sustainability – Antonia Malchik

Bison Bison, free-roaming Buffalo, eastern Montana

When I was in sixth grade, ten years old, my family moved briefly to Chico, California. My father, then an electrical engineer, had gotten a job there after being laid off from his firm near my hometown—Belgrade, Montana.

I was only in school in Chico for two months, but my teacher, Mr. Davis, made a lasting impression on me. Even at that age it was obvious how hard he worked to give everyone in the class an education tailored to their needs and strengths. Nearly forty years later, I still have my Davis Dollars, which he used as a reward system with which we could purchase certain classroom privileges, and I still remember his kindness, energy, ability to connect with kids, and his creative, innovative lessons.

One of those lessons was to write instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. For an alien.

That is, imagine an alien is visiting Earth for the first time and wants to know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you undertake to teach them.

It sounds simple, but anyone with some experience of algorithms, coding, and perhaps teaching will know where I’m going with this. How do you explain bread, or peanut butter? What about “knife,” “slice,” or “spread”? How do you make the instructions comprehensible to an alien, who has no concept of objects, actions, or ideas you might consider basic?

The lesson was a very early one in computer programming—this was in 1986—and would haunt me in college. My undergraduate degree was in mathematics, which required me to take and pass one computer science course. I dropped the class twice before barely passing it a third time, and each time was reminded of the difficulty I had as a ten-year-old breaking sandwich-making instructions down into granular, specific enough steps that an alien could follow them.

Though mathematics and propositional logic were always difficult for me, they were still far more accessible than computer programming. Programming, counterintuitive as it might seem, has something of the narrative about it. How do you break human relations, actions, and expectations into specific, step by tiny step instructions usable for a computer system?

The peanut butter and jelly sandwich has its corollary in one of the most referenced episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Darmok,” in which Captain Picard must learn how to talk with a species of people who communicate only in metaphor and allegory, using references to stories and myths specific to their own culture.

It is remarkably difficult to understand another human being’s thoughts, motivations, and ideas even amongst people who share a common language. We each carry our own vast experiences into every interaction, mapping our own needs, wants, fears, expectations, and unacknowledged trauma responses onto others.

As someone who writes about complex ideas that counter dominant narratives, particularly regarding private ownership, and perhaps even more as a longtime editor a little obsessed with the worlds and histories contained in every choice of word, this idea of comprehension, and its relationship with compassion, is something I think about all the time. When is compassion enough? When is comprehension necessary?

It’s fascinating, and disheartening, to consider how different, even oppositional, people’s information bubbles are, and how impossible to reach any kind of shared understanding if one’s own comprehension of reality is completely different than another’s.

But there is power, too, in spending time with that difference. I don’t just mean for empathy and understanding, though there is that. I mean for clarity and where to focus one’s energies.

I, for example, live in a small, politically progressive-leaning town in a northwest part of Montana dominated by hard right-wing beliefs, particularly Christian nationalism and anti-government extremism. I pay a lot of attention to local news and issues, far more than I do to national. Doing so is important for many reasons, one of which is that I know which battles I’m not going to win, and why.

Our right-wing county commissioners, for example, do not believe in zoning regulations or in spending government money (except, evidently, on their own salaries). If I want to see a county-wide bike and pedestrian system and actual regional public transportation someday, which I do, it helps to know I shouldn’t waste my energies on arguments focused on good uses of government funds, not with people who believe government funds shouldn’t exist.

And there is no point using arguments for tax policy, universal preschool, bodily autonomy, health care, and other issues that focus on how they affect me as an independent female trying to make a living and support her kids, with locally elected state officials who believe that I should do nothing more than raise those kids and keep house for the husband I never should have left.

If I want to make any headway with those legislators, or more to the point with the people who vote for them, I have to understand that they don’t see me as human, as worthy of equal rights and freedoms, and act accordingly.

The reality that women have been treated as subhuman, disposable, and ownable for at least five thousand years makes this galling, but for the purposes of making any kind of change, at least at the local and regional level, my rage and disgust are only useful if they’re aimed in the right direction, or at least framing the right narratives.

You can’t teach someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich if you don’t know how concepts like “peanut butter” or “sandwich” appear in their own minds.

Likewise “freedom,” or “humanity.”

One of the books I read over the last few years that became a touchstone for me was James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games. In it, he plays with many ideas I find intriguing, all circling around the concept of how to live, framed as being a player of games. Of Storytelling, he wrote,

“Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed.”

And while there are an infinite number of finite games,

“There is but one infinite game.”

The photo at the top of this essay was taken on American Prairie land about 400 miles—around 640 kilometers—east of my home. I drove out there to spend a week, for a writing assignment, and spent most of my time thinking about relationships, between people, between humans and animals, between animals and ecosystems, between myself and that place.

It was a place, and time, where I got to linger in the concept of what it feels like when energies are given to relationships and repair, when they’re given to life and how it interconnects, including with humans.

I don’t think of life or society or culture as a game—the phrasing feels to tech-bro-ish maybe, or maybe game theory was, like computer science, a subject I was never much good at—but I still like Carse’s idea of finite and infinite games as a clarifier for living.

For me, and something he alluded to throughout the book, the only game worth winning is the one that enables life to keep living. Teaching an alien to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a finite game that might or might not be worth doing. Working toward a world in which everyone has enough to eat, not limited to peanut butter-and-anything sandwiches, or even just to sandwiches, is a larger finite game that almost always supports the infinite one. And understanding? What seeks to comprehend, to know another, to soften toward their heart and their suffering? Maybe that’s the infinite game, one we only see glimpses of.

The infinite game sees a world whose laws are relational and life-supportive, where we are all kin with all of creation. And act accordingly.

Thanks to B. Lorraine Smith for a prompt tthat reminded me of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich assignment!

Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the deep roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such “being” difficult.

If you’d spent most of your life under skies like this, might gray be your favorite color, too?

In a week or two, a few yards of compost will get dumped on the edge of my garden. This is arguably one of the events I look forward to most all year. The ground is still too cold to work in it much—it snowed again yesterday and nights are back below freezing. (I accidentally typed “freezling” there and I like it so much better. Freezling has delightful possibilities.) At this point in the year, the garden’s emerging green prompts only eager possibility, before the pressure of weeding quack grass and thistles gets to me, before we head into when my year truly starts, the hot days of August when I’m strategizing huckleberry-picking days and tomato-canning sessions and keeping an eye on when the chokecherries are ripe.

Compost delivery speaks of warm mornings watching tree swallows in the nesting box while I pick strawberries and snack on peas, talk with sweetgrass, which I checked on as soon as the snow mostly melted, and was taken aback by how many new plants are peeking up. Some of them are undoubtedly quack grass, but there are plenty of telltale red-tinged tips. I cannot wait to smell her in the warmth of June, gently coax her strands into braids.

Our local compost service is one of the best understated things about where I live. Every week my five-gallon bucket gets picked up, more or less full of cucumber ends, pizza crusts, moldy cheese, steak bones, coffee grounds, overripe avocados. It gets taken to bear-proofed land not far from here and joins similar bucketsfull from households all over the valley, along with larger bins from local restaurants, to heat up to the point when a variety of bacteria begin to break all of it down and turn it into dirt, helped by viruses, fungi, and of course worms, slugs, nematodes, and all the other tiny creatures less immediately attractive than, say, apex predators, but no less vital to keeping a living planet alive.

Every year, when those yards of compost slide out of a truck in my garden, I get a little thrill thinking of how contained it all feels, how efficient, to see consumption turned back into something fertile and full of life instead of tied up in a plastic bag and added to the mountainous landfill just outside of town. That growing mountain of trash, and the fact that when I was a teenager thirty years ago the landfill was not a mountain, but a pit in the same location, makes me want to try harder to live close to home, to take more responsibility for this place I love so much and all those who depend on its vitality. To eat more huckleberries and spruce tips gathered from the surrounding mountains and far fewer avocados shipped thousands of miles from places whose dire water situations I’m too well aware of to pretend ignorance.

Putting my hands in compost prods me to make fewer choices that make other communities’ lives harder, but what I like about it is that it does so by reminding me how much joy there is to be found in loving and taking responsibility for the life I live among.

There’s something I learned years ago that often haunts me in the hours of darkness when sleep is elusive: when the Three Gorges Dam in China was completed, controlling the flood cycle of the Yangtze River, it altered Earth’s rotation enough to add 0.06 milliseconds of daylight hours to the planet.

I read something similar, though not as drastic, about depletion of the aquifer under California’s agricultural region, one of the things that contributed to my mostly giving up almonds.

You only have to read a handful of scientific papers to start seeing how vast the planet-wide relocation of water is, from ubiquitous and often unnecessary dams, to water-intensive alfalfa grown in Arizona to feed cows in arid Saudi Arabia, to the thirsty avocados grown in Chile or Mexico that end up in my compost bin.

Trade and exchange have been around essentially forever. How much is too much, though? How far is too far? How do the critical quantities of phosphate mined in the Western Sahara and sent to fertilize farms all over the world compare with peat moss harvested fifty miles from me and used to feed gardens like mine? What keeps my sleepless hours company isn’t some nightmare scenario where humans screw things up enough to throw the planet completely off her orbit; it’s more of a philosophical question. One at the core of most of what I write: how do we live together? Not just humans, but all of life.

If there’s a balance, it’s one that shifts constantly over time but one thing I think is certain: if that balance is to be in service of life, it must be determined by kinship and care, not by what one region wants that another happens to have. It must be determined by a deep sense of right relationship, not by who has the power to take and who lacks the power to say no.

It’s hard to undo built-in consumption practices, much less to escape the systems that enable them. The meat my family eats is almost all local and a lot of it is wild, brought home through my own efforts and the generous gifts of the land I try to live with. But the bags of lemons I bring home from Costco aren’t. I grow the strawberries we eat, but not the frozen blueberries in winter. Knowing too much about the environmental and social costs of the floral industry, I rarely buy cut flowers for people, but I still use coconut oil for my homemade lotion.

All of these end up in my compost in one form or another. I like that I can think of food eaten in my home cycling into dirt and transforming into food again, but as much as it helps decrease the growth of that landfill outside of town, how much weight has it also shifted from other places on this planet I might never see but that are beloved by those who live among them? How much of the soil I use to grow strawberries and potatoes carries with it the gravity of others’ hardships?

The compost will be delivered, and I’ll ask the driver about her now-toddler while we rake it out of the truck, and she’ll leave and I’ll stand in my muck boots and stare at the pile and think of what will grow from it. I’ll wish, as I do every year, that a strong friend or two would come by and help me shovel it all onto the garden beds in time to get the potatoes in.

That would be a gathering, wouldn’t it? Skip all the writerly readings and presentations and workshops and you all could come over and help get the garden started or just hang out watching flickers and tree swallows, and I’d cook big pots of things for every variation of eater and we’d lay wood in the fire pit and sit around muscle-weary and well-fed, and drink water from the aquifer my well draws from, and tell stories while the sky slowly melts to dark and the stars come out and the air turns freezling and Moon comes out to join the party.

A gathering like that would be something like compost, where there are no hierarchies or leaders, no unnecessary suffering, no waste, and everyone has a part to play, a contribution to make, simply by existing. We could create our own human ground where the potential still remains for so much to grow.

Building Local Power had a nice overview last year of small compost businesses and the barriers they face—from land access to funding—as well as their benefits.

Evening Moon

Tag: sustainability

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

What gets delivered with the compost