Antonia Malchik

Walking composition

“We have to accept that our world changes radically and perpetually, and that it changes with us and in us, and that we have an obligation to perceive, to intuit, to sense this change. That’s how we reach utopia.”
—The Archipelago Conversations, Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist

There are some days when I’m out walking around town, watching watching watching, and the sky literally takes my breath away. It’s rarely because of a stunning sunset, though those happen, too; it’s moments like the one pictured above, when the varied texture of the clouds and the range of blue-gray color make me hungry to stand and watch for hours. Especially in winter, when for several months at a time we rarely see the sun. There are spots, and moments, when the sky is so subtly its own perfect thing that you can almost feel it breathe.

The beginning of a new year seems like a good time for a brief book update. I’ve been working on the research side of No Trespassing, so far almost exclusively focused on land ownership. There’s a lot of reading to do, but there are also two visits I wanted to make. One is to the ranch my mother grew up on, outside of Geraldine, Montana. The family who owns and works it bought it from my grandfather in the mid-1990s. I haven’t been there since I was a child.

My mother has written and talked about the place a lot, but I’d like to visit myself to get a sense of it. The first chapter of the book is about ownership of land, and includes discussion of enclosures of the commons and land theft in North America, including the Homestead Act and my own family’s history related to it. I love Montana more than I can usually express. It’s made me who I am. But I was only born here because the land my relatives owned was stolen for the benefit of homesteaders like them. I might not possess that land myself now, but I’m still here because of it, and want to face what that means.

The second visit is to the Badger-Two Medicine area right against the Rocky Mountain Front. It’s a place I’ve been a little obsessed with since even before I moved back to Montana in 2014. Sacred land to the Blackfeet Nation, this area is currently “owned” by the U.S. Forest Service, and has been the subject of numerous lawsuits regarding oil leases issued in the early 1980s. The Badger-Two Med isn’t a big subject in the book, but I mention it in the Introduction because the oil leases pose critical questions about ownership, taking, right of use, and the changing story of private property rights that are central to what I write about.

Finding a sense of place when I’m writing is really important to me, so even though the subject revolves around the Badger-Two Med’s legal case, I didn’t want to write about it without having some sense of what was at stake, even a tiny sense. Last fall I got very lucky and saw a notice for the annual gathering of the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, an organization that was formed in the 1980s to fight oil leases in the Badger-Two Medicine. They’re still at it because there’s still one lease remaining, and I learned a great deal from presentations by the Alliance, most especially from the Blackfeet members who gave talks, and from the second day’s hike into the hills where the oil lease is located (this hike was where my favorite aspen grove pictures were taken).

I’m hoping to have time to really dig into writing and revision of the Introduction and first chapter of No Trespassing over the next two–three months, after which I’ll publish them here for paid subscribers (though, as always, if you can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll get you a paid subscription).

After that, it’ll be on to research for the second chapter, which is about water.

Though really, every time I think about it, it’s all about water. Doesn’t every river and cloud begin with a breath?

The sky breathes, animals and trees breathe. Every one of those breaths carries a little water, mostly unnoticed by humans. Rivers and pounding seashores, smokestacks and campfires, glaciers and tectonic plates, you and me. It’s all breathing, all movement, all exchanges of atoms combined into gasses we take for granted but depend on for our lives, our health—even our moods. A humid day, like the kind that blanketed every summer when I lived in upstate New York, leaves me in a state of grouchiness that’s difficult to shake.

I think this is one of the reasons I’ve never found weather boring: it’s always felt alive to me. One recent day it was -40°F (which is also -40°C, fun fact) here with wind chill, cold enough to get frostbite in a thoughtless moment; a few days later it was literally raining and snow was sliding off the trees. This week temperatures have settled into a moderate, “normal” winter range and it’s been snowing for a couple of days.

We’ll get some more snow, and calm winds. Most days it’ll be overcast with a heavy gray inversion layer over my town. If I go skiing and manage to get above the clouds, I might be fortunate enough to see a magnificent sun halo.

And in a few months the damp smell of a Chinook wind might be in the air, and the clouds will start developing a rumpled-silk quality that I find fascinating, and our days will get long and eventually it will get hot, or maybe summer will be full of rain and thunderstorms like it was when I was a child, or it’ll snow and then flood in mid-June like it did last year. Or wildfire smoke will choke this entire region. And no matter what, the stars and moon will be up there reminding me of the seemingly eternal time frames in which my life—all of our lives—barely have time to make a memory.

There’s really nothing more interesting than the weather. It reminds me that we exist and evolved on a living, breathing planet. That we’re walking and reading and raging and loving within the largest unseen river we can possibly imagine. And that its eddies and flows and turbulence and rapids and waterfalls and riffles and floods will determine our lives, whether we will it or not.

In the Badger-Two Medicine, looking out toward the plains of eastern Montana.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• By Vaia Errett in Winter 2022 of Montana Quarterly, “Holding Water,” an article about the increasingly intractable tension between those who hold water rights and all of those who need water on the Jefferson River near the Tobacco Root Mountains. Print only, unfortunately, but this article is worth reading if you can get a copy, for its attempt to take a more straightforward look at the impossibility of continuing to allocate water based on first-in-time rights, and the seeming impossibility of changing that system.

• Many of you are participating in my Threadable reading circle on Land Ownership. I’ve mentioned the reading circle on Water Politics and the World a few times because I’ve become a bit of a fangirl and got hooked on the readings. It’s led by Varsha Verkatasubramanian, a dam historian and author of an article in Current Affairs about the history and problems that led to the collapse of two dams in northern Michigan. On dams: “Whole valleys worth of trees are killed in the process. Bacteria in the water decompose the plants, generating carbon dioxide and methane. This is why dams are a critical source of greenhouse gasses—the world’s 52,000 largest dams are responsible for over 4 percent of the total warming from human activities. Reservoirs contribute 25 percent of human-caused methane emissions, the largest single source in the world.”

• The Building Local Power podcast on shifting paradigms of profit and the public good, and the history of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

• A great conversation on the Reframing Rural podcast about class inequality, cultural extraction, and rural gentrification with Butte-based journalist (and author of the incredible forthcoming nonfiction book Blood Money, which I have read and recommend) Kathleen McLaughlin: “Is it that much different that someone buys a multimillion dollar home at the Yellowstone Club and spends several weeks a year there, or a couple of weeks a year there and helps drive up the prices for working class Montanans. Is that that different than the Copper King, William Clark, owning mansions all around the world that were built with wealth from Butte Copper? I’m not sure. I mean, it’s just a different pattern of extraction.” (Link includes a transcript for those who’d rather read than listen.)

• A subscriber (thanks, Charles!) sent me this Economist article about the history and evolution of the city grid, and how to think about city layouts that serve people rather than cars.

• In my last essay post, I referenced hearing the line “it’s not about critical mass; it’s about critical connection” recently and said I couldn’t remember where from. It was via another subscriber (thanks, Jake!), who had sent me an obituary about the person it comes from, activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs: “Always the philosopher, Grace never had the final answer but would push us to think dialectically, to learn from the past but not get stuck in it.”

• Along the lines of finding hope or its equivalents when forces and circumstances are arrayed against it—and in line with my longstanding belief that science fiction is the best fiction because it helps us truly imagine different ways of being, especially with Octavia Butler—“How to Survive in a Broken World,” Jesmyn Ward on the optimism and empathy of Octavia Butler in Literary Hub: “This is the real gift of her work, a gift that shines in Bloodchild: in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that.”

The first step might be believing in what’s possible

A few weeks ago I was a guest on an international roundtable webinar-type thing for walkability advocates. It was a delightful hour and a half—I don’t get to spend much time talking about the policy-wonky and urban planning aspects of walking and walkability, at least outside of serving on my city’s bike and pedestrian advisory committee. It can be a relief sometimes to have conversation with people who already understand the structural and psychological barriers that make walking so inaccessible for so many, who don’t need concepts like “legacy infrastructure,” “Shoup Test,” or “universal design” explained.

One of the participants was in a country that is currently facing enormous upheaval and resistance against an authoritarian regime. I desperately wanted to ask him about it, what he sees, what he thinks, but had no idea if he needed to take the same kinds of precautions in talking openly as my father does when he talks to me from Russia. So I didn’t ask. But toward the end of our time, he said something along the lines of, “When our revolution succeeds.”

Brief, unrelated conversation followed on that line’s heels, and a few minutes later our time was over, leaving me wishing we could spend another ninety minutes just listening to what he had to say about where his country is going. I want to know what’s out there, or at least someone else’s experience of it.

A lot of the podcast listening and essay-reading I do is for the same reason: I want to know what’s out there. To find the stories of people trying something different. A new (or old) way of using space, or presenting history, or shaping an economic system, or relating to land and water. It’s partly curiosity on my part, but we also need to find these stories, to give them attention, to see if the way we live in this world could be different. If the way we live with one another could be different. We need examples that help us imagine a better world, and especially ones that show us viable ways of getting there.

People get asked all the time: What gives you hope? It’s not a question that interests me very much, even in the rare times when I’m feeling hopeful. I want to know what people are hoping for, what they’re ready to build, what visions of futures they’re working toward. I’m interested now more than ever, in part because I live in a liberal-leaning small town in an overwhelmingly conservative-to-right-wing county in a conservative U.S. state; the futures that many people I live near are dedicated to building—and they’re extremely dedicated and know exactly what they want to achieve and how—horrify me on several levels.

I want to know, as specifically as possible, what kind of better world people are ready to fight for.

When considering whether or not to include a podcast or essay in the Walking compositions’ “Stuff to read or listen to” lists, I’m usually looking for something extra. Not stories that are more unique or more heartwarming. More robust might be a way to put it. It’s about finding the people doing good in the world—even if that “good” is simply an in-depth explanation of why things are so awful (Crusades researcher Thomas Lecaque on the Conspirituality podcast is an example of this)—but also seeing what they’re doing to dismantle or create alternatives to destructive systems in the first place. Feeding hungry kids, while also articulating the systems that keep those kids from getting food. I want to see models for how we might recreate our communities, and our world, and what’s stopping us, all of which I’m more likely to find in Strong Towns or Frontiers of Commoning than in the New York Times.

I also look for more complex histories than I heard growing up, like the This Land podcast detailing land theft, genocide, and the forced allotment system and what they have to do with the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma U.S. Supreme Court decision; or Farmerama’s four-part series on Scottish land ownership’s entanglement with profits from slavery in America. We can’t build a better future if we don’t stop long enough to look the past—and the present—in the face, and with more depth than is allowed by consuming the daily news cycle.

That same daily news cycle can also blinker us, I think, to possibilities of a different kind of life. I’ve had several conversations over the last few months in which the person I was talking with at one point said some version of the line, “But I don’t see anybody doing that.” Each time, I found myself overwhelmed with frustration because what they meant was that, in whatever news sources they rely on, they hadn’t seen stories of anybody working hard enough to build a better world—or a better whatever-aspect-of-the-world’s-problems we were discussing—to believe that it’s realistic. Or there aren’t enough people working on it, or it’s not scalable, or the weight of everything striving to destroy any chance of a better world is just too crushing to overcome. And yet people are doing this work. It’s everywhere, even if it doesn’t make it into news headlines or my state legislature.

After I watched Adam Curtis’s recent six-part BBC series on the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent collapse of democracy in Russia, TraumaZone, I wanted to see if he had any kind of overarching summation about what happened over those decades. The series tracked closely with my experiences of life in the Soviet Union and 1990s Russia; and what to do about it all, or where Russia might possibly go from where it is now, is a question that eats at me every day.

In one conversation, he related the psychological state of the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse to Britain both currently and leading up to the 2016 Brexit vote, and the dangers in not having viable alternatives to a failing system:

“The overwhelming thing you get from talking to Russians during that time is that no one really believed in that system any longer. And they knew that no one in charge believed in it any longer. But what people also knew was that those in charge had no idea of any alternative. So everyone just accepted it as a system that no one believed in, but because there was nothing else, you just went along with it. So when it collapsed, it came as a terrible shock. . . .

We have a very different society from Russia thirty years ago, but I would argue that what the most defining characteristic of our present society in Britain is that everyone knows that somehow this system isn’t working, but no one, whether they be in the opposition or in the government or amongst the journalists or amongst many millions of people, have any idea of what other system would work. So we just sort of accept it, lurching from one position to another, all trying to rework that system but underneath we know that they know that we know it isn’t working. And it becomes this horrible feedback loop of knowing it isn’t working but not having any alternative. We are at the end of something.”

The end of what? Profit-rewarding, wealth-hoarding capitalism, maybe, or worship of pure individualism? As much as I want answers, I respect Curtis for not wrapping it all up in a neat bow for me, much as I think his insistence on not seeing alternatives must be at least partly willful—if I can see them, so can he. I suspect he just doesn’t think they’re realistic, which is something he could spend more time examining.

Here’s what happened, he said, and here’s partly why, and here’s where we’re seeing those same dynamics replaying themselves.

“I wanted to tell the story but I also wanted to show what it was like. . . . I started it before the invasion of Ukraine. . . . Then the invasion happened and it became clear to me that what I should be trying to do is say, ‘Look, this is the strange collapse of belief in everything that gave you Vladimir Putin. . . . He was born out of the implosion of an empire, and then the implosion of a democratic system, and you need to learn from that.’”

A strange collapse of belief in everything. That’s quite a statement, but I can’t say it’s wrong.

When belief in “everything” collapses, many turn to conspiracy theories to make sense of the world, and others for some kind of apocalyptic Millenarianism, while others reach for familiar paradigms of social and cultural structures. To hierarchies of gender, race, class, and human over nature. “Sensemaking” is a whole modern realm explored by people who are often, it seems to me when I spend enough time listening to their podcasts, frightened by lack of collective beliefs in the cultural stories that are losing their power, and convinced there are no viable alternatives. We need the order of hierarchies, they say, even if billions of people suffer. Without them, everything unravels. (For how many hasn’t it been unraveling, I wonder?)

In crises, Americans are often reminded of TV show host Fred Rogers’s lovely advice to “look for the helpers.” Wherever we are now, whatever is crumbling or unraveling or just increasingly miserable, we still need to find the helpers but we also need to find the people articulating how the problems were created, how they’re being perpetuated, and what needs to be changed or undone to address them. This is hard, because most things shaping the dominant cultural imagination are still stuck in a paradigm that no longer serves anyone. Even those who benefit most from it seem pretty unhappy a lot of the time.

In an interview about a new book cowritten with Rebecca Giblin, Chokepoint Capitalism, novelist and cultural/technology critic Cory Doctorow said that one of the editors they pitched really liked the book but wouldn’t buy it because all the fixes offered in the second half of the book “are structural solutions. There’s nothing that an individual can do to resolve this. It’s going to bum people out.” Well, yeah, said Doctorow:

“Oh, dude, you’re so close to getting it. Because of course there’s no solutions for individuals to unwind structural problems. But instead we can embrace the idea that there are structural ways that we can intervene that will take the bullies away from the gate. . . .

They all require that you think of yourself as part of a polity, not as an individual. None of these are things that we’re going to solve individually.”

On the surface, this idea seems hackneyed, almost threadbare. Solidarity! Work together! Collective action! But to commit to it requires a fundamental shift in how we view the rhythm of our days as much as the arc of our lives. It requires us to not just say we need community and interconnection, but to begin thinking about what that might look like. To take a clear-eyed look at how deep the problems go, and how massively things need to change to turn them around.

“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire?” wrote Nick Estes in Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. Estes didn’t leave the question hanging. He had an answer, defining freedom as not “the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.”

The question “What proliferates in the absence of empire?” is one that we can all be asking. It’s overwhelming for people who haven’t considered it before but it’s a place to start, maybe the place to start. It’s that question, or some form of it, that I’m holding as I delve into materials online and in print and in my community. What is already being built? What is possible?

The commons in many forms are a huge part of the answer, but they might not look like what we expect. They’re varied and ecological, unique to communities and cultures and ecosystems alike. The shape of solutions might be scalable, but the specifics aren’t. Maybe it’s this individuation that tricks so many of us into thinking that there is no collective will for change, or enough people making that change happen.

Even Adam Curtis lamented at not seeing where alternatives are to be found. Things are crumbling, and people want something different, but nobody in charge is filling that need, he worried.

“All those things that used to be in a way a block against trying to say, ‘Oh, no, we could try it a different way.’ . . . In a way, the way is now open. And what I’m waiting for is for someone to realize that. Because I suspect that all people want is to be able to say, ‘None of this seems to work. What could work? What could inspire us?’ And all you need is for someone to actually take that and run with it.”

I think he might be looking in the wrong direction. Who exactly is meant to be taking things and running with them? Political parties? Faith leaders? He didn’t say, though the surrounding context included critiques of the British Labour Party.

The one option that didn’t seem to occur to him are the people who are already building alternative structures. Who are already running with it. I can’t remember where I read this recently, but I thought it was a great perspective-shift: Don’t look for critical mass; look for critical connection.

I do hope, despite my general aversion to hope, that people are learning to give more attention to work being done all around them, whether it’s on watersheds, anti-monopoly law, food sovereignty, seed banking, sidewalk repair, housing, . . . there are endless problems in endless iterations, and so many people and organizations already doing the work to change them. Will it save the world? Who knows. Will it save us? Who knows. Does the work have to be done anyway? Yes. So we might as well pitch in, even if it’s just by giving more of our regular attention to people building alternatives to a collapsing system that is determined to break people and ecosystems alike.

Could that walkability advocate on the webinar a few weeks ago have imagined his country would revolt against an oppressive regime? I don’t know. But someone had to imagine it before it could happen.

“While many will agree that colonialism is wrong, they cannot imagine a future without it,” wrote Estes toward the end of Our History Is the Future.

He’s right. But let’s try. Because once we get started, there are all kinds of things possible that we never imagined could happen.

I can never get enough of aspen trees, and their interconnected root system is always inspiring to me. This grove is in the Badger-Two Medicine area near the east side of Glacier National Park. A couple of trees had bear claw marks all the way to the top.

Essay

When I was little, maybe eight or nine years old, I used to clean house for an older woman, Cora, who lived across the street from us. Mostly dusting and floors, for which she paid me 25 cents an hour. I did it for a couple of other families in Belgrade, too. Cleaning houses was my first job. And while we were pretty poor, I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking that my family needed to supplement our food stamps with that money. My quarters mostly went to buy Jolly Ranchers down at the Kwik Way.

I loved Cora. She was kind to me and chatted calmly while I wiped down her surfaces and knickknacks, and she never balked at handing over the quarter or two. My mother later told me some stories about her, like how she and another friend had once climbed down Yellowstone’s version of the Grand Canyon when they were young women, assisted only by their hat pins.

When Cora had to go into a nursing home in Bozeman, nine miles away, my parents took me to visit. I brought her one of the art projects I’d done in school, where we’d been using plastic wrap and aluminum foil to paint shiny snow and Christmas scenes. It was hard seeing her like that, laid up in bed in a bare room outside of her home, which had always felt comfortable and welcoming to me. It was harder when she died a short time later, on Christmas Eve. My parents told me after we got out of church that night, and I resisted having a photo taken with my sisters because I’d been crying.

Losing Cora that night is one of the minor reasons Christmas is difficult for me. She’s lingered in my head all these years. The grief I felt then, and later at her memorial service, are still tangible nearly four decades later, along with a growing wish that I’d known her when I was older, could have asked her about her life. That she lingered as more than a shred of memory for me, when her life was likely so very full.

Why do some people pull us into their lives, their influence remaining long after we’ve lost touch or they’ve passed away? There is no reason that Cora should have had such an effect on me, that I should have loved her so much and taken her death so hard, nor any good reason why her story has somehow become intermingled with mine. No reason that I can pinpoint, that is. I’ve searched for the bare facts of her life here and there, poking around in Newspapers.com archives, looking for old historical society records, and found nothing but a confirmation of her existence. But her effect on me is very real. I almost named my daughter after her, this woman who, objectively speaking, I barely knew.

Maybe some of the deepest impacts on us come from the people who slip out of this life without leaving many noticeable marks behind.

My older sister, who has five years on me, says that what she remembers being told is that Cora climbed alone out of the Yellowstone canyon using a hat pin, that one of her friends had fallen and Cora did what she needed to do to get help.

This is a lesson I’ve taken from most of the women in my life. From both my grandmothers in particular—my maternal grandmother, who believed in women’s education and independence and who lived a life of professional and voluntary service to others; and my paternal one, an engineer who raised children under Stalin and as a refugee during the Siege of Leningrad and whose ability to cope with impossible times I wish I’d had more time to learn from. They did what they needed to do, whether to survive or to help others do so.

At this time of year, because the memory of Cora is so sharp and I dislike Christmas for so many other reasons, I spend a little time lingering on my few memories of her, and of other women I’ve met in passing—in situations fleeting and far-flung—many of whose whose faces and names I’d never recognize again but whose stories have woven themselves somewhere internally.

Almost every Christmas ritual and tradition is, for me, something of going through the motions and trying not to ruin it for everyone else. With one exception: the moment when we walk down to the Luminaria and help line the river path and footbridge with candles in memory of those who are gone.

I have several lights to ignite, losses I won’t speak of. But Cora is among them, even though I only knew her for a short time.

Somehow, she’s still here, with the snow and the forests and the mountains I love so much, helping me get through.

Walking composition

“The word ‘economics’ makes me hiss like Gollum in Tolkien’s The Hobbit: ‘I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever.’ For I believe classical economic theory, and all the theories it presupposes, is destroying the magic ring of life.” —The Abstract Wild, Jack Turner

At the beginning of this school year, when both my kids were enrolled back in school, I made a slight shift in my life. Since I was almost guaranteed a 25-minute walk to school, and at least the same back home, I decided to give myself permission to walk for one hour per day without listening to podcasts. As someone who’s chronically overcommitted and overwhelmed, walking and listening is one of the ways I get stuff done. It also, though, contributes to the feelings of overwhelm and burnout. Something needed to shift.

I failed almost immediately—there is so much work to get back to! and relatives to phone! and Taylor Swift to listen to!—but have definitely been walking more often, most days, without listening to anything, and finding myself more relaxed after a walk, as well as more focused. (I’m also getting through far fewer podcasts. And essays, too, since I use the Curio app to catch up on many of those.)

Even though I live in a small town and rarely find anywhere to walk that my feet haven’t been before, it’s been a bit of a relief to nudge attention more into the lake, the treetops, the eagle that just flew by, the paucity of chokecherries in my usual foraging spots, the irritation of increased traffic and larger vehicles, the only time I have ever seen a muskrat in the river.

Being connected to the world around us as deeply as we’re able is one of the reasons I care about walking so much. “At its core, this book is about deep human connection,” I wrote in the introduction to A Walking Life. I still believe that, but believe even more that everything is about deep connection. Or should be. And that same connection extends far beyond the human.

In her book Doughnut Economics, economist Kate Raworth laid out a model for a different, more realistic economic system—one that meets human needs within local and planetary ecological boundaries. To do so, she first had to dismantle the models and convictions that have become hardened in economists’ (and laypeople’s minds), beginning with the idea of any economy as a closed, self-reliant system.

She started with a 1948 book by Paul Samuelson, titled Economics, and its iconic Circular Flow diagram, which was an inspiration for engineer Bill Phillips to build a hydraulic machine called the MONIAC machine (Monetary National Income Analog Computer) that generations of economics students have believed to be a perfect model of economic flow.

But it was missing something.

“The classical economists, led by Smith and Ricardo, had recognized labour, land and capital as three distinct factors of production. But by the late twentieth century, mainstream economics had reduced the focus to just two: labour and capital—and if ever land did get a mention, it was just another form of capital, interchangeable with all the rest. . . . So let’s restore sense from the outset and recognize that, far from being a closed, circular loop, the economy is an open system with constant inflows and outflows of matter and energy. The economy depends upon Earth as a source—extracting finite resources such as oil, clay, cobalt and copper, and harvesting renewable ones such as timber, crops, fish and fresh water. The economy likewise depends upon Earth as a sink for its wastes. . . .

The economy’s fundamental resource flow is not a roundabout of money, but, rather, a one-way street of energy.”

Raworth went on to detail the major flaw in Phillips’s MONIAC machine:

“While brilliantly describing the economy’s circular flow of income, it completely overlooked its throughflow of energy. To make his hydraulic computer start up, Phillips had to flip a switch on the back of it to turn on its electric pump. Like any real economy, it relied upon an external source of energy to make it run, but neither Phillips nor his contemporaries spotted that the machine’s power source was a critical part of what made the model work.” (Emphasis added.)

It’s such a simple oversight, and yet so fundamental. The system doesn’t work unless energy in various forms is drawn into it. And that consumption of energy isn’t reciprocal. It doesn’t give back.

By tricking societies into thinking that the circular flow was a model for human lives, economists tricked far too many—especially people with access to power—not only that our actions are separated from the world, but that we are, too. And that we can somehow keep that system going forever.

In his book Enlivenment, German philosopher Andreas Weber made a point that I’ve been sitting with a while. He said that in the enclosure of the commons, it wasn’t just that common people were suddenly denied access to land and water and other means of sustaining themselves (I should say ourselves; we still live with these consequences), but that they were also denied a relationship with the land that is fundamental to feeling fully human, to a sense of belonging.

To begin to grasp what that means, how much has been lost, forces me, at least, to question the basic underlying structures of almost every part of the culture I live under, which is probably why I’m so obsessed with the realities and injustices of land ownership. We are all of the earth, all part of it. When our relationship with it as well as our access to its gifts and sustenance are taken away, fenced off, privatized, every one of us loses far more than the dominant culture is ever willing to admit.

I don’t fully know what to do about that, except to advocate for giving land back everywhere in the world it’s been stolen and colonized—which, the further back one goes, seems to be pretty much everywhere—and to keep encouraging all of us to walk the world, to be present, to open ourselves a little to how this living planet can change perception of our own lives and the lives of everything around us. Walking isn’t just an evolved bipedalism, I once wrote:

“I have come to think of walking as more than a form of transportation; it is a manifestation of being as fully present in the world as is possible for each individual.”

I’m still learning what that means, to be fully present, to be in the world, of the world. More importantly, learning the ways in which we’re prevented from doing so, the ways in which we’re bombarded with beliefs in closed systems of life and energy whose existence is actually impossible. With beliefs that this way of living is inevitable. Because it isn’t.

It’ll be a life of learning, and unlearning, and whenever that life is over I’ll hardly have begun.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Kaitlin Smith in Orion on Octavia Butler and learning to forage and cook with acorns: “When we speak of apocalypse and how to survive its present and future demands, it is crucial that we broaden our vision, and I have found the acorn to be a heuristic that offers abundant food for thought.” (I really hope Smith and the editors here were unaware of Charles Eisenstein’s shift into extreme, uh, let’s just call it “weirdness,” over the past few years, because the paragraph devoted to him was jarring in an otherwise thoughtful piece.)

• Eric Nuzum had an interesting short piece in Nieman Lab, sent to me by a journalist friend, on what people want out of local journalism: “In all four cities, citizens wanted local news to tell stories of people, not stories about power. In their view, besides tragedy and crime, all current local news media does is tell the stories of people in power, not about people like them nor stories that directly (or clearly) impact their lives. . . . Politicians, government officials, and the wealthy have power, of course, but even interviewing book authors was seen as focusing on those with power.”

• In Reader’s Digest, Emma Taubenfeld on why taking sand home from some beaches is illegal, and the reality that industries are using up more sand than the planet can produce. (The piece doesn’t mention fracking, which is a big consumer of sand, but it does mention concrete—if you’re interested, this piece from Hakai magazine is an excellent deep-dive into that.)

• Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, Episode 4, with Dr. Sally Roesch on the links between the Doctrine of Discovery and the related 15th-century papal bulls that were directed at eradicating witchcraft and the ways in which Christianity is entirely founded on oppressing women: “If the church was to control spirit, it had to destroy Indigeneity, because Indigenous connection to the spirit was real, and the church’s connection to spirituality was power. In order to entrench power, these women had to be destroyed.” (There are a lot of interesting insights in this episode, like “[The church] would single out women who had wealth. The wealth of those women would then go to the church. John Mohawk had a really interesting analysis. He said that it was the wealth of witches that bankrolled the invasion of the Americas.” I’m going to be reading more of Roesch’s research.)

• (After that I went looking up John Mohawk, whom I hadn’t heard of before, and found a number of different article, essay, and video outlets and ended up ordering this collection from Birchbark Books.)

• In the Threadable reading circle Water Politics and the World, leader Varsha Venkatasubramanian shared Arundhati Roy’s longform essay “The Greater Common Good” (which I found riveting and enraging and educational in turn), paired with an interview with Roy on the same topic—massive dam projects in India that displace millions of people from lands they rely on with little benefit: “This is what is happening, because you don’t respect the dignity of the ordinary citizen. At the end of the day supposing we keep on talking about is it all right for 400,000 people to pay for the benefit of 40 million? You tell me. If the government today were to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to freeze the bank accounts of 400,000 of India’s richest industrialists and richest people and take that money and re-distribute it to the poor,’ what will happen? There’d be, ‘Oh, democracy has broken down.’ ‘This is you know a terrible thing.’ ‘Anarchy—’ So it’s all about who’s being pushed around.”

• Photographer Vivek Muthuramalingam with “The Slow Pleasures of Analog” in Dark ‘n’ Light magazine on rediscovering analog photography: “Personally, it was about slowing down, and making time for rumination as I went about coating the sensitizer over deckle-edged papers, and making myself a cup of tea while I waited for them to dry. I could choose cyanotypes if my theme dealt with memory, or perhaps, loss.”

• Yevgenia Belorusets’s most recent war diary from Kyiv in isolarii on the raw, painful complexity of identity, language, and responsibility in a time of war: “My father, a German-language literary translator, calls this void ‘dead empire.’ An empire that no longer lives, and cannot live, strikes, kills in the name of its impossible return.”

Walking composition

“I can’t believe the things you say. I can’t believe, I can’t believe the price we pay.”
— “. . . And Justice for All,” Metallica

I’ve been cold a lot recently. It’s winter, the temperatures have waggled around a fair bit, the wind picks up more than I’d like, and I spend a lot of time outside. Walking to and from the school, picking up groceries, attending committee meetings, meandering along the river. It’s my favorite time of year, the months I dream of when the interminable, sunny days of summer send me scurrying for shade and water. I love living and moving around in a place with long, cold, dark winters. Yet I am cold. I am cold now, in my own house as I type this while wearing a sweater, and was cold this morning when I walked the dog. I crave being warm. In the cold.

What is sacrificed to meet my desires? What resources do I demand to make myself comfortable in the climate I profess to enjoy?

How much of the planet does each of us require for our basic needs, much less our pleasure, our comfort, our leisure and ease? Our warmth.

The photos in this post are all from a couple of months I spent in Russia in 2005: Sergeiv Posad, the home of Russian Orthodoxy, up top; houses in the village of Aleksandrov where a museum dedicated to my stepmother’s great-aunt Marina Tsvetaeva (along with Ivan the Terrible’s castle) is located; and at the bottom a craft market on a sub-zero day in the ancient village of Suzdal, in what’s known as the Golden Ring of Russia.

That day in Suzdal is one that sits with me due to the sheer depth of the cold. I’d taken a train from Moscow out to Vladimir, a city known for its bread-baking factories and for having been burned flat by the invading Golden Horde in the 1200s. The people around me spent the ride sipping vodka and cheap Baltika beer, and I gave up trying to read my Russian detective novel in the near-freezing train car and stared out the window.

The journey from Vladimir to the village of Suzdal was long and riven with lack of information—when did the bus go? where did it stop? why did the driver have a string of stuffed animals bouncing above the windshield?—and cold. The walk to the bus station was cold, the bus was cold, the kilometer-long walk into Suzdal was cold, the pastry I bought for lunch was cold. The day was just cold.

Yet people weren’t sequestered indoors. Old men walked the streets in woolen boots, and children slid down the snowy hillsides. Even the craft market was open, the few vendors stamping their feet and blowing into their fingers over boxes and toys and hair clips all carved out of birchbark. I wandered around the village for a few hours taking photos of churches and small houses with intricately carved window frames—cottage-like wooden houses called izbas. Minute to minute, I probably thought more about how cold I felt than anyone who lived in those sub-zero days winter in and winter out ever had.

I was glad to get back to Vladimir and a heated room and hot soup, while the day itself sank into me, the way the cold slapped my face, the way my eyelashes stuck together and the wind found its way through my hat. It’s with me now, halfway across the world, burning natural gas to heat the room I’m in and hydropower to fuel the device I’m writing these words on.

People often ask to go for walks with me and just as often cancel because of the weather. It’s too cold, too hot, too windy, too wet. Over the years it’s made me wonder if human skin has devolved, if we’re unable to handle small variations in climate because our bodies have gotten so accustomed to controlled temperature conditions. My own circulation is all over the place. My hands are almost always cold, but most of summertime makes me want to crawl into a dark, chilly cave.

An inverted view of our maladaptation is how much we’re willing to burn to be comfortable. In an essay for High Country News last year, Joe Wilkins wrote about the hidden fires that make our lives possible:

“Maybe traveling some rotten stretch of interstate you spy blackened stacks, raveling smoke and wonder, What’s burning? We ought to ask the same each time we step into a comfortably warmed or cooled room, each time we click on a reading lamp or plug in a phone.”

When I was thinking about this recently, I considered cold houses and discomfort, about what even well-off people used to be adapted to not that many decades or centuries ago. Of an old castle I walked through off of the Isle of Barra in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides—the damp, the draft, the realization that no amount of peat fires or layered clothing would have made that laird’s lair in any way warm. Not in an “I’m going to hang out in my pajamas and try and fail to read Kim Stanley Robinson without falling asleep” kind of warm.

But then I remembered those izba houses in Russian villages and how Russians overheat everything in winter—apartments, overnight train carriages, tea—and how in these izbas there is almost always a window with a tiny pane you can open to let some fresh air in and heat out. You can see one in the middle photo below, in the window on the left.

Older Russian homes often have one of those rocket-type stoves surrounded by plaster or other material that a grandparent of the household used to—or perhaps still does—sleep on. They’re incredibly efficient and incredibly hot. The comfort level is dictated by that one low-resource, high-impact feature: an adjustable hole in the wall.

My house has no such feature. Sometimes it’s too cold, and my option to change that is to burn something, whether it’s wood in the woodstove or hydropower or natural gas to the central heating.

I wouldn’t trade the winters, or the dark, or the cold. I love seeing the stars for hours at night. Love frozen breath in the air and the crunch of boots on the ice and walking in snow-filled woods to a friend’s hidden bonfire spot. Yet I’m always trying to find ways to keep myself warm: mittens instead of gloves, an extra layer under my coat, a scarf, tea, soup, hugs, a fire in the woodstove that I often just want to crawl into.

What would my home’s resource footprint look like compared to a Russian izba with a central stove and a small window for air? All the materials burned and the lines and pipes used to transmit their energy into my home. All the planet-life drawn in to make my skin a little more comfortable in the chill of a room.

Whose lives do I burn to ensure my comfort in a climate I don’t want to leave?

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast might be one of the most important resources I’ve come across in a long time. I highly recommend making time for this one. From Episode 1: “You don’t have a right to the land. Our right to the land is superior to yours because we’re Christian and white. That’s still the basis of Indian law in the United States. And it carries on today. . . . We have to keep educating people about the damage of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination.” (I’m just some white middle class mom shouting into the void, but I think the importance of the Doctrine of Discovery can’t be overstated, and it’s nice to hear that affirmed by people who actually know what they’re talking about.)

• Fantasy novelist Ken Liu writing in Orion on control of narrative—or lack thereof—in the Anthropocene: “Stories have drained seas and melted ice caps, thickened the air and punched holes in the sky. Stories have launched a thousand ships and may yet launch a thousand nuclear missiles. The planet is at the mercy of our history, our story, our spell.”

• Two articles in Montana Outdoors from this year, one on the consequences of feeding wildlife (especially deer) indigestible food like corn, and another on what happens to a landscape when beavers are allowed back in.

• Matthew Denton-Edmundson in The American Scholar on the disappearance of wild ginseng in Appalachia and some tricky contemplation of ownership and the commons: “Why is it that energy companies are allowed to continue to demolish thousands of acres of valuable ginseng habitat while new regulations eliminate harvesting on national forest land that is supposed to be owned by and belong to the people?”

• The Log Project is a multidisciplinary, long-term project from writer and artist Karrie Higgins with creations using wood from a derecho (a straight-line windstorm) that hit Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2020. There’s a lot to explore from the site, including articles pertaining to the project:
  “As we burned the Morse code into this log, it took an ominous tone.

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  .– …. .- – / …. .- – …. / –. — -.. / .– .-. — ..- –. …. – ..–..

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  What hath God wrought?”

• A fantastic find from subscriber Charlotte: “Pierson v. Post’s Unheard Voice,” a poem by Ann Tweedy in Hastings Journal on Gender and the Law, telling the story of Pierson v. Post from the point of view of the fox. The fox not only owns herself, but she has a voice! (I love this one.)

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable* reading selections were the two 15th-century papal bulls that comprise the Doctrine of Discovery, along with a short introduction to Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 from the Doctrine of Discovery organization.

I’m sending the newsletter version of the reading earlier than normally scheduled because the Doctrine of Discovery is heavily intertwined with the 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh U.S. Supreme Court case, and is also essential to land ownership precedent worldwide, that I really think they should be studied in tandem. The bulls are fussy to read, but short.

I’ve included the two main bulls in the readings, as well as an introductory translation of Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 from the Doctrine of Discovery organization:

• Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455

• Bull Inter Caetera of 1493

• The Papal Bull Inter Caetera of May 4, 1493, introduced and translated by
  Sebastian Modrow and Melissa Smith

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

For anyone new to On the Commons, an overview of this project is here. These Substack posts are for anyone who doesn’t have iOS or doesn’t want to use Threadable but still wants to know about the readings; the subtitles are marked with “Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership.” Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions.)

The more I read about the Doctrine of Discovery, the more obvious its importance to land claims and land theft becomes. I think it’s vital enough to understand—not just the content or its contemporary effects, but the way it shapes our world today—that I’ve been trying hard to find other sources that explain it so people don’t have to read it cold and glean its importance for themselves. I was recently listening to a new podcast series, Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery, in which the hosts said in their introductory episode that,

“The Doctrine of Christian Discovery is essentially the key to understanding so much of what ails us today in the world. The Doctrine of Discovery is quite simply the Doctrine of Christian Discovery—that is, the relationship between how religion justified and encouraged the taking of lands by European monarchs and the Vatican from Indigenous peoples around the world.”

The papal bulls included in this reading were written permission from the pope at the time to the monarchs of Portugal and Spain respectively to claim the lands, resources, and people of any place its representatives came across, as long as said lands weren’t already “owned” by a Christian prince.

I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds here. Within Threadable, I included resources for some of the contemporary history from the 1400s; as with the definitions in the Charter of the Forest, just ask if you’d like me to share more! To summarize: almost at the same time that the heavily indebted Christopher Columbus was given permission and funds to sail and claim lands for monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, they had only just reclaimed the kingdom of Granada from the Muslim empire. Pursuing religious war in the name of Catholicism was predominant at the time that Bull Inter Caetera was issued in 1493, granting Spain ownership of around half the world. (I recommend Patrick Wyman’s recent book The Verge for an in-depth and readable history of this time.)

Bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455 was issued on behalf of the Portuguese empire and was directed mostly at West Africa. Both of these bulls gave broad license to the monarchs’ representatives to claim the world, no matter who was already living in lands they came across.

The rulers were, in fact, given express encouragement to claim not only lands and resources, but ownership of non-Christian people themselves.

The power granted and emboldened by these documents cannot, I think, be overstated. Not that land ownership and land theft started with the Doctrine or was limited to Portugal and Spain—the Charter of the Forest, which we went into a few weeks ago, is focused within England’s borders and addresses land enclosures and rights of the commons in the 1200s—but they empowered a hyper-driven and even more violent colonialism. And they were used to justify further taking of Indigenous rights and land for centuries.

The Doctrine of Discovery wasn’t called such at the time. It became doctrine through references in legal cases like Johnson v. M’Intosh that claimed in 1823—without any moral or legal defense—that discovery of land (by Christians or Europeans in general, depending on which empire was doing the discovering) was equivalent to ownership of it.

The point I know I keep making but is crucial, again, is that this precedent is still being used. The Doctrine of Discovery was what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referenced when denying sovereignty to the Oneida Nation in 2005. It reads as dusty, outdated history, but is in fact a living doctrine that has profound effects on lives and land around the world.

The link above, to an article by Villanova University professor Dana Lloyd, breaks down the doctrine’s role in that 2005 case and the finicky legal language used to try to erase the harms done: paradoxically, Ginsburg defended the decision on the basis that invasion and colonialism were part of history—done with, in the past—while referencing a doctrine that continues to do harm through legal decisions like her own.

There are also some readings that I didn’t include on Threadable itself because the platform doesn’t yet lend itself easily to exploring other texts within the app, but they are related and provide a broader foundation for thought and discussion:

• “Listen,” by Matthew L. M. Fletcher, in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, on being a Native American student learning about Johnson v. M’Intosh in law school:

“The story is huge. I cannot emphasize that enough. The story’s many strands and fibers contain the fate of ten million, or twenty million, or maybe even 100 million, people living in this land before the Vikings or Columbus arrived. Now imagine how many stories we all have, stories that shape us, define us, restrict us, lead us, teach us, and evolve with us. I have so many, I cannot keep track of them. And I always want more stories.”

• “The Doctrine of Discovery and the Elusive Definition of Indian Title,” by Blake A. Watson (author of Buying America from the Indians) from a 2011 Lewis & Clark Law Review Symposium.

• “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery,” from the Assembly of First Nations, January 2018.

• Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery, a podcast series from the Indigenous Values Project.

I’m only partway through the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, and can’t recommend it enough. It does a better job than I can of explaining how much of an impact this doctrine and the worldviews that shaped it have on our world today, from continued theft of Indigenous lands to climate change to resource extraction. And right in the introductory episode, the hosts lay out the entanglement of missionary Christianity with the belief in entitlement when it comes to Christian (and eventually white, European, etc.) claiming of resources.

“The Johnson v. M’Intosh decision, in which the doctrine of discovery was essentially moved from this Catholic principle of land-taking, conquest, and domination, into a Protestant state-building contest. . . . At the time, Catholics and Protestants literally hated one another. They were killing one another. But on this issue of Christians appropriating everything non-Christians had, they agreed on that principle. After it becomes this principle of law, of property, then this becomes literally becomes the law of the land in U.S. property law. Every law student during their studies is introduced to the Doctrine of Discovery.”

I’ve read a lot about the Doctrine of Discovery, but I hadn’t fully appreciated the Catholic/Christian aspect of it until sitting down with the documents themselves and then listening to the podcast. The legal effects of the Doctrine of Discovery might be most visible today, but the religious worldview they came from can’t be ignored.

These documents are important. They’re important because of what they set in motion in the first place as European empires spread out across the planet. They’re important because, through the U.S. Supreme Court, they gave license to ever more ravenous land theft in early 1800s North America, and were then referenced throughout the world. And they’re important because their influence still defines relationships of colonialism today.

That’s it for this one. The next reading for the Threadable circle on Land Ownership will be from Nick Estes’s book Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, which is a great book that I think everyone should read. It will be followed by a personal touchstone of mine, a selection from Henry George’s 1879 book Progress & Poverty, detailing the reasons why absolute private land ownership is one of the human world’s biggest sources of injustice.

Walking composition

“I don’t like planets. There’s dust and weather, and something always wants to eat the humans.” —The Murderbot Diaries: Exit Strategy, Martha Wells

I had the most beautiful hunting day recently, just before the season ended with my tags unclipped. I got out just before dawn to a place I haven’t been to in two or three years and it was so gorgeous and full of deer I chided myself for not going earlier in the season. I’d been hunting smaller parcels closer to home with no luck—one bit of state land in particular is my favorite spot to go hunting, even though I’ve literally never seen a deer in there in any season. Plenty of fresh sign, but no deer. I think I just go for the larches and chickadees.

The day before the American Thanksgiving holiday, a few inches of fresh snowfall overnight had me following several sets of fox tracks, two to dens, and tiny little rabbit hops leading across hillsides and under trees. And a lot of deer.

Shortly after turning from the old logging road (pictured above) into the hills, I spotted a doe through the woods. This is not a doe-hunting time of year in this place—bucks only—so all I could do was watch, and that was a gift all its own. The doe turned out to be two does, and they spotted me after a few moments. I stood as still as I could for over half an hour while they took turns stamping their front hooves and huffing warnings about my presence.

Deer alarm snorts, with a snow-crunch as my foot shifted and an airplane passing overhead.

My feet grew tired and cold-numb, but I watched the sunlight move through the woods and old man’s beard lichen wave in a barely-felt breeze and it was one of those days where I didn’t mind being chilled and stiff and wishing my knees were younger. Eventually, the does wandered up over a hill, and I sat on a fallen tree and took my hat off and watched the light for a while longer.

About an hour and a half and a couple of hills later, I had been sitting on a stump for a while watching a small gully that showed evidence of a lot of recent hoof traffic and finally decided it was time to make my way toward the car so I could go home and get started on Thanksgiving dinner preparations. I stood up, turned around, and just up the hill from me was another deer with—I thought I could make out from its head rising from a dip in the ground—short antlers.

I lifted my binoculars, slowly slowly, and sure enough, it was a young buck. I stood there staring at it for a few moments, heart racing, before remembering that there was a purpose to my being out there standing calf-deep in snow wishing I’d brought more hot tea with me. I lowered the binoculars, raised my rifle, breathed, aimed carefully.

And missed.

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A couple of years ago I heard an interview with the German philosopher Andreas Weber, which was interesting enough to prompt me to buy his book Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene.

I finally started reading it recently, and found it different from what I expected. The language itself is a reminder of why I quickly dropped the idea of being a philosophy and physics major in college (if there’s one word besides “blog” I wouldn’t miss from the English language, it’s “dialectic”), but what got my attention was Weber’s immediate inclusion of the commons. “‘Commoning’* is a metabolic reality,” he writes. “The body itself—our own individual bodies, for that matter—is possible only through participation in reality as a commons.”

It seems fitting that I started reading Enlivenment during hunting season, when I spend a lot of time out in the woods, most of it thinking about what this interconnection is, what it means to be out there, what I owe the place, what I expect or hope from it. How to stop more of it from being closed off for privatization.

And even more, what it is about humans and our culture that dismiss the centrality of these thoughts. That see the pure act of taking, or even the pure act of doing, to be goods in and of themselves. How the domination and control of nature have defined our relationships with it for centuries, and how the same mindset might be perpetuating itself in ways I can’t see. For which I appreciated Weber’s insights on the Anthropocene (which he extends later into the idea of sustainability):

“At present, I am concerned that the idea so predominant in the Anthropocene approach—that we can reconcile humankind with the unconscious, organic in itself and in others (human and not human) by subverting all of this under the power of culture—is just another attempt at domestication. We can see in it one more claim for controlling the world.

The neoliberal market system and its prerequisites . . . follow this method of exerting control by dividing the world into two halves: one nonliving sphere that needs to be colonized, and one that oversees and manages this control. The world, however, becomes better not through control, but through participation.”

I always come back to thinking that a need to control is born from fear. It transforms itself into something else, though, crawling all over human psyches and prompting a kind of pleasure in the act of controlling. I can see it in photos of successful hunts posted on social media, especially in what’s known as the “grip-and-grin” post-hunt or post-fish photo. I’ve read persuasive pieces on how these photos honor the animal as well as the hunt, but I can’t ever manage to see them as other than displaying a person’s triumph over a dead foe. To many, that’s a mischaracterization. Fair enough. But I don’t personally know many people who take and post those photos who care much about the animals and their own intentioned lives. Some, but not many.

We can’t help but consume—to be alive is to consume, to participate in death—but we can help how we approach it.

It was interesting to think about this practice in the context of Weber’s idea of enlivenment. “Ecological existence is only possible through gifts,” he writes, but the same is true of art.

“This has to do with the fact that art tries to capture aliveness from the inside.” (Emphases added.)

I’d like to think about that for a very, very long time. Is the purpose of art to make aliveness visible? To bring it into another’s sensory experience, to make possible the embodiment of interconnected aliveness? And what happens when art tries to serve the opposite?

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The buck gave me a second chance, waiting there on alert while I fumbled around with my rifle. By the time I realized the bolt was caught on the scope cover, he’d run off over the hill. I waded through snow around the side of the hill hoping to catch him if he came back over a ridge, but all I found was yet another doe who huffed at me for a while from behind some bushes where I couldn’t see her.

When I came home after that day of hunting, almost my last and the closest I came to bringing home food this year, my kids asked—amused, as always; I don’t know why but they find my itch to hunt funny—if I’d gotten anything.

“No,” I said, and told them about seeing the buck and missing it and that I was kind of bummed.

“Good for the deer,” said my daughter.

A reminder, if I needed it, that the commoning part of this, the interrelationship, is what matters. We are still eating from the elk I brought home last year, and I’ll never forget the few moments that led to her being in the freezer, the long, frigid day spent in the Sweetgrass Hills, the way she seemed to wait patiently while I scrambled to get my frozen fingers in position.

“This notion of the ‘meaning of life,’” writes Weber, “embodies some simple, everyday questions that stand at the center of human experience.” What are our needs, how do we make a living; what are our relationships and what do we owe them?

“My proposal is to shift focus to a new question: What is life, and what role do we play in it? . . . How is the metabolism of goods, services, and meaning possible without it degrading the system in which they operate?”

Good for the deer. In a strange way, I feel like I owe that deer’s ecosystem—our ecosystem, our home—even more than I would have if I hadn’t missed. Those words remind me that this hunting thing, it’s not about taking or even consuming. It’s about a relationship. And it goes both ways.

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*No matter how many times I’ve typed “commoning” in this newsletter, the platform insists on auto-correcting it to “communing.” I find this hilarious and also intriguing. The commune, at least in the Soviet sense, came partly out of the traditional Russian mir, the “shared responsibility” village that shaped life in that country for centuries. There is a relationship between a commune and the commons, just as there is one between today’s intentional communities and the commons, just as there is between each of us and the commons. That’s part of the reality of being alive; the question is how aware and intentional we are about that relationship.

Some stuff to read or listen to:

• The same Andreas Weber with the essay “Skincentric Ecology,” a beautifully written love letter to lichens, but also to life, on the Center for Humans & Nature: “Although I was only watching them, the velvet spheres out on the roof made my body tingle. They made me joyful, nervous, and restless. It was a view of other beings’ skin. The voice inside that whispered to love back did not originate in my head; it was my skin murmuring.” (This essay is included in the anthology Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, which I haven’t yet read all of. There’s a nice interview with the editors, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Orion.)

• The Conspirituality podcast recently did a two-hour episode titled “Doing Good in Impossibly Bad Times” on the Bund, which they describe as a “leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jewish people during the Reich.” (The pre-episode chitchat ends at about 31 minutes.) Just in case, you know, anyone feels in need of something like that right now. Or always.

• Erica Gies’s essay in Psyche, “What does water want?” looks briefly at efforts around the world to restore natural water flows, which Gies has dubbed the Slow Water movement: “Fresh water’s true nature is to flex with the rhythms of the earth, expanding and retreating in an eternal dance upon the land.”

• An interview from last year with Tyson Yunkaporta (author of Sand Talk) on For the Wild podcast in which he mentions something I wish everyone would talk about more: “60% of capital in the world is what? Land is what’s most of the capital in the world. That’s what’s used to leverage derivatives and futures into infinity, is that land. That’s why we’re not allowed to have access to it.”

• Mercedes Valmisa writing in Aeon on classical Chinese philosophy and the realities of life’s interdependence: “When humans participate in co-acting along with things, there is more than resonance and harmonisation at play, because intentions are introduced into the equation. This leads us to the third claim embedded in the co-action paradigm: that humans should design their actions so as to take into account all the others participating along with them. . . . One of the many powers of individualism – certainly one of the most corrosive ones – is that it makes us blind to the structures, institutions and resources that enable our possibilities to act and to become who we want to be, both personally and as a society. The way individualism makes us see social reality is the heart of its efficacy.” (I’m struck by the “intentions are introduced into the equation.”)

• Elizabeth Winkler in The New Yorker on what seems to have been the world’s first (known) author: Enheduanna, a priestess living about 4300 years ago in what is now known as Iraq: “For hundreds of years, students learned by etching Enheduanna’s words onto clay tablets, and about a hundred of these copies of ‘The Exaltation of Inanna’ survive. But since their discovery, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars have fiercely debated Enheduanna’s authorship.”

• I was recently catching up on issues of Montana Outdoors and found myself cutting out pages of the July-August issue from this year, on 100 things to see and do in the state. Now I have a little pile of ideas for next summer’s family trips. Sometimes it surprises me how little of the state I was born and raised in I’ve actually seen. Though to be fair, it’s a big place.

• Ethnobotanist Dr. Susan Leopold was on Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast talking about United Plant Savers, her learning trajectory in ethnobotany, and a lot I never knew about American ginseng and medicinal plants.

• I mentioned a long time ago that I like the Pondercast podcast in part because it reminds me of really good middle of the night college radio in the early 1990s. (Also, unlike many podcasts, it’s short.) The recent episode “Lists” fit that niche nicely: “What started out as the abacus has turned into an alternate universe of information we no longer need to burden our brains with. . . . Umberto Eco says, ‘Look to lists for the history of culture. . . . What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.’”

Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership

The most recent Threadable reading* was a selection from Walter R. Echo-Hawk’s book In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided: Chapter 4 on Johnson v. M’Intosh, pages 56-77, just before the section breaks.

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

For anyone new to On the Commons—of which there are, um, a lot, welcome! and thank you to Terrell for recommending it on Substack Reads!—an overview of this 12-week project is here. These Substack posts are for anyone who doesn’t have iOS or doesn’t want to use Threadable but still wants to know about the readings; the subtitles are marked with “Threadable-adjacent reading discussion on land ownership.” Please feel free to comment or email me with any questions. I have also slowed the reading posts pace from once a week to once every 10-14 days.)

There is a copy of Echo-Hawk’s book on archive.org. If you don’t have an account, you can create one for free and borrow the book for one hour at a time. I apologize; I’ve been forgetting to time my own reading of these, but in general they’ve been taking me about 40-45 minutes. And if you’re interested in this subject, Echo-Hawk has an engaging writing style. Its nearly 600 pages look daunting, but the book is very accessible to read.

While the purpose of the Threadable reading circle is to dig into the phenomenon of land ownership, it was always going to end up at theft of Indigenous lands. Though I suppose it started that way in any case, as the reading from Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth was focused on the enclosures of the commons in 15th-century Britain and the dire consequences for those who depended on that land for their survival. Anywhere that land is owned, which is pretty much everywhere, it has been taken from everyone else.

Anything that really digs into the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh is essential reading on this subject. It is this case that made possible many of the most egregious land thefts from Native Nations in America. Not only that, but it’s been referenced as a basis for Indigenous land theft worldwide. It’s one of the most important readings because it relies on the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery and is still used as precedent today. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referenced Discovery in the 2005 case City of Sherill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, deciding that the Oneida Nation could no longer claim sovereignty over land it had legally purchased on the open market:

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

Johnson v. M’Intosh is an incredibly convoluted case that involves generations of white people’s land speculations crossing from before the U.S.’s Revolutionary War to decades after it. Echo-Hawk covers much of the story, but if you really want to dig into the wonky details I also recommend Blake Watson’s book Buying America from the Indians, which is specifically about this case and everything leading up to it. (I wrote about Watson’s book around a year ago.)

There are two important points that Echo-Hawk highlights in this chapter: The first is that Chief Justice John Marshall, who authored the opinion in the case, was himself a well-known land speculator. He and his father owned vast tracts of land, and anything the Supreme Court decided about land ownership rights would directly affect Marshall’s own fortunes.

The second is the legal question that the case hinges on, which was, “Could white people buy land from Native Americans?” Or, to put it as Marshall viewed it, “Could Native American people own land at all?” The question being decided was whether those who had originally purchased the land from Native Americans owned it legally, or whether it was owned by people who purchased it later. But Native people, as Echo-Hawk states repeatedly, weren’t even allowed to have a stake or a say in the case.

Marshall skipped right over any of these considerations (in fact, as Echo-Hawk details, the entire case was rife with ethical shenanigans, including a straw man plaintiff and hand-picked lower-court judges—“the case was a sham,” he wrote) and went straight to what he considered, evidently, to be a self-evident truth: discovery of land translated into ownership of it. At least, it did for European people who wanted to impose their own private property systems on others. “Discovery” is mentioned several times in the 1823 decision, the most pointed instance being,

“The rights of the original inhabitants were in no instance entirely disregarded, but were necessarily to a considerable extent impaired. They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own discretion; but their rights to complete sovereignty as independent nations were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will to whomsoever they pleased was denied by the original fundamental principle that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.

While the different nations of Europe respected the right of the natives as occupants, they asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves, and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil while yet in possession of the natives. These grants have been understood by all to convey a title to the grantees, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy.”

(Emphases added.)

That is, Native Americans could live on and occupy and use land, but they could not own it. Because Europeans had “discovered” it.

The decision is made even more egregious, Echo-Hawk notes, because not even the papal decrees comprising the Doctrine of Discovery (which will be included in the next reading) nor English law at the time “entertained the notion that discovery grants title to Indian land.”

Marshall attempted further justification by stating that, “Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny,” which Echo-Hawk notes is a “half-hearted justification,” especially given the fact that almost no—if any—North American nations were ever actually conquered.

Conflating discovery with conquering, Marshall also makes the claim that, even if the Doctrine of Discovery doesn’t have much solid justification, it had been used to create private property rights and therefore couldn’t be questioned:

“However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.”

My Threadable comment on this passage is a little long to include here, but the Post-It note in my physical copy of the book reads, “So, because a pretension led to property acquisition, you can’t question that basis. What an asshole.”

I’m reminded of a passage in Willa Cather’s novel Shadows on the Rock, in which a character tells his daughter that the law is about protection of property, not about justice. See also Season 4 of The Expanse TV show. No matter how much Johnson v. M’Intosh is buried under ponderous legal language, it comes down—as does most land ownership justification—to one thing: I took it; now it’s mine.

The important thing to remember, again, is that this case is still precedent in the U.S. and many other countries today. It is this case, and the Doctrine of Discovery behind it, that create barriers toward realizing Indigenous land rights; and in fact pervade much of our perspective about property and land ownership worldwide.

The question I’d like to leave you with is: What do we do about this? Because I don’t think “nothing” is an option, or at least it’s not one I’m willing to accept. I look at my ancestors who homesteaded in Montana 5 generations ago, and I see a lot of heart and hard work, but I do not see justice.

There are movements to overturn the Doctrine of Discovery, which you can read about through the Indigenous Values Initiative. And you can read writers like Echo-Hawk, who asks not just “Was theft of Native American lands legal,” but also why it’s still being justified today. Reading won’t fix this, but knowledge is always a good start.

Walking composition

"mountains
will speak
for you

rain
will flesh
your bones"
—from "To Those Who Have Lost Everything," Francisco X. Alarcón

(This is a public post for all subscribers. Please be forewarned there are some anti-Semitic and hate tweets—directed at me—below.)

Like too many people, I have been wrapped up in the news about Twitter. I even took thoughts of it this morning up a forest service road to the view above, where I was just about to turn up a hill to look for some deer. Whether the deer were going to be found or not I don’t know—there was plenty of sign, but the snow was almost the crunchiest, noisiest I’ve ever walked on and there was no way I was getting anywhere near them today.

I have a lot of thoughts about Twitter, mixed up with my thoughts about the cryptocurrency crash currently occurring. Do I care about cryptocurrency? Not really. I don’t really care about social media, either, except, like politics, they have effects on all of our lives that we can’t control, whether we use them or not. I haven’t had a social media account (does Substack count?) for years, but not having social media doesn’t stop people from living in the world it helps create, nor from suffering from the hate that can be spread on it.

The podcast Your Undivided Attention had an episode in June 2020 detailing social media’s role in a genocide in Myanmar and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the social media-amplified effects of false news stories and misinformation. Their guest also talked about the effects on people who will never see the stories being spread about them. They’re not on social media, don’t have access to the internet, and therefore can’t respond. But they are still harmed:

“The truth is, you have a lot of communities who don’t have access to social media, who don’t have access to technology. The best example is the Indigenous community in Brazil or the Muslim community in Assam in India who are much poorer, who have less access to these technologies.

So you will have this cycle, this bullying cycle essentially, where, even for people who are not online, they’re being attacked and targeted online, on social media, by these bad actors. And they can’t report it. They’re not online. They can’t respond to it and spread their own stories. They can’t even have a conversation about it, they’re just sitting there being pummeled and pummeled and pummeled by this horrendous content that’s making people literally go out and look for them in the streets.”

I want to pretend that ditching all social media would protect us from the hate spread on it, but it doesn’t. It’s like pretending that you can be protected from violent rhetoric simply because you don’t speak the language it’s being spoken in. Having a billionaire who thinks every line of violent rhetoric is a good joke or “free speech” in charge of a platform is only going to make it worse.

In late 2016, just after the presidential election, my town was inundated with weeks of online hate and outright death threats mostly aimed at people in Jewish community. (There were plenty of national news stories about it at the time, but Anne Helen Petersen’s at BuzzFeed was the best and most comprehensive.) The same week it started, I had published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about my town, one particular white supremacist, and how community resilience is built, which drew some of that same hate-filled attention my way. It was only a splash, but it was enough.

There were several extremely shitty weeks, and more shitty months after that, and it’s not like the damage has ever disappeared. I’m still proud of how my town responded, how people supported one another and resisted the hate and how the entire place closed down the day of a threatened armed neo-Nazi march that never materialized.

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

(For the record, I am not Jewish, but a) that shouldn’t ever matter, and b) once you go down this road it’s only a matter of time before you wrap hate around everyone who disagrees with you, no matter their ethnicity or religion.)

This entire episode was part of what got me to write so much about community and trust in my book on walking. What do you do when trust is broken? What do you do when you don’t know whom to trust and still have to live your life, day to day? It’s a big part of why I wove in much of my father’s experiences growing up under Stalin into that book.

I didn’t leave Twitter until at least a few months after all this happened. And though it was a major factor, it wasn’t the only factor: Twitter is the only social media platform I’ve ever felt an addiction to, which was most of the reason—I wasted so much time scrolling and browsing it’s embarrassing to admit; plus I can honestly say I’m still relieved at the thought of never receiving a picture of some guy’s genitals in my DMs again.

Looking at these tweets still makes me feel ill. I kept them because I didn’t want to forget that time. How I couldn’t sleep much for weeks on end, and had trouble eating. How much worse it affected people here who were more relentlessly and violently attacked. How billions of people all over the world live with this kind of fear. How much of human history has been shaped by the violent actions that are the inevitable endpoint of hate and dehumanization.

A few months ago I tried to talk myself into getting over my issues with Twitter. There’s no use pretending that Twitter doesn’t play a major role in writers’ careers. It does, and I have fewer opportunities without it. Elizabeth Spiers wrote a compelling article about this reality, and after reading it I told myself to grow up and get back on the stupid bird app.

So I created a new profile, uploaded a photo, wrote a bio, linked to my website, did all the things. Then I went and looked at two of my Montana friends whom I’d probably follow first, to see what was going on in their Twitter-worlds. And I remembered what being on Twitter was like. Not what would come my way—what I’m like on there. What I’d have to comment on, and how. How I’d get sucked into never-ending politics dialogues because I have a problem with that kind of thing.

I almost threw up, seriously. Life really is too short, I thought. Maybe nobody ever pays me to write another book or essay in my entire life, that is fine as long as I never have to be that person again, the person I am on Twitter.

This post hasn’t gone where I intended it to go. Because it’s not meant to be about me; it’s about ownership, once again. It’s about the fact that the ability of people to become billionaires is a failure of society. It’s about how becoming that wealthy gives you immense power over the global commons. You can buy your 340,000-acre ranch from your fellow billionaire friend and use your wealth and influence to fence in not just the land, but the wildlife, the water, the democratic will of the people who want to keep those things in the public trust, with public access. And you can buy one of the most influential social platforms on the planet and fill it with hate speech and trolls.

One of the chapters of the book I’m working on is about ownership of data, which I maintain is a type of ownership over our selves—including our future selves, especially for children—that few of us really grasp the power of. It’s been strip-mined and commodified for years now, at the expense of society and our own agency in ways we don’t even understand.

Twitter is no different in this respect, but I think Ryan Broderick put what’s truly at stake best in a recent Garbage Day post on what’s really happening as the company’s staff and moderation are gutted:

“The narrative right now is that Musk’s egomania drove him to buy and inevitably ruin Twitter because he hoped to transform it into X, his totalitarian ‘everything app’ WeChat clone he wanted to send us to space with. But there is another, simpler narrative here. A man who grew up in apartheid South Africa, whose family owned a diamond mine, who made his name helping cyberlibertarians bypass banking laws, manipulating the US tax system to build faulty self-driving cars, and shooting rockets into space in the hopes of establishing debt slavery on Mars, bought an app built by activists and Black Americans, and that is relied on by the Global South as a valuable democratic tool, and is used by journalists around the world as a free and open source of information, and tried to turn it into his personal country club. This is just the mundane nightmare of watching a wealthy man wreck his new plaything — an imperfect, but vital communication system for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. This is a colonialist doing what colonialists do.” (Emphasis added.)

I have no particular interest in saving Twitter for Twitter’s sake, but it’s hard to deny its usefulness worldwide. It was instrumental in the Arab Spring protests, and I’ve read that it’s vital for the current women-led revolts going on in Iran.

It is the users who truly build these networks, who give them value. Just like it’s a physical community that gives land its value. Not the person who owns title to it. Yet in a system that rewards capital, it’s always the title holder who collects that value, who commodifies the commons and claims its rewards for themselves. It was true with Montana’s early Copper Kings; and with England’s 15th-century landowning nobility who kicked people off their land to make a better profit off of sheep; and with all the George Washington-type land speculators who made fortunes out of stealing North American land from people who already lived here; and it’s true of the digital technology that we hate, use, appreciate to some extent, and create through our labor.

I loathe all the digital technology. But what I loathe is how it’s been dictated to us. How we’re not allowed to buy devices built without literal slavery and poisonous extraction; how we don’t get to decide how we want to use it, and where, and what role it plays in our societies and individual lives. I don’t loathe what it’s given me: the ability to connect with people in ways I never could have in my own childhood, when we called my father’s family in the Soviet Union once every few years, from a neighbor’s phone at exorbitant rates per minute. I like being able to text with friends wherever they live, and video-call family overseas.

But it’s far too easy to say, “Well, look at all the benefits you get! You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” To which I’d like to remind people of philosopher’s John Gray’s point that, “You can break millions of eggs and still not have a single omelette.”

I’ll end with a quote about technology from my own book on walking, because when I was writing about trust and community and loneliness, I was asking these questions, about the destruction that a car-centric culture has left us with, and whether digital technology is going down the same road:

“‘Progress’ is a messy ramble, less a clear path through the woods than a process of bushwhacking through a jungle full of dead ends and U-turns and countless life-threatening encounters.

Building a completely car-dependent culture has brought us to one of these dead ends. Instead of increasing our freedom of movement, we’ve limited it to where and how we construct roads. Instead of opening the planet up to our human experience, we’ve gridded it out and closed it off. Instead of learning how to make better, stronger communities, we’ve boxed ourselves into suburbs lives that are at the same time disconnected physically and hyper-connected digitally, building out of our lives the wealth of daily interactions that make community-scale social capital possible, while investing in infrastructure that makes us incredibly vulnerable to the vagaries of a planet ruled by nature. . . .

How might technology be carefully and deliberately designed to improve human existence, without wholesale rewriting of it? How do we avoid making the same mistakes with assistive technology that we made with automobiles?”

Social media, and digital technology in general, taps into our deep-seated need to connect with one another. Humans are social creatures, even the strongly introverted among us like me. Our need for connection is real. It should never have been commodified, any more than water or air or land or people should have been.

I’m tired of the wealthy and influential among us breaking all the eggs and telling us we have to accept the few omelettes that might or might not get cooked and that they might or might not eat first. The digital world is a commons, too, and we should all have a say in how it’s created and how it’s governed.

This is already monstrously long, so I’m skipping the Stuff to Read/Listen to/Watch this week except that I recommend everything I linked to in here, most especially Francisco X. Alarcón’s poetry, which you can find more of on Poetry Foundation.

I did enable the Substack Chat option. This is purely because I have no other social media and it’s a way to share things that are more ephemeral, like an Instagram photo except not. You’re not going to miss out on much without it, and so far I’m not liking the experience of trying to read full newsletters or write comments on it. There shouldn’t be any pressure about this. After all, I don’t follow any of you on Twitter! But I am using the chat option casually. It’s nice for me to be able to see everyone else’s photos.

Speaking of photos, let’s end up on an up note. This is from Yellow Bay State Park on Flathead Lake, which I drove down to visit just to get out somewhere different a couple weeks ago. I love this planet.

Subscriber chat, and next month’s roundtable with Pedestrian Space

Readers who’ve downloaded the Substack app might have noticed the new chat feature. Since I don’t have any other social media accounts (I almost went back on Twitter last summer but now am kind of glad I couldn’t bring myself to follow through), I’m curious if the chat option for On the Commons can help us all connect in more casual ways. I enabled it this week and started with—of course—asking what people are reading (I finally started Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy).

I have a feeling I might be using the chat to talk more about walking and walkability, as well as private property, the commons, and trespassing. A lot of the photos I take but don’t get around to using on the newsletter are related to walking infrastructure and car-centric culture. It’s something I could write a lot more about, but since I wrote a whole book about it—which, you know, I think is actually pretty good if you feel like reading something on that subject!—it feels like I’m repeating myself a lot of the time. And without social media, there’s not really a way to share short observations of things like missing crosswalks or sidewalks closed for construction (there is always a sidewalk closed for construction).

Anyway, it’s there if you want to join! You’ll need to download the Substack app (messages are sent via the app, not email). From what Substack has said, this feature is in beta, so you might not see it yet on all the newsletters you subscribe to. Annoyingly, it looks like the chat function is only for iOS (Apple devices). I think all of you who’ve commented that Apple-centric apps are like a walled garden are probably right.

Here’s Substack’s explanation of how to get started:

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for the chat inside.

3. That’s it! If you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

And . . .

On December 9th, I’ll be joining Pedestrian Space for a roundtable conversation about walking and walkability. To join, you can tell me and I’ll send your email to the organizer, Annika Lundkvist.

These roundtables are very small and probably tend toward the more policy-wonky or granular end of advocacy. But I wanted to mention it because Pedestrian Space is well worth following even if you’re not interested in the roundtable. It’s a very cool organization headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, that advocates for pedestrians worldwide—especially through its Global Walkability Correspondents Network—and is supported by the Schumacher Institute. If you’re despairing of the world, connecting with walkability advocates is a great way to give yourself some hope.

That’s all! I’m hoping to give some book progress updates soon. I’ve been waiting on an interview that I think is necessary for one of the stories in there, and for a visit to the ranch that my mother grew up on, which might take a few months to organize.