translations it’s replaced with sin or debt.

Trespass, in other words, is a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more invasive than simply breaking through a property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the public nature preserve on the other side, I might annoy him, but there’s no actual harm done. If my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same, pouring itself into my children’s lungs with the law’s consent. The polluted air has trespassed into us, but it wasn’t by choice. The first crime of trespass was against air itself. When air has been violated, it is forced to violate in turn.

***

I was hiking along the Rocky Mountain Front in late September 2022 with a group working to stop oil leases in what is known as the Badger-Two Medicine. It’s an area bordered by Glacier National Park to the north, the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wildernesses to the west and south, and the Blackfeet Reservation to the east. The Badger-Two Med is sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. Under laws written and enforced by the federal government, it’s legally part of the US National Forest Service, but it was carved off of Blackfeet land in 1895, along with the eastern part of Glacier Park, in yet another land seizure accomplished with a deceptive treaty signed under duress, one in a long history of betrayals.

I hadn’t been to the Badger-Two Med before, although I’d been following the oil lease situation—which has been ongoing for nearly forty years—since before moving back to Montana. This was the first time I’d managed to visit it, on a hike sponsored by the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, which was founded in the 1980s to fight oil leases granted in the area by the Reagan administration. Most of the leases have been successfully canceled over the years, but in late September 2022, one oil company had just won a court appeal to keep its lease.2

Emerging from the aspen groves and into pines and spruce, my group walked a path that ran parallel to a buried natural gas pipeline; the organizers pointed out where a road to the remaining proposed site of the oil well would be built if the lease were upheld. A few miles further in, we would see a hillside already scarred by preparatory clearing.

It’s hard to imagine a place that feels more like the white European settler’s idea of pristine wilderness. Pristine wilderness and its ideals of unchanging purity have never really existed, of course, but perhaps places like this offer something better: I felt whole on that hillside. The air’s movement and scent felt like a welcome. And even though I know that there is no clean air, really, anywhere in the world—everything from dioxins to Chernobyl radiation has been found in polar ice, carried by the air and dropped even on places where few humans have ever stepped—I felt an extra surge of resentment at the thought of the trespass that would come not just from the physical invasion of an oil well but from the particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and volatile organic compounds that have been found in the air around and downwind of oil-drilling operations. At what the air would be forced to carry through no choice of its own.

***

As we walked to the top of a hillside where we could see out toward the plains of eastern Montana, the air shifted from a gentle breeze to a wind traveling east—stiff, but not quite the hard-blowing kind that is almost a constant presence on the wheat and cattle ranches that cover what’s known as the Golden Triangle, the wheat farming region my mother grew up in.

The wind blew the smells of encroaching autumn in my face, dried grasses underfoot and fecund soil under bear-claw-scarred aspen trees. The tiny bit of late-September chill reminded me that snow would be coming soon. There is nothing that smells more alive to me than that air. It feels conscious: the warm pine in summer, the tang of ice in winter, traveling down from these mountains to kick prairie and dirt-road dust in the faces of children growing up in the same tiny town my mother had over seventy years before. The heart that has always insisted on calling this place home, even during the twenty years I lived elsewhere, tells me, quietly, that this air I love in all its moods and seasons is conscious. It has a life of its own and a right to live it unviolated.

The crime of trespass goes both ways—what happens when we require the very source of life to carry sickness instead? Is this not a violation of the gods of life, of home, and of air’s own right to exist?

Acquiescence to the abuse and neglect of air is a trespass against humanity—against all of life, even against the air itself, for its own sake. Every living being has a common right to air that not only allows us to live the healthiest lives we can but also smells like pine and snowmelt, desert dust and prairie flowers, swamp grasses and moss. Air that feels like home.

1

Institutes of Justinian, bk. II, title I, “Of the Different Kinds of Things,” trans. J. B. Moyle (Oxford, 1911), available at https://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf.

2

Almost a year later, in September 2023 just before this went to print, that lease—the last in the Badger-Two Medicine—was bought out and was in the process of finally being retired.

Analog

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Analog

After recording the audio version of my most recent piece here, on the 1805 property law case Pierson v. Post, I spent a very frustrating hour trying to get my voice recorder to talk to my laptop. Or my laptop to listen, I don’t know which. I kept getting a message that the device wasn’t “recognized” and given the options to ignore, eject, or initialize.

I unplugged and replugged everything several times, turned them off and turned them back on, again several times, every order iteration I could think of. The Sony voice recorder’s troubleshooting page was unhelpful.

Finally, I went for “initialize,” which I’d avoided because I’m a very non-tech-minded person and things like that scare me, hinting as they do at “going to erase everything.”

A screen popped up with a lot of options I couldn’t decipher, but I clicked on the most promising sounding ones, and magic, the laptop suddenly recognized the voice recorder.

I was reminded of when I have to confess my mild face blindness, which frequently results in my being unable to recognize people I’ve known for years.

I told  Thomas Pluck after this ordeal that I was on the verge of giving up, deleting everything, and sending him bad photos of birds instead, plus one that Bryan Pfeiffer had kindly run the starling photo through Photoshop for me, making it less-bad.

The next day my phone, a non-smartphone with no apps or internet capabilities, called three people while I was clattering around the kitchen making dinner and listening to my son tell me about his recent school trip to Washington, D.C.

My phone, bless its sane heart, calls people all the time without me asking it to. It also hangs up on my older sister all the time when I’m talking with her. It drives me nuts. I’m constantly tempted to give up on this whole living-without-a-smartphone thing just for that reason.

I got this phone, a Light Phone, back in February, and spent a few months carefully transitioning to ditching my iPhone, which I did in June.

Even with those months of careful preparation, I didn’t realize how dependent I’d become on things like the mapping navigation feature until trying to drive around Portland, Oregon, with my son in August. I’m 48 years old. I know how to read a map. I love maps! I navigated unfamiliar cities without a smartphone until . . . 2015? 2016? How did I lose that capability so quickly?

And how did owning a smartphone become a near-requirement for modern life in that brief timeframe? In August, I took my younger kid to an event that required tickets be presented on a smartphone. Agents checking you in at an airport fumble when I present them with a paper ticket. The yoga class I take my younger kid to at the community gym requires people to register ahead of time, which has to be done via their app, so I end up having to call each day we go because I don’t have the app.

The county commissioners where I live tried to require smartphones to use the anemic, almost nonexistent public bus system, a blatant effort on their part to make the lives of unhoused people even more difficult. I saw a raffle giveaway at a public event recently that required people to scan a QR code to enter.

The demands that technologies make of us can be overwhelming, even if you’re someone who benefits enough from those technologies not to be particularly aware of said demands. It’s too-infrequently asked how we’re expected to bend and shape our lives—all life, really—to the needs of technology, rather than the other way around. Being sold stories of how much any particular technology gives us doesn’t change its demands, or what it takes from our lives.

I’ve written before about the parallels between digital technology and the invasion of automobiles and the roads they require, including in A Walking Life, in which I wrote that

“The future before us requires us to face the realities of our world full-on, and to figure out both what we want from our most cutting-edge inventions, and how they can serve us better, how we can reclaim our physical world, our physical selves, and the time and attention to appreciate both.”

Some time ago, a subscriber had recommended a series of lectures to me from the 1980s, physicist Ursula Franklin on The Real World of Technology, and I now go back to those talks repeatedly.

Franklin starts out talking about pottery making in ancient China, and what kind of shift is demonstrated when vases stopped being individually crafted art, and became something produced en masse to strict standards of quality and conformity.

Technology, she said, is often introduced as a form of social control, but over time people begin to see it as normal, or even necessary. Like cars. Or the looms that the Luddites smashed—not because they feared technology but because they recognized its introduction as a way to increase profits for factory owners at the expense of their jobs, and at the expense of the product’s quality.

Property law is a technology. It has shifted over time to continually expand what rights people think should be granted with ownership, and what rights everyone else, non-owners, lose. The right to prevent “trespass” being one of the more recent and most egregious.

Franklin pointed to several legal technologies that restrict freedoms and imagination, like certain tax codes or contracts. And even in the 1980s she saw early computers’ potential for defining and limiting how and through what mediums people communicate with one another.

Even though I tell people how many things I miss about a smartphone and what a pain in the ass my sane phone is, I rarely meet someone who doesn’t express a longing for the freedom to make the switch; or, likewise, the freedom to give up social media platforms, both technologies often required for one’s job.

What cars and roads have taken from us, the damage they cause, is measurable. I covered plenty of it in my book, from the effects on lungs and brains of car exhausts’ pollution, to the higher rates of social capital in walkable communities. Jason Anthony of Field Guide to the Anthropocene recently wrote about the pollution from cars’ tires, a reality that haunts me, to the point that I gave public comment at a city council meeting several months ago—related to a missing section of our bike and pedestrian trail—about those microplastics shedding into the river.

The effects of social media and smartphones are more difficult to pin down and are almost always subjective. I have talked before about my own social media addiction, something that many researchers still insist isn’t a real thing. Likewise with screen addiction, which I’ve seen in some kids firsthand.

The invasion and theft of attention is unlikely to have excellent science behind it anytime soon. There are too many conflicting and confounding factors. But when I spent some time recently wondering why I started developing an aversion to Substack, I realized it was because interacting with it, or even thinking about interacting with it, was making me feel exactly like I used to when I was on Facebook. I deleted my FB account completely in 2017 after years of repeated deactivations. My mindless scrolling took up hours, and even thinking about being on the platform wrecked my creativity.

This is a specific phenomenon that I find difficult to describe, and am curious if others have experienced it, too.

When I was on FB, someone created a group called Binders of Women Writers, which I was invited to join early on. It quickly became vast and generated many subgroups of genre, identity, region, etc. For a long time, for me, it was wonderful. I’m still friends with people I connected with there, especially in the science writing world, and suddenly had access to editors at bigger-name publications that previously had seemed out of reach.

But when the social expectations of those groups started to seep into my personal page, it became a problem for me. I didn’t always want to repost essays that old family friends might find offensive or hurtful. My personal relationships are very important to me. I’d joined FB in the early months of new motherhood to help alleviate the isolation of living in a rural area with a new baby, and found myself reconnected with many people I cared about and had lost touch with.

The scrolling—the way I do it, literally mindless—got to me, the way I lost time when I was meant to be working, and the blurring of my personal and professional lives became frustrating, while at the same time interacting with FB tended to dilute most of my creative ideas, to the point where many of them would fizzle away if I weren’t careful.

Being on Substack also reminds me of Instagram, which I left in 2020 after getting fed up with curating a “self” online in the midst of a months-long family crisis. The effort it takes to curate a “self” here, on Substack, often feels similar.

And it increasingly feels similar to Twitter’s expectation of constant, immediate opining on every issue of the day, large or small, which I am almost less interested in reading than I am in writing. One of the reasons I admire 

Elif Shafak’s newsletter so much is her ability to her use own life experiences and insights to provide broad and deep contextual thought for the problems and horrors our worlds face, like her recent essay about being put on trial for her novel The Bastard of Istanbul.

This is not an “I’m leaving Substack” thought; it’s an “I’m trying to figure out how to do this in a way that feels better” thought. In the past few months, I’ve come back from offline time at forest service cabins or camping to find that the usual buildup of emails and messages feel like innumerable straws quickly draining my psyche.

It takes effort to keep one’s mind strong in the face of being urged to and rewarded for quick responses; I have wondered if Shafak’s dedicated longform fiction writing helps keep those muscles in shape. It’s hard to imagine a book like her most recent There Are Rivers in the Sky even being possible for an imagination pulled into constant online responses and reactions every day—or worse, bent into knee-jerk contrarianism so habitual it ends up being, as I read someone describe a self-anointed “thought leader” guru-type recently, in a situation where “Sometimes contrarianism can be such a strong trait in a person, it bends one into actual bullshit.”

To keep our attention intact and strengthened is a fight, just as hanging onto the freedom to walk and wander is a fight, and it’s not going to get any easier. I’ve been through this self-internet recalibration process many times over the last 20 or so years.

Most of those who create digital technologies, and benefit from them, have no interest in changing its design to truly benefit the rest of us, much less the rest of non-human life, the Center for Humane Technology being a necessary if imperfect outlier. And complaining about all of it online only fuels the machine. Attention is attention.

I recently read Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s book Women Who Run with the Wolves for the first time. Of the many lines and passages I marked in my copy was this one:

“We wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than into a fire of conflagration.”

The problem with “burn it all down” (and I’m not saying I’m immune to this) when it comes to the systems we exist under is that those who will suffer most are those who already suffer most. Most of those who benefit from the systems, and cause the most damage, have ways of shielding themselves. One piece of research that has stuck with me in this work on private property and the commons is a study of intergenerational wealth in Florence, Italy, over 600 years, maintaining itself even through wars, revolutions, massacres, plagues, . . . burning it all down doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

What, instead, can people do to create a world worth being in, to transmute rage and grief and a fierce knowledge of injustice into something flourishing, something alive?

What gives you the skills and focus to cook without starting a grease fire in the kitchen? Do you know how to tend a wild burn so that it nurtures new growth, without fueling a conflagration that kills everything? Where I live, plants like huckleberry bushes, camas root, and lodgepole pine trees need fire to flourish, but if a wildfire burns too hot for too long, even they will not regenerate. The fire needs control, needs tending, needs the kind of kinship that comes from intergenerational knowledge—a better form of wealth.

I heard the term “pyroepistemology” for the first time in the last year or so, applying the concept of controlled fire to clearing ground for new and old ideas. Maybe it can be applied to our own sense of attention and belonging.

I recently stood under a mountain ash tree on a walk home and watched a flock of cedar waxwings nipping snow-dusted berries off and gulping them down. I had forgotten to bring my camera out and could only stand in the snow and watch, trying to fix those moments in my mind—the soft yellow-green of the birds’ chests, the dark red winter berries against my favorite color of indefinable blue-grey sky.

These moments keep alive in me my desire to build and care rather than destroy or complain. I’m trying to bring more of them back into my life. I recently started playing my harp again, and continued working on an interminable embroidery project thingy I’ve been making for a friend for close to two years.

I’m trying to find ways to get more familiar with my own rage and its sparks by spending time with myself and the real, glorious world that wants tending and care and its own nurturing fires.

And I’m trying to find better ways to be online, for myself, putting boundaries around the demands of time and attention, at least within what my work requires. It’s never going to be easy. There’s every incentive to stop trying, just like there is every incentive to give up on walkable communities and the removal of borders and barbed wire fences. Like everything else that makes us human, it’s worth doing anyway. Being better humans, more human, has to be part of being good ancestors and building a world worth being born into.

With that in mind, if you’ve made it this far, don’t share this essay. Or, do, but not yet. Do something to connect with yourself first. If you’re into breathwork, do one of those practices four times. Or stretch your arms overhead for 20 seconds. Go for a walk. Hug someone you like. Ruffle your dog’s ears. Write a letter with paper and pen. Do one of Anna Brones’s 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being. Rest your feet in running water. Cry for a loved one who’s gone. Cry for the world. Listen to the songs toward the end of this healing conversation about kinship and indigeneity across cultures and time with Dr. Lyla June Johnston and Angharad Wynne (singing starts around 1:03).

What can you do, this moment, the second you get to the end of this essay, to feel alive? To feel as fully present in this-world as possible? Can you feel that shift in yourself, between how you feel when you’re binary in all senses of the word, and when you’re vibrant with awareness of how the air of your home smells?

Where are you? Who are you? What are the embers beneath your unique, individual fire? And what can you do for yourself, today, right now, to bring it all back home?

Ilya Kaminsky’s poem “Letters,” from the anthology You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón and sent to me by a wonderful friend.

Fox Owns Herself

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on Fox Owns Herself

If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons!

Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: What is the difference between attention that fractures us and attention that restores? What role have three 15th-century papal bulls served in the “claiming” of land worldwide by Christian peoples of European descent, and how have those claims evolved?

New writing! Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature, is out now: “The Elementals series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?”

I have an essay titled “Trespassing” in Air, alongside stellar writers like Báyò Akómoláfé, Ross Gay, and Roy Scranton. Other volumes include writing from Robin Wall Kimmerer, Andreas Weber, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sophie Strand, Joy Harjo, and many more. As with their previous series Kinship, this anthology brings healing and guidance to a world sorely in need of both.

This essay, on the legal question of where ownership originates, and the perspective gained by thinking in geological time, was originally published November 11, 2022.

One mid-morning on a bitterly cold November day, I was sitting at a table with my younger sister, her two little girls, and my younger kid. We were staying at a rented Forest Service cabin in Montana’s North Fork valley, no internet or electricity or running water, having recently cleaned up from breakfast and playing an interminable game of Unstable Unicorns.

I glanced up from my hand with the two “Neigh” cards I kept forgetting to use, when I lost control of words and patted my kid on the arm enthusiastically several times before managing to say, “There’s a fox on the porch!”

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

We all put our cards down and padded from window to window as the fox tracked around the cabin, watching her until she disappeared back into the woods.

One of the most famous and pivotal property law cases in U.S. history, the 1805 case Pierson v. Post, involves the hunting of a fox. The legalities of that particular case have staying power for a reason. They hinge on the question of what grants ownership: labor or possession? Was it Post, who was hunting the fox, or Pierson, who actually killed it, who owned the animal in the end? New York State Supreme Court reversed a lower-court decision in Post’s favor and granted ownership to Pierson. The written decision reached back through centuries of legal thinking, drawing even from the Byzantine emperor Justinian I.

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

Yet rarely is it asked: What about the fox herself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought about the fox’s visit, and Pierson v. Post and the question of property, and how long ago it was that some humans decided to claim ownership over others—water, women, wildlife, and seeds; our relationship with those contain the ancient genesis of ownership, I continue to believe—and then create justifications for such claims through centuries of philosophical, religious, and legal argument.

What could change if we inverted that relationship? If we started from an assumption that all beings own themselves, that every being has agency and choice?

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

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

In the comments on the original essay, Charlotte Hand Greeson shared a link to law professor Ann Tweedy’s then-recently published poem from the point of view of the fox, “Pierson v. Post’s Unheard Voice.” You can download the full poem from that link—it’s beautiful—but here’s a taste:

“I learned since that the man on the horse and the man on foot quarreled
about the right to kill me, had a third person decide. . . . 

. . . Students still study the story
but give me not a moment of their time. I am the invisible focal point. . . .

. . . You are right to think that, alive, no one could own me.
That’s the only true part of your story.”

Sunset’s alpenglow on the peaks of Glacier National Park

The deep ethics of optimism

by Antonia MalchikLeave a Comment on The deep ethics of optimism

Swan Lake, Montana, nearing sunset, through the smoky haze of a nearby prescribed burn.

In 2016, a month or two before that year’s U.S. presidential election, I was at a two-week interdisciplinary artist’s residency at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Banff, Canada. We had dancers, writers, visual artists, actors, composers, and musicians in our group, with writer Pico Iyer, musician Richard Reed Perry (of Arcade Fire), and choreographer Christopher House leading workshops.

The residency was formed around the theme of the Art of Stillness, taken after Iyer’s recently-published book The Art of Stillness, with a series of weekend workshops on stillness open to the public—like forest bathing, a Japanese tea ceremony, concerts, and a series of talks on Deep Listening that might have contained one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.

With Iyer, we discussed writing of stillness, and stillness practices. Perry had us listen to our own heartbeats and breathing through stethoscopes, and composed music based on the rhythms we tapped out.

It was a beautiful two weeks, easily the best residency I’ve ever been to. I attended another three-week writing residency in Banff two years later, and decided that interdisciplinary ones are far more inspiring. There’s a cross-seeding of creativity, of playing in unfamiliar forms like (for me) dance and composition. All of us who attended the Art of Stillness have stayed in touch over the years (one of our group, writer and physicist Wendy Brandts, passed away in 2022) and followed one another’s work. Stories shared in that group made their way into A Walking Life, and the book itself was largely shaped by the lessons I got to soak in for those two weeks.

Every morning, Christopher House offered a movement session before we each went off alone to studios to do our day’s work. I can’t remember what kind of music he played or if he gave us much direction in the dancing, but there was one line he repeated day after day, in those movement sessions and in his own presentations and workshops: “We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism.”

I wrote about that line off and on at the time, and remember posting something on Instagram the day of the presidential election with simply that line and a photo of the bitterly cold, snowy morning, Sun’s rise refracting off ice-glazed caragana branches.

That was in 2016.

I wrote about the deep ethics of optimism leading up to that election because I couldn’t figure out what it meant. I’ve thought about it frequently ever since and still don’t understand what it means. The deep ethics of optimism. What does it mean, what does it mean?

I have a feeling it’s the kind of idea I might have an epiphany about just moments before I die. I hope that moment is a long way off, but I look forward to it.

And it’s a thought I find myself wanting to share now and again. Maybe I’m hoping one of you will have an answer. Maybe I hope that for one of you it will be an answer—in the way that I say walking is, not something that gives an answer, but whose action, whose exploration, is an answer in itself.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe it’s what brought me to writing more seriously about the commons—I’d published my first essay about the commons and land ownership in Aeon earlier that year.  Freya Rohn, who writes the Ariadne Archive, recently sent me photos of “a list of women who were named as defying enclosure laws and were imprisoned and executed” in rebellions against enclosure—theft of commonly shared land in England—in 1589.

The optimism of the commons does not require building something new, but it does require an understanding of what has gone before. It needs us to see not only what has been lost, but that things haven’t always been this way. It’s why it was so important to me to write about centuries of violent rebellions against land enclosure in High Country News recently. The harsh restrictiveness of private property in land is very recent—while the same of ownership of people, especially women, and of food and seeds, is very old.

It is deeply ethical to ground yourself in the knowledge that humans have always, everywhere, shaped their worlds—our worlds—differently, have shaped them to treat animals with respect, revere trees, nurture kinship with rivers and springs, and at the same time care for people’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. To have, as my friend Sherri Spelic has written about with regards to education, Care at the Core, the kind of ethos that shaped economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model, meeting human needs without straining ecological limits.

Maybe optimism is misunderstood. Maybe this is about the deep ethics of knowing, not just believing, that there are better ways to live. That it is possible because it has happened, over and over.

Maybe the deep ethics of optimism is more about what we think of human nature. It can be, and obviously is, dire, cruel, selfish, abusive. But it is also reflective of what a society rewards, what culture cultivates. Humans evolved in community, in interdependence. We wouldn’t be the species we are if we hadn’t cared for one another for hundreds of thousands of years. The paleoanthropological records are clear on this. Hominins evolved within the necessity and ethos of care.

Which means we can, with intentional effort, reward and cultivate behavior that brings care back to the core of human life. Given where we are, that’s not easy. Given where we are, it might be hopeless.

But given where we are, I can’t accept giving up on humans’ capacity to do better. People have burned down their worlds, and others’, countless times throughout history. In such times, those who suffer most tend to be those who have always suffered most.

A friend recently sent me some photos of her visit to Kara E-Walker’s exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I misread text on the wall that read “A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler” as “A Respite for the Weary Time-Tender.” It felt a perfect word-shape to hold the increasing everyday stresses of lives even without considering war, genocide, climate change, and the power of billionaires.

A respite from tending to time, because we are weary.

We are weary. We need respite.

We are exploring the deep ethics of optimism. Maybe all it is is being alive, and loving this world with our whole hearts, despite everything that seeks to break us.

First snows! Looking out toward the peaks of Glacier National Park recently in Montana’s North Fork Valley. ☃️❄️🏔️

Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history

by Antonia Malchik3 Comments on Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history
Church of the Transfiguration, Peredelkino, Russia, midwinter

At the age of nineteen my grandfather, Jacob Davidovich Malchik, flipped an electric switch, saw a working light bulb for the first time, and knew his future waited somewhere outside his muddy Ukrainian village. In post-Revolution Russia, he left the Pale of Settlement’s shtetls, where Jews had been confined to living for generations, for proletarian Leningrad. With the tsar gone and the Bolsheviks promising equality for all, he had the chance to discard centuries-old restrictive laws that had been attached to him more closely than clothing, ground into his skin like a tattoo.

But Jacob hadn’t counted on the damage a dictator’s paranoia would do to that dream. As a Jew and the son of a moneylender he struggled even to gain admission to the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in the 1930s, despite his top score each year on the entrance exam. It took him years to finally become an engineer, and only his intelligence, work ethic, and sheer luck pushed him against the later current of Stalin’s deeply anti-Semitic Soviet Union.

Those very qualities endangered his life in a Soviet state that required thinking and acting only in absolutes.

In 1937, the year Stalin’s first great purge of “undesirables” began, a popular Party boss summoned Jacob to his office and ordered him to denounce a man who was suspected of being an “enemy of the people.”

Hard words, those: denounce, enemy of the people, the Party. Concepts that in that world, at that time, had punitive, harsh meanings, a black hole of language dwindling into singularities, hostile to nuance or texture.

Jacob replied that he didn’t believe the man was an enemy of the people. In doing so, he knew the risk he was taking. To be denounced in 1937—and, equally, to refuse to denounce someone—meant a surprise visit in the middle of the night followed by a show trial, possibly torture, and either a bullet or exile to Siberia. Denunciations were anonymous, required no proof, and more often than not led to the victim’s death.

Two million people died during Stalin’s first purge, known as the Great Terror, an average of a thousand executions per week.

The Party boss tried again to convince Jacob to write a denunciation, but he refused to comply. Jacob went home that night, told my grandmother Anna Davidovna what had happened, and together they packed a small suitcase and waited for the KGB’s midnight knock.        

Jacob knew what was being asked of him. He also knew that his own morality—for which the words justice and honor and honesty are only brushstrokes—would not allow him to sacrifice an innocent man’s life for the sake of his own, innocent, life.

My grandparents were not active dissenters against Stalin. But they retained hold of their sense of self, of who they knew themselves to be and the difference between right and wrong. They read forbidden Solzhenitsyn with their children at night, sitting around the table passing each illegally copied page to the next person as they finished. My grandmother listened to banned Voice of America and Voice of Israel—though I imagine that these days she would feel about the Israeli government the way most of my family in Russia does: absolutely opposed.

In the last few years, my cousins in Russia have spoken up against the invasion in Ukraine and found themselves silenced in the face of mass arrests. Relatives reported years ago of watching ballot boxes stuffed with pre-filled forms during sham presidential elections. Nobody in my family takes democratic freedoms for granted, but perhaps it takes living under dictatorship or oppression to realize that even the right to fight for something better can be stripped away.

The Church on Spilled Blood, St. Petersburg, Russia, the sky rose-gold under a midnight Sun in June

Most of what I know about being a good ancestor comes from grandparents I never knew. To do what is right without expecting recognition for it, without even expecting to survive. They taught me that in good times and bad, being a good ancestor entails treating all your relationships with respect, no matter how intimate or how distant. To live with integrity, whether you’re ever recognized for it or not, and whether or not the world around you seeks to shatter all that you value as good and right and moral.

Being a good ancestor begins with how we treat those beings closest to us. That’s a minimum but not the totality.

The KGB never came for my grandfather. The next morning Jacob found out that the Party boss whose orders he refused had been arrested, with a letter in his vest denouncing Jacob as an enemy of the people. The man was shot a few days later. His letter, his “right answer,” gave my grandfather some immunity from further accusations; if Jacob had given the answer he knew was expected, I would not be here.

Jacob and Anna never saw the end of the Soviet Union—or barely did, in my grandmother’s case. They had no expectation that their world would shift to meet their values, but they likewise refused to abandon their values to meet that world.

When my father was finally given permission to emigrate from the Soviet Union with my mother and older sister in 1974, he was given three days to leave the country. Three days to say goodbye to his family, his friends, his job, Leningrad with her endless canals and pastel light under a midnight Sun, ice skating on the Neva River in the depth of that far northern winter that I crave returning to the way I crave water drunk from cold mountain streams, or walking this world barefoot.

Three days, and he was told not to return. He didn’t even speak English when he came to Seattle at nearly 30 years old.

And he never saw his father again. Jacob died a few years before Mikhail Gorbachev began loosening the restrictive borders of the Iron Curtain. Anna Davidovna, my grandmother, died shortly after the Soviet Union fell, less than a year after I met her for the first time. I was 14 years old.

My grandparents left me some small understanding of the complexities we live with when daily routines and adhering to one’s higher values are riddled with life-or-death pitfalls. They also left me with a question I wake and walk with every day of my life: how do I make choices and exist in a world that seems intent on destroying everything I care about? How does anyone?

The work I do is aimed at exploring these questions, and on reviving and strengthening truths like those left me by my grandparents, at bringing us back to the good in the world, to reminders that we are all alive, interwoven with all of life, and that how we treat one another and non-human life alike matters. Interconnection, relationship, kinship—they’re a mosaic that presents the opposite of individual ownership and private property.

Under authoritarianism, my father told me shortly after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, you have to find your red line—like his father did when asked to denounce another innocent man, the line you will not cross, even at risk of your own life.

No matter who wins or loses elections large and small, these truths have been under assault for thousands of years. They need repair, just as the wild, breathing, beautiful living world needs our attention and care.

No matter what times we live in, no matter who holds power or who is being oppressed, we all have to hang onto ourselves, to what we know to be right and good, to not sacrifice those values even for our own skin, much less our own power, success, or status.

The moral codes we live by do not have to be immaculate. They do not have to check every box of what we think is expected of us, or what we expect of ourselves. All they must be—and this is harder than it sounds—is sturdy enough to withstand the wreckage of history.