From Yellow Bay State Park, Flathead Lake, Montana
I desperately want quiet. That kind of quiet you get in the midst of a forest where even the pervasive whine of traffic is too distant to penetrate. I’ve spent all week wanting nothing but quiet, as I attended meetings and bought fidgets for someone’s birthday and cooked dinner and did dishes and woke up so, so early and hugged the quiet, candlelit hours to myself like an infant who’s finally drifting off to sleep.
In those hours, the need for quiet crashes in. Sometimes—often—the online world is so noisy that I feel like I need ear plugs. Mind plugs? Even without social media, the nudges for attention from online fracture my thoughts and focus and capabilities. I told someone once that being online reminded me of parenting toddlers, with every minute broken by some version of “mom, MOM, Mom.”
I grew up without television service, without even a telephone in the house until I was almost ten. I didn’t have a regular email address until my late twenties (one of my brothers-in-law worked at Google at the time, which is why I’ve had the same email address since Gmail was in beta—20 years now) and staved off switching to a smartphone for nearly a decade after they were released to feast on people’s time and attention. And yet here I am, 47 years old, with one kid nudging adulthood, metaphorically whimpering in a dark corner to get some mental space away from my devices and the needs of online.
Not everyone has these problems. I keep having this conversation with people, who often recommend turning off notifications—I did that in 2017 and never turned them back on; it’s been years since I allowed anything but texts and phone calls to nudge me—and don’t always seem to understand that the addictive design of these devices is all too effective for some of us. It doesn’t matter how many apps we delete.
I spent too much money purchasing a dumb phone last month, the only one I could find that works only in grayscale and doesn’t accommodate any apps. As I’m slowly weaning myself off of turning on my smartphone (the camera is still an issue), I remind myself of what my mornings were like when I didn’t feel its tug. For years I’ve turned my phone completely off at night, as I do the WiFi on my laptop, so that I can get up in the early hours and do all the little things that make me feel whole and connected without staring into the face of that bright screen first, but I can still feel its presence stalking me around the house.
It’s more than the smartphone. Online communication and interaction manages to completely drain me on a regular basis. This was one of those weeks, where I couldn’t get offline because that’s where my work is and increasingly felt like I was at a loud party full of flashing lights, bad music, terrible drinks, feeling desperately tired and thirsty because the water fountain was broken, but I wasn’t allowed to leave.
Next week I have three nights alone at my favorite forest service cabin, offline and away from electricity, and all I can think about is not how much work I might or might not get done, but an almost desperate need to sit by the river and not think or do anything. To watch the long, slow shifts of light at sunrise and sunset. To spend the middle of the night awake hour staring at the stars and Moon if She’s visible.
I have all sorts of strategies to manage my relationship with digital technology, put in place years ago for my sanity, creativity, and, as I’ve written about before, because my humanity is more important to me than finding conventional writing success, and I don’t like the human I am when interacting with social media.
None of those strategies are really enough, or maybe recently I’ve been feeling the press of it all more. I had a wonderful, long conversation earlier this week with a good friend and colleague about this particular platform, and ended up realizing how much more difficult I find to use ever since Notes was rolled out and the social media-ness of it has increased. That doesn’t mean I’m leaving it (I tried setting something up elsewhere a couple months ago but simply don’t have the technical expertise), but figuring out how to open a tab on my browser and look at it, even to read other newsletters I like, without feeling instantly disheartened and drained, has been difficult. I’m bolstered by writers like Amanda B. Hinton writing about which newsletters she reads for nourishment, and all the tremendously good writing and research and interesting ideas I’ve seen, and even friends I’ve made, that I never would have without this platform existing. There are ways to be in this particular space without feeling like it’s taking more than it’s giving. At least, I hope there is. I just need to figure out my own balance.
But it’s also important, I think, to keep in mind that no technology is value-neutral. How it’s created, built, deployed, used, and discarded matters. I saw a comment elsewhere recently that said we’ll learn to live with and benefit from digital technology “just like we learned to live with and benefit from cars” and I refrained from answering that comment only because at this point it makes me very tired. I wrote a whole book about what we’ve lost to cars and car-centric infrastructure, how much damage we live with because of cars and the loss of walkability. It’s a very good book, and I think an important one.
Funnily enough, when I sat down with my notebook to draft this, my intention was to mention my fractured attention and communication overload, and not write much at all but to share some photos of recent activities that keep me feeling alive and engaged with the world as I want to be in the world.
In a way, that’s the crux of humans’ evolving relationship with technology—all technology, but digital in particular. In what ways can we manage to function with what’s demanded of us—and I use those words intentionally, because some people might succeed and even thrive in relationship with technologies, but there are always vast consequences unseen or unacknowledged or unimportant to people who benefit from them; most of life is simply trying to survive it—while being alive? Completely alive. Aware, conscious, attentive.
Every time I go to one of these cabins for days offline, or spend time in the wilderness, or go for a long walk along the river after school drop-off and before checking email, or spend wonderful, attentive time with a friend or few, it’s a fight not just for my own life, but for all of life.
Aside from sharing research and ideas on private property, ownership, and the commons, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here: share with you a love of life. The hilarious turkeys I can hear outside right now, and the very noisy magpie staring at me through the window, the way sunset last night melted its way through rumples of gray and blue-silver clouds, how the Milky Way has been visible the last three nights. The way the air doesn’t yet quite smell of spring and I’m holding on a little longer to my favorite season of cold and dark, the hours we’ve spent together in quiet aliveness. So maybe I’ll just be quiet for a bit and share some of that.
My brother-in-law and I recently took a wildlife tracking course together through Swan Valley Connections. As we approached the meeting spot, we slowed down for the awesome sight of a juvenile bald eagle feeding on a deer right by the side of the road. No photos of that (we were driving and he flew off), but we got to watch some bald eagle shenanigans for a few minutes before meeting up to go track wolves, mountain lions, mink, muskrat, and a ridiculous number of squirrel feeding sites (mounds of shredded pine cones), which I was so entertained by I neglected to take photos.
That same day, one of my college roommates, who happens to be one of my favorite people in the world and whom I haven’t seen or even talked with in about eight years, came to town with her boyfriend for a week, so I took some time off to drive them down to the Bison Range and around the entirety of Flathead Lake, which is gorgeous at all angles.
Doing things like these keeps me in touch with how I want to be spending my time. Not as an aspirational goal or some kind of self-improvement resolution, but because that’s what makes me feel alive. And isn’t that what life wants of us, really? To live with this world like we care about it.
Several people have asked how No Trespassing, this book I’m writing, is coming along. It is, it’s coming along, I promise! Many months later than I’d planned, but given that I have a job (for those who don’t know, I work as a copy editor for K-12 textbook publishers) and am the primary caregiver in my household, I should have planned more flexibly. I thought tinkering out this first chapter on land ownership would be straightforward, since it’s what I’ve researched most, but that might be part of the problem. It keeps sprawling, with always another book to read, on top dealing with of a number of personal situations over the last couple months. You know, weeks of scrambling around some half-emergency but also doesn’t everyone want to know just a little more about how much John Locke tailored his philosophy to justify colonial land theft?
I can research forever, it’s a problem.
I’m finally feeling like it’s taken form enough to get back in touch with my generous beta readers about their timelines and availability. The second chapter, on water, was written for my original book proposal, so it should take far less time to get in shape (famous last words). Thank you for your patience and interest in this work! I think it’s important, and I’m grateful that you do, too.
A couple of weeks ago I met someone I’ve revered for years: Lucy, named Dink’inesh in Amharic, meaning “you are marvelous.” Dink’inesh is of the species Australopithecus afarensis, one of Homo sapiens’ many hominin ancestors, and lived approximately 3.2 million years ago. Paleoanthropologist Jerry DeSilva, whom I interviewed about bipedalism for A Walking Life and who invited me to Dartmouth College to talk with students recently, showed me around his lab and there she was—a replica; Lucy herself is safely in Ethiopia, her home—resting on a foam bed sculpted to fit her bones.
It’s hard to describe how thrilling this kind of meeting is for me. I wrote about the feeling in A Walking Life, when Nick Ashton at the British Museum handed me a cast of fossilized footprints found on the Norfolk coast and estimated to be between 800,000 and 900,000 years old; it’s the depth of time that gets me, that immense geological knowing of planetary life.
Thrill is the best word I can think of to describe these encounters. A shiver down the spine, the sense of being in the presence of wonder and mystery, life that puts every one of my own existential worries into the context of time so vast that it’s a miracle we’re even aware of our own existence.
On that same trip, I got to meet up and walk with several people whose conversation and company put those same existential worries into a different kind of context, the one brought by reminders of our interconnections and relationships. The contexts that make human life beautiful and worthwhile for me and remind me what I learned while researching A Walking Life: most people want the best for others. Sometimes it can feel like that “most” barely scrapes 50% of humanity, but it’s there nevertheless. I’ve learned it over and over, probably because I’ve had to learn it over and over. It’s too easy for me to believe the opposite.
I got to meet, in person for the first time ever, two women I’ve been in a writing group with for well over a decade. We were meeting over Google Hangouts once a month long before online gatherings became the norm! To be able to hug them both, walk through Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while we talked, and share food and more hugs, meant more to me than I realized it would. These people have been special to me through half of my writing life and almost my entire parenting life, and I’m grateful, even, for all the hard times we’ve shared together.
Before I met with Jerry DeSilva and his students, field biologist Bryan Pfeiffer, who writes the excellent nature-focused newsletter Chasing Nature, went farther out of his way than he should have so that we could go for a walk together on part of the Appalachian Trail and into an ice-covered hemlock forest, looking for mosses and lichens and talking about writing, books, the trials and tribulations of digital media platforms, and what I could use to take better pictures of Moon if I give up my smartphone (something I’m thinking about). I’ve learned so much about birds, dragonflies, buds, and photography from Bryan’s writing, it’d be hard to describe it all, but it doesn’t come close to hanging out in person for a few hours.
From there I had a fly-through visit with an old friend from graduate school, and then took a bus and then a train to Philadelphia, where JJ Tiziou let me stay at his place so I could participate in his Walk Around Philadelphia, which is in its third year. I was really looking forward to this walk because I love that kind of thing but even more so because writers Thomas Pluck and Chad O live in the region and had told me they signed up for it.
I wrote a whole book about walking, I might have mentioned a few times, and I wholeheartedly believe in its gifts for us as individuals, for our communities, for nature and our sense of belonging in this world. But I feel like I’m always relearning those same lessons. I was looking forward to talking with Chad about his
Scientific Animism work, and meeting Tom and telling him how much I enjoyed his posts about the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and his thriller The Boy from County Hell, which I’d read on the plane (as I said to him, I don’t usually read thrillers because I don’t handle violence well, but I fell for the characters immediately and it made a welcome break from forcing myself through chapters of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism), and when we were all gathered at the meeting spot I met reader Caroline (hi!), who’d come up from Washington, D.C., and whose work in Kazakhstan I still want to know more about.
It was in walking with these people and having these conversations that I remembered all the things I believe about walking, that it connects us to one another and to ourselves, that it reminds us that we’re animals evolved on a living planet, that it makes our interactions richer, that it brings us face to face with a world that our species has been co-evolving with even before Lucy and her people lived what I’m certain were loving, fraught, rich lives on the land that is now called Ethiopia.
Tom has a great post on his newsletter about this walk, which has more and better photos—including a selfie of the two of us—and Chad found me an almost completely faded “No Trespassing” sign that I’d overlooked while wondering if I should crawl through a hole in the fencing.
When A Walking Life was being published, I told the marketing people that I’d wanted to write a book for the “everywalker.” I was tired of reading about philosophers and writers wandering through pristine woods and up remote mountain peaks. This is our world, I’ve said. We have the right to walk it, in all its glory and grit.
Being reminded of these realities matters to me. These connections and relationships matter to me. All of it: walking with old friends I’d never met in person, walking with a friend and colleague in a gorgeous frozen forest, walking with new friends and acquaintances along the sometimes ragged-looking borders of a city beloved (hopefully) by a million and a half people.
I carried Lucy with me that day, walking the border of Philadelphia. In his descriptions of the walk, JJ asks participants to consider borders and boundaries, including within ourselves. Where are our own mental and physical limitations? How do we negotiate decisions, like which half-formed path to take in a woods unknown to any of us, or when to stop at the end of the day?
After miles of walking through woods and on concrete, my left knee let me know how much it disapproved of all this motion. The group tried unsuccessfully to find a place for a cold drink and possibly hot food; Tom and I lingered back, talking and, in my case, wondering when I could give my knee a rest.
When paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson first found Lucy in 1974, he found her left knee crushed beyond repair, destroying a key piece of evidence about her bipedalism.* But her spine, pelvis, and foot bones, along with other evidence from nearby fossils of her species, confirm that she walked upright on two legs. If I remember correctly what Jerry DeSilva has told me, signs in her vertebra also point to the possibility that she lived with pain.
Lucy tells us a tremendous amount about how we came to be what we are. One of the reasons I find the presence of her kind of deep time so thrilling is that these details of evolution tell us just as much about who we are, if we let them. Lucy likely experienced pain, just like I did walking miles around Philadelphia. Did she ever ask her group to slow down, take a break, as I perhaps should have?
Walking with a group, especially when I’m tired or hungry or need a bathroom or am in pain, reminds me of something else I learned when researching walking: the hominin fossil record has many examples of people with various disabilities, whether from injury or birth, being valued and fully equal members of their communities. The weight of scientific evidence points to the reality that we evolved to be interdependent, and to care for one another—a reality innate to our development, not an offshoot of it. The more recent proposition that humans evolved to be individualistic and competitive is contradicted by millions of years of hominin history.
I was more than happy to come back home, catch up on sleep (and a backlog of laundry, homework, and decaying food in the fridge), go for a walk with a couple of close friends and another longer walk by myself, and coddle my aggrieved knee. But getting out and meeting people, slowing down and walking with them instead of corresponding over texts and emails, brought me back to what this is all about, the writing, the walking, the living, the multi-dimensional relating, the negotiating of physical and emotional needs: it’s about one another, and how we manage to live, and walk, together.
We exist. It’s a miracle. Time is vast, our lives are brief. Remember: you are marvelous.
*There is a particular angle the knee develops in upright walking, called a bicondylar angle, a tilt in the femur caused by downward pressure as babies start to walk. Jerry DeSilva wrote about these details, and his work with Lucy and many other hominin fossils, in his excellent bookFirst Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human.
The chickadees have been singing again and it’s time to order seed potatoes and onion starts. The year has barely had time to rub sleep from her eyes, and the frozen peaches are not even dented by my hunger for their winter warmth, and I feel like I just got the potatoes stored away in the paper bags and moderate temperature that seems to have—mostly—succeeded in keeping them edible through the winter.
How can it already be time to think of choosing carrot and lettuce seeds, of where to plant beets and how to make more room for green beans, of the soil’s stirrings and the young yawns of growing things in my garden? It might be months, still, before I can visit the sweetgrass and turn the soil, but it is time, already, in the midst of this winter, to be planning for the next.
I was away most of last week committed to what I’lll broadly call parental duties, long hours of chaperoning, most of which took place in the confines of a hotel my kid and I rarely left. By the time the commitment was done, my body felt stunned from lack of movement. I spent two hours on Monday walking through town and along the river trails, relieved at the sight of water, the freedom to wander, the flurry of chickadee-company, and the surprise of what might be a new construction along the riverbank.
The drive home had been painstakingly slow, through hours of fog that seems to mark most of this winter’s personality. I hadn’t seen Moon at all for what feels like weeks until three nights ago, moonglow through the fog, Her bright self mostly hidden from the skies I live under until the dark, dreamy hours of this morning.
I watched Her there for an hour, remembering what moonfall feels like and ignoring my usual routines. A few hours later, on our way to school, She was cast slight pink in the pre-dawn sunlight that crept out from behind the mountains.
Who else, I wondered, might be watching that alpenglow wrap itself around Moon?
Why put all those words and observations on a page, why share them with you? What is this human urge to story? To shape the narratives we see around us, to call attention to beauty and comprehend grief? Why write?
I’ve seen this question lobbed about since I was old enough to understand the concept of philosophy, if not philosophy itself. What is the compulsion to create? Why do we care so much?
I don’t have any better answers than anyone else. All I know is that I become a grumpy, unpleasant person when I don’t write. It’s a compulsion. It’s joyous and beautiful, to be lost in a narrative, but it’s also demanding and ruthless. Writing left me once for a few months, just flat walked out the door. I had thought that if that ever happened, if I couldn’t create, I would feel bereft. I thought I wouldn’t know myself. But what I felt was free. I kept thinking of all the things I could do with my life now that I weren’t driven to shape them into narrative of some kind.
Writing came back after about three months of that release, as if wandering through the door after an argument: “I just went for a walk. Needed some air.” And there we were again, back in a lifelong need to story, to do whatever it is that happens between my interaction with the world I exist in and the way my mind—or whatever it is—decides those experiences and thoughts should sound, feel, taste.
Writing is very, very weird.
The novelist Elif Shafak wrote recently of a 16-year-old girl in Afghanistan who loved to read, who dreamed of libraries and pizza and of meeting Shafak herself after reading one of her novels, and who was killed by a suicide bomber.
“I am tired of being attacked and stigmatised and labelled by fanatics and zealots and ultranationalists only because I am a writer,” wrote Shafak.
“But when I feel so down and despondent, I think of Marzia and I think of every other aspiring novelist and aspiring poet in the world who were never given even half the chances that were provided to me throughout my life: books, bicycle, pizza, electricity . . . I will never belittle any of these.
I have no doubt that Marzia would have become an amazing storyteller if only she had been encouraged and if only her life had not been brutally taken away from her. I feel like all of us in the writing community owe something deep and precious to all the Marzias on this planet. We owe them a sincere commitment to literature.”
Writing is weird but it’s also necessary and it exists far beyond any arbitrary measures of success and failure. I’ve written before of my stepmother’s great-aunt, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and her life that knew little but hardship and brutal loss, and how throughout it she wrote poetry so meaningful and beloved that to this day there are museums dedicated to her all across the country.
At the end of my life, all I can ask for is that I’ve done the best work possible and used whatever skills and talents I’m fortunate enough to have to create something of beauty and meaning. Maybe one book, one essay, one single line, might reach the one person who really needs it.
“It is as simple and as powerful as that,” wrote Shafak.
“The love of books and libraries and the joy of reading. This is all we need. This is why we keep on writing.”
There’s something more, too: that delight and spark that Marzia knew reading and writing held for her, the world-opening potential of stories that I remember feeling at her age.
I think many of us write because we can’t help it, because it’s a jealous lover or a hunger that can’t be sated or whatever metaphor works for you. When that leaves us, even if it’s only for a while, we still have what’s left: we write for one another. And what a gift that is. Stories can break empires; they can tell our hearts we’re not alone. They make us laugh. They make us grateful to be alive.
It’s been foggy and somewhat rainy for days and days, but today the cold was biting again. I didn’t dress warmly enough and my fingers were numb by the time I dropped off my kid at school.
As I was turning away from the building, blowing on my hands, I saw a cluster of ten-year-olds, their pom-pom hats wobbling as they turned, ignoring the school bell to send frosty breath up toward a bald eagle soaring low overhead.
The crossing guard watched, and me, too, and we smiled at each other, and I held close the gratitude I always feel at the sight, at watching children hold their breath because they see a bald eagle and they know. You pause for such birds. The soul bows. And I hold the knowledge I wish these kids never to have, that my gratitude is weighted with the knowledge that bald eagles were almost extinct when I was growing up.
High on the mountainsides just outside of town, the first light of dawn brushed the snow, the same light that was coaxing alpenglow from Moon. A flurry of snow rose in the light, over three thousand feet above me, and I wondered which of those sunshot flakes will be the first to meet spring’s young strawberries.
I received a surprise care package this week from a friend who knew I’d been going through some difficult personal things recently. Among tea and a kind note were two books of poetry. This poem, titled “Not This,” by Olena Kalytiak Davis, appears in one of them, The World Has Need of You: Poems for Connection, and I keep rereading it, finding something new to catch my thoughts each time.
I used to love crossing borders. When I was young, they smelled of adventure and exploration, of languages I hadn’t learned and could tune my ear to, of foods like a book to be tasted instead of read. I still remember the first time I managed to say “thank you” correctly in a small town in Turkey; and plunging my wrists one summer day under freezing cold fountain water on a hill outside of Budapest, where the heat felt like it might crush me and our friends woke us daily with tiny glasses of espresso and brandy.
To hand my passport over to a border agent once brought a tiny thrill. To a person brought up in a small Montana town where daily rhythms were determined by the train howling nightly as it passed by the Con Agra grain tower and the church bells I sometimes got to pull after Sunday school, borders were to enter a world unknown, a world made large.
Borders haven’t felt like that in a long time. When my spouse and I prepared to move to Australia from Austria, I was 22 years old. We spent exhausting hours at the Australian embassy in Vienna filling out forms and answering questions and submitting to lung X-rays to check for tuberculosis and compiling massive customs forms in two languages for our scant two boxes of belongings. We flew out on my 23rd birthday, which in Australia time had already passed. My spouse had a job in Sydney, which was why we were moving; my first three months in the country were a slog of employment applications and residency requirements and trying to find out how to get a birth control prescription. Living there had its wonderful moments—most of them spent in the ocean—but they were despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them.
I have just spent the last few days in Canada, where some longtime friends and I cross-country skied and cooked for one another. I have lived in proximity to this border, between America and Canada, for almost the whole of my life. The closest crossing to me is an hour’s drive from my home, and I’ve driven over it so many times it’s as familiar as the footbridge I usually take to walk into town. It wasn’t that long ago—only decades, and what is that in geological time? not even a fingernail’s worth—that other friends and I would get the idea to go to Canada at some stupid hour of the night just to jump into a lake we liked visiting. We didn’t need passports back then, and the border guards were mostly bored.
Going to and coming back from Canada last week involved little stress. We presented our passports or passport cards. I as the driver answered questions about alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons in the negative or semi-negative as not all of us are non-smokers. Our carful of white mothers in their forties was waved through easily.
And yet even to me, there was nothing about this interaction that didn’t put me on edge, nothing about it that didn’t remind me of threat, of what can be denied. If not denied to me personally, to plenty of other people who have just as much right to traverse this man-made barrier just as much as I do.
The entire interaction of crossing the border, beginning with the slowdown to the border gates and the scramble of finding passports, and through the questioning that brings up vivid memories of previous border crossings involving full-on stripped-out car searches and quizzes split between me and college boyfriends about what color our toothbrushes were, makes obvious the crushing power of borders. These are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, or wildlife, yet maintain the say of life, death, or the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied—they have the power to strangle our travel, our relationships, our communities, and our work. They impart the conviction that anyone on one side of a border or another has the power to judge, to condemn, to dispense death.
My friends and I were just going cross-country skiing as part of a tradition to celebrate one person’s birthday. What if we’d been fleeing genocide? What if our entire personhood were suddenly made illegal?
My paternal grandparents were Jewish people in the Russian empire, subject to strict rules about religious and cultural practices, limited work opportunities, male children’s compulsory conscription into the military (as young as the age of 9 depending on the tsar), and, like in much of Europe, forbidden from owning land. Not to mention being confined to living in shtetls within the borders of what was called the Pale of Settlement. My immediate family history is defined by who is allowed to live, work, travel, and wander, where.
To show my passport and be waved through a border says everything about the kinds of freedoms I have, and how easily they could be taken.
Borders are psychological, emotional, and physical. I don’t publish fiction because I attended a hyper-competitive MFA program where other students and at least one professor persuaded me I had no talent for fiction. I know this is an idiotic way to let my life be determined, but I haven’t had the time to counteract the effects of the snobbery and need to tear people down that were pervasive in those fiction writing workshops. This is a border I mostly created and maintain myself. I will dismantle it when I have time.
Borders are social and cultural. When I enter a mosque or a Russian Orthodox Church, I cover my hair. When certain people come into my home, I take down and hide the sign above the coffee grinder that reads “Keep Your Fucking Shit Together” because I know it would offend them. I don’t walk through other people’s yards even though I don’t believe that private property boundaries should exist.
My views on the importance of free speech are boundaried by the reality of its lack for the half of my family living in Russia, but also by an understanding that words can cause just as much harm as physical violence, a perspective that puts me strongly at odds with an absolutist view of free speech. (I wrote about my town’s experience with neo-Nazi troll storms, including some of the messages I received personally and what effect it had on me, here. I wouldn’t usually urge people to go read something like that, but in this case, if you haven’t, I actually think it’s important.)
I am, for some masochistic reason, a moderator on my local NextDoor, which is peppered with decisions and behind-the-scenes debates often determined by my own borders about what should be allowed, and what should be removed.
My stepbrother and his family weren’t able to come camping with us this last summer because they are Russian and can’t readily leave a country that’s been waging war on a neighboring one. They can disagree with the war all they want, but the border created by geopolitics doesn’t care what they think, or desire, and it’s illegal for them to say anything about it publicly. These are very different kinds of borders with vastly different consequences. Not all of them require a passport; many of them still require a form of passing, or of shaping oneself to accepted expectations.
One of the books that I’ve learned most from over the past few years is Harsha Walia’s Border & Rule. Since reading it, I’ve watched several of her online presentations and webinars, and am often inspired by her expansive view of what borders are, what they do to us, and how dismantling them requires also dismantling the systems of oppression that they enable, as she wrote about in this interview:
“A no border politics is expansive. It includes the freedom to stay and the freedom to move, meaning that no one should be forcibly displaced from their homes and lands, and that people should have the freedom to move with safety and dignity. Those two freedoms may seem contradictory, but actually they are necessary corollaries. The crux of a no border politics is nestled in the broader politics of home. How do we create a world where we all have a home?”
It’s an answer to something brought up repeatedly in Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall’s book The Prehistory of Private Property. The essence of freedom is contained in the answer to one question: Can you leave?
Can you? Can I? Could I just pick up and walk north until I reach the border and then, like the rivers that run down from Canada full of selenium pollution from coal mining, ignore it? The answer is no, obviously, and it might serve us all to ask more frequently why not.
When I lived in Austria, I had to apply for a meldetzetl, a residency visa for foreigners. To get it, I had to go to a special foreigners’ police station. I had lived in the country for two months and had been taking intensive German lessons for two weeks. I arrived in good time for my appointment, only to find that nobody there spoke English, or in fact any language other than German. At the foreigners’ police station. The officers ridiculed and belittled me in words I barely grasped, and told me to come back with a translator.
I wasn’t a middle-class, middle-aged white woman at the time. I was 22 years old and had used my last speck of savings from waiting tables to pay for a root canal at the dentist. But I was still a white woman in a country that at the time was extremely racist toward anyone not obviously white. I was scared and sad, but had a multi-lingual friend, also a white woman, who worked for the BBC and came back with me to translate and also threaten the police with press exposure if they didn’t follow their own damn rules. I got my residency visa purely because of her.
Within a couple years after the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York City and elsewhere, my spouse and I were stopped about 70 miles from the Canadian border. My spouse, who only applied for U.S. citizenship a few years ago, is English. Our friends who were going hiking with us were also stopped. The wife was American, while the spouse—one of my husband’s oldest friends—was from Northern Ireland. We were taken to an immigration center, sat down with a whole lot of other people, and told in no uncertain terms that the males of our parties, the non-American spouses, could be deported immediately because they weren’t carrying their identification and green card papers.
The border agents were dead serious and it was scary as hell. Close to that time period, a colleague of my spouse’s avoided her own husband’s deportation by moving back to her country of birth—she was Japanese and her spouse was Italian; the renewal of his U.S. residency visa had been denied and for neither of them, suddenly, was it easy to live and work on land where cranberries grow and turkeys roam wild and where they had employment. The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did.
I look back on all of these interactions, and more, like the innumerable run-ins I’ve had with the police in Moscow trying to get a bribe out of me or the stories I’ve heard from a local border patrol agent we used to be friendly with, and see a world laced with borders. Borders that are not, as Harsha Walia wrote, “fixed lines simply demarcating territory. They are productive regimes firmly embedded in global imperialism, and border controls exist far beyond the territorial border itself.”
Coming back from Canada, my friends and I passed several herds of grazing bighorn sheep, and slowed for a flock of pine grosbeaks (I think) reluctant to leave the road. We got through border security easily, drove forward, and then paused to debate if we were allowed to go back and ask the guard about using the bathroom. We were allowed, but sat there for a minute literally asking one another, “Do you think we’re allowed to go back and ask him?” with an undercurrent of uncertainty and fear created on purpose by the psychological architecture of the place.
Borders are physical, social, cultural, and emotional, but what they are most is a form of power. When I hand my passport over, it’s with the knowledge that my freedom to go, to wander this Earth and love it freely, can always be denied.
A world of boundaries and respect, but no borders, could truly be one where traveling smells of freedom, a world that can be read and known through our footsteps, the only true book, one to be experienced rather than read, and whose air shifts like poetry as we traverse every curve of her spine.
These snowghosts! I like to think of them watching over the winter-quiet ranges all the way to Glacier National Park (the peaks of which you can see from here on a clear day) and beyond.
Winter is my most joyful time. It came late this year. We didn’t get significant snow and it was barely what I’d call cold until a little over a week ago, when usually we’d have feet of snow by December, or at least mid-December.
Winter is being driven out of much of our lives. Being aware of the shift in temperatures and the decreasing snow packs and number of snow days breaks my heart; trying to pretend it’s reversible at this point would break my brain. Maybe we find our sharpest, brightest shards of humanity in loving most fiercely what we know will be lost.
Last Sunday I shortened my usual early-morning routines involving coffee, greeting the morning air and sky and ground, writing by candlelight, and some other rituals, and threw my ski gear into the car to meet my sister and father up on the downhill ski hill just outside of town. It had been dumping snow for over twenty-four hours after weeks of winter being just out of reach and, while everywhere was still gray and foggy, my spirits were soaring. The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” blasted too-loud in the car as I joined the line crawling uphill to chase a powder day.
By the time I’d finished making coffee, my phone had already gone off with texts from friends with ideas for the day. “Anyone want to join for a ski around Loon Lake?” “Snowshoeing in Glacier?” “Good day for a bonfire! We’re going to hike up the forest service road and roast brats.”
Not everyone where I live is a winter-lover. By March, many minor exchanges are guaranteed to have a complaint about wishing the snow would stop, or the inversion layers would lift and Sun make an appearance. But aside from difficulties that many have with the near-perpetual gray skies, which can bring on an undeniable depression (not for me but for many people), I’m fortunate to feel surrounded by people who, like me, seem to come alive in winter.
I love the cold and snow of these months, and mourn their passing even while delighting in spring. The long, dark nights are like a blanket to wrap up in. The overcast skies for weeks on end don’t bother me much, though I do find a surge of energy overtakes me that one day in February when Sun comes out, and the three nights I’ve seen Moon in the past month—I’m looking at Her right now!—have brought me pure, intense joy. The beauties of winter, which Freya Rohn portrayed lovingly in poems and photo-poems in The Ariadne Archive, work their fractal way through my imagination and attention like so much flower-frost on an old window. The magic of winter is unparalleled, from the fox tracks my niece and I part-followed on our route to school last week, to the sun halos that burst out every few years on the ski mountain.
Sun halo and sun dogs, from 2021
Nothing makes me believe more in something more about our existence than Nature herself, Earth herself, Moon, Sun, trees, rivers, ice rime on a ponderosa pine, coming across a snow-covered bear den or snowshoe hare tracks when out hunting, a glorious sundog following me all day around a ski mountain—all of it, themselves. No matter where we originated in this world, there have always been forces and delights and entities to remind us that what we call creation or life is always in the process of becoming, and astonishing us. To feel humble before it all, and love for it all, might be our greatest calling.
This weekend has been bitterly, unbelievably cold. I’ve experienced this kind of cold before but not often. Thursday and Friday nights were around -58°F (-50°C) with wind chill, and it was very windy. Saturday morning dawned with -31°F (-35°C) even without the wind, but there was no wind, and with Sun making a rare appearance it was one of the more beautiful days I’d seen in a while.
Frostbite is a real issue, as is hypothermia. So are cabin fever and depression. I take all of it seriously. After spending Friday mostly crawling out of my mind with near-claustrophobic irritability from staying inside, on Saturday I dragged a heavily bundled and face-wrapped kid out for a walk, and then spent an hour by myself sliding around the neighborhood on cross-country skis a friend had lent me for a couple of weeks.
This friend and I had gone cross-country skiing on a nearby lake before the cold front came in. Her dog romping free across the ice and snow, we sh-slshed among silent woods under a rumpled silver sky for a little over an hour, sometimes talking, sometimes just skiing. I haven’t felt that good in a long time, like I was convalescing from a severe illness and was rediscovering what it was like to move my body through the world.
I’ve been meaning to get back into cross-country skiing since moving back to Montana nearly ten years ago, but with kids and work and life in general, haven’t managed much of it. Luckily, most of my close friends are avid cross-country skiers and started getting me out last year. Skiing is one of my favorite things to do, whether downhill or cross-country, but the environmental impact of downhill skiing, which I started doing at the age of two and enjoy more than almost any other activity, has been weighing on me for years. From energy consumption to broken wildlife habitat to the economic inequalities that tend to explode in ski resort towns like mine, it’s a lifelong pleasure whose real-life impacts are impossible to ignore. Even most ski wax contains endocrine-disrupting PFAS chemicals.
Cross-country skiing brings similar joys without nearly the impact (not to mention cost), and is something people have been doing without chairlifts and heavy-duty boots for centuries. Some of my favorite scenes from Sigrid Unset’s trilogy of novels Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th-century Norway, involve Kristin strapping on a pair of skis and heading off into the woods alone.
There are bigger changes to make than giving up downhill skiing, but I’m looking forward to shifting more of that time toward those quieter snow-graced days. For however many years we continue to have snow to treasure, I hope to spend more days sliding quietly across land and water untouched by grooming machines.
Silent lake-skiing under a rumpled sky
Who knows how many true winters my part of the world has. All I know is that I’ll welcome every one of them, every hour toward Solstice added to beloved darkness and starry nights, visible or not, every flake of snow that makes it from the clouds to land on laden spruce trees, every story told in an animal’s tracks, every footstep or glide of skis, every frosty breath and peek of Moon from overcast skies, every ice crystal refracting light to result in a sun halo, every single moment of creation that persists in living and creating despite the worst that humanity tries to throw at it. Every bit of it that reminds me I am an evolved animal capable of living joyously on a planet very much alive, and that I intend to do so.
If you don’t know much about the Doctrine of Discovery and want to learn one thing of true importance this year, I’d make it that. You can start with any one of the resources linked to below, or Mark Charles’s powerful TEDx talk on the doctrine and the false message in “We the people.”
The doctrine is not ancient history. It’s a subtly hidden 500-year-old idea with tremendous and lasting global power. It takes the “I took it; now it’s mine” underpinnings of ownership further to “I saw it; now it’s mine.”
You can also read two of the original papal bulls (translated from Latin) comprising the doctrine for yourself, as well as a translation of Bull Inter Caetera of 1493 with introductory commentary from the Doctrine of Discovery organization:
“The captivity of individualism in the West leads many to reject the possibility of institutions and systems inflicting social harm that requires a social response.” —Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah
Do you ever wonder how land comes to be privately owned? I wonder all the time. It’s the whole reason for this newsletter. I’m interested in other forms of ownership, too, but it’s land ownership that gnaws at me day in and day out. How can you wander at will, let your feet roam, if your path is constricted by roads built to serve cars on one side, and “No Trespassing” or “Private Property” signs backed by laws made to serve landowning classes on the other?
Living in North America in particular, both the sense of entitlement that comes with owning land, or property in general, and the recency of those ownership titles make the question of “How did this land get turned into real estate?” a sharp one. Considering the shape and flavor that predominant American history narratives tend to take, it’s curious that very few people who live on this continent, in this country, have any idea of the answer.
The Doctrine of Discovery, which was articulated and hardened into U.S. law through the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, is not the basis for all private land ownership, which began centuries, if not millennia, earlier. I’m writing No Trespassingbecause I’m interested in that older, deeper question of ownership. But the doctrine has been adapted to enable colonial land theft throughout the world over the past 500 years, and continues to form the basis for injustices related to land and resource rights—putting the desires of an oil pipeline company over the health of a river, for example.
Sarah Augustine, author of The Land Is Not Empty and co-founder of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery, summed up the doctrine as having “legalized the theft of land, labor and resources from Indigenous peoples across the world and systematically denied their human rights” for over five centuries.
The “doctrine of discovery” is a set of papal bulls issued in the 1400s, in which the then-pope gave official Catholic blessing to Portuguese and Spanish monarchs wishing to claim land they’d “discovered,” as well as all of that land’s resources and people. A pope issues a declaration or bull today in the 2000s and much of the world might not notice, but in the late 1400s the Catholic Church in Europe was nearly all powerful. These documents gave express permission for the thefts, oppressions, and genocides that the monarchs of Spain and Portugal were already eager to pursue. Bull Romanus Pontifex, wrote the introducers to the Papal Encyclicals translation,
“is an important example of the Papacy’s claim to spiritual lordship of the whole world and of its role in regulating relations among Christian princes and between Christians and ‘unbelievers’ (‘heathens’ and ‘infidels’). This bull became the basis for Portugal’s later claim to lands in the ‘new world,’ a claim which was countered by Castile and the bull Inter Caetera in 1493.”
The first bull was Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452 on behalf of King Alfonso of Portugal. The second, also for Portugal, was Romanus Pontifex of 1455, granting King Alfonso the right
“to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [the word used for Muslim people at that time] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ . . . and the kingdoms, . . . possessions, and all movable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
In other words, it granted the king of Portugal the right to appropriate all said kingdoms, possessions, etc., that Alfonso’s representatives happened to come across, and convert them to the crown’s own use and profit, including people.
Bull Inter Caetera was issued in 1493, using similar language to grant the monarchs of Spain ownership of around half the world. No matter who was already living in lands they came across, the representatives of Spanish and Portuguese monarchs had official church license to claim them—and the military backing of their respective countries—on behalf of their kings and queens.
It’s vital to understand the Doctrine of Discovery’s impacts—not just the bulls’ contents or their contemporary effects at the time, but the way the doctrine shapes our world today. In the introductory episode of the Mapping the Doctrine of Discoverypodcast (created by Indigenous Values Initiative), the hosts said 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,”
along with the claiming of resources and permission to extract, and carte blanche to commit genocide of and enslavement over any non-Christian peoples, as long as said lands weren’t already “owned” by a Christian prince.
Inter Caetera was issued shortly after Spanish (formerly Aragon and Castile) monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella had funded the heavily indebted merchant Christopher Columbus’s explorative journey across the Atlantic Ocean. By all accounts deeply devout Catholics, Ferdinand and Isabella had only just reclaimed the kingdom of Granada from the Muslim empire, and in 1492 had ordered the expulsion of all Jewish people from Spain following the edict known as the Alhambra Decree. (I recommend Patrick Wyman’s book The Verge for an in-depth and readable history of this time period.) Their rule was a project of brutal conquest and Christianization at almost any cost, a project and brutality Columbus was heavily involved in.
The power granted and emboldened by these documents cannot be overstated. As I said above, land ownership and land theft didn’t start with the doctrine, nor were they limited to Portugal and Spain—the Charter of the Forest pertained to English land enclosures and rights of the English commons starting in the 1200s—but they empowered a hyper-driven and even more violent colonialism through holy decree. With the pope’s bulls in hand, the representatives of Spain and Portugal undoubtedly felt that their god was on their side.
The “Doctrine of Discovery” found its name through references in later centuries’ legal cases—most famously Johnson v. McIntosh, in which Chief Justice John Marshall slipped in “civilized” to equate with “Christian” and wrote that discovery of land was equivalent to ownership of it. For European nations embarking on a project of discovery and conquering, he wrote,
“it was necessary, in order to avoid conflicting settlements and consequent war with each other, to establish a principle which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted, should be regulated as between themselves. This principle was that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. . . .
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.”
“Discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it.” Therein lies the Doctrine of Discovery’s origin story, and that entire passage will break your brain if you think about it too much.
It should break your brain. If you got on a boat tomorrow and sailed around on whatever ocean is closest to you, and came across an inhabited island you’d personally never heard of, you might be able to tell yourself you’d discovered it. If by “discover” you simply mean you saw or observed or found something new to you, by all means, go ahead and say you discovered something.
Does your sight of that land, your “discovery,” go further? Does it give you rights of ownership over the island and its people? Why wouldn’t you say they discovered it first, since they’re living there?
But maybe there’s gold, or timber, or cinnamon trees—something you want to make money off of, which you can only do if you claim the island and everything and everyone on it as yours to control. You have to come up with some reason why you, and not the people already living on the island, have the right to benefit from what it offers. “Discovery” must be mangled to mean something more than it does. It must equate to possession.
So you make a ruling that you’re more “civilized” than the people of the island and therefore your discovery has weight while their being there, their existence on the island, doesn’t. You come up with a doctrine that gives rights of ownership not to the people inhabiting a place but to the most recent person to come across it: you. And you back that ruling with military force.
This precedent is still being used. It was referenced in a U.S. Supreme Court decision denying sovereignty to the Oneida Nation in 2005, which was defended on the basis that invasion and colonialism were part of history—done with, in the past, supposedly—while at the same time referencing a doctrine that continues to do harm through legal opinions like this:
“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.’ . . .
standards of federal Indian law and federal equity practice preclude the Tribe from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold.”
In other words, the “discoverer” of land retains the ownership right to it, no matter who was there first, or whether or not land ownership existed as a system before the “discoverer” landed there, or even how extensively and violently the Oneida Nation’s sovereignty rights had been suppressed over the last 200 years.
That’s a legal opinion not even 20 years old that relies on the idea that “I saw it; now it’s mine” is a justification for ownership but that already being there isn’t. In his TEDx talk on the Doctrine of Discovery, Mark Charles said that it was “quite possibly the most white supremacist Supreme Court decision written in my lifetime. And it was written and delivered by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”
Johnson v.McIntoshstated outright that Native Nations could not own land; only European nations—and after them the United States—could. Part of that 1823 opinion contains the following baffling language:
“It has never been contended that the Indian title amounted to nothing. Their right of possession has never been questioned. The claim of government extends to the complete ultimate title, charged with this right of possession and to the exclusive power of acquiring that right.”
That language is all the more baffling because there is a long history of treaties defining coexistence, and even of land purchase transactions of a kind in some places, during the centuries of European presence in North America before the United States existed. Though it’s not so baffling when you consider that 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.
Legal cases like this one are a reminder that, just because a law exists and can be enforced, doesn’t mean it’s just. If the right of possession had never been questioned, as Marshall claimed, then why was it overthrown simply because a European happened to land on a continent they’d never seen before?
The role of Christianity, and the power of Christian nations, can’t be ignored in the doctrine’s formation. Johnson v. McIntosh didn’t refer directly to the papal bulls giving rights of ownership to discovering Catholic nations, though as legal scholar Peter d’Errico has written, Marshall “was undoubtedly aware of them.” Those bulls never applied to England (which hadn’t been a Catholic country since the 1530s), but England’s rights of ownership were fused with its own Anglican brand of “civilized Christianity.” In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert was granted a charter from the English crown authorizing him to
“discover and take possession of such remote, heathen, and barbarous lands, as were not actually possessed by any Christian prince or people,”
and the Cabots were granted a similar charter in the decades after that.
The first episode of Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery laid 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 Johnsonv.McIntosh 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 the law of the land in U.S. property law. Every law student during their studies is introduced to the Doctrine of Discovery.”
“calls on the Christian Church to address the extinction, enslavement, and extraction done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands,”
and it’s why the authors of Unsettling Truths do the same. Co-author Mark Charles is Navajo and a Christian pastor, both of which are central to his values and worldview.
Last spring I attended a day-long webinar on the international consequences of the Doctrine of Discovery, with presenters from the U.S., Finland, South Africa, India, and New Zealand, among other lands. Steve Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land, showed how almost every current battle in the U.S. between resource extraction and rights of land and ecosystems, such as Standing Rock, can be threaded through legal precedent to end up back at Johnson v. McIntosh.
Former Chairman of the Yakama Nation JoDe Goudy shared the Nation’s statement that
“. . . the religious, racist, genocidal, fabricated doctrine of Christian discovery . . . the legal fiction that Christian Europeans immediately and automatically acquired legally recognized property rights in our lands upon reaching the Americas . . .
This doctrine of domination and dehumanization—Christian discovery—is not welcome within Yakama Territory, and should no longer be tolerated in United States law.”
The doctrine’s effects are vast. Johnson v. McIntosh gave justifying language to anyone in the world who wished to perpetuate the project of colonialism: take the land, claim ownership over it, and profit from the gifts it holds, no matter what the consequences to anyone else.
These documents are important. They’re important historically because of what they set in motion 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 19th- and 20th-century North America, and were then referenced for similar ambitions throughout the world.
And they’re important because their influence still defines relationships of colonialism today. They’re one of the bases for nearly every claim of absolute land ownership or property right—gold or lithium mining in a place where people have relied on a healthy ecosystem for millennia, for example—and are much of the reason that it’s so difficult to defend the rights of life and well-being over the right to extract and profit.
I’m reminded of a recent interview with physician and sometime-activist Gabor Maté, in which he said to his interviewer,
“You know what [the Canadian government] hasn’t apologized for yet? We have not apologized to Indigenous people for taking their lands and their resources and their forests and their rivers and their oceans. Why haven’t they apologized? Because they’re still taking it.”
“I saw it; now it’s mine,” backed by the violence of state power, justified that taking, and with it came sets of values over how land, food, water, and everything else is used, shared (or not), and cared for (or not). The doctrine carries within it a hunger for profit and a near-obsession with the right to wring dry every drop of life itself in the pursuit of wealth. Along with more ancient systems of power and hierarchies, it defines how humans are allowed to survive in and relate with our world. We still live under that rule, and while a few benefit from it, none of us can be protected from its effects in the long run.
When I was 19, I watched my father walk into a meeting room with the Chechen mafia.
My father has run a small coffee roasting business in Moscow, Russia, since 1992—or ran it for 30 years, until Putin invaded Ukraine and also made it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any part in managing a Russian business. Those three decades have had so many wild and surreal stories that I could probably make narrative out of nothing but “running a coffee roasting business in Russia” for the rest of my life. I was there at the beginning, watching my parents and their co-venturists from Montana Coffee Traders rent a building aside the mud-grooved roads behind the Komsomol’skaya train station, where wild dogs roamed and people were always trying to bum papirossi off of me—tiny, harsh cigarettes. I didn’t smoke.
In 1995, I had just finished my first year of college, where I also worked as a barista at a small coffee shop and roaster in St. Paul, Minnesota. The business in Russia was building its first coffee carts: small, mobile espresso stands that they would place in supermarkets around the city. I was there to train some of the employees on how to make lattes, cappuccinos, stiff Americanos—not stiff enough, at first, for all the new customers annoyed that the flavored sugar syrups were non-alcoholic.
The Soviet Union had collapsed shortly after we left the country in 1991, bringing down the Iron Curtain that had kept my father in exile for 17 years and opening up the country to free-market enterprises like this coffee roastery. Oligarchs started claiming the massive profits from state-run enterprises like oil fields and steel factories almost immediately, and the mafia moved in on small businesses shortly thereafter. There was no way to do business in Moscow without dealing with a mafia until years later, when the police figured out their own corruption and bribery mechanisms and took over the mafia’s role.
In the years between when he had to meet regularly with Igor from the Chechen mafia, and when the Moscow police had his phone tapped, my father said something to me that I’ve never forgotten: “How do you do anything as a person of integrity in a corrupt system like this?”
My father’s company has managed to remain solvent throughout decades of social and economic upheaval. It’s stayed small, and still employs many of the people who started there, a small raft of security and honest work in a country where both are scarce. He is also a person of integrity and honesty, whose ethics have been pushed and challenged throughout every single one of those years, into choices that have no right or wrong answers, only a hopeful contemplation of what does the most good.
A flock of what I think were Bohemian waxwings kept me company the entire two hours I spent wandering the Old Highland Cemetery outside of Great Falls.
Last week, after a research trip to meet with the archivist at the historical museum in Great Falls, Montana, I joined my family and some friends at a hot springs for solstice. In both Great Falls and at the hot springs, Moon showed up and I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see Her. Especially driving through the mountains toward Great Falls and the prairie and farmland of eastern Montana, out of the low gray skies that are a near-constant in the winter where I live. I hadn’t seen Her, or the stars, in well over a week. I stopped the car at several points to stand in Her light, a moonlight waterfall. Moonfall.
There was something other-worldly about it, by which I mean this-worldly. The this-world that too much of most of our daily lives washes out and hides from us. The this-world I soak in when I go to forest service cabins or my stepdad’s cabin, far from any electricity, especially electric lighting, where the stars can show their brilliant, miraculous selves.
I was re-watching The Hobbit the other night, and remembered all the nights, so many nights, I’ve spent in my life under unfiltered starlight, alone or with family or friends. I’ve always thrilled to the elves’ love of starlight in those stories, which I think was described more fully in The Silmarillion but which Tauriel’s lines in the movie bring to life so beautifully:
“All light is sacred to the Eldar. But what elves love best is the light of the stars.”
“I’ve always thought it was a cold light, remote and far away,” said Kili.
“It is memory,” Tauriel responded. “Precious and pure. Like your promise.
I have walked there sometimes, beyond the forest and up into the night. I have seen the world fall away, and the white light forever fill the air.”
I have seen the world fall away. That is what happens when I’m out there those nights, walking out or simply looking up when sleep leaves for a time to linger in starlight; and at dawn and twilight when the sun rises and sets as if he has all the time in the world—which he does, far more than this world itself has—and the times I’ve seen Moon come up from behind the mountains, as if She were gathering all of existence in Her light. A world that feels whole, one you can wander without fences or property lines, borders or walls, greed or war.
From the hot springs, I drove my younger kid to the Bison Range instead of going straight home. It’s just far enough from where I live that I hadn’t taken them yet, though I knew they’d love the place. We saw bald eagles on the drive in and out—four in total, very active; it’s always awesome, in the older sense of the word, to see them that close—a cluster of buffalo on a distant hill below the low fog line, and a kestrel taking off from a fence post in front of us.
My kid asked a lot of questions about the land and the bison, questions I couldn’t answer without entangling myself in inadequate language. They know about invasion and theft, and the museum at the Bison Range did a much better job than I could ever hope to of describing the history of that specific land, the buffalo herd, and the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes’ relationship with all of it.
Trying to tell these histories without using the word “own” is difficult, though it’s made easier with someone who already understands the sheer wrongness of ownership, as my kids both do—instinctively, somehow, on their own, having arrived at that belief. Maybe they got it from living in a place where “No Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs are ubiquitous and it’s hard to understand why you can’t just walk where your feet and mind wish to go. Or maybe this is an understanding that is innate to most people, and we have to be taught to think differently. To say, “The federal government used to own the Bison Range and then gave it back to the CSKT” makes absolutely no sense, especially without including the rest of the story, the original theft of all that land, all this land, and more. How can you give back, much less own, what was never rightfully yours in the first place?
The wrongness of it can’t be told enough, or in enough ways, and one of my biggest struggles with the work I’m doing here is finding effective ways to explain, for people who don’t already get it, that wrongness—of ownership itself, and more specifically what it means to take land that all rely on for sustenance and survival, and turn it into private property, into capital. It’s like a rift in reality that many people can perceive but far too many can’t, and I don’t know that we can make much progress in the world until they do.
There’s a display at the museum that shows the effects of the Dawes Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, which forced reservation land into individual private ownership and demanded that any reservation land not subsequently owned by individual Native Americans be open to white settlement. The display shows the erosion of land by mostly white settler private property claims more clearly than anything I’ve ever read. It’s startling every time I look at it, even though I know that history, and even without considering the travesty of justice that “reservations” are to begin with.
There is no owning here, no gentle waves of agricultural settlement that are ubiquitous in U.S. history stories. There is only taking. Like everywhere else in the world where “landed property” is a legally protected value. There is only theft, violence, and the power to defend it. Visiting the Bison Range is a reminder of this, and of what all this land could be again. A world made whole.
Sunrise over the frozen river last March from near the cabin I stay at most often.
Every year there is a Luminaria near where I live, down by the footbridge that rests over the river. It was begun in honor of people I care for deeply and all the others who care for them, and one another, here. It’s about the only part of the Christmas season I enjoy, and I’ve been grateful every year since I moved back that it’s there, keeping connected all the people who comprise the heart of this community, a place and people that most visitors never see.
This year I had heard a rumor that it might be the Luminaria’s last because event permitting has become difficult. After saying hello to whole bunches of my favorite people, faces I couldn’t recognize in the dark but whose friendly gaits and voices were familiar, I handed my kid my phone to take photos of the candlelight glittering off the water and settled in for conversation with the person who’d started this tradition, asking him about the permitting issue.
Considering what has been happening in Substack-world regarding monetized publications by Nazis, this person’s explanation felt almost ironic: in late 2016 and early 2017, my town was terrorized through an online neo-Nazi hate campaign, with people in the Jewish community specifically targeted for death threats, including months of personal phone calls and emails. I don’t really want to go into it more specifically again. I wrote some about it and its effects on me here (trigger warning for anti-Semitism), but, as is the case with her response this week to Substack’s Nazi issue, Anne Helen Petersen’s reporting on what happened, from when she was still at BuzzFeed, remains the best I’ve seen.
The reason that getting a permit for the Luminaria is difficult now is because the city revamped its block party and event permitting process in the wake of the threatened neo-Nazi march at that time. The march never occurred but the threat is ever-present.
Though I was appointed to the Board of Parks late last year, I don’t yet know all the details of how these permits work—we spend a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how to mitigate damage to Depot Park’s grass from the annual Oktoberfest—but am personally very interested in making sure we can keep the Luminaria going.
These gatherings are important. Maybe you have a similar tradition where you are, or one around Solstice, or harvest festivals, or religious or spiritual or ancient practices I know nothing about. Or maybe they exist near you and you’re not aware of them. These traditions create what’s called culture. They bring people into relationship with one another, and into relationship with this-world. The land and water, animals and moonlight.
Like walking, traditions and rituals remind us that we are animals evolved in relationship with this planet, with the life and light that co-create existence.
I was thinking the other morning about my father’s struggles with how to maintain integrity in a corrupt and unjust system, and the struggles that all of us face at one point or another with our ethics, morals, and values, and I remembered something Tyson Yunkaporta, author of Sand Talk, said in an interview once:
“We’re at the beginning of a thousand-year cleanup. What generations to come will need most is good stories, and good cognition.”
Good stories and good cognition. I think about that a lot now, and something
“Are we all also not fireflies, sending coded signals across the continuum of space and time by beaming our light into the quantum of gift we leave behind in our pursuit to build a better world, in pursuit of finding others who can decode the signals, who can see our light?”
Good stories and good cognition are like fireflies, or the lights of the Luminaria, sending signals of understanding and solidarity across the night, their seasonality hinge points as this planet, this-world, makes its annual circumambulation of the sun, whose light makes all of our lives possible.
Not every question has an absolute answer. But we can each of us try to be a firefly, a candle’s small flame, sending our solidarity across space and time. Or at least I can try, try my best to be a light—starlight brought by memory.
My kid took this photo, of the footbridge with its Luminaria lights and their reflection in the river, starlight above. I was very impressed!
I’m going to be republishing some older essays, revised and updated, for the next few weeks, as a kind of field guide to specific commons- and ownership-related subjects that have been covered on my Substack (and copied here) over the last three-plus years. This first essay, “Competence Lost,” is not from On the Commons. It’s from the Winter 2014 issue of the literary journal The Jabberwock Review and has never been published online. I wanted to include it here because, while it’s more of a personal essay, it was also, I think, one of the seeds for the ideas behind this newsletter, No Trespassing, and my first book, A Walking Life.
The snowstorm described in this essay took place in late February 2010, when I was living in barely-upstate New York (Orange County for those who know the area). I’d forgotten how widespread its effects were until I went to look up reports on it, which you can see in the New York Times, CBS Albany, and elsewhere. I forgot to make this comment in the audio version, but it was 3 days before I could get out of the driveway, after a neighbor hitched a ride to his barn a few miles away, drove his front-loader back, and dug everybody out.
Competence Lost
9 a.m.
The tires slipped, eager for the ditch that hugged this steep, curvy section of road. I twiddled the steering wheel, resisted tapping the brake pedal. The car made its way to the flat without heading for either the languid, half-frozen river or the snow-crusted cornfield, and my hand shook as I finally shifted down to first.
“Mommy, mommy, mommy?” The o’s drawn out long, nearing a whine, ma-AWmy. My son watched the snowfall from the back seat.
“Can you sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ for me, honey?” The shakiness had migrated to my voice. We reached the end of our road, pitched at an inconvenient incline where it met the hill of the highway. The stop sign was irrelevant. There was no way I was stopping, not until I pulled up in front of our garage. The bald tires of the station wagon protested every time I steered them anywhere but straight, the road so slippery that brakes had become a danger.
It hadn’t looked that bad from the house, when I’d decided to run out for coffee before the snowstorm started in earnest. If the car slid off the road, I’d never be able to explain that idiotic decision to my husband, safe in Toronto on a business trip.
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” my son sang. The car waggled its rear end along the highway, eeking as slowly as possible. A plow, its blade raised, passed us going the other direction and the driver shook his head at me.
A journey that should have taken fifteen minutes lasted an hour; we never stopped for coffee. I didn’t dare. My heart thumped in time with attempts to move ever slower; I threw silent apologies at the red light in town where I turned right without pausing. When we got home, I wanted nothing more than to drink something warm and alcoholic, and to curl up in bed, reliving the number of times the car should have slid off the road. But there was my three-year-old son, eager to play, and the five-months-along fetus inside me, not allowed booze.
By afternoon the shakiness had begun to disappear, but it refused to leave completely. Growing up in Montana, I’d spun our rusted-out Suburban around empty parking lots to get the feel of driving on ice. I’d rocked and dug countless cars out of snowdrifts. I’d driven through blizzards so thick that daylight had no effect on visibility. Now I was living in upstate New York, where the difference lay not in the texture of the snow but in the advent of motherhood. Doubt had crept in and stayed, invited during that drive by the constant worry of landing in the ditch and injuring the child in the back seat. The snowstorm felt like a live thing, come to haunt me, to lay its cold fingers on my child and strip away my sense of self.
7 p.m.
The snow came down in thick, fat flakes all day long. My son and I built towers with his blocks, ate scrambled eggs, read Goodnight Moon ten times or maybe twenty. I measured the snow line rising against the deck door and wondered if whisky was healthier for the fetus than stress. I finally put my son to bed and drank a hot cup of chamomile tea before bundling up to wrestle with the snowblower. I’d come to hate chamomile tea during my second pregnancy, but with a little honey it was better than plain hot water.
By the time I got the snowblower started and forded the drift outside the garage, the night was already pitch, the darkness made eerie by continuing heavy snowfall. It piled two feet high and was cemented at the bottom with six inches of freezing rain and sleet that had fallen the day before. It usually took me two hours to clear our five-hundred-foot-long driveway, which cut to our house built in a former cornfield. I could barely see the driveway markers in the snowblower’s headlight, and there was nothing I wanted to be doing less right then than wrangling the gas-guzzling machine with its spinning blades down the driveway—nothing, that is, until twenty feet from the door, the blower sheared a pin. Our route to the outside world was closed off.
When I came back inside, the emotional moorings that had been weakening all day finally broke loose. The lights flickered and flickered again, responding to the outages in the main transformer a few miles away, and I started crying, picturing myself trying to keep my son warm before a fading fire while outside the snow kept falling. Dramatic scenarios that would never come to pass but I couldn’t stop impaling myself on. I sat on the couch wrapped in three blankets, checking the power company’s website every few minutes and crying harder every time the lights wavered.
Buried somewhere in my squishy body and unskilled self are the genes of more resourceful ancestors. Growing up, I learned to embroider using my great-grandmother’s thread, pickled cucumbers in another’s massive crock-pot. When I started learning to ride a horse, I inherited a great-aunt’s saddle. It once seemed to me that if I were to time travel and land at my ancestors’ dugout on the Montana prairie, I’d have no problem contributing something to daily life, being useful. I’d haul water and hew wood, cheerfully clear a trail through snowdrifts to the barn.
I no longer think that self exists. Maybe I’d just freak out, and sit by the fireside rocking my babies, waiting for the loneliness and wind to drive me insane.
After the snowblower gave out, I sat inside staring at the gathering whiteness of the yard and surrounding field, steeped in panic, fighting the bone-tiredness that had possessed me my entire second pregnancy. I wanted to reach back to my ancestors and shake them. Where are my lessons, my skills? Why didn’t you leave anything for me? What happens when the apocalyptic post-oil climate-change future finally heads our way? If it all falls apart, how do I keep my children alive?
Those ancestors of mine didn’t leave much record of themselves. Some photos. A solid barn in eastern Montana that is still intact and in use over a hundred years later. No diaries, no precious letters. Sometimes I browse through the sparse journal excerpts of other women from that time period, looking for the winters, the loneliness, the lost babies. Those who mythologize the earlier histories of those lands both erase the violence inherent in every family with a personal history like mine, and romanticize what life would have been like for them. But there was no romance. There was just life, and hard work. A lot of loneliness, a lot of scraping for survival, frozen cattle, locust-riddled wheat crops, sickened children.
These days, city-dwellers and land-seekers looking for a bit of space, a bit of privacy, air to breathe, are searching, often without realizing it, for what those romanticized histories seem to promise. But we haven’t cut the umbilical cord to modern conveniences and the security they offer: electricity (meaning light and warmth), roads (meaning both escape and connection), and supply lines (meaning food and fuel).
All of which, as demonstrated by the storm that stripped away my self-respect, are easily made inaccessible. The storm left in its wake collapsed barns—four of them within a few miles of us, each standing for a hundred years or more, finally sighing to the ground under the weight of that thirty-six hours of wet, constant snow. It left truck engines blown out, and several communities aching for electricity for nearly a week. At times like these our plump houses set on their own, away from other people, planted in former cornfields, take on an unnerving aspect. They come to represent the past rather than the future.
Overnight three feet of snow, a little more, made the car sitting in front of the garage pointless. What I needed to traverse those five hundred feet were snowshoes and I didn’t own any. In fact, right then, I owned little that was useful. The weather was oppressive, there was no shaking it. The storm’s repeated excitement of panic and worry, its irritation as the snow continued to fall in thick, quiet flakes, was torturous. It seemed almost intentional.
Instinct is to gather oneself in, to fold one’s children into one’s arms and bow one’s head over them. Hoping the storm—whatever storm—will pass over us without notice. Despite my grandmother’s pickle crock and an ability to chop firewood, my upbringing was mostly books and escapism and stories and emotional survival. Nobody ever taught me to do anything truly useful except bake snickerdoodles. Everything else is self-taught and it’s not enough, never enough. To be more, to do more, to grab competence by the tail and swallow it, maybe raw, maybe dripping with blood, that’s what we need to survive what might come, or what we might lose. To tell the elements we see them, and respect them, and are not afraid.
10 p.m.
Before I curled up in bed, I turned the heat way up. Just in case. In case it all fell apart and the residual heat was all we had. I filled up pots of water. In case our option was to die of thirst or freeze to death from trying to eat snow. I mapped out a route to drag my son by sled to a friend’s house a couple miles away. In case the driveway wasn’t clear until spring.
All of which, given the facts, were just plain silly. Even if the driveway stayed blocked, there was no thought of starving, or freezing. Not this time. The fridge was plump with produce, the pantry wedged tight with rice, pasta, beans, and oatmeal, and there was half a deer chopped up and packaged sitting in the deep-freeze. If the electricity went out, it was cold enough in the garage to keep most food, and I didn’t need electricity to light our propane-fueled stove. The basement was stocked with enough canned peaches, tomatoes, jam, and salsa to last a month. And the woodpile outside would have kept us warm enough for a solid week, at which point there was plenty of pre-broken hand-me-down furniture to put under the ax. If I could find the ax and remember how to use it.
But I’d become like an old wheat rancher, rigid in my beliefs, with obsolete fears. That night reminded me that I was tethered not only to the fierce, energetic child sleeping upstairs, but to the incubating little person in the womb who did and did not yet exist. A woman at night, pregnant, is reminded constantly by the discomfort of rearranged organs, by the aches in her back, by the pesky insomnia when sleep is needed most, that her body has been pressed into service.
11 p.m.
Just before I turned off the bedroom light, I opened the blinds. There, lining the driveway parallel to ours, were our neighbor’s big, bright lampposts. I’d been making fun of them for the last two years. Like many of the locals, our neighbors moved out there from New Jersey saying they liked “living in the country,” and immediately turned it into a close approximation of suburbia. They dug a pond, put in a phallic fountain, stripped down their field to achieve a four-acre lawn, and then planted iron lampposts all down the driveway leading up to their spotlit house. It was the lamps I found most irritating. “Drowning out the stars,” I said. “So obnoxious.”
That night, I opened the blinds so I could see them as I fell asleep, their electric filaments burning in the snowstorm. Before daybreak, I woke up several times and searched immediately for the lights leading to the road like they were a signal from the rest of the world. Were they still burning? Were we still here? Had it all fallen apart? But there they were, an anchor to the civilization I never learned to live without.
We had fresh snowfall recently, which was sadly washed out by rain for the next several days, but before it went I took a long walk around town to soak it all in. Look at that light! The photo brings out the blues, but in person it was more shades of gray with blue tint, and this light is precisely why gray is my favorite color. The clouds, the river, the flat light on the snow, the rocks in the riverbank. The way a splash of indirect sunlight gives all of it depth.
It’s hard to believe this river was a Superfund site not that long ago, that its waters were siphoned off and temporarily drained to allow a massive cleanup from a century of contamination from the rail yard. A friend of mine says that when her parents were growing up, the river used to catch fire.
I spend a lot of time thinking about that kind of contamination, what property rights allow and what they steal from the rest of life. But just as often, the beauty of this river snags me, pulls me to pause and sit alongside, dangle my feet in her gentle current. When there’s yet another leak from the rail yard that requires quick containment and a warning to people to stay clear of that area, it’s a reminder of how precious it all is, how easily these gifts are used up and discarded. Yet with a change in perception and a clarification of what we value, it’s just as easy to respect and care for them. The more people I listen to, the more it’s clear how many yearn for a reality that reflects those values. They just want to know how to get there.
For the next few weeks, I’m going to be republishing some older essays. There are many more people subscribing than when I started this newsletter over three years ago, and I wanted to share revised and updated essays that directly speak to what this whole project is about: ownership, private property, the commons, and the book I’m working on. These essays will go out as emails and comments won’t be enabled, but you’re always welcome to email me. I’ll try to continue adding an audio version to each post.
So far I’ve chosen essays from 2020 and 2021 on the East India Company and the dangers of corporate monopoly combined with state military power, the Doctrine of Discovery, an essay on loneliness that feels somehow timely again, and one on dirt, soil, and commodification. Anyone who’s been reading a while, if there’s one that stuck in your mind, feel free to make a recommendation.
I’m going to start with an essay that was in the winter 2014 issue of the small literary journal The Jabberwock Review. It’s never been published online. It’s a personal essay about a snowstorm in 2010 that brought home my own dependence on fossil fuels and roads, and was probably what got me started thinking about both car-dependence, and therefore walking, and private property.
Last week I attended a webinar recommended by subscriber Chad, who writes the newsletter Scientific Animism. It was given by designer David Dylan Thomas and was titled “No, Seriously, F*ck Engagement: Building a More Human Web.” It was billed as being for designers, which I am not, but it was really about capitalism, the insanity and injustices of the systems we live under and the stories that perpetuate them, and what people can do within their own work to forward a more humane world. It was uplifting, challenging, refreshing, and left me with more tangible optimism than I’ve had since attending the Reclaiming the Commons conference last summer.
Thomas ended with some advice about identifying our own values as well as identifying and challenging our assumptions—which reminded me of what one of my mentors told me over a long phone call after I got my first book contract: identify your biggest assumption (about walking in my case) and push at it from every direction you can think of.
Thomas went one step further from that, and I want to leave you for now with his words, one of the more solid pieces of advice I’ve heard in a long time:
“Co-imagine the future with the people hurt by the present.”
I imagine each of us walks with that idea very differently. What do those words mean in your own life?
May you and the weather find peace with each other, wherever you are.
A Walking Life starts with what mainstream news sources call a “refugee crisis.” I don’t like that term any more than I like the term “migrant”—I love the richness that words hold, the worlds they carry, but their ability to flatten is equally powerful. These are shorthands that limit how we think about one another: a crisis of refugees, or a crisis for people who’d been forced to become refugees?
The story was one that dominated news headlines in 2015: people fleeing war in Syria, on foot, stuck for a time in Hungary before being allowed to cross the Austrian border and on into Germany. Vienna, Austria-based BBC reporter Bethany Bell, an old friend of mine, was reporting from the border, where she sent me pictures of the piles of abandoned shoes “worn-out and inadequate to the monumental task they were being given,” I wrote. “In between interviewing refugees, Bell took pictures of bedraggled shoes and a prosthetic leg abandoned on the pavement. Another pile of donated shoes waited to be put to use.” In her interviews, she found an unexpected sense of hope, and, she told me,
“‘for me there was something deeply human in it. For all the things we create for ourselves, the homes we build, the lives, sometimes you just have to walk away.’
Walking is both our first step and last resort when fleeing war or persecution. A refugee doesn’t have the luxury of restraining his step with respect to political margins.”
Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin wrote recently about the line a lot of us living in . . . let’s say “politically challenging” places hear on a regular basis: why don’t you just leave? Which not only, as she points out, ignores financial and other constraints, but also, as she also points out, ignores the reality that harmful or violent politics don’t stop at borders.
The spectrum of who flees, who’s forced out, who’s being put at grave risk by staying, and who stays to fight no matter what the cost, is vast. It’s determined by factors that accumulate and pull on one another and is, in the end, beyond anyone else’s individual judgment. Not everyone can leave. Not everyone is allowed to stay.
All I can personally say is that the story of whether or not one leaves a home, and how, and what level of choice is or is not involved, is the story of humanity. It is in this particular story that my writing about walking and my interest in private property intersect most profoundly, and in ways that often surprise me.
A couple of weeks ago I came across an article some of you might have seen, about a database compiled by The Atlantic of the books used to train generative-AI systems. I figured my book had to have been used, along with the 20 years’ or so worth of writing I have online, since last winter my spouse put my name into ChatGPT and said, “Look! It can write an essay in your style!” (This conversation did not go well, though I think we eventually got to the point of me being able to explain why the last thing in the world I want is a machine to do my writing for me, especially one that’s stolen my work to do so.)
Sure enough, A Walking Life is in the database. It winded me a bit to see it verified.
To be clear, the copyright issue is the least of my concerns. If you want to go to a local library and photocopy every page of A Walking Life and pass it around to people who want to read it, I’d actually be thrilled. That is, after all, how my father and his family read Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, though photocopiers were highly controlled and only in government offices and a bureaucrat risked his life to get those stories out into regular people’s hands. The more copies of my book are purchased, in whatever form, the happier (theoretically) my publisher is and the better chance I have of selling them or someone else on another one, but it’s far more important to me that people read it than that those reads show up in the graph provided for me in my publisher’s author portal.
It’s a completely different thing to have a multi-billion or -jillion or whatever-dollar company steal my work and then use it to both make more profit for itself, and to put other writers and artists out of work.
It’s also impossible to disentangle complaints about AI and other digital tech from the long history of technology being used to deliver more profits to a few, steal masses of people’s labor, and provide lower-quality services and products to people paying for them, along with building unjust and destructive structures that humanity and the rest of life simply have to live with going forward as best we can. Roads, highways, and automobiles are the examples I usually bring up but there are plenty of others. In A Walking Life I wrote about the Luddites, who are usually characterized as anti-technology but weren’t that at all. What they objected to was being forced out of their jobs—with no compensation or safety net—by machine adoption that made more money for the factory owner while also producing shoddier products.
It’s not about whether technology exists or not. It’s about how it’s used, its effects on people and ecosystems—the energy and water consumption of AI and data centers is absolutely staggering—and whether its role in the world is to contribute to life’s well-being or make it worse.
“The planning structure always fits well into the needs of the powerful,” said physicist and technology philosopher Ursula Franklin in a series of 80s-era lectures (undying gratitude to Jake for sending them to me; they’re amazing). “It rarely fits well into the needs of the powerless, and that is where the struggle sits.”
She gave that lecture long before talks of artificial intelligence became rampant, but whether we’re talking about AI, highway systems, railways, or the mills and machines that powered the Industrial Revolution, her questions hit home:
“Do people matter, or are people in the way? The technology will come once we make the decision whether indeed people matter or whether they are just in the way, and you design more and more stuff to make more and more people unnecessary, unneeded, and redundant. Don’t ask what benefits. Ask whose benefits, whose costs.”
The theft of my book, which took years of research and writing to produce, hasn’t done anything to improve my life, and I doubt it has anyone else’s, but it’s certainly contributed to someone acquiring just that bit more wealth, which can then be used, as wealth always has been, to tip the scales of injustice a little bit more in their favor. My cost, their benefit. That is what enclosure is, both historically and currently: taking that which was in use by all or already belonging to someone in one form or another, and making it your own for the purposes of private profit.
Neither I nor any other writer or artist has been given a choice in the matter, nor can we disentangle ourselves from the systems we’re being frog-marched into, not unless we give up creating entirely. And I can’t think of a single writer I know who would even consider that. We create because we can’t help it, because it brings us joy, because to not do so would be to flee one of the things that makes us feel most alive.
“There is no reason,” I wrote in A Walking Life,
“why our online lives can’t be used as a tool to enrich our restored communities, no reason why we can’t recover from the flu with some good friends bringing us soup and others bolstering our spirits through Instagram.”
Which, in my feverish and brain-fogged state when I came down with Covid last week—a week after getting a third booster shot!—I was delighted to notice was exactly what happened: A friend came by and left a jar of soup and some leftover huckleberry galette by my door. My brother-in-law offered to drop off more turkey broth. Another friend brought me groceries on her way home from work at the rail yard and included a bar of nice chocolate she knows I like.
And then a friend online, whose newsletter Berkana is one of the most beautiful and thoughtful on Substack, sent me a short video of someone making turmeric chai that was so soothing to listen to and watch I let it loop several times before realizing it was something I could actually do (the brain fog of this virus is very, very real for me). So I made some and drank it and did so again in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, and you know what? I felt better the next day!
A Walking Life is about a lot of things, but at its core it’s about being fully alive beings on a fully alive planet. Walking leads us into every one of these subjects because walking is how we evolved. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it’s what makes us human. And it’s what can shine a light most clearly on the barriers that have been placed to prevent our full exploration of that humanity.
The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has filed a class-action lawsuit against several of the companies who’ve used published books to train AI. I gather some of the basis for the complaint is that the content was scraped from a site of pirated works. I’m curious where the lawsuit will lead, though it’s currently only for fiction and I’m not going to get too hung up on its potential. For nonfiction writers and others not immediately affected by the lawsuit but whose work is in the database, the Guild encourages us to write letters to the companies involved and provides a form for that purpose.
Which honestly made me laugh. I appreciate the thought but have better things to do with my day than beg any one of these enormously wealthy and powerful people to please not steal my work to make themselves richer. I can spend that time making more turmeric chai, for example. Or sewing up the hole in my kid’s blanket. Or writing a letter to my county commissioners about their gutting of the county library system, which I doubt they’ll care about but at least they’ll read (maybe). Or I could go for a walk.
These huge, systemic problems can’t be solved by piecemeal approaches, and in any case my focus is on the deeper structures that make the harms possible. Technology has been used both to improve human and non-human life for millennia, and it has been used to control and destroy it far more often. It depends on who benefits, who pays the costs, and who decides.
Perhaps most damaging of all, it’s been used to determine what we think we can imagine: a way of being in the world and living together that’s not determined by the control, power, and ownership of a very few. A world where food, shelter, health, soul-fulfillment, relationships, and even the joyful gifts of creativity are not dependent on tricking us into thinking we can only succeed in competition with one another.
I want us to unburden ourselves at the very least of restrictions around what we conceive as possible, and to contemplate a world where leaving means to wander freely, rather than being forced to flee—whether on foot or in the worlds of our own imaginations.
Someone’s been updating the No Trespassing signs on the fencing around the rail yard in town.
Antonia Malchik 