Antonia Malchik

Community and plum jam

A friend invited us over to glean from their plum trees last weekend. I picked enough to make fruit leather and jam for the winter, and the trees still looked like they’d hardly been touched. Fruit trees, I thought as I picked, expose capitalism’s lie of scarcity.

And then the smoke rolled in and we closed our windows and watched the sun turn red and I checked a list against the contents of our emergency bag before pitting the plums and turning my thoughts to bounty.

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Ever since the local bookseller introduced me to N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, fire season reminds me of her novels (and of Octavia Butler, who Jemisin has said was a tremendous influence in her).

In The Fifth Season, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy, we’re introduced to an Earth that periodically has some sort of volcanic or seismic event, called a “Season” (hence “Fifth Season”), with the destructive effects of each season often lasting for decades and upending normal life. Except that “normal” describes a world built to respond to these events—not with firepower or technology because those are repeatedly destroyed by Earth’s periodic seasons but with localization and community. No agrarian utopias here: These communities are towns, often walled, that are porous and fluid until a season comes, and then they shut their borders and try to survive with the people and resources left inside. There is no rugged individualism or survivalist tendency. Without the complexity and diverse skills of a community, survival isn’t possible.

Jemisin’s world, set around 40,000 years in the future, is not kind. As Earth is no longer a bountiful and forgiving place, all people must have something useful to contribute—each person’s name, in fact, consists of a first name, a middle name that indicates their skill class or “use-caste” (leader, breeder, etc.), and last name that is simply the name of their community. At the same time, orogenes, people who have the ability to control stone and its forces, are scorned, feared, oppressed, enslaved, and killed.

It’s a worrisome if interesting portrait of what happens to people when the planet they evolved on can’t be trusted to support them. Community is acknowledged as necessary, the only way of life that can ensure survival, but it’s hardly depicted as soft and generous (though individual people might be). The implication is that it can’t afford to be.

I think I’m going to pick more plums. Anyone want some jam? I’ve never made plum jam before but if I get enough fruit leather stocked up I’ll give the jam a shot.

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Some slightly related things I listened to or read this week:

• Former farmer Tom Philpott on the Smarty Pants podcast talking about our broken agricultural system and his book Perilous Bounty.

• Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, also on Smarty Pants, on how intensive agriculture inevitably led to a pandemic, and how conversations about fixing the system seem to be willing to consider everything except changing the real problem—the economic model.

• Historian Rutger Bregman (the guy who pissed off all the billionaires at Davos) talking on the Futures podcast about how the true superpower of humanity is in our ability to cooperate, and that in an uncertain future you’re far better off acquiring friends than wealth.

• “Repairing the Broken Earth: N.K. Jemisin on race and environment in transitions,” by Alastair Iles in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.

• “The Ecological Vision That Will Save Us,” by Kevin Berger in Nautilus: “We either act in concert with the environment that gives us life, or the environment takes life away.”

• Meteorologist Eric Holthaus talking on the At a Distance podcast about the need for cooperation to combat the climate emergency.

• FUN! Baking bread using 4,000-year-old yeast on Sapiens.

In one of those odd synchronicities, I’ve been having more in-person conversations recently about cults in general and conspiracy theories* in particular. We’ve been gnawing around this question of what causes people to believe in things in the first place—to believe in anything at all, whether conspiracy theories or established religion.

I don’t have any answers, though it’s curious to me that it seems easier for some kinds of minds to believe in that which can’t be proven than in that which can and I keep coming back to wondering if fear is at the heart of it.

Cory Doctorow recently published a book on Medium (it’s 109-minute read and well worth it) called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Before getting into the very real, very urgent problems of surveillance capitalism itself, he wrote probably the smartest thing I’ve read on the disconnect between conspiracy theories and facts:

What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us — conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as “corruption”) — is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?

“Trauma, not contagion,” he reiterates in the next paragraph, is what we need to look at to understand the divisive and often violent rhetoric flaring up all around us.

There’s something in that, but I also, again, look at embodiment, or lack thereof, as part of the problem, exacerbated by fear of what we can’t know or control. Why is it so hard for large numbers of people to believe that scientific research on, say, climate change, reflects real situations? Part of it’s identity—denying climate change tends to be connected with a particular political identity, and nothing is harder to change than a person’s view of their own identity because it’s who they are—but part of it is also in how we teach science, as cold research unconnected to the lives we live and the planet we live them on.

Some science writer friends and I had a conversation many months ago about the failings and pitfalls of science communication, and the responsibility of those of us who write about scientific research to help people understand it. But when people don’t see science as having anything to do with their lives, even the best communication can only go so far.

When my son was in 5th grade, he looked forward to his first science lessons. He looked forward to them until the first one, which focused on learning the scientific method and didn’t leave that subject for at least two weeks, quickly instilling an aversion to science in who knows how many formerly eager school kids. Now, I have nothing against the scientific method. It is obviously a very important thing to learn. But teaching it before kids have a chance to run their own messy experiments, try out their own observations of something they’re curious about—in short, before they come to know and love science as a way to explore and investigate everything they want to understand about the world—leaves them feeling that science is something “other.” It doesn’t have to do with them, doesn’t have to do with life. You can explain six ways from Sunday that your washing machine uses fuzzy logic in order to function and nobody will care, even though fuzzy logic is a really amazing thing to think about and is a reason the Mars Rover can walk around.

I think of science education as equivalent to that period of time in parenthood when you agonize over whether to just let your kid touch the hot stove or not. Because no matter how many times you tell them it’s hot and it will hurt, they will never totally believe you unless they’ve experienced it themselves. Without that experience, without seeing, feeling, smelling, messing around with the world and seeing what it can do (in a fun poking-sticks-in-the-mud way, not Facebook move-fast-and-break-things way), how can we expect people to believe what they haven’t experienced simply because some scientist said so?

The problem in early-age science education is reflected in our tendency to believe conspiracy theories and sloppy science not because people are stupid or gullible, but because life is full of uncertainty anyway and a poor science education makes that uncertainty an even scarier thing. It translates to a fear of making mistakes because mistakes are penalized by a lower grade; it translates into thinking science is a realm for the “smart kids,” not for those of us who struggle to get it. So some look for answers that gives them a more solid footing in the world, and others go further, looking for answers that don’t rely on the smart kids interpreting reality for them.

One essay that came into my inbox this week was a short one on Karl Jaspers, a philosopher I’d never heard of before who urged his fellow Germans to face the realities of their country’s recent actions after World War II. He also, wrote the author, made a life’s work of arguing for becoming comfortable with uncertainty:

Jaspers believed that we might not be able to come to an agreement about who we are and what we want to be, but we can agree on what we don’t know and how we’d like to act toward this nonknowledge. . . . ‘All thoughts,’ Jaspers therefore concluded, ‘could be judged by this touchstone question, do they aid or hinder communication.’

I wish I’d come across Jaspers earlier in life. I will never persuade a believer in conspiracy theories that they’re wrong, and it’s long since evident that more facts don’t change a climate change denier’s mind. But wondering what could further communication might be more productive. And in the long run, a better, more hands-on, messy science education full of dead-ends and mistakes could teach us both science’s potential and its limits, and help us become comfortable with uncertainty.

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*Still looking for another word for “conspiracy theory” that is less loaded with dismissiveness. The closest I’ve come is “a theory that purports to explain pretty much every perceived wrong in the world and names the specific people supposedly responsible.” That is obviously not going to work.

Anger and bodily equilibrium

I hiked up this mountain to go huckleberry picking last weekend. By myself! For hours! Which these days is a precious rarity, reminding me of when my children were babies and I faced months without an hour alone. (Early on in this pandemic jokey memes floated around urging introverts to check on their extrovert friends—“they are not okay”—which I did via phone, but it took a bit longer for the reality of being an introvert stuck at home with people around all the time to sink in.)

While I was chin-deep in huckleberry bushes, filling an old milk bucket in a promise to my daughter that we would pick enough to make jam this year, a man walked down the trail wearing a hat whose slogan prompted, in me, anger, irritation, and despair. A little while later a young couple walked up the path with a speaker blasting music from the woman’s backpack. (Someone later explained to me that people often play music while hiking because of bears, but this was loud. Egregiously, rudely loud.) More irritation and internal mumblings about entitlement. (Also I have never yet been eaten by a bear because I wasn’t forcing fellow hikers to listen to my music.)

I tried to breathe my way to some kind of mindfulness, but my responses were deeply physical. I could feel the anger, despair, irritation, and frustration through my whole body and it wasn’t going away.

I imagine a lot of people, millions probably, feel this way on a daily basis. I’ve long been fascinated, though, in why it is that we think these reactions are only in our minds, not our bodies. After decades of research on embodied learning, epigenetics, and the physical realities of emotional trauma, we still walk around the world pretending that our minds and our bodies are separate things.

Usually I walk or yoga-stretch my way out of these reactions, but I really wanted to pick berries, which required me to be mostly stationary. Usually just being in nature will do the trick but it wasn’t this time. So I put earbuds in and listened to a podcast episode about the million-plus-year-old bones of a hominin, homo antecessor, found in a cave in Spain. And then another about the future of physics and the search for a theory of everything (as in something to stitch Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics together, not an equation that tells humans how to finally get along with one another.) Slowly, over the next two hours, my body began to let go of its reactions as my mind helped put them in perspective.

We, or at least I, can’t help the world find its way to justice and a sustainable relationship with nature by staring angrily at political slogans I disagree with or growling because someone is rude enough to blast their music when I just want to listen to the trees. But pulling the mind and body back to some kind of equilibrium, whether through physical action or stories that bring the vastness of existence to the forefront, strengthens my ability to practice true citizenship, or at least to try.

Abundance and commodification

I’ve been thinking about abundance and commodification all summer. Every July we go camping with a bunch of friends and family, and our trip happens to coincide with when huckleberries are ripe in that particular location. (This photo is of chokecherries, not huckleberries.) This year was the first time I noticed that, although the kids eat huckleberries all day long, as do other camping kids, and campers and day visitors gather gallon bags full of berries to take home, the huckleberries never run short. There’s always enough for everybody until their season is over.

If commercial pickers aggressively harvested that area, though, the situation would be very different. There might be enough berries for that picker(s) to turn a profit, but little for everyone else. I would be seriously pissed off if that happened, and deeply sad, but isn’t it the reality for most of the world, and an increasing reality throughout much of human history? (This problem has plagued many civilizations.)

I’m just about finished reading an intriguing book, Strange Harvests, by Edward Posnett, in which the author visits the sources of 7 different items around the world and writes about their history, harvest, and commodification. The items include eiderdown in Iceland and cave-harvested birds’ nests in Borneo (popular particularly in China as the essential ingredient in bird’s nest soup). Although Posnett’s book is about the items and their harvest, what he’s really looking for throughout is a model for using and relating to the natural world and its bounties that is, for lack of a better word, sustainable and mutually beneficial for the ecosystem and animals involved.

There are actually many modern examples of this and plenty more throughout history. Success depends on group, community, or tribal cooperation along with management of a local resource being enabled and respected by larger authorities (a national government, say). The problem with the profit-above-all motive is that it encourages one actor to use up the resource and pocket the profits before others can take a cut. It leads to clearcut forests, extinct species, and poisoned waterways.

This week my stepmother, nieces, daughter, and I walked to a public park to pick chokecherries for jelly. I’ve picked from this particular public tree for years now, and it always produces far more than I could possibly use or even reach. So I make jelly and give it away and my daughter and I and stepmother eat some and every single time I think about what our relationship with this world could be if we stopped using everything up as if it’s not going to be there next year.

When someone asked me many months ago what my next big project would be and I talked about the commons, private property, and ownership, they asked me why I would go write about something so completely unrelated when my whole thing, for many years now, has been walking.

This question has come up more than once, and relates to what people are possibly thinking when they say that my book wasn’t at all what they expected. Perhaps it’s the kinds of readers who are attracted to walking as a subject, but I’ve found that any book about walking tends to set an expectation of someone like Rebecca Solnit writing about someone like Henry David Thoreau.

One of the reasons I wanted to write a book about walking instead of stopping at a couple of longform essays about it was precisely because of that expectation. Everywhere I turned, with the exception of Tom Vanderbilt’s four-part 2012 series for Slate that started with “The Crisis in American Walking,” walking was presented as an intellectual and philosophical subject that only intellectuals and philosophers practiced. It’s as if only minds are allowed to walk, not bodies and especially not the bodies of everyday people.

My approach to walking is related to my advocacy for embodied learning: we are real, physical beings who evolved on a real, physical planet. We understand this planet, ourselves, and one another through our physical relationships. Walking is one of the most fundamental of those relationships.

Which goes back to the commons. This planet is everyone’s birthright, not to abuse or exploit or use up, but to care for and be cared by and most definitely to wander. Yet in a car-centric culture, not to mention the barriers created by the fiction of nation-states and borders, that right is taken away. Mass amounts of space in towns and cities is given to cars, not people; in many places there are vast miles with no sidewalks.

The situation has only gotten worse over the last decade or so. In her recently published book Right of Way, former editor of Streetsblog USA Angie Schmitt details the mid-2000s loss of even meager national funding for biking and pedestrian infrastructure in favor of more highway funding. If you’ve ever tried to advocate for more walker-friendly infrastructure in your town or state, this excellent article from Vice explains how state-level Departments of Transportation are locked into an algorithm that is only able to consider improvements or funding through the lens of legally-mandated Travel Demand Modeling. Improving traffic flow, not creating a world that prioritizes health and humanity, is where your tax dollars get to work.

Any infrastructure we invest public funds in or permit private developers to build should be designed with the needs and interests of human (and the rest of life’s) bodies, minds, and psyches first, and machines last. The fact that we are, for all intents and purposes, required to devote a significant percentage of our incomes to finance at least one car so we can get to our jobs is a failing of public policy, not a reflection of societal values.

If we are to exercise the right to walk, we need a healthy and accessible commons. Clean air and water, healthy soil, fewer roads and machine noise (car or otherwise), more trees. Whether we can walk in the future depends on whether it’s healthy and safe to do so and whether there’s anywhere to go in the first place.

What stands in the way of your walking, or in the way of others in your community? Finding out how to remove those barriers, how to create a human-friendly commons, is not a bad thing to devote one’s energy to. There is so much in our world that we don’t have control over, so many issues of equity and justice. This is one that affects every community in unique ways and requires responses unique to each of those communities. It starts with understanding that we all have a right to the world.

Smelt and relationship

I went for a much-needed hike with my sister today, up a mountain in chilly fog and nearly-freezing rain. My body felt grateful and rested after the haul, a result that should never surprise me after years of physical and intellectual research on walking.

I don’t know why smelt popped into my head while we were hiking. I knew we had a small bag of them in our freezer that my husband had bought on a whim last spring, a treat for us to experiment with. I laughed when he showed them to me, and told him about my only knowledge of smelt: an essay my friend Sara Bir had once written—“Smelted” for the online magazine Full Grown People, where we were both regular contributors—that intertwined cooking smelt for the first time with the fraught nature of marriage. Sara is a masterful writer as well as chef and the essay was chosen for the next year’s Best Food Writing anthology.

So I looked up a recipe online—Sara’s right, it is indeed “tiny, stinky work,” and I had an entire childhood of gutting fresh trout to lean on—and gamely pan-fried the pile of butterflied fishlets. My husband enjoyed one, I ate the rest, my son pointed out that there were heads, and my daughter asked if I were going to eat the eyes (it’s a well-known family fact that I will eat trout eyes). And I thought back to the fact that I get to hike with my sister because we live in the same town, and the many years now that Sara and I have been in the same writing group and what we’ve gone through together. And how marriage is difficult, but so is friendship and that all we have, really, is relationship. To everything.

Elderhood and citizenship

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Stephen Jenkinson’s book Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. I’ve been following Jenkinson for a few years after being introduced to his work on dying through the Pondercast podcast and am always eager to find more of his thinking.

I think Come of Age is possibly easier to read if you’ve listened to some of his talks and can hear his voice in the writing, or watched the short documentary about him on Vimeo titled Griefwalker. But his points about our lack of elders—particularly that being an elder has nothing to do with being elderly; it’s something cultivated and earned—made me think about whether we’re in a similar place with citizenship. We have legal citizens of societies, and plenty of people who agitate and complain about politics, but what does it mean to be an engaged, involved citizen? It’s hard and boring and often daunting work but it’s demanded of all of us if we want our societies to function. I’ve been pushing for more people to vote for many years, but we don’t just need voters; we need citizens in the same way we desperately need elders.

I am fortunate to have had a few people in my life whom I think of as elders. Unfortunately, they all died when I was young. I think I’m always searching for more, even if unconsciously.

Grief and gratitude

Grief comes close on the heels of gratitude these days, especially when I’m out in nature. Is this just part of being a grown-up, I wonder? Maybe it’s been true ever since humans became conscious and hits us sharply when we face human-caused suffering like war and environmental degradation.

I sat by this stream for a few minutes the other day after hiking up a mountain to pick huckleberries. Filled with gratitude. A few minutes later a woman walking up the trail with an empty huckleberry container caught me hugging a tree. I hope it gave her a few moments of joy, delight, laughter, or at least a bit of lightheartedness to her day.

I recently read a short piece in MIT Technology Review about how to talk with family or friends who are enmeshed in a cult or conspiracy theory.* I am fortunate that my friends and family are generally science-respecting people of reason. We tend to argue about details and strategies, not politics or facts. But many of my friends struggle with loved family members or longtime friends who they feel they’ve lost to conspiracies or cults.

The point that really stuck with me from the Technology Review piece, which relied on academic researchers and active members of the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, echoed something I’d read from Steven Hassan, an escapee from the Moonies cult who now devotes his life to studying cults and helping deprogram cult members: remind people of who they were. Who they’d been before joining the cult or getting drawing into the vast web of information that can be connected a million different ways as evidence of any theory that can be dreamt up. Don’t point out the differences; just keep connecting them back to their former self.

(The lure of conspiracy theories is one of the hundreds of reasons I am such an advocate for embodied, hands-on learning, especially in the sciences. We all benefit from remaining grounded in the real, physical world.)

This advice might not release someone from a cult or a conspiracy’s charm, but it probably can’t hurt, and it reminded me of an essay on Aeon that I probably send to people more than any other.

“Escape the echo chamber,” by C. Thi Nguyen, details the differences between echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, most importantly how the latter protects members from outside information (like a cult), while the former filters all such information throw its chosen groupthink lens (like a conspiracy theory). “In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined,” Nguyen explains, using Rush Limbaugh as an example.

Nguyen makes the case that you can’t reach people in an echo chamber by trying to reason with them. All you can do is to keep providing a space or place for them to turn if they ever try to leave the echo chamber, and erode their trust in the echo chamber if it’s possible. Members within the chamber, cult, etc., find themselves quickly on the outs if they ever disagree with something the group says or believes in. For someone to take that risk, they have to have someone outside the group they can trust.

WhatsApp groups can evidently behave similarly, with members afraid to contradict groupthink belief. I’ve never used WhatsApp so don’t know the feel of the space, but have found myself on the wrong end of group norms in a Facebook group more than once. One conversation was about female writing mentors intertwined with criticism of older male writers (much of it valid criticism). I hazarded to say that all of my writing mentors had happened to be older men and I’d always found them willing to give supportive guidance when I asked. It was the wrong thing to say in a group that by that point disallowed almost anything good said about men. (I am all for down with the patriarchy, but maintain that the white patriarchy hurts everybody, including men. Who was it who said that before we teach boys to break girls, we first have to break the boys?)

It was a short lesson in groupthink that is too easily enabled by social media but that has likely always existed in humans in some form since we became self-conscious beings. The Moonies didn’t need a WhatsApp group to lose their independence of thought and action.

Nguyen’s essay and the Technology Review article are reminders that of the many ways to deal with these situations, the most effective are probably with compassion.

What’s interesting is that, for all the noise that thought leaders and mass media make about our society’s so-called divisiveness and polarization, you don’t have to look far to find people who are truly trying to understand one another, who make an effort to find common ground and build trust. Difficult conversations are happening all around you, right now, and people’s perspectives are always shifting; it’s just that you won’t generally see these efforts happening on public-facing platforms. They’re awkward and sometimes tense. But they’re happening because people don’t want to be polarized.

Perhaps the healthiest thing we can do for our society right now and into the future is to begin dismantling the fixed idea that deep divisiveness is what defines us. To act and speak from the belief that humans care about one another. Conspiracies dazzle far too many, and cults provide a sense of safety in an uncertain world. But believing that we are divided and that echo chambers provide no way out does nothing to serve us.

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*A friend recently pointed out that “conspiracy theory” is usually used derisively, and my neighbor stopped me mid-conversation last week to remind me that not all conspiracies are theories. She’s right—I enjoyed the BBC miniseries Cambridge Spies, which details a pro-Soviet conspiracy high in the British government that was quite real—but I haven’t yet found replacement phrasing that more specifically describes belief in a far-fetched and improbable conspiracy that is most definitely not true. (Think Pizzagate.)

Boots, lightly abandoned

These shoes have been in this location since about mid-lockdown, which is something like five years ago in Covid time (in real time about four months). For the first two weeks I thought someone would come back for them, but all the neighborhood children have played and biked and run up and down the road all summer long and the boots have stayed. To mangle Hemingway: “For free, child’s shitkickers, lightly abandoned.”