Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected.” —Ada Lovelace, mathematician and designer of the first known computer program

I’m still catching up on my magazine backlog and recently enjoyed in particular “The Bear God Revisited,” an essay by Emily Sekine in the Spring 2020 issue of Orion. Sekine wrote of her journey learning about disaster preparation (for tsunamis in particular) in Japanese communities. For a backdrop, she used author Kawakami Hiromi’s 2011 rewrite of a short story in which a woman goes for a walk with a bear. In the new version, the story reflects the recent reality of nuclear contamination—rice fields are turned over in an effort at decontamination; the bear god still catches a fish but has to wash it with bottled water. (While Sekine’s essay isn’t online, both versions of Kawakami’s story are, translated into English and published with Granta.) Kawakami’s fictional bear god, wrote Sekine, “is a sort of everyday god.”

“Note that Kawakami does not claim that people used to believe in these gods; rather, she asserts that the gods used to exist.”

—-

Text from my mother regarding the difficulties making vaccine appointments in her county: “Yesterday all appointment slots were gone in five minutes and the suggestion was, ‘Don’t you have children or someone who is good at this?’”

I don’t know how to further express the frustration and anger that comes from knowing I’m surrounded by people who call themselves patriotic and will rage-wave massive American flags at any questioning of the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget, and then perform the same pseudo-patriotic rage-waving to reject any suggestion that at least some portion of our tax dollars would be better spent on a caring and robust public health system. Why wave the flag around if you don’t actually believe in having a functional country?

“I don’t remember having quite this much trouble getting an appointment in the USSR,” my mother said, laughingly referring to our conversation last week about how few people in this country understand how deeply broken and dysfunctional it is (or who believe it’s broken and dysfunctional but for fantastical reasons rather than real ones). She’d already lived in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and dealt with its bored and inefficient bureaucracy. Getting a vaccine for a virus causing a global pandemic in a supposedly first-world country in 2021 shouldn’t rely on rumors, money, or having tech-savvy, English-speaking young relatives who can try to game the system for you; comparisons to the Soviet-era necessities of finagling connections and pooling together time and resources to get anything from sausages to ballet tickets to a doctor’s appointment come quickly to mind.

I called her county’s dedicated vaccine line and talked to a very friendly and helpful person who said the website might have information the middle of next week. Maybe. But keep checking. And check the news. “It’s kind of like getting concert tickets,” the person said. I laughed. “It’s a little more serious than that but I get where you’re coming from.” In my head I wasn’t laughing. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. It’s nothing like getting concert tickets. FFS.

An hour later I saw this Anne Applebaum article in The Atlantic: “You all might be living in 21st-century America, but those of us who reside in this new version of Moscow, circa 1975, have to scoff at quasi-optimism. Beat COVID-19? With a bunch of dysfunctional Safeway websites? With dozens of different institutions, each one requiring different forms and a different registration? Signs that we live in a dying superpower are all around us.”

—-

Philosopher Stephen Jenkinson has referred to the coronavirus as a god, a “small god,” like those left by the wayside two thousand years ago in the wreckage of Rome’s conquests. Not thinking consciously of it, I found myself over the last few months texting phrases like “Covid willing, we’ll be able to have dinner/go hiking together/hug each other sometime in the fall/next year/whenever people stop flaunting their ignorance and distrust of science.”

In a retrospective on the bear god story rewrite and a related discussion of uranium 235, Kawakami wrote, “If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?”

Covid willing. Maybe it is a small god. How many others are out there waiting to trip us up?

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• If I lean toward any economic theory, it’s probably that of Georgism, which follows the notion of late-1800s economist Henry George that land should never be privately owned. Failing the overthrow of land ownership, George advocated for what’s called a “land value tax,” which separates the values of land from the value of improvements on it and plows tax from the land itself back to the community rather than the property owner. It’s a system that’s been successfully implemented in the past (most notably in Pittsburgh, where’s it was credited with having kept housing prices affordable for decades), and is complemented by the acknowledgment that when a community invests in improvement, nearby property owners shouldn’t be the sole beneficiaries of an increase in value. Along those lines, Sydney, Australia, is trying to implement a land value tax that would kick in when infrastructure improvements lead to increased property values, but it’s finding it more difficult than it should be (capitalism!).

• Just a bunch of random but weirdly riveting observations from Sapiens about the slowdown of growth in tooth enamel found in 300 teeth spanning a 2,000-year history.

• I wish this essay on Psyche had more advice for how to deal with a seemingly global epistemological crisis, but it was interesting to think about author Kenneth Boyd’s prescription for nourishing one’s own epistemic well-being: “There are three components of epistemic wellbeing: access to truths; access to trustworthy sources of information; and opportunities to participate in productive dialogue.”

• An “alternate history” from MIT Press Reader on what would have happened if the Luddites had won and managed to develop a productive and healthy rather than extractive and profit-driven relationship with technology. This piece is a fun excerpt from a book of “economic science fiction” and purports to be an encyclopedia entry from the year 2500. “Principles over Property” became their motto and Lord Byron was their poet laureate. (Weird echoes of the actual organizational structure of Soviet communism in this imagined world shaped by Sustainomics, though.)

• This episode of Origin Stories (the podcast from the Leakey Foundation—I can’t link to the specific episode, but the most recent is near the top of the page) has a great conversation with Rebecca Wragg Sykes about her new book on Neanderthals titled Kindred. The details about hearth fires in particular had thought-provoking insight into how much of a story a hearth fire leaves behind. Neanderthals evidently had very advanced control of fire and even burned coal.

Shortly after January’s attempted coup in Washington, D.C., Leah Sottile, a long-time reporter on anti-government extremism (including this great piece on the history and co-opting of the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag) and host of the Bundyville podcast* about the Bundy family, the 2016 takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, and related stories, published a newsletter on what she sees as the dangers inherent in the likelihood that Congress—or the D.C./Atlantic seaboard bubble in general—will brush off the insurgency as a fluke of freaks acting out a fantasy.†

The very fact that this possibility is right now more likely than true accountability and reform is indicative of the problems we face, but even more daunting is the continued failure of major media outlets to take this threat seriously. Even when covering armed and clearly serious and organized extremists, there’s a tone of “this can’t be real, can it?” that I assume has characterized insulated media types throughout history until the moment it became all too real for them. There is a lot of good journalism out there, but for the most part the biggest platforms, and voices with the widest reach, aren’t the ones practicing it, and I’m not just talking about the big newspapers that wasted four years publishing sympathetic stories about Trump voters in midwestern diners and barely mentioned murders carried out by militia-trained white supremacists.

In her essay, Sottile recounted something she’d heard from a bomber she’d interviewed for the Bundyville podcast. When she asked him what would happen if Trump were impeached and/or removed from office, his response was, “All bets are off.” Most of her essay is about the seriousness of those four words, and the failure of much of the “serious” world to take them, and the threat they pose, seriously.

“Those four words alone have kept me on the domestic terrorism beat. . . . They pushed me to understand the bombing in Nevada more, how it tied to the greater Patriot movement, to understand the movement’s capacity for violence.”

Watching the attempted coup last month, Sottile was reminded of the way that major news outlets dismissed the significance of the 2016 Malheur standoff (or whatever we want to call it):

“What I was thinking about was the way national media outlets scoffed at the presence of armed men in a remote wildlife refuge out here in Oregon. It was a novelty story. A fringe story. Did it really matter? I thought of all the conversations I had with editors in New York and DC, who couldn’t understand why this was a story everyone needed to care about. . . . As the Malheur takeover played out, people found a way to scoff, to tell journalists like me to not give them so much attention.”

Living in a place like northwest Montana, and having grown up alongside children of probable Aryan Nation members and Montana Militia sympathizers, it took me a long time to come to terms with the mountainous, crushing dismissiveness that many major media outlets treat “Western” stories and trends that, they clearly feel, have nothing to do with real people’s lives. The only national media outlet I’ve seen (and published with) that treats “the West” as a real place with real problems rather than a movie backdrop is the Los Angeles Times, which is why I subscribe to it and not the New York Times.†† (It wasn’t the truly idiotic piece about the Sip ‘n Dip bar in Great Falls, Montana, that finally stopped me reading NYT, but it didn’t help.)

Reading Sottile’s essay reminded me of a response I’d gotten from a high-end literary journal in New York a couple of years ago to an essay I’d submitted about my hometown. “Richard Spencer lives in Whitefish and there’s a growing white supremacist movement there,” wrote the editor. “Anything about Whitefish has to include that.” This essay, mind you, was about walkability and the decades of community work involved in slowly evolving a tightly connected walkable community with a healthy downtown retail core. It had zoning code overlays and an explanation of school trust lands in it. It was about urban planning. Most of the social and financial capital invested in the town’s current walking and biking trail system was built in the decades before Spencer’s parents bought a vacation home here and he decided to launch a white nationalist podcast out of one of their bedrooms.

I realize that I’m on the one hand saying that a magazine shouldn’t have insisted my small western town only be defined by the fact of white supremacy while at the same time complaining that major news outlets don’t take the threat of white supremacy and anti-government extremism seriously, but the points are two sides of the same coin: the simplification of places, people, and issues. The lack of multi-dimensionality with which so-called hinterlands are viewed. We’re either hicks, rednecks, and a joke, or we’re completely defined by the presence of racists. (Also fly-fishing because Norman McClean.) I don’t know what those editors are imbibing (or maybe I do and it’s part of the problem) but just because a place has a population of under a zillion doesn’t mean it lacks complexity. We have real problems and we also have real ways of trying to address them.

That editor’s assumptions made me angry but worse was the lack of humility. This was at a time shortly after the Charlottesville tiki-torch event, which predictably turned violent (predictable to anyone paying attention), and certain parts of the country were only just coming to terms with the realities of white nationalism in their midst. To ignore the fact that this problem is everywhere, to pretend that little Whitefish, Montana, is more tainted by the presence of this high-profile white supremacist than New York City is by its several known hate groups (37 statewide according to the Southern Poverty Law Center) is only going to perpetuate the problem. The white supremacy, the anti-government extremism, the sovereign citizen movement and constitutional sheriffs aren’t “over there” or “out there” or “anywhere but here.” They are everywhere. If the most elite of editorial teams can’t perceive the reality of our predicament after militia members in Michigan allegedly planned to kidnap the state’s governor and a local sheriff said they were just doing their duty in trying to make a citizen’s arrest, much less after an attempted coup, then those teams and editors are at a minimum not doing their jobs. Having a little humility about what we don’t know is one of the biggest steps anyone can take to start healing many of society’s ills, and it’s particularly vital to performing the service of crafting civic discourse, which is part of what media does whether it intends to or not.

After all, I don’t go around telling Queens residents who they are and what defines them just because Donald Trump is from Queens. I’ve known plenty of people from Queens but don’t know anything about the character of the place and wouldn’t presume to pretend.

Sottile’s frustration stems partly from the difficulty she faced getting editors interested in stories on the 2016 Bundy-led takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. If anyone needs a reminder that Trump was a symptom of this country’s racism, not the cause, that takeover was achieved (albeit temporarily) during the Obama administration by a group of heavily armed white people with a history of anti-government extremism and violent threats. They spent a month at the refuge toting guns around and destroying artifacts with no intrusion from law enforcement. That same year, under the same president, mostly non-white and totally unarmed water protectors encamped at Standing Rock were systematically harassed, hazed, attacked, and abused by law enforcement and a militarized private security corporation simply for trying to protect their only source of clean water—all taking place on land and water that was legally theirs by treaty right.

For Sottile’s uninterested editors, Malheur and the whole mess of the Bundy movement were an “over there” problem. But, as I also wrote in a post a few weeks ago, the recent attempted coup was the blindingly obvious evolution of an increasingly armed, trained, and angered group of people whose threat to society and potential for mass violence the U.S. government has insistently ignored since the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992.**

It’s not that papers like the New York Times or Washington Post are required to tell these stories, but the fact is that they, and other major media outlets, do tell them, and for the most part tell them poorly, perpetuating both stereotypes and a dangerous belief that extremism is some sort of uneducated and poor rural people problem (if you go by major media characterizations, it’s amazing how many people in this country grow up poor, including me, and manage not to become extremists). Up to and including the moment when a bunch of armed self-proclaimed “patriots” come within minutes of possibly murdering members of Congress. Because some people were dressed like they were headed to a Renaissance Faire, it was assumed to be a LARP, and because almost all of the people were white it was assumed that they didn’t pose a threat.

And it’s not just major media outlets. One of the last episodes of Sam Harris’s podcast Making Sense (formerly called, like his meditation app, Waking Up) that I ever listened to was one where he interviewed an historian of white nationalism. “Finally,” I thought, “Harris is going to dismount his Islam-is-worse-than-all-other-ideologies hobbyhorse and grapple with this very real homegrown threat.” Instead, his only substantive response was to add on a bit after the interview where he critiqued the scholar’s frequent correction of the differences between white nationalism and white supremacy (because she’s a scholar and making those kinds of distinctions is part of what scholars do) as a “symptom of wokeness.”

I know I go on about the power of story a lot, but they matter. Refusing to see the importance of work like Sottile’s and instead spinning a different story about all extremists being rural rednecks on the one hand and anything that tries to take white supremacy seriously as “wokeness” on the other is part of what got us into this mess. There are plenty of people in this country, millions, maybe tens of millions, who do understand the dangers we’re facing, but the urgency of that knowledge is either being tamped down, turned into a joke, or completely erased by media that is meant to be a counterweight to both extremism and to government power, not its handmaiden.

Instead of telling me that my town of almost 8,000 people that has long been a minor liberal bubble in a deeply conservative area must be defined by one high-profile white nationalist because his wealthy parents happened to have bought a vacation home here, editors and producers could create more space for writers like Sottile who know that every place has nuance and layers, journalists who seek out the story that is, not the story they expect to see.

There’s a quote from mythologist Martin Shaw I’ve been coming back to a lot, especially now as I watch some editorial departments scrambling to understand what’s going on and how to talk about it. “The business of stories is not enchantment,” he wrote in his book Snowy Tower. “The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.”

I doubt there is much that Sottile could say, much less anything I could say, that would change the minds of thought leaders or editorial departments. But the perspectives they dismiss as irrelevant will continue to affect this society in increasingly violent ways, and their insistence on telling only one narrative, the one that feels comfortable, is a structural part of the problem. One thing that Malheur and the attempted insurrection had in common was that they only failed, it seems, not because they weren’t serious but because, while the perpetrators were armed, trained, and present in significant numbers, they weren’t quite certain what to do once they succeeded in their first set of goals. It’s only a matter of time before someone connects those two live wires, access to power and those willing to use violence to gain it. The people who could, and would, do so are right in front of us. If we plan on stopping them, we have to start telling the right stories.

—-

* The entire Bundyville podcast is a story worth listening to (you can also read it on Longreads) but if you just want an overview, this live interview from 2019 is a good primer.

†LARP—live-action role play—is an acronym I had to look up, seeing it referenced all over Twitter and various think pieces after the attempted coup. The question posted was often how many people thought they were engaging in a LARP. It’s not an irrelevant question, but I’m more interested in how many people knew they weren’t, including members of Congress.

††High Country News is an obvious exception and also a model for the kinds of solutions that media could look for: an exceptional regional news magazine whose stories invariably have national implications. I also subscribe to Native News Online and Indian Country Today.

**This problem is obviously far older than that, but in my lifetime Ruby Ridge and Waco formed a distinct fault line after which federal law enforcement wasn’t even going to attempt dealing with extremist white people. Those events radicalized whole new generations of extremists, and subsequent lack of follow-up either by government or media allowed the movement to grow unquestioned and unchecked.

Once and future technology

“If the ultimate authority in the world is human feeling, but somebody has discovered how to hack and manipulate human feelings, then the whole system collapses.”
—Yuval Noah Harari speaking recently on the podcast Your Undivided Attention

My spouse and I skinned up the local ski mountain on a recent early morning (those tiny tinges of pink on the clouds are all we got of the sunrise). If I happen to still be on my way up when the chairlift opens and my father happens to be skiing that day, he’ll stop on his way down and ask me how I’m enjoying suffering. Skinning up a mountain does feel idiotic sometimes but it also feels awfully good.

On the way up I listened to a recent episode of the Futures podcast with computational biologist Andrew Steele on aging and longevity. (I don’t usually listen to anything while out in the woods, but the chairlift started turning early and I’d generally rather listen to something that makes me think than the squeaking of the empty lift a couple hours before it’s even open to ride.)

I’m not really a futurist and probably don’t think about this stuff more than the average person, but there’s two reasons I listen to more episodes of Futures and Your Undivided Attention than I do of other podcasts. The main one for Futures is that every time I do, the interview turns out to be far more thought-provoking than its description implies. The conversations are far-ranging, and the interviewer Luke Robert Mason almost always asks the questions that rattle around in my head as I’m listening. For example—when discussing how humans might soon live to 200 years, I thought of recent discussions about the problems with gerontocracy in the U.S. Senate. (Not that there is anything wrong with people of any competent age wielding power, but most of us see the power imbalances inherent in the Senate and U.S. politics in general. This is a good article on the current drawbacks.) Next thing I knew, Mason was asking about power imbalances in scientific research or university departments that might develop with a healthier elderly population that lives longer.

The other reason is one that I brought up toward the end of my book, which is that when we don’t pay attention to the future implications of current technologies, they can end up having a disastrous effects on our lives. Since my book is about walking and a good chunk of it deals with the loss of walking, my main focus was the national highway infrastructure. There was tremendous resistance in the 1920s and ’30s against car dominance on streets that used to belong to everyone, but over the decades we’ve allowed that history to be rewritten by car manufacturers while approving highway plans that destroy communities and human health at the same time.

How technology shapes our lives matters. I think we all know this. But we don’t always envision what the shape of its effects will be in 100 years or so. There’s a phrase, “legacy infrastructure,” in computing, architecture, urban planning, and street design that describes baked-in infrastructure that can be extremely difficult to reverse-engineer to be more human-centered. Redesigning a four-lane, 45 mph road to include bike lanes and sidewalks, for example, can be both difficult and expensive. But there’s no choice. If you want a walkable world you have to work with legacies of the decades when pedestrians weren’t considered in road design.

We deal with visible and invisible legacies all the time, from lack of crosswalks or sidewalks to laws that encourage destructive profit-seeking over, say, a right to clean water (approving oil pipelines from a legal perspective is a legacy of values, just as lead pipes are a physical legacy); from private and shared traumas to tooth decay guaranteed by a childhood of too much sugar.

When it comes to technologies, the more potential they have to affect life on this planet, the closer attention we should pay to the consequences, good or bad. Corporations are just fictions we’ve collectively (kind of) agreed on, but what they build or destroy is very real.

To keep this attentiveness in balance with paying attention to the world around me, the physical world, this breathtaking planet, is always a challenge. But it’s mornings like that one recently, as my spouse pushed his skins up ahead of me until he was out of sight, and the overcast sky offered a muted sunrise, that remind me why it matters.

I guess I’ll keep suffering up that mountain as long as my knees let me. The sunrises are worth it, even when they’re barely visible.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• A thoughtful, well-written article on the evolution of the idea of “redpilling” from The Matrix’s original creation to radicalizing people—usually young men—into extremist ideologies: “How did the red pill go from being a critical component of a film created by two trans women to being a popular term used by men’s rights activists (MRAs) and white supremacists?”

• The Yield, by Tara June Winch, is a novel of love and dispossession placed in a rural part of Australia. I had some trouble engaging with it, which I’m sure had to do with my mood but wasn’t helped by the fact that one of the three interwoven plot lines was a long letter written by a white colonizer about 100 years before the story takes place and I’ve never enjoyed historical fiction very much (with the exceptions of Kate Atkinson and Louise Erdrich). Not the fault of the author, and the chapters containing the main character’s grandfather’s dictionary listings for his native Wiradjuri language (Winch is Wiradjuri, though in the book the language and clan have a fictional name) made the book worth it on its own. A reminder that every word is ripe with story.

• If you have any interest in fire ecology, this episode of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast with research ecologist Paul Hessburg is sobering but fascinating. Sobering: the mildest years of Western wildfires are already behind us, even counting California’s recent megafires. Fascinating: everything about fire, forest ecology, and what modern foresters and fire ecologists are learning by (finally) looking back at how people managed these forests before European invasion and colonization.

• An interview with astronaut Kathy Sullivan on the Futures podcast about her new book. It was something different to listen to, which was nice for me, but it’s also worth scrolling through to about 7-8 minutes before the end (around one hour in), where she talks about not being a fan of the Lifeboat theory for space—colonizing space as a response to climate change and environmental devastation. It’s a form, she says, “of the ultimate gated community”: “It becomes close to being an amoral proposition to me. . . . No one who talks about that means all of humanity. They mean some small segment of people—chosen by whom? on what grounds? . . . And the rest of you lot we’re just going to leave behind on the trash pile we’ve created. So no.” I like her.

• I somehow can’t stop watching this 15-minute video on Psyche that explores and evokes the attachment to movement and landscape experienced by the staff of the Trans-Siberian railway. I could totally see getting addicted to that job.

Space and time

“Movement is humankind’s oldest survival strategy.” — Paul Salopek, Out of Eden Walk

My media consumption this week had a collision of observations about space. In National Geographic, Paul Salopek published an essay on the slowness of his multi-year walking journey compared to the increasing change of the world. Salopek is following humans’ ancient migration from Ethiopia’s Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. He started in 2013 and is currently in Myanmar. The quote above is taken from his recent essay, and reading it made me sit back because it’s such a lovely distillation of what I spent a lot of words saying in the introduction to my book.

The question he poses afterwards has become even more important since he began his journey: what happens to us sedentary moderns who don’t have the capacity, money or legal room to move elsewhere when climate change brings big shifts?

This is something we’re all going to have to reckon with at some point or another and it’s one I think about a lot as I wander around our neighborhood trying not to slip and crack my head on the ice. We built our house and moved in about four years ago. I really love it here in my hometown. I love my community, my family being nearby, my friends. Even deeper, I love the mountains and the lodgepole pines and larch trees, the rivers and tucked-away lakes. I don’t know that I love the fact that those high mountain lakes get stocked with fish every year (why???) but to roam around a mountainside in August and jump into an ice-cold lake accessible only by foot (or fish-stocking plane) is something I don’t ever want to have to give up. Might we have to, someday?

There’s a quote in the beginning of my book from BBC journalist (and a personal friend) Bethany Bell, whom I interviewed about what she saw covering the Syrian refugee crisis as thousands of people walked from Hungary to Austria several years ago. With the lives we build for ourselves, the things we love, she said, “sometimes we just have to walk away.”

Are we prepared for what might come, and what it might ask of us?

—-

I finally finished Nick Estes’s book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. (Thank you, Chris La Tray, for prompting me to move it to the top of the TBR pile!) This is a must-read of American history and an incredible narrative of injustices inflicted paired with matching resistance. It’s an answer to so many issues that plague America today, stemming from colonialism and racism and perpetuated because we’ve been too scared or too weak to admit and deal with the realities of our history. “By following its own legal traditions,” wrote Estes, “the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.” Private property law, repeatedly, forms a lynchpin for what has been stolen and how it is justified.

—-

And then on the Team Human podcast Douglas Rushkoff had a long conversation with Mark Pesce about his book Augmented Reality and how realities that play out online, like Pokemon Go, are increasingly affecting our real-life physical spaces. “Property law may be the very problem that AR could break,” Rushkoff said when talking about people in Los Angeles jumping over fences and onto private lawns to find their Pokemons. But, countered Pesce, “do you want it broken by Mark Zuckerberg?”

Well, no, though I don’t think Zuckerberg is among those who want to break property law so much as he is among those who knowingly use its power to hoard property and wealth for themselves. But the question did make me pause.

Property law, or at least its application, is far more likely to be broken by the physical realities of climate change—the hurricanes and floods that sweep away cities, the wildfires that repeatedly burn down towns, the droughts that make staying untenable. How many times will people be willing to survey and document wrecked land in order to establish their property ownership?

Sometimes we’ll just have to walk away. And I don’t think enough of us are even close to being able to face that reality.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Paul Salopek also published an incredible op-ed this week reflecting on the decline of the once-thriving multicultural and highly advanced Silk Road and its links to America’s modern decline as the U.S. chooses fear, ignorance, and isolationism.

• I enjoyed philosophy and religion professor Alan Jay Levinovitz’s essay in Aeon on natural medicine and the way he broke down the two questions that “natural” medicine claims to answer—Why me? and What can be done?—that “modern” medicine fails to address. As someone with chronic pain issues that will likely never be resolved (I wrote this post on one of the many days that I woke up feeling like all my joints were on fire), I’ve had more than one friend claim certain supplements or that one chiropractor across town or some kind of ionized water sold under a pyramid scheme would cure me. (Spoiler alert: No. Neither has anything else, ever, except walking. And Vicodin did once but its addiction potential scared me.) I appreciated Levinovitz’s points that there are answers we crave from medical professionals that if they can’t answer—which usually they can’t—they can at least address instead of ignore.

• Istanbul might have barely a month’s worth of potable water left, as Turkey faces a severe water shortage. The religious affairs directorate has instructed imams to pray for rain, which never hurts, but that won’t do a whole lot if the government refuses to acknowledge that reaching for more capacity isn’t going to solve a problem wrought by sprawl, population growth, and climate change. Science denial and lack of political will strike again. Turkey is one of the countries I most loved visiting, and this makes me very sad.

• If you need a little escapism this week, this episode of Scotland Outdoors was lovely. The wonders of ice (including in recorded sound), the importance of play, and the worldwide lore of ravens. Did you know that ravens imitate wolf calls? You can hear it at about 1:19 (one hour nineteen minutes). So eerie.

The space between

Ski Jesus says be nice to people.

Listening to an episode of the Futures podcast on quantum mechanics with physicist Sean Caroll reminded me of a science fiction book I read recently—Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds, whose plot relies on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the theory that every possible reality exists simultaneously in an infinite number of universes.

There was a perhaps predictable but nevertheless well-executed metaphor that spun out in this novel about how the spaces between people, and how we understand one another (or mostly, don’t), are even wider than the spaces that the main character traverses between worlds.

The main character is allowed to do this on over 300 worlds because her “self” on those worlds has died. Only people whose alternate self has died in a universe can visit it, and only worlds relatively similar to the one the main character lives on are accessible. These specifications make sense given the science, but they also allow Johnson to explore many issues of class and justice: Since your other self has to have died for you to visit a world, the people employed to traverse are almost always those whose lives are precarious to begin with—they’re more likely to have died in many different realities, so employing them is efficient because they can visit all the worlds where they no longer exist. And it allows the author to play with plenty of ways that the main character can fail to understand her own self.

It’s a very human book, coping with questions of trust and division while at the same time with the unfolding reality of a wannabe dictator raised by an abusive and narcissistic father. “He doesn’t want us to feel closer to him; he wants us to worship him.” Oof.

The spaces between us, the ways in which we try to relate to one another and save our own lives, while struggling against the forces that seek to take all they can and crush everything else, they’re a hard thing to traverse. But they’re worth it, even if we’re not walking among the stars.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• A whole lot going on in this two-hour podcast episode of Your Undivided Attention—a conversation between the founders of the Center for Humane Technology and historian Yuval Noah Harari. AIs that understand people better than people do, the fast-arriving reality of tech that can read your emotions from the inside, and the degradation of a shared reality as everyone silos into their own virtual reality. Kind of fun freethinking when Harari presses the group to think about utopian uses of tech rather than dystopian. Even in these best cases, he asks, do we still lose our free will?

• The wonky side of my brain that still follows a lot of urban planning would very much like you to get interested in parking policy. An enormous amount of land is devoted to parking, and unlike, say, affordable housing or decent health care, minimum parking requirements are dictated by local zoning and is something that normal everyday people can to work change in their own communities. Planetizen has some good thoughts: “We consider housing for automobiles a necessity that, by law, everybody must subsidize, while housing for people is optional.” A lot of wonkiness here — like “For example, a recent study of multifamily developments in the Denver region found that 40% of spaces in market-based buildings and 50% of spaced in below-market buildings are virtually never used” — but the boring day-to-day stuff is actually where the world changes if we truly want it to.

• More wonk: There are actually 3 housing crises in California. Also part of the same article, a really compelling overview of how the power of California’s construction workers’ union seems to hold back affordable housing initiatives.

• Watching Barcelona use the pandemic to forward people-first urbanism was inspiring but I wasn’t sure if it would last. It seems to be going full-steam ahead, though, squeezing out cars to make more room for public spaces and urban greening.

• I haven’t read this book yet, but if you’re interested, Verso Books is making its U.S. Anti-Fascist Reader available for free as an ebook (electronic version only; paperback is around $20).

Grief

“If we love anyone, we will grieve them when they die—and it will be harder, and last longer, than we ever expected.” —Mark Liebenow

One of the newsletters I subscribe to (Zeynep Tufekci’s “Insight”) had a subscribers-only piece about the vaccine rollouts the other day, and I kept trying to prod my brain into at least fully, attentively reading the piece even if I couldn’t think of anything to say about it. But I couldn’t muster the attention because I was giving most of it to what almost everyone else was giving attention to that day.

Even when I can’t engage with Covid-19 news, though, there is one thing that brings its reality home to me every single day, and that’s the obituary section of my local paper.

Not everyone in there has passed away from Covid, and even if they have it often won’t specify (I assume that’s up to the family), but there is no denying the reality that for well over two months now that section has been longer than it was six months ago. Sometimes it stretches over two pages, which might not seem like a lot, but I do live in northwest Montana, not in a city of millions (the entire state barely has over a million people).

By chance on one of the days when the obituary section seemed even longer than usual and included two people in their thirties, I received Mark Liebenow’s newsletter—Mark writes beautifully about grief and being a widower and was one of the people whose feeds made Twitter a more human place to be when I had an account there. It included a link to his short essay “The Landscape of Grief,” and provides some direction that many might need right now but don’t know how to find.

Many of my friends have lost someone over this past year, some to Covid and some to other causes, and the inability to gather and share the grief has felt an added source of pain. It’s hard to know what to do with the enormity of grief and the need to help when physical contact is impossible. All I can think of is advice a friend gave years ago when talking about her bout with cancer: Don’t disappear.

But I wish I could be there to grieve with everyone. I wish we all could. I should have said this in my post on the attempted coup and embodied trauma, but I hope that throughout this—throughout life—you are able to pause and take stock of how fear, anger, worry, tension, and all the grief, all of it, affects your body, and how you can care for yourself.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• In the midst of miring myself in Twitter during the attempted coup this week, I came across this bizarre story of someone in Oregon who light-heartedly tried to train some crows while they were furloughed and ended up with a semi-violent crow army. If you need something else to think about, diving into the Reddit thread of advice in response to the problem was probably the best use of five frivolous minutes I made all week (that’s not saying much). I think my favorite part is that it’s posted in a forum for legal advice because the poster wasn’t sure about liability if the crows attack someone.

• This piece by anthropologist Gideon Lasco on rediscovering the rewarding rituals of making and consuming coffee during a pandemic, published in Sapiens, is a pleasant reminder of the small joys we look forward to whether the world is storm-tossed or calm. (Also, if you read it and are interested in the Cup of Excellence competition mentioned at the end, it’s actually a great organization that has helped many small family coffee farmers by rewarding them for quality coffee [several of my family members work in specialty coffee, and my father has served as a judge for Cup of Excellence in the past]).

• Also in Sapiens, anthropologist Julianne Yip on new technical approaches to saving Arctic sea ice, and her advice that anyone attempting to do so should first start thinking of the ice—and nature in general—as a partner, rather than as an inert object that humans can manipulate at will: “Focusing on levers can lead people into a technical trap, whereby a complex problem is falsely reframed as a simpler, technical one just to make it tractable.”

• Also on the subject of partnership, Rianne Eisler, a Holocaust survivor and author of the now-classic The Chalice and the Blade, on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast talking about her new book Nurturing Our Humanity.

A short time ago (a million years ago? Covid time is weird and stretchy and shapeless but combine it with attempted coup time and I don’t even know) I wrote a bit about the Boston Tea Party—a founding myth of America, but also a riot that destroyed private property. What many people also don’t know is that the perpetrators dressed up in costume—garb imitating the nearby Mohawk tribe, to be exact—before overtaking three ships and dumping their cargoes of tea overboard.

I’ve read some news reports from that time period (and if anyone’s really interested, the information I used in my book for the Boston Tea Party section came from The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants, an enormous but invaluable volume of first-hand accounts from that era of America-to-be), and after reading mainstream media’s hot takes from yesterday’s attempted coup, I’m thinking about looking back to see how derisively the British Parliament and British press spoke and wrote about the men in costume revolting against their country, or at least their country’s taxes.

Just because people are attempting insurrection in costume and look and sound ridiculous doesn’t mean they aren’t deadly serious.

Like the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party, those who “stormed” (their word) the U.S. Capitol fervently believed, and continue to believe, in their cause. This is one of the reasons I wrote recently in my post about the CSKT water compact that its opponents are people I have completely given up on reasoning with, if I haven’t given up on them as human beings and neighbors. (And just for the record, this is one of the reasons I value living in a complicated, mixed community that is anything but a bubble and why this “getting along with people whose opinions I detest” can’t just be rhetoric: one of those elected state lawmakers, whom I’m sure supports yesterday’s attempted coup, is married to a teacher who has been one of the few people to make my kid’s middle school years slightly less hellish. They live a ten minutes’ walk from our house.)

I keep going back to this video posted by Molly McKew, an expert on information warfare whose Twitter feed I used to follow, of a young-ish man (need I say white?) who had witnessed the shooting of a radicalized QAnon-believing Air Force veteran as she and others rushed through the doors of the building.

In videos like this what gets my attention is the body language—shakiness, tension in the voice, and the rise in pitch toward the end as the man’s passion comes through. About a minute into the two-minute video is when his real self comes out, his purpose (or what he thinks is his purpose) for being there: “This—this cannot stand,” he says, pointing toward the building. “They don’t represent anyone. . . . They think we’re a joke. . . . We have to do something.” As McKew points out, he can’t really explain who the enemy is or what his goal is. But he is angry and shaken and firm in the beliefs that led him there.

I’d ask where his passion was during Standing Rock or pretty much any week last summer during Black Lives Matter protests, but I imagine we all know the answer to that.

As I tried to drag myself away from Twitter yesterday while doing math with my kids, I thought a lot about bodies and emotion. My publisher, Hachette, did a little interview with me before A Walking Life came out, and in it I said some things I’d maybe revise or update, but some things that seem even more relevant today, like how social media—in fact, all media—seeks to manipulate our emotions, and what that does to us:

“I’m also really interested in the messages our bodies are sending us and how that can be manipulated. When you feel angry because of a news headline or depressed because you’ve been reading your Twitter feed, what do you really know about that emotion and what’s causing it? Are you, in other words, responding according to what you actually know is true in the real world and about real people, or according to outrage constantly triggered by the media you consume? I’ve come to think that getting to know your body—unfiltered through social media—is essential for understanding emotions like anger. Maybe it’s time more of us started asking how our perceptions of people on ‘the other side’ are being manipulated and whom that manipulation serves. Because it’s definitely not serving us.”

The entire scene yesterday is a part-answer to that problem, and as so many have pointed out, from Sarah Kendzior to Joy Ann Reid and many others, it was entirely predictable. I’m a writer at core but essentially I’m a housewife and mom of two living in a small town in Montana—I’m nobody, basically—and last summer even I was saying to friends that I didn’t see any of this going anywhere except armed clashes between police, citizens, and factions of enlisted military and the National Guard if nothing was done. That wasn’t just informed by Trump, but by having grown up in a place with a strong Aryan Nation contingent, and having watched it and its offshoots blossom after the FBI and other enforcement mechanisms lost the stomach for going after violent white extremists post-Ruby Ridge and Waco.

So here we are. The people breaking windows in the Capitol were responding to what they thought was true about the world, and their bodies were pumped with outrage and anger kept fed by a media machine that has zero interest in facts, only in attention.

The title of this post is taken from the book The Body Keeps the Score by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in which he lays out his ideas involving how trauma lodges in the body, and details his work with Vietnam veterans and victims of child abuse. His work has been extended through studies on epigenetics by people like Rachel Yehuda (who studied descendants of Holocaust and 9/11 survivors) and Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart, who has studied trauma passed on through generations of Native American populations—Lakota descendants of those who’d survived the horrors of Wounded Knee in particular, but also those who suffered conditioning and abuse when forced into residential boarding schools.

The man in the video posted by Molly McKew is deeply misinformed at best, and looking for further radicalization at worst. I hope not. But no matter where he goes from here, the reality is that he and so many others who participated in a revolt yesterday are carrying bodies full of toxins that have been pumped into them for years by right-wing radio show hosts, by the Fox network, by online conspiracy theorists, and of course by the president and his supporters and enablers.

All of those words and feelings don’t just pass through the brain or stay on the internet. They stir emotions, start rushing energy and stress hormones around, and clamor for action. This is part of our evolution. Our flight-or-fight reaction is a stress response evolved to save our lives in the fact of immediate danger. Media uses it all the time, in some cases unknowingly but they certainly know what they’re hoping to achieve: to keep people engaged by keeping them outraged and angry, by keeping those bodies pumped full of stress hormones.

At some point all that radicalization and anger was going to have to go somewhere. People have been acting on those emotions for years by yelling online, by going further into conspiracies and disinformation, and by stocking up on weaponry. In some cases they’ve attended training camps for armed revolutionaries.

Nothing ever stays “just online.” It doesn’t matter whether I agree with any of those people or not, or whether you do or not. All of society suffers the consequences because at some point their emotions will need their bodies to take action.

And it’s not like I’m immune. One of the reasons I quit Twitter was because it was clear to me how easily hooked I get in toggling from one political feed to the next, and going further into the “how bad is it?” rabbit hole. Once I left, I was more aware every time I let myself look at Twitter of its physical effects on me. It’s like a craving for sugar or trashy cliffhanger TV shows (24 comes to mind) but worse. I can go from feed to feed to feed and at the same time be completely conscious that my body’s tension is growing—not just from anger, but from a physical need to fix it all. It’s no different, likely, than what a conspiracy theorist goes through engaging in a near-manic desire to connect all the threads together and finally grasp the entire picture. If I just check Molly McKew’s feed one more time, or Sarah Kendzior’s, or Malcolm Vance’s, or JJ MacNab’s*, or someone who seems to have an ear in the White House, then surely I’ll “get” it all.

And then what? I think we know what. Those aren’t the feeds yesterday’s insurrectionists were following, but the mind-body process might have been similar. The end is a strong desire to do something. And when you have a president who’s prompting you to go invade the houses of Congress to save his presidency and the democracy you believe you’re losing, what does anybody expect? Throw in a feeling of connection and fellow-feeling with a whole lot of other radicalized, disinformed insurrectionists, and you’re going to take that body full of excitement and stress hormones and march up the steps. And put your feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk I guess?

The longer a toxic media ecosystem is allowed to pump poisons into society, the more their bodies—or all our bodies—will keep the score. But it’s the body politic that pays the price.

*These are really good people to follow if you’re interested in these things, though!

John Vaillant and the likeways of art

“Public property rights stand equally important [to private ownership], for they secure the life sources for all citizens: the air, water, oceans, wildlife, fish, forests, vegetation, and soils. Without an abundance of such natural wealth, there can be no social stability, and thus no individual liberty, for citizens struggling to survive can fall prey to tyrants.” —Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

I recently finished reading John Vaillant’s book The Golden Spruce, about a famous golden spruce tree and the logger-turned-environmental activist who cut it down. Somewhere around a third of the way through I almost stopped reading, because I wasn’t sure if I could handle yet another story of the utter destruction wrought by commodification and unchecked capitalism.*

It’s an incredible history, reaching back to the first meetings of the Haida people with European ships looking for commodities and trade in the late 1700s, delving into the growth and mechanization of the logging industry, and tracking one man’s personal journey of heroism or hell.

I kept reading because Vaillant is an excellent writer and several friends whose judgment I trust have recommended him, and I wasn’t sorry I kept going. I didn’t feel any better about commodification or humanity, but Vaillant was deft and matter-of-fact in his treatment of the subjects—not leaving me with hope exactly, but more a bolstering, of refusing to look away from the reality whether you think you can change it or not. His skill in narrative turned the subject from one I wanted to avoid for once, to a book I’ll actually keep on my shelves rather than passing on.

—-

Some days after finishing the book, I walked to City Beach on a gray, cold day with my husband while our kids were at their grandparents’. We ran into one of the swimming teachers from the gym, a woman I’ve known marginally for several years, and was glad to find was coping with quarantines and pandemic as well as possible. We chatted a bit about this and that, and somehow stumbled onto Elon Musk and Mars.

“What are we doing messing about with this planet?” she said. “We need to be out there, we need to be building space stations and moon bases.”

Well, maybe. Do we? I don’t think so. Personally, I think it’s the frontier mentality, looking around and realizing what a mess things are and how much work it’s going to be to clean it all up, and fantasizing about being able to start over with a clean slate elsewhere. It never actually works that way, and space will be no different.

But she talked about the technology and how fascinating it is and how much we benefit from the kind of research that goes into space tech, and that, of course, isn’t wrong. But I still think we’re fooling ourselves if we imagine we can go and do incredible things in space and somehow be a better species when we still can’t bring ourselves to feed all the children on the planet. We’ll do it anyway, though. Or some people will, while others will keep trying to feed all the children.

—-

Recently I’ve been questioning the purposes of art, which is kind of a hopeless quest that every creative person goes through (and just for the record, I think everyone’s a creative person)—a three a.m. “What am I doing here?” wail followed by searches on the internet for wildland firefighter training. Which is doubly silly because I already have a non-writing job and, at 44, am probably too old to go off firefighting.

In any case, Vaillant reminded me that the purpose of art is to serve a perhaps undefinable role in tracing the vast networks of connections, knowledge, pain, hope, and lifeways that bind us together, and will always bind us together, no matter how much we forget about them nor how far we travel from one another. To remind us to keep watching the stars while we feed the children.

*I was going to write “unchecked greed” here, but I don’t think greed is the right word. Greed seems to imply an intent to take from others, knowing that it’s unfair, but the kind of capitalism we function in tells us that there’s nothing wrong with commodification that causes complete destruction, that whatever we pursue in the interests of profit is the right thing to do. Plenty of people participate in this system with willful greed, but plenty of others do because there are no other choices.

The Boston Tea Party is one of the defining stories of America’s founding as a nation. I remember learning about it year after year in school in the 1980s, probably every American kid does. What was never said in those scrappy little classrooms across Montana is that the story of the Boston Tea Party is also one of the sharpest tools wielded in defense of the mythologies that make up the American ideal. The fact that it was an illegal riot that destroyed private property doesn’t just get glossed over; it’s never presented that way, not in the U.S. anyway. It’s noble, the little nation that could refusing injustice imposed by a far-off government. What also gets glossed over is that the impetus for the riot wasn’t simply taxes; it was taxes imposed by government in order to benefit a private corporation.

The struggle over taxes in the British colonies had been ongoing for years. The tax on tea, however, had another purpose besides enriching King George III: The British Parliament wanted to keep the tea tax as a symbolic acknowledgment that the government maintained its right to tax the colonies, but they also wanted to help the East India Company claw its way out of debt. The story of the Boston Tea Party, the real one, points to the longer history of government enabling corporate power and profit until it essentially becomes an arm of the corporation itself.

The East India Company had its own private army. It in effect controlled all of India at one point, nominally representing Britain’s interests but serving its own. As with many of our modern corporate-government revolving doors and mutual back-scratching habits, the interests of the corporation often enveloped, or became, those of the state, as noted in this Financial Times article on the East India Company and its implications for modern capitalism:

“The EIC remains history’s most ominous warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power — and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders can seemingly become those of the state. . . .

For just as the lobbying of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was able to bring down the government in Iran and United Fruit that of Guatemala in the 1950s; just as ITT lobbied to bring down Salvador Allende’s Chile in the 1970s and just as ExxonMobil has lobbied the US more recently to protect its interests in Indonesia, Iraq and Afghanistan, so the EIC was able to call in the British navy to enhance its power in India in the 18th century. And just as Facebook today can employ Nick Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister, so the EIC was able to buy the services of Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered Yorktown to Washington.”

It’s a long but excellent article, detailing the Company’s permission to wage war, and instances of forced privatization across the world at the Company’s behest. It also points to England having isolated itself from the rest of Europe due to wars over religion—I assume the author is referring to the abandonment of Catholicism and establishment the Church of England—as a factor prompting the country to look for markets outside of Europe, a vital ingredient for colonialism: “The English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield, and to do so they had no compunction but to use, for the first time in history, unbridled corporate violence.” The article likely summarizes a lot of history I’m not familiar enough with to know the details of; it’s well worth reading.

One of the questions I keep asking myself is if government (the type of government I’m most familiar with, some form of representative democracy) has always existed to serve private interests. Its main claim to enforcement of law is a monopoly on state violence, most often employed in the name of protecting private property, rather than protecting citizens from harm. This is obvious when you look at laws and police actions against something like constructing an oil pipeline. The pipeline is private property built in pursuit of profit; therefore, it qualifies for legal protection from the state even though it threatens clean air, water, and soil—even if it takes others’ private property in turn. The U.S. government’s power of eminent domain, after all, was first used for private gain when railroads were being built across the continent, and has continued to be wielded in the name of private profit ever since—the Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) and the Pennsylvania District Court case granting eminent domain to a pipeline builder over the objections of a family of maple tree farmers in 2016 are only very recent examples of a longstanding pattern.

What to do about it is another question. Even democratically elected representatives are eager, as we see all too clearly every day, to promote corporate interests over that of their constituents if it assures them a safer and longer place in a seat of power. We need democracy and the right to vote, but those tools aren’t enough to assure a livable planet and lives of dignity. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient.

There’s a tendency to just say, f— it, burn it all down and start over. But that’s been done more than once throughout history, in several places within living memory, and all it results in is a lot of suffering and the same cycles starting over again. It’s as if there’s something broken at the center of humanity, or at least a sizable portion of humanity, and we’re never going to find a better way to live together until we clearly define the shape and scope of that brokenness. As long as we* accept structures that prioritize private profits over life and health of the planet, pollution and structural injustice is all we’ll get. If I believed in the devil, it would be someone in a sharp suit promising me two or three generations of decent jobs in exchange for the water, soil, and air I depend on, with the added bonus of sacrificing my kids’ health and sense of themselves as free human beings. It is the purest kind of evil to smile and hand out some cash while snipping the threads that link us to life.

I don’t believe in devils, or deities, though. I do believe that the stories we tell and accept about ourselves and other have tremendous power. If we can change the stories, maybe we can begin to change something about our lives.

Instead of trying to burn it all down, plenty of people focus on building from the ground up—better systems, better ways of doing and being and living: this profile of a local food and farm co-op in Washington, in the November issue of High Country News, is a reminder that even when things feel like they’re falling apart, there are people and networks all over the world trying to piece them back together. Montana’s Alternative Energy Resource Organization (AERO) has been working against corporate agriculture for decades, from lobbying for a different kind of Farm Bill that works for people and food rather than commodities, to producing the bulk of the country’s organic lentils and heirloom grains like kamut. Oakland’s Unity Council has also been working for decades on affordable housing, higher-quality food access, and integrated public transportation in Fruitvale, one of the city’s poorest areas.

There are plenty more. I’m reminded of these organizations and people every time I work on a story about urban planning, affordable housing, or pedestrian advocacy. They are everywhere. They just never get featured on cable news or the podcasts of so-called “thought leaders.”

Changing our systems to serve people involves all of these efforts. And they don’t have to be scaled up—they have most power and efficacy when they stay connected to a particular place and community. Instead of scaling up small, workable, place-based systems, we need to take out the support systems that keep oppressive conglomerations afloat, from tax subsidies to weak interpretation of anti-monopoly laws (which should never have been confined to only the consumer price of a product, but should always have included what it truly costs us). And of course to change the way a large percentage of human beings see themselves as co-existing with the rest of life, which is no small task after centuries—maybe millennia—of negating and oppressing this reality.

During the U.S.’s recent election cycle, my state elected a governor who ran on the tired trope of lowering taxes, “creating jobs,” and being a successful businessman. People in my state are actually very good at “creating jobs.” Small business owners sometimes feel as common as pine trees. Many of those jobs—upwards of 70,000—are dependent on a healthy commons in the form of clean rivers full of fish and public lands that provide the kind of solace and clean air that no job could touch.

It’s often hard to get people to acknowledge the existence of these jobs and the kind of healthy shared commons that make them possible because our idea of a “job” is so starved of meaning and hamstrung by identity and self-perception. (Journalism jobs have fallen by 65% in the last 20 years, for example, while coal jobs have fallen by 61%, but we don’t hear much about the former because a “real job” is completely ensnared in a different form of identity politics than the kind that people like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson complain about.) Working in a lumber mill is a job; working as a fishing guide is, too, but also somehow isn’t the kind of job you’re talking about when you’re voting for “job creators.” Real jobs means lumber mills, slaughterhouses, car factories, oil pipelines, tech engineers. It means hundreds of people, massive profits for the bosses, and a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to environmental destruction. Maybe it’s the type of job or maybe it’s the number of people employed at each operation, but the myriad small businesses that rely on public lands and a healthy commons somehow don’t count when it comes to political rhetoric.

This is just a story we’ve been told, one that we then tell ourselves and one another, and it’s a system people then vote for. But we are capable of telling different stories. We just need more people doing so.

The East India Company and various colonial governments were very effective at telling stories. They’ve left legacies of imperial pride that still resonate and warp people’s thinking today, and blind us to the dangers of corporate power. As that Financial Times article pointed out:

“We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. For it was not the British government that began seizing chunks of India in the mid-18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London.”

People once believed women could be witches. They once believed that illness was caused by dark humors in the body, and that Earth was the center of nested rings of singing spheres. We can change what we believe, starting with what we think we know about history and the real, live world around us. We can tell better stories about what is possible and what we’re capable of. We need to, because corporate growth and greed will not stop taking and commodifying and destroying all that makes life worthwhile, nor will it stop fabricating stories that make vast numbers of people believe it’s inevitable, unstoppable, and probably for the best. We need more stories, better stories, and we need them everywhere in hopes that those stories can, over time, change what is.

That’s what I hope for 2021. Change, as I always say, takes a lot of time and a lot of work. This year, we can start by finding and amplifying as many instances as possible of people doing real work in real communities to make their worlds better. We can commit to finding, and believing in, different stories—the ones that make us realize a different world is possible, and then making it probable.

*Here I go again—“we, we, we.” I think English just needs a different word, or a few different words, to bring about more nuance when talking about societal thinking that shouldn’t be characterized as “us vs. them.”

The CSKT water compact and dealing with (or bypassing) ideology

“Elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. . . . in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.” —Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Tucked into the Covid-19 relief bill recently (finally) signed by the U.S. president are a couple of items that are probably unknown outside of the area of northwest Montana I live in, or at least largely unknown outside of Montana. Forwarded by all 3 members of the state’s congressional delegation is the completion of a water compact between the state and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes—one that resolves almost all water claims by the tribe, and in which the CSKT gave up many of those claims in order to reach an agreement with the state legislature—and at the same time returns the National Bison Range to tribal ownership.

This compact was passed by the state legislature in 2015 and is a huge win for the state and, I hope, a relief for the tribe in finalizing their water rights—this despite the fact that they gave up significant water claims to which they were entitled under the Winters Doctrine (the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case Winters v. United States that determined reservations that relied on agriculture automatically had first right to water sources). Transfer of the National Bison Range had also already been approved, but Ryan Zinke nixed it when he became Secretary of the Interior (for absolutely no good reason except he thought it would win him political points, but don’t get me started on Zinke because I have almost nothing nice to say).

As Montana-based national journalist and one of my favorite writers Anne Helen Petersen said on her Twitter account, this is going to royally piss off the far right in the Flathead Valley. She’s right. But she’s also right that the only things that make them angrier than the water compact are mask mandates (or even being asked to wear a mask) and refugees. Also liberals, gun control legislation, and the idea of a county-wide bike trail. So there’s that. And at this point it’s hard to care too much. Some of these conservatives have become such rigid ideologues that they object to even the idea of working with fellow legislators in the Democratic Party. Brad Tschida, one of the 18 Republican legislators (8 of whom are from Flathead County, where I live) who signed a letter in opposition to the water compact was quoted as saying in my local paper:

“When you have members on the other side of the aisle that are acknowledging and favorably responding to that decision, then I think there’s something wrong with that, . . . So, to me, that smacks in the face of the citizens of the state of Montana that sent 67 Republicans to the Legislature this year.” (Emphasis added.)

He also literally said that this legislation must be wrong because some Democrats approved of it. Which is one of the now countless examples of the fact that many in the foundation of the Republican Party simply believe that any Democrat having any influence, power, or even winning a vote, is flat-out illegitimate.

I know many people who associate with that thinking, and they have become so entrenched in propaganda that it’s hard to reach for any kind of mutual sympathy. When the bipartisan water compact was passed by the state legislature and approved by the Republican attorney general, some of these objecting legislators were part of a group that launched a competing “People’s Compact” that had very little real support outside their ideological bubble and no political or legal legitimacy. But they tried hard, paying for billboards and a booklet insert in newspapers across the state, and claiming that the legislature had had no time to review or understand the CSKT compact despite also acknowledging the it had been worked on and negotiated for 8 years. They also tried to agitate against transferring the National Bison Range back to tribal ownership by complaining that a public resource was being given to a private entity, but aside from the fact that that doesn’t seem to stop them from wanting to privatize all other public lands plus public education, it ignores the reality that that Flathead Valley land had been set aside for a reservation when the Salish tribe was forced out of their lands in Bitterroot Valley, and that the CSKT then had to give up their nascent buffalo herd when being forced to open the reservation up to white settlement. Aside from ignoring the initial reality of all of this being on stolen land anyway. And that the CSKT has committed to keeping the Bison Range open to the public.

I realize I’m getting a bit lost in the weeds here, but I’ve been following this issue closely since I moved back to my hometown and am absolutely exhausted and annoyed with this group of people that keeps claiming to be the menders of fences while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any reality beyond the ones they’ve defined. You can’t reach mutual understanding over an issue that people believe in completely different realities about, though you can still hold out hope of building connections and understanding in other ways. But someone’s inability to perceive reality or their own prejudices doesn’t justify forcing other people to continue living with those injustices. Some people have a really hard time with change; that doesn’t mean everyone else has to sit around until Doomsday waiting for them to grow up.

These objectors are some of the same people who, when the CSKT paid millions of dollars for full ownership of a dam down-valley that they’d been co-managing, freaked out, insisted that the tribe would mismanage the resource, and then hired a lawyer who tried to claim in court that the tribal dam ownership was somehow linked to the Turkish government and the U.N.’s Agenda 21. (I am not kidding.) I don’t want to give up on people, but there comes a certain point when giving up on trying to help them see facts is the sensible thing to do.

I am incredibly relieved about the water compact and National Bison Range because I was worried that the federal end of the process might have to start over with the new Senate and presidential administration, and the CSKT has waited long enough for those issues to be resolved. It’s something that a lot of good people have been working on for a long time, and with Montana’s recent election of many harder-right conservatives, might be one of the last examples we get of the state’s supposed ability to look beyond party and work together on real issues that affect real people. But I credit the legislature with this win less than I credit the CSKT, who on this issue and many others (I believe they were the first local government in Montana to have a strategic climate change plan, which they wrote and passed in 2013) have shown an example of governance that other communities would be well to look up to.

If I owe you an email, apologies! I’m not always fast at responding to email, but holiday weeks tend to shut down my inbox for a while.

—-

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Newsletter reader Timothy shared this incredible essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer (whose Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss are books I keep returning to) on serviceberries and the struggle of commodification versus the promises of an economy based on reciprocity, reflecting the generosity and abundance of nature. (It also never occurred to me that serviceberries would be attractive enough for farming.)

• Did you know there’s been a transcontinental bike and pedestrian trail in the works in the U.S.? The Rails-to-Trails Coalition, among other organizations, has been piecing it together and it’ll take a while—longer than many of us would like—but the the trail already has 2,000 miles.

• I’ve never read Raynor Winn’s books, but I’m going to after listening to this interview with her on the Scotland Outdoors podcast. Her description of her husband’s illness and the 600-mile walk they took after becoming homeless sound beautiful, and I’m keenly interested in their experience of his neurological health improving during this intensive journey. I wrote a fair bit about neurological health and walking in my book, but of course science is always finding out more.