I recently came across a news story about the community of Lake Tahoe, California—a place known as a ski resort, as my town in Montana is also known but, also like my town, a place where thousands of people live full-time. People who keep the community running, whose taxes and labor pay for the infrastructure necessary to make ski vacations and second homeownership possible; and who, like the majority of humans, struggle to survive.

The company that provides Tahoe’s nearly 50,000 full-time residents with electric power has informed them that they will have to find another electricity source within a year. NV Energy, the electricity distributor, told Liberty Utilities, the electric company serving the Tahoe community, that it needs to divert all of Tahoe’s previous capacity to power AI data centers.

This isn’t really a new situation, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. The details, which I recommend reading the original reporting for, are tangled in a complex knot of jurisdiction and state law—NV Energy is located in Nevada, while Tahoe is in California. The legalities of cross-state electricity production and consumption in the U.S. depend on federal regulations from FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), as well as each state’s laws and regulatory oversight from that state’s Public Service Commission. In Montana, where I live, three PSC members are elected to well-paid, powerful positions, all of which are currently held by zealous anti-regulationists; other states vary on PSC positions being appointed or elected, and their power over ordinary people’s lives through regulatory oversight of utilities—or lack thereof—is often overlooked.

Like most of the commons we rely on, electricity is being treated not as a public good, a technology necessary to living in this modern world, but as a resource ripe for further privatization and enclosure. It’s treated as a property right that can be taken from those with less power (pun unavoidable) and given to those with more.

There’s a line I’ve often heard among environmental and conservation groups: “private property is bedrock.” Local and regional resistance to conservation is more likely when private property rights are perceived as threatened, so private property is a third rail that environmental advocates rarely touch.

This concept was evident in a 2025 court case that came before the U.S. 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding what are known as “corner crossings”—the practice of stepping over (but not physically touching) intersecting corners of private land in order to access public land. Without corner crossings, private property owners can, in effect, privatize public land by denying access. The case originated in Wyoming, and the 10^th Circuit found that that corner crossing was legal; the practice remains illegal elsewhere, like in Montana.

In the decision, the judges referenced a previous 2021 case in finding first that

“protection of private property is indispensible to the promotion of individual freedom,”

which in turn referenced an even earlier 2017 case that came to the U.S. Supreme Court out of Wisconsin:

“Property rights are necessary to preserve freedom, for property ownership empowers persons to shape and to plan their own destiny in a world where governments are always eager to do so for them.”

In the 49-page decision, the judges waded into the U.S.’s own laws against enclosure (or “inclosure”) of public land, passed in 1885 to “‘prevent the absorption and ownership of vast tracts of our public domain’ by the cattle barons.”

Though that Wyoming case was a win for public lands and public access, it’s clear that the judges first made an effort to solidify the “private property is bedrock” notion—avoiding, or attempting to avoid, the third rail of private property rights.

In America, private property is akin to religion. You do not touch private property, we’re told. To do so is anathema—property ownership is the bedrock of American individualism, and innovation, and freedom.

The truth is almost exactly the opposite. America was built on stolen people, stolen labor, and stolen land. The taking of property—the creation of property—through violence and dishonored treaties was exactly what created this country. And once you accept that that taking, that theft, was justified or at least irreversible—once you accept that the creation of private property in land, water, and other forms of life and necessities is an immovable foundation of a society and nation—then by that same logic you must accept that nothing is in fact so insecure as private property ownership.

That is, if the original theft is accepted, if it’s left standing, then any subsequent theft is just as easily justified.

Once you’ve created an idea, a value, a story, that acts like bedrock in the imagination, it becomes almost impossible to fight against. Any land or right can be taken for any reason. The person or entity—a corporation, for example—doing the taking need only have more money or more power, and the two often go hand in hand.

Take the following examples of private property’s fragility, just two from my piles of research:

• Residents of New London, Connecticut, lost their homes when the city took their properties, via the government’s power of eminent domain, to sell to a private developer. The 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case (Kelo v. New London) expanded the power of eminent domain “for public use” to essentially cover any kind of economic development, even if the public couldn’t access those benefits. The homes were bulldozed for shopping, a hotel, and luxury condos—high-end development that was in fact never completed.

• In 2016, a family of Maple tree farmers lost 558 trees on their land when crews working for a natural gas pipeline company, arriving with the protection of armed federal marshals, cut down the trees to make way for a gas pipeline. The natural gas company had won a court case in 2015 to take the family’s land via eminent domain. (The pipeline was never built, and in 2020 the family won a court case regranting them ownership of the land. They were planning on replanting trees to replace those lost.)

Societies structured similarly to the United States are forced into an odd juxtaposition: on the one hand, ownership of property is almost our only security—just ask anyone whose rental apartment building was bought by an investment company and their rent doubled or more—and on the other, relying on ownership as the basis of security is ridiculously tenuous.

Private property rights are less “bedrock” than a narrow, sometimes maintained and sometimes neglected, path on a steep, shale-covered mountainside. The kind of trail I’ve hiked countless times, knees quivering at the thought of a single slip, a single step out of place that can send me and half the hillside heaving uncontrollably downhill.

Traversing the terrain of life under a private property regime without understanding how fissile these rights are is like walking that path in fog. I’ve done that, too, and in snowstorms and heavy rain. It’s terrifying, not knowing where your steps are landing, what might send you and all you hold dear into the abyss.

Another recent story came out of the U.S. state of Georgia, where over the last year a Blackstone-owned AI data center drew 29 million gallons of water from the local utility without permission, and without paying for it. When the usage was revealed—only through a local resident’s government records request—the water company collected back pay from the data center but there was no fine, no accountability, and no reconsideration of how local water is used, and by whom.

Instead, the water company said, “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It’s called customer service.”

I live in an area served by a small cooperative electricity company, which sounds fairly secure until you find out that most of its power comes from the massive Bonneville Power Administration and its many hydropower dams all through the Columbia River Basin, starting in Canada. Some of those dams were powering data centers and damaging salmon habitat long before AI was more than a pipe dream—all those photos in the cloud, all the emails from online retailers, all those GoPro videos that seem necessary every time someone bikes a trail or skis a line. All these Substack essays. I have little confidence that Bonneville would choose local communities’ electricity needs over corporate-backed AI data centers.

It’s not even about the kind of money that corporations have to wield influence over policy; the people who cover these stories have also noted that individual rate payers are stuck paying for the needed infrastructure upgrades and expansion for years to come, even if they don’t benefit from it. I’ve seen it happen with our regional natural gas company’s insistence on buying a struggling coal-fired power plant and recouping that cost from their customers over the next few decades.

This is what power and wealth grant, whether they come from individual people or corporations: the right to take from others who have no real recourse. That was true when wealthy landowners privatized the commons—that is, stole them from the people—for private profit in 15^th-century England; when the East India Company and the British Crown stole generations of wealth and resources from India from the 1600s until 1947 (read ’s incredible writing on Britain’s wealth extraction from India); when the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan conquered, controlled, and extracted so much wealth from other regions in the 12^th–13^th centuries, including areas of China, Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan, that from my understanding Genghis Khan remains, corrected for today’s values, the wealthiest individual in history.

I could list examples all day, many of them within an hour’s drive of where I live. I’m sure everyone reading this can think of any number of similar examples within seconds.

During a conference I attended a couple years ago on the Doctrine of Discovery, Steven T. Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land and co-producer of a documentary on the Doctrine of Discovery, said that private property rights do not in fact grant ownership. What they do is grant a right of domination: “Property isn’t a right of possession,” he said, “it’s a right of domination.” If you “own” land, you have the right to extract from it, abuse it, forbid other humans from stepping on it, or even care for it if you wish. You could stop treating land as “it” and instead treat land as kin. But there’s no requirement that you do so.

And if someone more powerful comes along who wants to dominate that land in a different way, the bedrock contained in the idea of private property allows them to do so.

The same is true of water, electricity, seeds, air, trees, rare earth minerals; knowledge, imagination, your mind, your relationships. The law as it currently stands does not protect life. It doesn’t even truly protect rights. It protects property. And the transformation of property into power compounds over time.

The reality we live in is, in fact, exactly the kind of economy that Adam Smith, the famous advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and author of The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), warned against: one controlled by monopolists and rentiers, in which those who already own extract their wealth from everyone else.

The only way to shift this reality is to build a world around the collective good—of people, but also of wildlife and wild waters, of Tamarack trees and Mountain Chickadees, of starry nights and air you can breathe, of mountains as sacred and oceans as sovereign. And of histories that deserve sunlight and reparations.

Some places are beginning to enact those values in real time. In the state of Oregon, the Public Service Commission just passed a rule that forces data centers to pay for any needed infrastructure upgrades, rather than passing that cost on to individual ratepayers. In Idaho, the state legislature is moving on legislation that restricts data centers’ use of water. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) has been working on community-controlled electricity for over 50 years, and their work expands to all kinds of community power. In countries all over the world, people are pushing back against the rights of data centers’ owners to extract water and electricity and land and make the rest of us pay for it.

Ownership will never guarantee rights, much less safety. Security lies not in pride and what we can own individually—not in our ability to dominate—but in humility and in what we can care for and manage together.

Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute. Receipts of revenue return can be found here.

All wild waters have a different flavor. The North Fork of the Flathead River, the river near the off-grid cabin I stay at most often, is wide, and fast enough I wouldn’t risk trying to swim across it. Its headwaters are in Canada, and it has so far been saved from toxic selenium levels by an international agreement that turned its sister rivers, the Elk and then Fording Rivers, into a sacrifice zone for the waste of mountaintop removal coal mining in British Columbia.

The saved river tastes of snow and rock, a little pine and something of the young otters I once watched playing in the rapids just off the opposite bank. The uncanny warmth of ice.

A little-visited creek on the other side of the mountains where I search for caddisfly casings in late summer tastes of dirt, like fresh-planted geraniums, and the fireweed and kinnikinnick where its waters gather high up in the eastern portion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Caddisflies, like many macroinvertebrates, are a sign of a water’s health. They need water that runs, chortling and burbling along rocks and moss, well-aerated and low in pollution. Caddisfly larvae build tiny, nearly perfectly cylindrical casings out of various materials, usually gravel. They’re hard to spot, bits of washed-bright gravel clinging to similarly colored rocks under rushing water.

I fell in love with caddisflies during my son’s fifth-grade field trip to a local wetland, less than 10 years ago. Although I grew up fishing Montana’s waters, and my mother is an expert fly fisherman, the kind of fishing I did involved worms rather than flies, and I was never taught much about the waters themselves, much less the tiny creatures that make up their vast ecosystems. I’d never seen a caddisfly before that hot spring day with my son’s class, learning about rescue birds of prey and macroinvertebrates at a hidden wetland sanctuary in the shadow of the ski mountain on the edge of town.

Caddisflies fascinate me. Miniscule creatures! Maneuvering miniscule bits of rock to form perfect little temporary homes! What more does one need to be awed by creation?

Learning about them and other macroinvertebrates from scientists near where I live, I learned about rivers, too—the level of cleanliness they need for health, the way their ecosystems spread underground, far beyond the borders of their visible shores.

Architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha wrote a book I haven’t yet read called The Invention of Rivers. He wrote in the book’s introduction, of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns, that they were not just empire building projects, but “more fundamentally and necessarily to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.”

I bought the book after hearing an interview with Cunha, floored by his obvious but revolutionary argument that of course rivers don’t have solid boundaries. How could they? Maps of rivers’ flow, length, shape, and course are deceptive. Rivers are living, breathing creatures. Expecting one to adhere to a mapped route is like expecting a toddler to fall in line with your expectations of behavior just because you read a seemingly smart book about parenting your spirited child.

I was recently able to turn back to No Trespassing, the book I’ve been promising readers here for far too long, and came across a passage in Chapter 2—the chapter on water—that I ended up repurposing in an essay for the “Air” volume of The Center for Humans & Nature’s Elementals anthology:

“Trespass is fluid. It’s a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more physical than simply breaking through somebody’s property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the nature preserve on the other side I might annoy them, but if my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same. This form of trespass, though, is exactly what the law currently allows.”

In the published essay, this passage is about what is carried through the air and into all living beings, contrasted with barbed wire fencing and No Trespassing signs that keep our physical bodies from wandering.

In the unpublished chapter, though, it follows a section I wrote about Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case involving decades of pollution from a mining company layered in the soil of Anaconda, Montana. The court’s opinion leaned on lack of jurisdiction, but Gorsuch’s dissent went straight to the issues residing deeper within legal history: the plaintiffs’ arguments, he wrote, relied on “ancient common law causes of action like nuisance and trespass.”

The majority decision, he wrote,

“strips away ancient common law rights from innocent landowners and forces them to suffer toxic waste in their backyards, playgrounds, and farms.”

This wasn’t what the law was written to do, Gorsuch claimed, “it was what it was written to prevent.”

(For my American readers: Gorsuch, right? I know. He can surprise, as in he did in McGirt v. Oklahoma.)

The most commented on essay I have ever published here was about borders, particularly the violence that borders perpetuate by their very existence. The most read essay remains one I wrote about my Russian-Jewish grandparents in the Soviet Union, of their time during dictator Josef Stalin’s violent political purges, which killed millions. It’s an essay about moral codes that might not defeat the face of evil, but will withstand the wreckage of history. The second most read essay is about an early American court case involving a fox, a hunter, and a landowner, and provokes the question of ownership contrasted with a right to exist.

The commons, I believe, is all of this and more. It is all that is shared, cared for, carefully managed and husbanded. Enclosures of the commons sought to wall in land’s abundance for a privileged few. For nearly 800 years those enclosures were fought by commoners in England and elsewhere, often in bloody battles that killed thousands. Those people knew what was at stake when the commons were stolen. Their thriving, livelihoods, and even survival were trespassed against. And so they trespassed back—against unjust laws, in defense of life and freedom.

I firmly believe that just about everything imaginable and unimaginable is connected to a commons—air, water, ideas, food, soil, stories. Survival. Thriving. Liberty. A person’s right to determine their own identity. But I am aware that my writing here strays in and out of a strict scholarship definition of the commons as a subject. Because of that, the title of this newsletter has been bugging me for a while. The concept of trespass is more fitting for what happens in this space. It is, after all, what sparked rebellions against theft of the commons in the first place. Who gets to define what is trespass, and what is law?

The answer, as is always true of hardened borders and hardened ideas: they are defined by those in power.

A river embodies trespass. It refuses to remain where it’s told. It lives not simply according to its needs, but also the needs of all the beings that rely on its unique ecology. When circumstances demand that a river change its borders, it does not hesitate, even when human expectations have relied on it staying put. A river can be dammed, drained, poisoned, siphoned off for agriculture or hydro-fracking for fossil fuels, built against so heavily that its banks erode, but it cannot, in the end, be conquered. In whatever form, its waters refuse to stop living.

Like wild waters, every form of trespass in every fold of Earth has its own flavor, its own unique ecology. Trespassing, really, is what this newsletter is about.

I am writing this at a cabin near a lake where my family used to camp regularly when I was growing up. I have many memories of this place. Most of them are not great—my childhood was defined by fear, violence, and poverty—but the ones that involve the water itself feel so lively, so embedded as small sparks of joy, that by now, in my fourth year staying here alone as an adult, I feel welcome.

This lake knows me. And I her—the pounding falls at the far end, pouring out of the western half of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the mountains still covered in snow at the end of April. The Loon that called this morning (stupid Canadian wolf-bird for you fellow Heated Rivalry fans; shout-out to my younger sister for getting me hooked on that show), the Eagle that soared for hours yesterday, the Red-breasted Nuthatch I spent some time watching clear out a nest cavity, and the Ruby-crowned Kinglets who will not shut up.

The Grizzly Bear whose very fresh, very large pawprint on the trail turned me right around a couple years ago. The memories of my sisters and me jumping from the rope swing you could only, in those days, reach by canoe. The laughter of children and murmurs of lovers echoing across the water for hundreds of generations before colonialism sought to dominate these places.

Caddisfly casings, like rivers, aren’t built like nuclear bunkers. If you watch them for long enough, you can see the insects crawl partway out the end now and then, gather more material and wiggle back inside. Their boundaries are fluid, like water. Like life.

Waters trespass against the demands of a world that asks too much, gives too little, and yet somehow is still granted so much life, so much abundance, that nature’s generosity is almost a trespass itself. Against capitalism’s need for scarcity. Against the desire of a few to own everything. And against our own fear that we’ll never survive it all.

Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute. Receipts of revenue return can be found here.

Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a person walked along the muddy residue of a lake that today is so long gone it might be found only in myth. And maybe not even there—the oldest known story of humankind reaches back only 100,000 years.

Whoever walked those shores, whoever it was who pressed their toes in the mud of an area that has recently been called Alathar, left a ghost of their own life behind: seven of their footprints were fossilized and remained long after the land turned to desert and became known as Saudi Arabia. Left alone, the fossilized footprints could remain long after even the memory of that country—of all the nation-states we know now—disappears.

In my book A Walking Life, I wrote about another set of fossilized footprints, left by another species of hominin (likely Homo antecessor) between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago, on the coast of what is now Norfolk in England. Those footprints included children—an indication that the people were living in that relatively inhospitable climate, not just a group passing through in search of food.

In reports of findings like these, timeframes are given casually: “between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago”; “between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago.” In the case of Dink’inesh’s people—Australopithecus afarensis, of which Dink’inesh, popularly known as “Lucy,” was one—it’s 3.2 million years ago, such a vast reach of time it’s usually not even given a range.

Can you imagine how many lives, worlds, stories, are folded into even one decade of those hundred thousand- or million-year time ranges? Eyes reflecting the starscape and watching every rise of Sun, following the phases of Moon, ears tuned to the rustle and brush of trees, feet wandering in search of food or some other urge of the heart or mind familiar to us, leaving a ghost of story on the shores of Alathar.

Lingering on the life of just one person in that vast stretch of years can make time feel infinite. It often makes me wonder: How have we survived this long?

The first year or two of Covid have come up in conversation frequently over the last several months. Quiet, muttered exchanges with women I meet briefly or barely know, mentioning how Covid broke them. Mothers especially, and people working in the health care industry, anyone with a disability or long-term illness, caregivers, and many working in the service industry. It has always stuck in my head that, at least for the first year of the pandemic, the cohort with the highest death rate were line cooks. When I think of my own years dishwashing, prep cooking, and waiting tables to make ends meet, and the chronic exhaustion and lack of health care access combined with poor ventilation and the heat and steam of a commercial kitchen, it makes sense.

When I’m in conversation with other mothers in particular, all I can say in response is that Covid broke me, too.

Six years ago, the world shut down. That’s what we say. Though heaven forbid anyone in a caring or serving profession shut down.

Six years ago, the world shut down. But during that shutting down, much of the world re-enlivened, like the water and air overstressed by billions of people dependent on fossil fuels.

And for a brief time, care and mutual aid were considered governmental priorities. For a brief time, before such community and public-minded thinking was considered too risky to economic growth.

Even before governments large and small ditched that modicum of responsibility, the amount of effort required simply to hold a family together was crushing. And afterward? The only comparison I can think of is the final book of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which a weapon called Dual-Vector Foil is deployed, curving spacetime to flatten entire solar systems and all the life within them from three dimensions into two. My life felt like that, crushed under immense gravity and flattened beyond repair.

Six years we’ve been living not only with the virus and its continuing risk, but also with that whisper of a promise—what a society could be if care, kinship, and an ethos of community were our priorities.

Despite persistent Long Covid effects in many aspects of my own health, the beginning of that six years feels like a lifetime ago.

Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a hominin person walking along the shores of a lake was having their own six years. In that timespan, hundreds of generations of peoples had six years that to us, to now, feels so inconsequential that we mention 9,000 years as if it’s nothing. A brief period. One in which entire civilizations could rise and fall and be forgotten. Entire creation stories shared and spread and handed down from so many ancestors that their beginnings can only be found in rock itself.

The persons walking the Norfolk coast that 850 or 900 thousand years ago had children with them. Their footsteps are scattered and energetic, like those of any kid intent on the world around them. I wonder sometimes if it was their parents with them, or aunties and uncles, grandparents, other relatives, all of the above. Human infants are uniquely helpless among mammals; we evolved to work in community to care for our young and help one another survive. There’s a reason our species is described as being obligatorily social. Hominin brains evolved to be interdependent.

That is, humans are wired to respond to one another, to rely on and trust one another. We might also have learned how to manipulate, dehumanize, and reject one another, but that reality can’t change billions of years of evolution.

I recently finished editing an incredible book that will be published next year, by the neuroscientist Dr. Ruth Feldman. Our ability to love and care for one another, to treat all life as relations, goes back, I learned from Dr. Feldman, to the earliest evolution of life on this planet, before hominins or any other mammals even walked this Earth—before there was even much Earth to walk.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, is estimated to be around 300,000 years old, give or take. Barely a hairsbreadth on Earth’s timeline. And yet we’re still the inheritors of evolution’s incredible gifts—of the ability to walk upright and use our clever hands, but also of the highest intelligence of all: how to care for one another. How to love and be loved. How to value life.

Thousands of years of “civilization” have never yet broken that inheritance, though it has tried repeatedly. The determination to keep wealth and power flowing to a few needs a different kind of shut down, that of our stronger evolutionary instincts, the ones that allow us to simply care for one another.

The continued press and violence of domination societies leave us with a choice each of us makes every day, consciously or not: Do you give up, or do you stand by your values and what you know to be moral and just? What are you willing to compromise, or to risk, so that the world might become welcoming to all, so that future generations might have a chance for a fully realized life?

Before my father returned to Russia most recently, we had lunch together, and I got him to tell me again the story of a family relative, his Uncle Oskar, who came home from World War I in 1918 to find German soldiers occupying his village in Ukraine, a German captain living in his mother’s house and treating her as a servant. “He expressed his displeasure in a very aggressive way,” as my father describes it, and fled through a window when the captain took out his gun. Oskar then had to escape, secretly and on foot, to Romania, where he worked as a doctor in the next war.

We meandered to more recent history, my father’s 30 years running a small coffee roasting company in Moscow, Russia, and his regret at not having made better use of the contacts and connections he made during those decades.

The following clip of our conversation is more me talking than him, for once; a reminder that when you live life in relationship, measures of success will look very different than what’s considered the norm in the dominant culture.

The TL;DL if you don’t want to listen to the whole clip:

Aleksandr (Sasha) Malchik: “If you’re a businessperson, you have to use this.”

Me: “As much as you wanted to be successful, and to be visible, and public, and seen, in my experience of you as my dad—for my entire life—I have never known you to want a relationship to be transactional.

And as far as I’ve seen of people who use it the way you’re ‘meant’ to, the ‘right’ way, those relationships are always transactional. Always. Even the personal ones. . . .

Anybody who doesn’t treat those relationships as transactional is shifting the paradigm, even if it feels like those opportunities slipped away. . . . That’s huge.”

Even when it feels like we’re losing, if we’re living relationally, there’s a chance that in the long run we might be winning.

I would bet a jar of chokecherry jelly that the person walking the shore of Alathar 100,000-some years ago dealt with manipulators and abusive people, greedy leaders and selfish relatives. I would also bet that there were plenty of others who weren’t. That maybe, even, the manipulators and abusers and selfish people became outcasts from the community. As David Wengrow and David Graeber covered comprehensively in their book The Dawn of Everything, humans have formed pro-social and community-minded societies, as well as destructive power-rewarding ones, all over the world, many, many times over the past few thousand years.

Depending on who you are and what kind of agency you have, there is an element of choice in these formations. An enslaved person in 4000 BCE Uruk—6,000 years ago—had almost no choices. But the middle class and elites probably did. And so do many of us.

How and where to take action, what to do in the fact of injustice and violence, are questions constantly in the ether. They follow a deeper question, one that asks us to sink into our evolutionary inheritance and decide at every moment, in every encounter, whether with humans or not: am I being relational, or am I being transactional?

And likewise, to have the discernment to know when we ourselves, or others, are being treated transactionally rather than in relationship. This second aspect can be more difficult: it can be easy to excuse how someone treats people in their personal life when we perceive their public actions as beneficial, without realizing the interpersonal and even soul-level harm that’s perpetuated by private cruelty and lack of personal accountability.

One of the gifts of the work I do, whether when editing, or research and writing, is being constantly reminded of the vast timeframes of human existence, and the even vaster ones of life itself. One of the fossils I wrote about in A Walking Life is of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, dated to around six or seven million years ago.

There is nothing that has made me believe in miracles and magic more than getting grounded in the millions of years and countless tiny shifts of evolutionary biology that somehow resulted in our own lives, in today. Excuse my language, but it’s fucking awesome. It really is.

Somewhere in that biological history we evolved a capacity for partnership, interdependence, and caring, and it’s been far more influential in our continuing evolution than traits for domination and competition. I don’t know how the latter started to become predominant in human societies reaching back nearly 10,000 years ago—there are theories related to a shift from hunter-gather to settled agricultural societies and the subsequent rise of city-states—nor do I know fully how to make the former the expected norm again.

But I think we can begin by each strengthening our own innate capacity for relationship. By slowing down, observing and being part of the lives we exist within; by getting to know people well enough to see them clearly, and ourselves well enough to see us clearly.

We all have the right, and the capacity, to shape a world around relationship.

Billions of feet are wandering Earth right now. Each of them leaves a story, whether it’s fossilized for the study of scientists and poets 100,000 years from now or not. Whether those stories will show future generations our time’s shift from harm to care, from extraction to kinship, rests partly on obvious and visible choices our societies make now, but also on the thousands of imperceptibly small steps each of us takes next.

Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute. Receipts of revenue return can be found here.

My father recently sent me a photo from outside the apartment he and my stepmother share in Moscow. It’s a tiny one-room flat that once belonged to my stepmother’s grandmother, Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Anastasia’s sister, Marina Tsvetaeva, is still one of the most beloved poets in Russia; it was lesser known that Anastasia wrote poetry, too, but the hardship and heartshatter that both women endured is well documented.

I once read Anastasia’s own poetry back to her in that tiny room, poems she’d written in English but could no longer understand. The memory of sitting with her there, next to the piano that took up most of her small room, has the flavor of another time, another life. Sometimes it makes me miss a Russia I never knew.

The photo my father sent shows snow-covered sidewalks and bare birch trees, someone shoveling in the distance. I have older photos very similar to it—different apartments, different winters, a different someone shoveling in the distance. Different times I’ve sat in small rooms being served cucumbers with dill, or blini pancakes.

Though I was born and mostly raised in Montana, I’ve been homesick for Russia ever since I left in 1991 at the age of 14, just weeks before the coup that collapsed the Soviet Union. Even while watching Moscow and St. Petersburg morph into unrecognizable cities, I missed it, that land, that language, some indefinable, ancient pull. It’s an ache of belonging, and of loss.

I’d like to say my longing is generational, since my father was born in the Ural Mountains and grew up in Leningrad. But his parents weren’t from Russia, at least not as its current borders lie. They were Jewish, and so were confined, as all Jews in the Russian empire were, to shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, the only band of territory Jews were allowed to live, their lives and occupations and movement strictly controlled and their communities at the mercy of violent pogroms. My grandfather came from a small village in Ukraine, my grandmother from another near Belarus.

The history of that entire part of the world is thick like blood. Miles of forests, birch and poplar, and wide grasslands, holding fast through shifting territorial lines and allegiances all through Eastern Europe and the Caucuses, lands and peoples linked by thousands of years of invasion, control, tribute, and trade with the Ottoman and Mongol Empires.

Its history runs like blood, too: there’s the raiding and enslavement of Slavic peoples, who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands or more kidnapped and sold away from their homes to the wealthy in empires south and west of the Black Sea. That slave route operated unbroken for nearly a thousand years.

There are the Jews whose ancestors had migrated to Europe centuries before, who ended up in lands controlled by the Russian empire after over a thousand years of oppression, expulsion, and massacres so violent and comprehensive that it’s estimated the DNA of almost half of Ashkenazi Jewish people comes from only four mothers. Four women who survived in a community that by their time had been massacred down to a few hundred people.

That land bears other scars, too, ones that run a different kind of heartblood. Lithuanians were the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, first enduring over a century of invasions and battles pursued by the Crusades, and other pressures from Catholic and Orthodox powers—all that after the previous century’s attacks from the Golden Horde in the north of the Mongol Empire. Jogaila, who in 1386 was crowned king of Lithuania in exchange for being baptised and forcing conversion on his people, subsequently allowed Christian churches to be built for the first time. He also ordered sacred oak trees to be cut down. Household grass snakes, who were kept in homes as protective spirits and were considered dear to the sun goddess Saule, were ordered killed.

The cutting down of sacred groves and the destruction of sacred springs throughout Britain and Ireland as the lands and people were bent to Christianity—having spent previous centuries recovering from Roman occupation—is more well-known than the histories of the same happening throughout the European continent. But those lands, too, are laced with memories of spiritual land, water, and animal connections that power spent centuries erasing, usually with violence.

What became of the people whose cultures the Roman general Tacitus recorded in 98 CE in his Germania—the Vangiones, Triboci, Nemetes, the Gauls, and countless other peoples? Tacitus wrote that their sacred places were trees and waters rather than human-built temples, and he wrote of the role of women in leadership. What memories does the land hold of those peoples? When were their holy trees cut down and how did they cope with the loss?

When I was researching my first book, I read a great deal on the science of epigenetics, related to what’s become known as intergenerational trauma, focusing on the work of scientists like Rachel Yehuda and Lars Bygrov.

“What Yehuda found in her early research was that the children of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to develop PTSD if exposed to a traumatic event than were demographically similar Jewish people whose parents were not Holocaust survivors. This is not, to be clear, a change in a person’s genetics; it’s a change in how a person’s genes will respond to their particular environment.”

Yehuda repeated those results in studies of the children of women who were pregnant and present at the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center. Other researchers have shown epigenetic effects in children whose mothers survived the Dutch Hunger Winter; and still more comes from Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s research on historical trauma in Native American people. Epigenetics is still a relatively new field, but its conclusions about intergenerational trauma are well established.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsardom in favor of communism, my grandparents came to Leningrad. They walked straight out of the pogroms, massacres, restrictions, and theft of children that Jews had endured for over 2000 years, a history that had not yet ended when they each left their villages behind to help build a new nation.

My grandparents, Jacob and Anna, enjoyed an extremely short few years of believing they could finally live and work in the world simply as people. A few years, before Russia’s—and especially dictator Joseph Stalin’s—anti-Semitism kicked back in. They endured returned restrictions on Jewish people, Stalin’s paranoia and threats of violence against and expulsion of Jews, and then the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, which my grandfather barely managed to survive, almost becoming one of the thousands dying each month of starvation. Jacob and Anna endured war and poverty, dictatorship and societal upheaval, and never escaped the millennia of prejudice and hate that had stalked their ancestors.

I’ve often wondered what of their experiences I carry in my own genes. And that of their parents and their parents and on and on and on. Those histories, and my own personal traumas, made their way into my children, through the blood and cells we shared as they became. The effects that accumulation will have on their lives is unpredictable.

As far as I know, there is no study on intergenerational trauma that gives it an end date, an end generation.

I read a study a while back on probable PTSD symptoms showing up in the medical records of men of ancient Mesopotamia who’d been at war. The reports say they were haunted by ghosts. What happened to the man of 14th-century BCE who’d just come home from his mandatory three-year rotation in the Assyrian army? Could he find healing in the land, or in his children; or did his pain turn inward to depression or outward to attack others?

What happened to the young mother in 1226 who’d been kidnapped by slave traders in her Swedish village and found herself serving in an Ottoman household? Did she ache for home, for the relatives and sacred trees and waters she’d been torn from? What happened to those people’s children, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and those of their villages and nations?

What happens to us?

Patrick Teahan, a licensed therapist who maintains a YouTube channel specializing in childhood trauma, recently posted a video of a bit of his own family history: One day in the winter of 1920, his great-grandmother, who had just days before given birth to twins, was at home in County Kerry, Ireland, when members of the Black and Tans, a paramilitary British force, dragged her, her newborn twins, and the rest of her children, outside while the soldiers raided their home.

Teahan’s grandfather, who was 14 at the time, came home to find the house ransacked. His mother died the next day. The experience, Teahan says, reverberated in cycles of violent abuse, from his grandfather to his father and onto him.

“My grandfather’s home invasion was 106 years ago. The trauma didn’t just pocket in 1920 and filter out. It went through the generations until someone did something different.”

His point in telling the story is to demonstrate the ways intergenerational trauma plays out. He gave background on who the Black and Tans were, how they were recruited and trained, and the enormous violence they inflicted on Irish people; and the parallels between their makeup, recruitment, and training, and that of the U.S. government’s ICE terrorists today. Those who inflict violence on others, he reminds us, are rarely rewarded in the end—power will discard them as soon as they no longer serve a use. In Teahan’s words, “Power does not love you,” but all have to live with what they have done. Many Black and Tans, when the the force was disbanded, were rehired and posted to then British-ruled Palestine.

Teahan’s story reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenneger’s personal video a few years ago, about his father, an angry man hiding in alcohol, the inevitable outcome of rage and shame many men experienced after participation in World War II as Nazi soldiers:

“They drank to numb their pain. Their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the evil of war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt. . . . They were all broken in the same way.”

The perpetrators of violence have to live with what they have done, but so do their victims, and descendants of both not even born.

It wouldn’t surprise me to know that all of us carry widely varying degrees of ancestral hardship, oppression, violence, and shame deep in our marrow. I wonder about the grief of those who saw the sacred groves felled or witnessed the massacres of their mothers, sisters, and brothers as witches; and what is carried by those who themselves participate in massacres of people, and what each passes onto their descendants, and for how long.

I wonder, a lot, about my own lineage, how an ancestral legacy of fear and oppression and violent prejudice that extends back millennia can transmute itself. How it turns, in cases like my grandparents, to unshakeable moral codes of honesty, hard work, and generosity; yet in others warps into a strangely shaped sense of entitlement, license to perpetuate the violence of generations on others.

The neurochemical balance that helps humans maintain a sense of right and wrong, love and hate, is shaped by shadows, some of them ancient, some of them hiding in our own cells.

Maybe my yearning for Russia is a short intergenerational root, or maybe it comes simply from having lived there and fallen in love with it as a teen. Maybe if I visited my grandfather’s Ukrainian village I’d feel something entirely different, something closer to what I feel in Montana, as if I want to spend every day of the rest of my life walking the lands barefoot and drinking the waters unfiltered. Or maybe I’d feel the terror of generations living with that land under the threat of violence and expulsion, never quite able to feel safe, never able to feel at home. Never feeling a sense of belonging at all.

The say ars longa, vita brevis—roughly translated as “skill takes time, life is short”—but maybe vita is far longer than we care to think about. One story might take a lifetime to write well, but it draws on years and generations beyond count.

Our stories don’t just live on by being told. They live on because the lives of those long gone are carried as complex messages in our DNA, as sparks in our hearts. They live on because we live on.

Until March 31, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to the 2026 James Welch Native Lit Festival. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance. Receipts of revenue return can be found here.

Some places to roam:

• How, and and why, does anyone own the earth?

• The limitations of meditation and lure of silence.

• Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic.

✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

One of my oldest and closest friends, a roommate from my undergraduate days, is a public school art teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the Twin Cities’ current federal government-driven violent crisis, she is part of a team arranging rides for kids, raising money for rent assistance, etc. She has given me permission to share her Venmo if you are looking for a way to contribute: https://account.venmo.com/u/AlisonShipmanThompson

Recently, I stopped at the county landfill to tip my recycling into their dedicated bins. The region I live in doesn’t have much recycling. Cardboard, paper, and aluminum cans. No plastics. We used to have glass recycling but the person who owned that equipment got ill, and nobody else has been able to find enough market for the recycled products from glass. I pay for a weekly compost service, which makes me feel a little better, especially when I order compost from them in the spring and bury seed potatoes in it.

Going to the landfill is both gut-wrenching and surreal. When I was a teenager, the dump was a pit in the ground. Now it’s an ever-growing small mountain. A few years ago, the county I live in purchased 90 more acres to expand the landfill, a reality that’s a bit of a brain-twister: arable, beautiful, life-giving, and expensive land is needed so that we can dump our waste, probably most of which is the result of entirely unnecessary consumption, including my own. All I can say is that most of that waste stays local. There is no out of sight out of mind; you can see the landfill just off the main highway.

The recycling bins are near the appliance dump: a growing hill of dishwashers, washing machines, stoves, and refrigerators backed by stands of spruces and lodgepole pines.

I often see Bald Eagles at the dump. While the sight is sad—it’s obviously the trash that draws them there—a Bald Eagle never fails to be majestic. The soul bows, as I wrote once, at the sight of that grand white head, or the speckled one of a juvenile, those enormous wings almost unmoving through the air, staying aloft with only an occasional downdraft.

This time, I glanced around for Ravens and instead saw a Bald Eagle fly to the top of a tree. Then I looked more closely, my car still running with Nine Inch Nails on the CD player, and couldn’t help saying out loud to myself, whoa.

I counted fifteen Bald Eagles roosting around the appliance area of the landfill, occasionally lifting off to soar over to another tree. Fifteen Bald Eagles.

When I was a kid, I could not have imagined such a sight, at the dump or anywhere else. From consuming DDT in fish and other dangers—like the lead from hunting bullets that linger in animals the Eagles eat—Bald Eagles were in crisis. It was something we learned about in Montana schools, or at least the ones I attended. A passing mention: they were an endangered species but the adults had it covered, we were assured. They were fixing it.

I’m going to turn 50 this year, and for about the last decade those long-ago lessons have been one of the most hopeful things I carry with me, somewhat unexpectedly. Bald Eagles were delisted from being endangered in 2007, and though we obviously live in a world run by a domination ethos, one that does not value life and in which there are very few adults “fixing” anything, a dominant culture whose soul does not bow to Eagle overhead, whether in the wilderness or at the dump, I now see Bald Eagles quite often. As a child growing up in Montana I can barely remember seeing even one.

A week or two after counting fifteen of them at the dump, I was away for a weekend with some of my closest friends, near home but out of town, with long views to the mountain ranges and over farm fields. Two of my friends kept spotting Bald Eagles flying back and forth over the fields, and resting in the trees across the road. I took a few very bad photos of said Eagles. We cooked food and smelled the snow and two friends taught me and another to play pinochle.

All my friends but me ventured out for forest walks and cross-country skiing. Much as my physical and mental self ached to be moving through the woods, I am only just beginning to feel a bit of strength and stamina return after at least two years of being flattened by Long Covid, and recovering from a hip surgery in October.

The reality of Long Covid has been maddening. I’m tired all the time, struggle with brain fog, really feel like I shouldn’t be driving but where I live it’s almost unavoidable, and want nothing more than to lie for hours in the sun by a river. Any river.

Last summer I regretfully canceled my volunteer wilderness trail crew commitment and didn’t sign up for a single barbed wire fencing removal weekend. My entire being desperately needed wilderness, and barbed wire removal in particular is one of the world-repairing tasks I like doing most, but I knew I couldn’t handle the long miles of hiking into camp, much less the longer days of manual labor.

Long Covid has no real fixes from medicine yet. I am very fortunate to have a number of friends with extensive experience on both sides of medicine, both providers and patients. They have advice, and send me scientific studies and reports of treatment trials. I try different remedies. So far, what’s worked best has been excrutiatingly slow, gentle exercise, along with any long hours I can spend by myself lying on rocks near running water, doing nothing at all.

I hesitate to say that nature cures, even though I believe it does and research backs that up, but it feels like about the only thing that might work in the long run.

The slow, frustrating reality of trying to heal Long Covid—which I don’t even know is possible—reflects a little too closely the slow, frustrating nature of trying to heal the scars left by several millennia of domination cultures and subsequent intergenerational traumas. If we could just get a start, I keep thinking, the way I finally got a start on slow, frustrating exercise by grumbling my way to the community gym last month because the sewer backed up into my basement and I needed a place with a shower.

But all those forces of domination and commodification, they don’t want to give room for a start. They might lose profits, and they might lose power, and for people whose only sustenance, whose only meaning, comes from those two things, the thought of losing them probably feels like death.

The rest of us have to find our way to stopping them anyway. And in the meantime, as I try to remind both myself and readers here, there are people all over the planet getting a start on healing, on revitalization and life-giving practices, on reclaiming the commons despite forces that want nothing but more extraction, more oppression, more pain and poison and harm.

The only reason humanity has survived this long is that enough people have fundamentally refused to give up caring, no matter how slow or how frustrating its results might be in coming.

While hanging out on the couch of the house my friends and I were staying at, where Bald Eagles flew across much prettier landscape than that found at the dump, I thought about longstanding debates over what is deemed “natural.” About why wilderness was invented in the first place, and why protection of it is fought for: quite simply, because the dominant culture can’t seem to help destroying everything else.

I had an essay published recently in American Prairie Journal with the title “Where Land Repairs the Soul.” (My essay is on p. 38, or 40 on the Issuu platform; excellent reading throughout this issue!) Among the subjects of enclosures of the commons and the meaning of wilderness, the essay was really about belonging. About what it would take for every person in every place to feel, even for a few moments, what it might mean to belong to land. Not to own it, not even necessarily to use it. Simply to belong to it.

That sense of belonging comes easily to me out in the million-acre wildernesses around where I live, where I take photos to share here, photos that try to evoke some of the incredible sense of rest and being-aliveness those places give me.

But if I take enough time and give enough attention, I feel it, too, at the dump, watching a Bald Eagle soar and knowing right through the soles of my feet that under and even within the appliances and mountain of trash, everything is alive. I can never disentangle myself from interconnection with it all even if I wanted to.

And I don’t. I don’t want to. Learning to repair both the world and our individual selves might turn out to be one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever received, right below the gift of this miraculous planet herself. I wish the repair weren’t necessary, but it’s a process worth doing well. Who knows what this landfill will look like in a hundred years, or five hundred, or a thousand, what world the Bald Eagles’ descendants might know.

Your trash might be a Bald Eagle’s treasure, and in some strange way it’s mine, too.

Until March 31, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to the 2026 James Welch Native Lit Festival. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance. Receipts of revenue return can be found here.

Nearly two decades ago, I had a premature baby. “Had a baby” is a strange phrase, isn’t it? It sounds so simple, like having a loaf of bread, or an itch. Whereas even in the best circumstances there is nothing simple about “having a baby.” My son’s and my circumstances were hardly the best—I’d come down with HELLP Syndrome, an extremely rare and almost always deadly pregnancy-related illness. Its only treatment is delivery of the baby, no matter how underdeveloped they might be.

My son had nearly 8 weeks to go, time he needed for his lungs to develop and time to grow larger than his 4 pounds. But either he came out or I died of liver failure, there was no other choice.

So while I was unconscious, he was taken out by Caesarian section and whisked off to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I was wheeled to Normal Adult Intensive Care, where I complained all night every time the machines started shrilling at me, and my then-spouse told me, each time, that they were beeping because I’d stopped breathing.

My son, who survived, spent a month in the NICU. That month remains one of the worst periods of my life. For the first ten days in particular, I had no idea whether he was going to make it or not, and nobody involved in his care was making any promises.

I spent a lot of exhausted hours in the NICU being terrified, reading to my infant in his incubator and engaging in what was, at that time, a known but not widely used practice called Kangaroo Care. The NICU nurses had told me about it. Every day they set me up in a nursing rocker chair with pillows for support and a blanket over my shoulders because I was shirtless, and handed my baby over. I held my son for hours like that, skin to skin, his oxygen and various monitors still attached, dangling wires between my arms. His heart and lungs repaired until, finally, he could breathe on his own. And so could I.

Kangaroo Care was first used in hospitals in Colombia, and it was found that premature babies held in this way, skin to skin, actually fare better than babies warmed and held in incubators. In many ways it’s an obvious practice—of course human newborns need to be held!—and in others revelatory.

I recently had a conversation with Ruth Feldman, the scientist who has done the world’s leading research on Kangaroo Care and its effects on health outcomes, about her decades of related work on “synchrony” and the neurobiology of attachment.

It was a mind-blowing conversation that I hope will lead to more, and reminded me of a book I often return to, Rianne Eisler’s Nurturing Our Humanity. In that book, Eisler—better known for her classic The Chalice and the Blade—draws on decades of research on authoritarianism and its adherents, in particular the correlation between authoritarian upbringings and later tendencies to vote for and support authoritarian leaders.

As Eisler points out in her later chapters, it is a continuing folly to assume that how children are raised has little or nothing to do with the eventual shape and character of the society they live in.

These ideas circle around what has become, for me, one of the most pressing problems of our time: the fracturing of societal and interpersonal trust.

A friend recently sent me a New York Times article about artificial intelligence, detailing some of large language models’ (LLMs, which is most of what is called AI actually is) lifelessness and predictability when it comes to written prose. In response, I told my friend that I’ve been thinking a lot about how the widespread adoption of large language model chat tools for uses like therapy, friendly conversation, and editorial feedback is indicative less of the usefulness of the tools than it is of how bedraggled human trust has become.

When you don’t, or can’t, trust other people with your secrets, your heart, your pain, your struggles, or even to give helpful and non-shaming editorial feedback on a piece of writing, it’s the most natural instinct in the world to turn to systems that feel objective, intelligent, and firm yet supportive. Systems that have been trained enough in the ability to predict natural language patterns that they feel real. They also, it seems to me, feel to many people like the kind of nurturing they didn’t receive in early childhood, like the friendships and close human relationships a crisis of loneliness makes little room for.

Where do we put our trust if it seems that all else, especially all things human, have failed us?

I was close personal friends with someone for several years who I know now to be one of the most self-serving, deceptive, and manipulative people I have ever met, someone who has sabotaged good causes and projects and taken credit for other people’s work.

This person has a large public following, speaks and writes passionately on issues that are close to my heart and the hearts of many, and appears at events and in photos with others who are admired and respected. Yet I know from my and others’ experiences that every aspect of the public image this person creates serves only to increase their own status and access to wealth.

How, I have wondered, would most people ever have a clue about this person’s true nature? I can hardly judge anyone else’s ignorance. After all, despite small early misgivings, I spent years in seeming friendship believing this person was who they presented themselves to be.

Between the adoption of and misplaced trust in LLMs and the ease with which manipulative people can twist good causes and good hearts to their own ends, human trust feels like the psychological equivalent of a broken road in a wracked land, crumbling to pieces, pitted with sinkholes and buried land mines, its clear tracks disappearing under dust and the growth of new life.

In a world where anyone can use digital tricks to manipulate and deceive, and those who don’t wish to go that route can simply use their innate abilities to do the same, how do you know whom to trust, or what?

Where, even, does trust come from—our judgment, our experiences, our gut feelings? Or maybe that neurobiology of connection, wired in early childhood to tell us what is safe, no matter how misguided those instincts might have become.

Who knows.

I have said on this newsletter that learning about the Doctrine of Discovery might be one of the most important annual goals for anyone who wants to see a better world. I still believe that’s true, but we need to know ourselves, too.

Outside learning will always hit a barrier if we do not match it with equivalent learning inside each of us.

Over the past many years there have been several writers and thinkers I gravitated toward whom I later become disillusioned with. I’m starting to think that getting to know the answer to “why”—what drew me to them? what did I miss early on?—might be more serious than I’ve given it credit for. I have found, and maybe you have too, that truths I once held close can morph into something unrecognizable.

Do I, or you, trust someone because of the work they’ve done or claim to have done, because of their identity, because of whom they associate with? Is that trust warranted? How do we know?

Maybe we can no more “have” trust than we can have a baby. The moment you have a baby, after all, is the moment you will never fully have that baby again. Over time, they slip away, growing and changing and becoming their own entity apart from us, as they should. Maybe trust is the same.

But maybe research into human connection can show where the broken road of human trust might also, in part, be repaired, so that we can see it clearly, if only for an instant before it disappears again.

When that road has vanished in my own life, I have always been able to turn not to other humans or some digital comfort, but to the living world. In recently, Bryan Pfeiffer wrote far more beautifully than I could of the power of life in rooting us to where we are:

“Plants are rooted, literally and figuratively. They exist or do not owing to location, climate, bedrock, soil, fungi, microorganisms, and the brute forces of humanity: culture, economics, hubris. Plants are perhaps the most genuine expressions of history and place and community — a natural community. They grounded me as well.”

Like Bryan, I find grounding in the natural world. It’s also where I reorient—to myself, and what I think I know to be true.

I don’t know where this world is going. I know the changes I’d like to see and the healing I desperately wish for—for rivers, for trees, for Cutthroat Trout and Goldfinches, for Elk and Bison, for Long-horned Bees and Caddisflies, and for the human heart.

In the meantime, all I know is that it makes sense to hold one another, and the world, until we can all breathe again.

Wishing you good heart, and self-knowing, in this Season of Lights.

New Year’s Eve my son and I took a long walk around town taking photos together. These, and the photos at the top, are my photos from that walk (his are better). We talked of many things, but most of all the marvel of a Mountain Ash tree’s gifting of food to Robins and Bohemian Waxwings, birds so lively and alive I felt like plucking a berry and flying off with them.

The following is a revised version of an essay originally published in January 2022.

Many years ago, late into Barack Obama’s presidential administration, maybe in 2015 or even early 2016, I had a long messaging conversation with an acquaintance about some of the right-wing movements and talking points that had become prevalent over the previous few years, specifically the fear-mongering over “they’re going to take our guns.” “They” being liberal people or, more specifically, Democrats. Guns being in America of course not just a tool or even a weapon but an enormous and lethal flashpoint of a longstanding culture war.

Why, I asked this acquaintance, did people keep believing and investing emotion in “They’re going to take our guns” when for the previous eight years it simply . . . hadn’t happened? How did people keep believing in this fear month after month, year after year?

In response, this acquaintance gave me the first good explanation I’d yet had about echo chambers and the dissolution of our information ecosystems—long predating the rise of social media, which further weaponized forces already in motion.

Over Facebook messages, she gave me a long, detailed history of her own upbringing in Rapture-oriented Baptist culture. In her childhood, she told me, no matter how many years went by, the Rapture was always just around the corner, God always just about to bathe the world in blood and flame, and spirit the righteous to heaven.

The key, she said, was that the adults in her world managed to keep the fear of impending doom fresh and alive, month after month, year after year, down to her entire school sobbing in terror one morning when they’d been told the Rapture was coming shortly after noon that day.

“During the formative years of many conservatives’ lives,” she wrote me, “this was the experience.” A constant drumbeat of being told that the end of days was just around the corner, and a nonstop fear of the future.

Whatever people were told was going to happen, she said, was always in the future, and the future was always to be feared.

It was one of the best and earliest explanations I’d read—aside from Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, as I wrote about a while back—that showed how deeply identity is involved in choices and decisions that from an outsider’s perspective make no sense.

Ever since then, I have intentionally looked for works and projects that either explain or engage with identity. Real identity, the way that our perception of ourselves, and of others in relation to ourselves, dictates how we’ll vote or even what we’ll believe.

It’s why this anthropology article about the blow to identity when steel mills in America’s midwest closed down being just as important as the blow to income sticks in my mind, as does this personal essay about growing up in a Christian homeschooling evangelical world that trained children to be warriors in American culture battles—and to win those battles in legislatures and courtrooms. It’s why this essay from Aeon about echo chambers and epistemic bubbles has ended up being the one I recommend to people more than almost any other.

I can’t think of many more entrenched identities in America and several other countries (I’m looking at you, Russia) than whiteness. Religion, wealth-based hierarchical structures, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, and human supremacy over the rest nature are the only identities I can think of that have deeper roots.

Kelly Brown Douglas’s 2015 book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God tries to get to the source of this identity and its staying power. Referring frequently to her own identity as a Black woman and mother, and position as an Episcopal priest, Douglas begins her book looking for the roots of “stand your ground” laws, which in many U.S. states allow someone to shoot another if they feel threatened; the book centers around the case of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Florida who was killed while walking home by a man who used the “stand your ground” defense.

She pins those “stand your ground” laws to ideas of American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, and traces them not back to 1776 or even 1619, but much further, back to the first century CE and the writings of Tacitus, a Roman general who wrote A Treatise on the Situation, Manners and Inhabitants of Germany, commonly known as Germania:

“In 98 CE Tacitus published Germania, which has been called ‘one of the most dangerous books ever written.’ Perhaps it is. The danger is not so much in what Tacitus said, but in how his words have been construed. In the brief space of thirty pages, he offered an ethnological perspective that would have tragic consequences for centuries to come. This perspective played a significant role in the Nazis’ monstrous program for ‘racial purity.’ It is the racial specter behind the stand-your-ground culture that robbed Trayvon of his life.

“In Germania Tacitus provides a meticulous portrait, based on others’ writings and observations, of the Germanic tribes who fended off Rome’s first-century empire-building agenda. . . . Perhaps what is most significant, at least in garnering the attention of political architects for centuries to come, is that Tacitus portrayed these ancient Germans as possessing a peculiar respect for individual rights and an almost ‘instinctive love for freedom.’ . . . According to many later interpreters, Tacitus was describing the perfect form of government.”

Douglas’s arguments track through the conflation of idealized Anglo-Saxon society with Christianity in England, and how early English immigrants brought that attitude to North America intact because they thought that even the reformed English church wasn’t Anglo-Saxon enough:

“The English considered themselves the descendants of the Germanic tribes identified by Tacitus. They believed that these tribes were their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. . . . Notwithstanding the fact that some of Tacitus’s ancient tribes were probably of Norse heritage, these reformers generally agreed that corruptions entered into English church and society with the Norman conquest in 1066. Popular belief held that the Normans adulterated the very English laws and institutions that served to protect individual liberties. . . .

“The Pilgrims and Puritans fled from the Church of England to build a religious institution more befitting Anglo-Saxon virtue and freedom. They considered themselves the Anglo-Saxon remnant that was continuing a divine mission. They traced this mission beyond the woods of Germany to the Bible. Thus, they saw themselves ‘as the Israelites in God’s master plan.’”

This faith, Douglas reiterates later in the book, is crucial to understanding the lasting power of American exceptionalism:

“Not only did the early American Anglo-Saxons believe their mission to be one of erecting God’s ‘city on a hill’ but they also came to believe that they essentially had divinity running through their veins. The Protestant evangelicals in particular believed themselves to be as close a human manifestation of God on earth as one can get. In general, however, the religious legitimation of America’s exceptionalist narrative suggests that to be against Anglo-Saxon America is to be against God.”

The crux of Douglas’s arguments lie in the development of whiteness as treasured property—property created through the myth of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism (which she calls the “wizard behind the curtain of white supremacy”), mixed with belief in preordained Christian dominionism:

“Whiteness in this respect is not simply cherished property, but it is also sacred property. . . . Within the religious narrative of America’s exceptionalism, anything that cannot pass the test of whiteness cannot get to God.”

I’ve thought a lot about humans as property—women most universally, and slavery worldwide, reaching back thousands of years and continuing through the present day; the philosopher Aristotle described an enslaved person as a property with a soul back in the 4th century BCE—but until I read Stand Your Ground (and later, thanks to a recommendation by Sherri Spelic, Cheryl Harris’s 1993 paper “Whiteness as Property”), I hadn’t thought much about how the creation of a class of people as property to be treasured and protected easily turns everyone else into something to be controlled, something—not someone—that becomes a threat when it invades the space or entitlements of the treasured, protected class.

A key component of property rights, Douglas reminds us, is the right to exclude, which “ultimately ushers in the stand-your-ground culture.”

“This right to exclude inexorably gives way to other fundamental rights—the right to claim land and the right to stake out space. These rights, Harris [Cheryl Harris, in “Whiteness as Property”] points out, were actually ‘ratified’ at America’s beginnings with ‘the conquest, removal, and extermination of Native American life and culture.’1 From then on, she says, ‘Possession and occupation of land was validated and therefore privileged’ as a white property right. . . . These rights of exclusion, land, and space are the defining characteristics of whiteness as treasured property.”

Stand Your Ground lacks direct reference to the Doctrine of Discovery, the 15th-century papal decree that, as I’ve written about several times before, forms the continuing legal basis for much of America’s outright theft of land from Native American nations. I wish Douglas would have examined the intersection of the Doctrine with mythological Anglo-Saxon supremacy because they became deeply intertwined, but in general her points still hold.

According to Douglas, it’s in the ancient idea of the Anglo-Saxons as some sort of mythically perfect society and people that we find the roots of much of America’s founding ideals—the ideals of freedom and individual liberty specifically—mixed wholesale with the belief that specific white Northern Europeans were the only people who could understand and embody those ideals. Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as Irish, Scottish, and Swedish people, initially weren’t included—in a 1751 essay, Benjamin Franklin also threw out the French and most non-Saxon Germans as not white enough.

Even before America’s founding, the country inherited the unalloyed belief of culture as synonymous with bloodline, and therefore race:

“Building on Tacitus’s admiration for the way these Germanic tribes ruled their communities, the myth stressed the unique superiority of Anglo-Saxon religious and political institutions. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, the myth shifted its focus to Anglo-Saxon blood. In doing so, it seized upon Tacitus’s characterization of the ancient Germans as ‘free from taint,’ and suggested that the superiority of their institutions was a result of their blood.”

America’s original sin, Douglas articulates, lies in the belief that white Americans are both the genetic and spiritual descendants of Anglo-Saxons; Anglo-Saxons in the white imagination represent not just the purest form of humanity, but the purest form of society.

The conflation of skin color with race and therefore culture was fully integrated into the dominant American psyche by the 1920s, by which time Franklin’s objectionable French, German, and Swedish people, as well as Eastern and Southern Europeans, previously excluded, were considered white. The project of whiteness, wrote Douglas, by that time overlapped almost completely with the project of Manifest Destiny.

It’s here where a foray into the Doctrine of Discovery would have been most helpful, because the book dives into a core tension of privatization versus the commons (without naming it as such), which is the question of who has a right to land and, therefore, to life. Douglas quotes an 1846 speech by Senator Thomas Hart Benton in which he makes the case that the “white race” is the only one that has obeyed the “divine command” to “subdue and replenish the earth.” All other peoples, he claimed, were subsumed before this civilizing project:

“Benton’s remarks make clear the other defining feature of Manifest Destiny. It was not just about land and race. It was also about life. . . . Those who had the right to land were also those who had a right to live. Manifest Destiny was about more than who was destined to occupy a certain land, it was also about who was destined to live. If the manifest vision was the expansion of Anglo-Saxonism from east to west, then those who did not capitulate to Anglo-Saxon ways were destined to become extinct. Benton was clear: it was whites who had the right to land and life; others were eligible for extinction.”

Protecting the treasured property of whiteness, in other words, is an overwhelming and centuries-long iteration of a war on life itself, and on the right to live.

Given this historical context, one of America’s recent manufactured culture wars—over the nonexistent teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public schools—makes a little more sense. As haphazard and frankly weird as that particular contrived moral panic is, in the realm of identity, the “threat” that’s being responded to is perceived as real, as is the threat inherent in the dismantling of a powerful creation myth underlying that identity.

Not just the myth of American exceptionalism, but the older myth, that England and then white America were inheritors of a somehow pure and noble people, strong and intelligent and just (they were also red-haired, according to Tacitus). That somewhere way back two thousand years ago existed a perfect culture of perfect people who knew their position and their purpose and ran their societies along the purest of principles along with the purest of blood, and if we could just find our way back to it everything would be all right.

This hankering for a previous idealized society can be seen in critiques of social justice movements as well as of critical race theory, critiques that seem to rest on the notion that studying the bases of America’s laws, politics, and culture through an understanding of whiteness’s influence—as well as the influences of gender, culture, and wealth—is somehow anti-Enlightenment and anti-intellectual—in a sense, anti-Anglo-Saxon.

Which is in itself odd: trying to erase knowledge of real events in favor of a blander narrative for the sake of cohesion is an anti-Enlightenment endeavor. If someone can’t quote Thomas Jefferson’s high ideals about democracy and freedom without feeling that they have to bury his active efforts to trick Indigenous people out of land, and his position as a slaveowner, then that person is not doing a very good job of crafting a society based on any kind of shared reality.

The American settler story, to give another example of a history many people find threatening to crack open, is often framed as one of intrepid yeomen farmers-to-be making the hopeful but uncertain journey to an unknown land to prove their worth in building an independent and productive life, providing the basis for society based on democratic principles and without a monarch.

What’s left out almost completely is the reality of many of those lives: if those settlers weren’t rapacious land speculators with a bit (or a lot) of cash backing back home, most were landless due to centuries of feudalism, many escaping serfdom or barely out of it, many refugees from famine or evictions from land, unable to sustain their families from the commons due to enclosure and privatization of activities like hunting and fishing.

They were also at the mercy of nobles, landlords, and rulers with a seemingly endless appetite for war. So. Much. War. As much as I love Montana, and I love it down to my smallest bones, I’d probably leave too, given the chance, if all I or my ancestors or my children had known or would ever know were the kinds of war-packed centuries that Europe saw in the 1400-1600s and beyond.

History isn’t some smooth narrative of simple stories that can only ever make a nation or a people proud. It lurches around the needs and ambitions of people who did not agree on much of anything, not who should be king or whom land belonged to or who had a right to the basic necessities of life nor what form of religion to follow. The war in Europe between Catholics and Protestants that started in 1619 lasted thirty years and resulted in an estimated eight million dead, from famine and disease as well as battle. England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 came after those in power imposed a poll tax and legally prohibited higher wages even though labor was in high demand after massive population loss due to the plague. It ended only after the East Anglian rebels were crushed and King Richard agreed to the peasants’ demands, a promise he then reneged on, perpetuating more centuries of inequality, injustice, and subsequent revolt.

People don’t fight racism and misogyny and wealth inequality and crushing hierarchies—much less the narratives that underlie them—because they have a sense of shared reality with the people perpetuating and profiting from those systems. They fight them because the reality in front of them is destructive, deeply unjust, and makes no rational sense.

The Anglo-Saxon myth holds just as much sway over American identity—even if it’s less understood or known—as the idealized (and very pale-skinned) nuclear family life of the 1950s does. There is very little daylight between the mythologies born out of Tacitus’s Germania and modern white nationalist calls for pride in culture and people—what culture and people is never specified, only that it be pale-skinned and preferably Christian.

Truly facing this history and its consequences could not only slow the devastation wrought by centuries of injustices, it could even have unforeseen beneficial outcomes, like seeing if the Anglo-Saxons that Tacitus wrote about so enthusiastically might have healthier societal models to emulate.

The Anglo-Saxon peoples evidently had no hankering for gold or silver, for example: “The possession of them is not coveted by these people as it is by us.” Their sacred places were “woods and groves” rather than temples, and many, such as the Varini, Avions, and Angli, worshiped the goddess Hertha, or “Mother Earth.” They also valued the counsel of women, assuming “somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses.”

And undercutting his own claim of a people whose bloodlines were “free of taint,” Tacitus described the lives of peoples, countries, and clans like the Gauls, Langobardia, Hermunduri, Narisci, and Varini—I counted 35 before losing track—and their wide differences in law, worship, dress, governance, battle, and hairstyles. In other words, Germany as he depicted it nearly 2,000 years ago was a mixed and multicultural land whose inter-people relations we know little about.

We could, if we wanted, aim for some of those other ideals and skip the idolization of blue eyes and “russet” hair along with Tacitus’s later delight at sixty thousand Germans dying in battle without help of the Romans on either side but “as it were for our pleasure and entertainment.”2

Truly a stand-up guy, Tacitus.

Returning to Trayvon Martin and too many others who could only be victims of stand-your-ground thinking and never the beneficiaries of it, Douglas writes that:

“The Anglo-Saxon myth, which emerged from Tacitus’s Germania, has shaped and continues to shape America’s sense of self. This myth is the unspoken, but pervasive, narrative that determines who is and who is not entitled to the rights of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ . . .

“The deaths of these young black people are about more than a Stand Your Ground law. They are about a culture that is bound and determined to protect the Anglo-Saxon ‘white country’ that both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin imagined and worked to build.”

As my acquaintance taught me some years ago about Rapture culture, adherence to identity has tremendous power. And threats to identity are painful, so much so that many will engage in violence before questioning their adherence to a particular identity, much less before walking away from it. But until our societies learn to face some of our more destructive identities, and our beliefs about them, they will continue to harm vast numbers of people as well as our communities and the commons, the generous gifts of this planet, that we all depend on for survival.

Douglas’s hard work unpacking the myths of Anglo-Saxon society and Tacitus’s admiration of it and its peoples gives us the knowledge to know what we’re facing—and to give the Anglo-Saxons a rightful place in history without insisting that the world they created for themselves is one we need to carbon copy for the present day. Like all other peoples, the Anglo-Saxons lived, they loved, they quarrelled, they cultivated, they died, and they changed.

As we all must, hopefully for the better.

Some places to roam:

• How, and and why, does anyone own the earth?

• The limitations of meditation and lure of silence.

• Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic.

✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

A few days ago, I was sitting by this river, near a U.S. Forest Service cabin where I went recently for a sorely needed offline, off-grid, off-network recalibration. It’s been too long since I sat in the woods by myself for a few days.

Late October, the larch trees have yellowed, turning mountainsides bright and the woods full of unexpected sunshine even on gloomy days. Larch in autumn is a spirit-lifter, an anti-demon spell, a joyous shaft of light when the world is shifting dark.

It snowed the first night I was at the cabin. I trekked down to the river carrying my coffee the next morning before sunrise, happy despite knowing that in my rush to pack water, food, sleeping bag, and books, I’d grabbed a coat too thin and decided against snow boots—a mistake and I knew it, as the hole in the sole of the thin canvas shoes I’ve been intending to replace reminded me.

Ravens flew down the river and high above the trees, more than I usually see at this place. I could hear more further off in the woods and wondered what was keeping them so social. I wondered that for the next three days and never got an answer. They sounded not anxious exactly, but somewhat like me getting my stuff ready to stay in the woods and my kid packed up to stay at their dad’s: busy, harried, organized but frazzled.

The river at that spot is wide, its rapids gentle but the rushing tumble of water strong enough to be heard a long way off.

I watched some rapids tumbling around opposite bank from where I sat, the burble and leap over hidden rocks tricking my mind into thinking they looked like two otters playing in the water.

Wait, I thought. Those are two otters playing in the water.

I recently spent several days pitting, pureeing, and dehydrating a vast amount of plums picked from a friend’s trees—trees so heavy with fruit that after an hour of filling my bucket, the branches looked untouched. My friend had already picked and dehydrated his own many batches of fruit leather from his other trees, which ripen earlier, but I’d been too busy with the rest-of-life, the crises and plans and bureaucracies and commitments that translate into too little time in the garden and out foraging.

But this one bucket made it into my home, my fingers purpled dry by the slicing and pitting and feeding to the blender—a many bladed monster that, as I texted to the friend I’m renting a furnished house from, looks like something from a horror movie.

In the kitchen now is enough fruit leather and dried apples—from another friend’s August generosity—to see my kid and me through the winter if we’re not too greedy.

How does one get that way? Too greedy. Or perhaps the question is, how does a human, or a whole society of humans, lose perspective on what is enough?

I recently finished Caroline Dodds Pennock’s book On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, and in it Pennock described briefly the value of cacao beans in Mesoamerica in the late 1400s and early 1500s, which were a form of wealth: a turkey egg or avocado could cost three beans, a small rabbit thirty.

Only the very wealthy could feast with gourds of cacao to drink; when resource-hungry European people came, claimed, and took, they took so much that even just reading about it felt like watching land being actively drained of life: gold, emeralds, brazilwood, cacao, people.

And yet, as many Indigenous people of the time noted after having spent time in the “noble” houses of Seville and Lisbon, no matter how much wealth was siphoned from their homelands, it did nothing to change the circumstances of ordinary European peoples. The poverty of the majority of people’s lives was often remarked on, especially when contrasted with the opulence of royalty and their hangers-on.

How much is enough?

What breaks a belief in kinship and reciprocity—how does one lose the knowledge that it is mutual care, not taking more for ourselves, that gives the best assurance of security?

I’d like to have a functional health care system that doesn’t bankrupt people, and to not worry about food and housing, but beyond a certain point can’t imagine an amount of money that would replace the kinds of relationships woven among people, and between humans and ecosystems, inherent in nature sharing gifts so wealthy that even multiple families can’t use them all—like my friends’ plum and apple trees, or the potatoes and strawberries I grow, or the wild huckleberries throughout the nearby mountains—and in people sharing them with one another.

Maybe “enough” is forever undefinable, guided only by that clear thread of relationship and reciprocity, of what keeps life life-ing.

There were in fact two otters in the river. I watched them for a long time, absolutely filled with delight. They tumbled and rolled upstream, all along the far shore, their sleek bodies and tiny whiskered heads popping out of the water every few seconds, their slim tails flying up to dive back down.

I wanted to step into my real skin, like a Selkie, and swim across the freezing water to join them. I wanted to not feel the frozen ground so acutely through my thin-soled shoes, to be indifferent to the bite of chill wind through my inadequate coat. I wanted to dance a song to Moon that night and to know each Raven by name, and to soar with the Bald Eagle who circled over the river downstream, toward the new-snowed mountains.

I wanted these minutes to be my entire life. I was, in fact, greedy for them to last forever.

From a distance, like here in Montana’s North Fork valley, the larches—or tamaracks—turning yellow in autumn look like the warmth of a fire, a controlled burn, but when I’m deep in the rain-shrouded woods draped in the deep green of fir, spruce, and pine, an autumn larch is a streak of sunlight.

Here, we explore questions as varied as:

• The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, the epitome of ownership’s claim “I took it; now it’s mine” in the form of “I saw it; now it’s mine.”

• Is it possible to consume without exploitation?

• What is wrong with Russia?

✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

There are short audio recordings at the beginning and end of this essay. They contain only wildlife morning sounds. The same are embedded within the audio recording of the essay itself. (If you are using headphones, watch the volume shift between wildlife recordings and essay audio.) Hope you enjoy!

Coyote and Rooster, early morning, eastern Montana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Likewise “freedom,” or “humanity.”

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

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

And while there are an infinite number of finite games,

“There is but one infinite game.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning calls, eastern Montana: Coyote, Meadowlark, Prairie Dog, Goat, Wind, my coffee cup, keyboard, and creaky porch chair

Here, we explore questions as varied as:

• The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, the epitome of ownership’s claim “I took it; now it’s mine” in the form of “I saw it; now it’s mine.”

• Is it possible to consume without exploitation?

• What is wrong with Russia?

✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Watch Duty, a non-profit providing real-time information in wildfire country—information we previously got from the U.S. government’s now-eviscerated EPA through InciWeb—will receive this quarter’s 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue. Firekeeper Alliance, “committed to reducing suicide rates among the Blackfeet Nation and other Indigenous communities in Montana,” will receive next quarter’s 5%. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

Some years ago when I still lived I upstate New York, I began working at a sawmill. I had two very small children at the time, and had never intended nor desired to be a full-time stay-at-home mom, not to mention be one and working at the same time (due to the full-time stay-at-home mom reality, most of my work happened in the middle of the night, a capacity I no longer have). But I was doing exactly that, and rapidly dying inside because staying at home with children all day is not, to put it mildly, my calling in life.

One of my kids went to part-time preschool twice a week at a nature museum, which also offered adult classes like beekeeping and wild foraging, both of which I took—out of curiosity but also to stay sane—along with rustic woodworking, an activity I’d never imagined myself doing. I am the kind of person who can’t be trusted with a table saw or even, frankly, a spirit level. The rustic woodworking artist who taught the class introduced me to New York Heartwoods, a micro-mill run by a woman (coincidentally, also from Montana) who’d bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 and specialized in milling wood from downed and diseased trees on public and private land.

Working at the sawmill a couple days a week—interning, really, since I was there to learn and wasn’t being paid—helped keep me from going completely numb, from depression and dissociation from life, and it got me into research on embodied learning, but I was also intrigued by the mill’s mission: the owner only worked with fallen or scavenged trees. The point of the mill was to introduce circularity within the wood milling system, which fit right in with efforts I’d been making toward supporting local food systems and fending off long-term despair over single-use plastics.

We worked with a lot of city Ash trees felled by emerald ash borer, and Cedar that had been cleared from farm fields. I spent one entire day planing Cedar planks for someone who’d rescued them, already milled, from her family’s farm and was making an art installation out of them.

Another time we spent most of a cold, snowy day dragging out enormous old beams from a fallen barn, taking them back to the mill to be sawn into boards that would be lightly sanded and used to make shelves.

The mill’s shady, forested yard was full of beauties, every one of them cared for, whether already milled and kiln-dried or not. I don’t ever plan on moving away from Montana, whose forests are full of soft-wooded Pine and Fir, Aspen and Spruce, but do sometimes miss working with hardwood.

One day, we were milling reclaimed beams from an old barn for a client. Old barn beams are a pain because they’re often full of nails—long, heavy, rusted nails that are hard to spot. We ruined a few blades as hidden nails made it through and wrecked the metal, and finally gave up. That barn beam went back to its owner, or maybe to a scrap pile, joining the piles of beautiful wood resting around the property, testimony to one woman’s commitment to making sure their lives continued.

It only occurred to me later to wonder why we hadn’t taken the time to look for and remove the nails ahead of time, why we sacrificed several saw blades and in the end the beam itself rather than take the time to remove as many nails as we could find and make the wood workable again. It obviously would have been a waste of time, but then again, the entire endeavor could be classified a waste of time, if all we use for measurement are the standards of capital and efficiency.

A couple months ago I succumbed to the urge to crawl through all the essays and posts in this newsletter, starting from the very first essay in late summer 2020, about Marcus Aurelius and my own cognitive disconnects around the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when my older sister was still in the military.

I ended up deleting almost 200 out of nearly 300 essays and posts. Some were from before Substack launched its Twitter-like Notes platform, and were brief photo + quote + sentence or two “walking compositions,” a practice I’d migrated over from my deleted Instagram. Many posts I thought were pointless, and others need more revision work. The ones I kept, I’m slowly revising and recording audio for, since I only started doing audio versions in late 2023 (I’ve made my way through nearly 20, starting from the beginning).

Many of the posts and essays I deleted, I saved in offline Word documents, collecting them by theme. By far, the largest of these collections is one I’ve labeled “Abundance and Commodification,” with over 40 pages of text. Some of what I’ve rewritten here about my time working at a sawmill are lines scavenged from that document.

Out of all the writing I do on the commons, the complementary topics of abundance and commodification—of food and seeds in particular, but of everything in general, including labor, creativity, and ideas—overwhelms the amount I have written about land ownership, which surprised me because I feel like I never shut up about land ownership, and repeat myself to a tiresome degree.

Something about rereading all of those words and stories, and collecting together the ones that I felt needed more editing, or perhaps shaping into a larger, more cohesive project, reminded me of my faith in storytelling, how deeply I believe in its power, and in the world’s need for it. For more stories, stories with heart and truth, as many as possible from as many different perspectives as possible, especially from voices, people, and places who’ve been heard the least. Every iteration, not for the purpose of telling anyone else how to feel or what to think, but sharing the unique experience of what it is to live one’s own individual life. The joy, the pain, the traumas, the grief, the love, the visions and losses and hope.

I don’t think we can ever have enough ways to help ourselves feel what it’s like to live in someone else’s experience.

Yet it often feels like the world is awash in stories. Good stories, important stories. Stories we need to hear and stories we need to tell. Fantastic fiction that opens up possibilities for imagining different ways of living; investigative reporting that unfolds the truth of the world. I have been floored by the work of brilliant documentary filmmakers, by novelists who are bona fide geniuses, many of them personal friends.

And what changes?

It is very easy for the path opened up by that question to lead to despair. I’ve been there myself more than once—I’m there myself more than once on any given day, and I don’t think it’s solely a genetic half-Russian Jewish fatalism. It’s looking at the world, and humans, as clear-eyed as possible. It’s seeing people I believed in and trusted coopt genuine need and good causes for their own benefit; it’s seeing the hard work of millions crash against the walls of capital and power.

But down that path is also possibility. My father used to say, and still does, that the biggest problem in the world is lack of imagination. He meant a capacity to place ourselves in other people’s lives and experiences, a capacity for empathy. It’s both true and bigger than that.

Every story shared is a chip in the systems and structures that seem unbreakable and insurmountable. Most of the time we don’t see what’s changed until long after the fact. Real life isn’t a Hollywood apocalypse movie with sudden shocks to the system and people screaming for the walls. We’ll never know what cracks it all open. But those stories, that work, looking at life slant and seeing what can change, that’s how the light gets in.

After taking my first rustic woodworking class, I couldn’t get enough of working with the diversity of hardwoods that grow and fall in the U.S.’s northeast. I learned about the different high-end uses of varieties of Maple, and how bad Black Locust smells—there is no other way to say it but that Black Locust smells like ass—but also how useful it is. Black Locust is so hard that it can be used in decking. It’s like cement board.

I learned how bacteria and fungi cause spalting and how beautiful its black lines are lacing through decaying stumps or sawn boards. In midwinter, the mill’s owner sent me on a day-long chainsaw safety course, where, after several hours of learning to care for chainsaws and safety equipment and looking at photos of people who’d had horrifying accidents, I stood in knee-deep snow and cut down a Pin Oak. I decided I never wanted to use a chainsaw again because I am clumsy and it was terrifying.

The entire project of New York Heartwoods was at core anti-capital. It was inefficient, time-consuming, space-consuming. Slow. Laborious.

It was an enormous amount of work simply to find markets for the wood products, much less retrieve the trees and logs and mill and kiln-dry and shape and sand it all. That entire day one employee and I spent planing someone’s recovered stack of Cedar planks? The client probably could have bought something similar from IKEA for far less money than that day’s labor cost. Even though I was working at that sawmill for free, nobody else was.

But that’s the point. The work was slow and laborious. And smelled heavenly. I could eat my winter-cold sandwich on a stump of spalted Sugar Maple and smell the melt-snow damp of coming spring. I could peek into the kiln and its stacks of Ash boards. I could do work, and feel alive while doing it.

What does efficiency in our lives get us? The question sits like an invisible monster in the center of capitalism: if “the economy” isn’t there to serve human and ecological well-being, what is the point?

If working with wood by hand gave me and others pleasure and satisfaction, and gave clients connection to their ecosystem and its cycles, why not engage in that kind of work? And why are we prevented from doing that work simply because it doesn’t provide enough income to feed our families?

It’s the reason I recommend reading Wengrow and Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything as a balm for despair. Or at least listening to interviews about it, or reading summaries. Whatever works. It’s an enormous book and what’s important is the message behind it: there have been countless ways of forming human societies over the past several thousand years. Just because our current industrialized culture feels like some kind of inevitable endpoint doesn’t mean it’s true. Those endlessly varied histories remind us what might be at the core of true freedom.

It also gives an opening into that question, “What changes?” Well, a lot can change. We never know how, not completely. Working toward change for the better doesn’t guarantee success, nor does it guarantee lack of pushback, but without stories we don’t even know how to imagine something different.

I heard someone recently—one of the tarot readers I follow on YouTube—talk about leaning into fear with curiosity. Despair, too, I suppose. That’s where we can find self-empowerment, and perhaps an entirely different way of perceiving both problems and possibilities.

Like in K-Pop Demon Hunters: perhaps a failure to seal the Golden Honmoon isn’t a failure at all. Maybe it’s a way to discover something more powerful and more honest, with a capacity to connect us all.

Here, we explore questions as varied as:

• The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

• Is it possible to consume without exploitation?

• What Is Wrong With Russia?

✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Watch Duty, a non-profit providing crucial real-time information in wildfire country—information we previously got from the U.S. government’s now-eviscerated EPA through InciWeb—will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of June. Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” received last quarter’s 5%. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

“Oligarchy is based on the notion that those who are unequal in one respect are in all respects unequal; being unequal, that is, in property, they suppose themselves to be unequal absolutely.” –Aristotle, Politics, 350 BCE

My last year of college, I applied for a coveted internship at a relatively prestigious literary magazine in St. Paul, Minnesota. When the acceptance arrived, I was excited for all of a few hours.

Then it came home to me that the internship—as is the case for most internships—was unpaid. The editor who’d interviewed me seemed surprised when I called later to ask about the possibility of even a small stipend.

It was the final semester of my final undergraduate year. I’d taken the previous semester off of university and moved back to Montana to be an adult around for my younger sister, who, at fifteen, was in high school and living for the most part alone (long story). Before that, I’d been working up to five different jobs at a time to support myself through college.

The week I was offered the internship, I went for a long walk with someone I’d been friends with since our first confused, heady days of freshman year. He bought me a sandwich and listened to me angst about whether or not I could afford the money—and the time—to work at a job I’d probably enjoy but for which I wouldn’t be paid.

It wasn’t possible, I already knew that, and at the end of our walk we parted at the door of the family diner where I’d been working as a waitress the previous year—a job I took because making tips got me a lot more rent and grocery money than the coffee shop I’d worked at my first two years of college.

So I turned down the internship and waited tables instead. Every now and then another waitress and I got together at her apartment to paint our nails and watch Xena: Warrior Princess and I tried not to think about who got the assistant editing position I’d been so excited to be offered.

The advantages of wealth and privilege get mentioned a lot but not usually with much substance. I’m not sure how many of us truly understand how wealth accumulation turns into power, influence, and status—the literary world is only one small example of how the financial freedom to work for free gives a person entry and connections in all directions, from publishing opportunities to awards and grants to the strange situation that’s evolved in the past couple decades where “writer” is in many places equated with teaching workshops almost more than it is with publishing, or even with the act of writing itself.

But this isn’t only about the writing world. It’s about money, and power, and their feedback loop.

It took me months to even sit down to write a first draft of this essay because the subject bumps against one of my own failures of imagination: it’s very hard for me to understand how millions, or even billions, of people don’t understand how accumulation of wealth leads to accumulation of power, and how the combination leads inevitably to large-scale human oppressions, environmental degradation, and almost every kind of injustice and inequality.

The combination of power and wealth has always led to the failure of societies, and in their current iteration are leading quickly to the failure of the human species.

In the month or two before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, I picked up David Herszenhorn’s book The Dissident: Alexei Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner, about the Russian dissident and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.

Navalny became internationally known after surviving an attempted poisoning, likely ordered by Russia’s top leadership, and then running for president of Russia against Vladimir Putin. But the core of his work was always about corruption. His investigations and fiercely productive blogging activity focused on business deals that benefited government officials, their families, their friends, their friends’ families . . . almost always at the expense of the Russian people and Russian land, whose natural resource wealth of oil, timber, and minerals was not-so-quietly but very quickly privatized by those already in power, for their own gain, in the years following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Those who benefited most from the privatization were, largely, either those who had held power in the Soviet Union, or people connected to them.

Vladimir Zelensky, an actor and comedian who was elected president of Ukraine after starring in a very successful comedy show about a teacher whose anti-corruption rant went viral, resulting in him unintentionally becoming president, came to fight internal corruption and the influence of Russian wealth and power as the real-life leader of Ukraine.

Navalny was most likely murdered for his anti-corruption work. Zelensky’s country was invaded in 2022 and continues to battle an army of Putin’s soldiers, many of whom were forced into fighting. I’ve heard plenty of stories of disobedience turning into forced conscription that I can’t even share publicly.

And in January 2025, the U.S. government faced, and quickly folded to, a hostile corporate takeover in which the wealthiest person in the world for months wielded the power to fire anyone employed by the government, from wilderness trail crew workers, to people monitoring clean drinking water, to core staff running the power grid of the entire Pacific Northwest.

Everywhere you look, a combination of wealth and power seems to be battling to control more of the same—and winning.

Of course I want to burn it all down. Don’t you?

The problem with that is, as I’ve written here several times before, whenever entire systems and structures are burnt down, it is nearly always those most at risk, those who’ve suffered most, who end up suffering more.

The accumulation of wealth leads to rule by oligarchy, but it also provides those with power the means to protect themselves from inevitable resistance, even mass violence, the French Revolution notwithstanding.

Whatever system arises from the rubble, those who’ve previously accumulated wealth usually have the means to maintain their power structures, or rebuild them all over again.

In his book Black Sea, Neal Acherson described the strange self-protective quality of wealth through the behavior of Polish nobles whose resistance to reform led to the Third Partition in the late 18^th century and the dissolving of Poland as a country for 123 years:

“To the end of their lives, many of these Targowican barons failed to understand what they had done. They kept their vast estates, travelling now to St. Petersburg and Odessa rather than to Warsaw and Krakow. They had lost the political influence they had enjoyed in the old commonwealth, but to be appointed Marshal of Nobility in some Ukrainian county was not a bad substitute. . . . The fact that they themselves were secure and prospering could only mean that all was well with Poland too.”

To put it in more familiar terms: in the 18^th century, the Polish nobles fucked around and everybody else got to find out.

In The Sociology of Freedom, co-founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan—who has been incarcerated in a Turkish prison since 1999, many of those years in isolation—tracked the question of power back at least 5,000 years, to the beginning of people’s ability to begin controlling and accumulating surplus “product”—food for the most part, but also other people’s labor.

Wealth, in his writing, is the ability to accumulate and hoard the resources that people need to survive, including food and work. Power comes from control over that wealth:

“The fundamental characteristics that have marked the central civilization from its very beginning and determined its character have remained essentially unchanged for five thousand years. . . . One characteristic that remains stable whatever the differences or forms adopted is the monopoly’s hegemonic control of surplus product. . . . We must take care to understand the monopoly. It is neither purely capital nor purely power. It is not the economy, either. It is the power to use organizations, technology, and violence to secure its extortion in the economic area.”

Much of the power in wealth is about who owns what, which translates into who controls and dominates what, especially land, water, food, and the right to pollute the commons we all need for survival. Vandana Shiva—who’s been working on seed and food sovereignty in India for decades—has in recent years reiterated what can never be said enough: “If you control food, you control people.”

The U.S. government’s determination to wipe out buffalo and destroy land relationships through iterations of theft so as to force people and Native Nations into dependence in recent history is proof enough of this (its goals in this respect are explicit and well documented); and if you read about enclosures of the commons over the past 800 years of British history, you’ll also run into plenty of examples of entire villages of people evicted and starving and forced into “jobs” for the first time because a few already-rich people wanted to get wealthier by raising sheep on land that was previously used and lived with in common.

To give just one example, Andro Linklater, in his sections on England’s enclosures of the commons in Owning the Earth, wrote:

“In a single day in 1567, Sir Thomas Gray of Chillingham in the north of England cleared off his manor no fewer than 340 villeins, cottagers, and laborers whose right to work their plots of land existed simply by tradition. Whole villages and townships were soon emptied—in Shakespeare’s county of Warwickshire alone, sixty-one villages were wiped out before the year 1500.”

These land thefts and evictions led to starvation and mass homelessness and criminalization of the same through anti-vagrancy laws and the right to enslave people found to be in violation. Those who were already wealthy had the power to take what they wanted, call it theirs, and justify the theft through philosophies and laws that placed rights of property—no matter how it was acquired—over the rights of people, and of life in general.

The long-term impacts of wealth—whether of land or wealth in other forms—accumulate intergenerationally, for far longer than most of us realize. A research paper co-authored by scholars with the Bank of Italy and the University of Bologna that tracked intergenerational wealth in family dynasties in Florence, Italy, from 1427 to 2011 challenged a common misconception that family wealth is usually wiped out within three generations. They found instead that the top earners of today are most often descendants of those “at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” families who had been lawyers or members of elite trade guilds in the year 1427:

“Intergenerational real wealth elasticity is significant too and the magnitude of its implied effect is even larger: the 10th-90th exercise entails more than a 10% difference today. Looking for non-linearities, we find, in particular, some evidence of the existence of a glass floor that protects the descendants of the upper class from falling down the economic ladder.

These results are new and remarkable and suggest that socioeconomic persistence is significant over six centuries.”

The authors pointed out that the results are particularly remarkable when you consider the enormous social, economic, and political upheavals that took place in that region over those centuries, “and that were not able to untie the Gordian knot of socioeconomic inheritance,” a reality that they felt comfortable extending to similar countries in western Europe.

Ownership and wealth are far stickier and more resilient over time, even over collapsing societies, than most of us would like to believe.

And of course what security of wealth both comes from and translates into, along with power, is ownership of property—land in particular.

The weight of wealth and power is enormous. It sucks up life and resources, and seeks more of the same; it crushes people and feeds off their labor, and seeks more of the same. When it faces resistance, it responds by protecting itself. Maybe firing someone. Maybe abusing or even murdering them. Maybe invading an entire land.

The Roman Empire is one of the most well-known cases in point. “Empires entail ongoing costs,” political economist John Rapley wrote in Aeon about the Roman Empire. “The richer an empire becomes, the more it must spend to preserve that wealth,” spending more money on ever-shakier military campaigns and using up public funds to protect the security—and property—of the wealthy and powerful within its borders.

“Power,” wrote Abdullah Öcallan, “is not simply accumulated like capital; it is the most homogenous, refined, and historically accumulated form of capital.”

Power, in other words, is a manifestation of wealth itself. It is what wealth is for.

Given the resilience of wealth, the protective quality it gives to those who have it, what are we meant to do about the power it wields, power that causes an immense amount of damage and limits everyone else’s freedoms? What’s the answer, the solution?

There are two that I can see: the first and most urgent is to tax wealth, obviously. Prevent the kinds of massive accumulation of resources that lead to accumulation of power. Pretending that one doesn’t lead to the other, and that their combined strength don’t lead to oppression of most of the human population as well as destruction of much of the rest of the living world, is a fairy tale.

David Wengrow and David Graeber’s book The Dawn of Everything is partly directed at this problem, detailing societies across the planet over several thousand years and how they rose and fell and shaped themselves—or didn’t—around an awareness of the dangers of wealth and property accumulation. Those shapings, the authors wrote, determine everyday people’s security of three essential freedoms: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” Wealth accumulation—especially in landed property over the last near-millenium—leads to the kind of power accumulation that erodes or outright prohibits these freedoms.

“Progress” is never a clear path; it’s a messy, tangled walk through an overgrown forest that often leads in circles. The benefits of whatever we call progress are only fully realized when they come hand in hand with an awareness of wealth’s downfalls.

The second response is to pay serious attention to building parallel systems that not only show the viability of, for example, commons management of land and life, water and work, but have the resilience to keep going even when shit does hit the fan—which systems run by and for wealth and power are generally too fragile to withstand.

There are plenty of examples of these systems being built right now, probably all around each of us, that we might be unaware of because they aren’t the stories that grab national and international headlines. But the podcasts Frontiers of Commoning and Building Local Power, for example, both focus on efforts around cooperative farms, community broadband, watershed citizenship and bioregional activism, Rights of Nature, tenants’ rights, composting and food security, and more.

The more a society is designed to crush you, though, the harder it can be to make these efforts successful. In my book A Walking Life, I wrote about the St. Paul, Minnesota, area of Rondo, a majority Black community of thriving businesses and neighborhoods, which was largely destroyed, losing over 700 homes and 300 businesses and the community split in half, to build a now 8-lane freeway during the U.S.’s highway-building craze in the middle decades of the 1900s. It’s a far too typical story. Most of the U.S.’s major highways, where they run through cities, were built by destroying mostly majority-Black and poor communities, along with any equity they’d built in those businesses and homes, and largely to serve more affluent suburbs.

Wealth gets its resources, including power, by extracting from everyone else in any way legally possible and many illegal.

You can’t separate injustices from one another without power weaponizing that separation to eradicate resistance—or attempting to.

The right to vote, for example, has long been entwined with wealth, specifically wealth of land. In 1819, a peaceful rally of nearly 60,000 unarmed working class people in Manchester, England, was organized to advocate for the right to vote for those who did not own property (the U.S. Constitution, too, originally limited voting rights to property owners in addition to requiring that they be male, white, and over the age of 21). Land enclosures—theft of the commons—going back as early as the 13th century meant that very few people owned land, but laws they had no opportunity to participate in writing affected them anyway.

Government forces attacked the peaceful rally, resulting in 18 dead and over 650 injured in what is called the Peterloo massacre. Those who didn’t own property wouldn’t get the right to vote until the late 1800s.

Self-taught American economist Henry George spent most of his 1879 book Progress & Poverty writing about the ways that land ownership leads to wealth inequality and accumulation of political power by a few, and resistance to the same:

“Absolute political equality does not in itself prevent the tendency to inequality involved in the private ownership of land, and it is further evident that political equality, coexisting with an increasing tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth, must ultimately beget either the despotism of organized tyranny or the worst despotism of anarchy.”

If normal, everyday people understood the reality that all wealth comes from land, from nature, as well as from the labor of others, human and non-human alike, they wouldn’t vote for a system that gives yet more wealth and power to those who already have it, that hands power to those who control land and are therefore able to accumulate wealth.

But as should be painfully obvious by a simple glance at the daily news, mass understanding of that reality requires more than education; it requires imagination and insight. It requires that those who do the storytelling—journalists, reporters, novelists, and poets—share experience with the bulk of humanity, at least enough to access some empathy, to be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes. To understand that what they’re being told by those in power might simply be a story benefiting and protecting the same—power, and wealth.

It takes a lot of imagination and intention to see where our own privileges have blinkered our vision. If I had come from a family with even middle-class income, if my parents or grandparents had money and I weren’t working more than one job at a time just to support myself and be able to finish college, I could have taken that internship with a prestigious literary journal. I could have started climbing some kind of literary ladder, become an editor at an equally prestigious publisher maybe. And I maybe would have assumed that it was only my hard work and talent that got me there, not seeing the ways the trail was cleared and the path smoothed before I ever stepped on it.

We all need self-awareness to be able to see how power is actually structured, how it is shaped around the interests of wealth and property. That there is no “trickle-down,” that enormous accumulation of wealth is detrimental, actually, to life and freedom at every level you can think of, including the individual lives shaped and softened by wealth itself. All of this requires an understanding of propaganda and Story and how deep attachment to identity—both individual and shared—runs through every human being.

It requires a shift in consciousness, you might say, as well as changes in tax codes and societal priorities.

Or there’s a third option, which is to wait for the incompetence and nepotism inherent in oligarchy to eat their own power structures from the inside out.

The philosopher Aristotle, who made an extensive study of the rise and fall of city-states, rulers, and power structures in his book Politics, written over 2300 years ago, warned that oligarchies are inherently unstable. They can’t meet the needs of the regular population, they can’t abide competition in business or culture, and they can’t be bothered to follow the laws they write, even those that benefit themselves.

In a video summation of oligarchies, how to fight them, and Aristotle’s Politics, the narrators of the YouTube channel Legendary Lore1 said that,

“Aristotle observed that while a state can handle many types of protest, the real danger comes when people stop believing the state serves its proper end: the good life and virtue of its citizens,” resulting in an erosion of legitimacy.

“Aristotle warned against the wealthy treating common things as their own, like when public spaces become effectively private, when shared infrastructure serves only elite interests, when common goods like water and, in our times airwaves and digital networks, become de facto personal property of the economic political class.”

Oligarchies tend toward nepotism and its ruling members live openly in opposition to the laws imposed on the rest of the population. Their networks become brittle, and the systems often succumb to infighting among oligarchs themselves.

“Many oligarchies,” Aristotle wrote in Politics, “have been destroyed by some members of the ruling class taking offense at their excessive despotism; for example, the oligarchy at Cnidus and at Chios.”

We can wait it out, knowing that not only does everyone else suffer in the process—and it’s a long process; some form of oligarchy has been in charge of Russia going on decades now, culminating in the theft of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022—but the reality of wealth will likely, in the long run, still protect many of those who caused the damage. And then the cycle can start all over again.

One of the biggest things I learned while writing my book about walking was that connection, care, and community are just as core to our evolution, just as ancient if not more so, as any of our worst tendencies. If humans were all despotic, greedy, and evil, our species wouldn’t still be around. There are hundreds of thousands of years of archaeological evidence showing us capable of greed but even more of cooperation, and we have the opportunity, in every generation, to choose which of those tendencies we reward, strengthen, and build societies upon. Likewise, that reality inevitably gives something to build hope upon.

“If mutual aid,” wrote Wengrow and Graeber in The Dawn of Everything,

“social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kinds of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.”

My own energies tend toward helping to build, support, and research and write about those parallel systems, usually hyperlocal, that go under the radar but that provide examples for lifeways that make societies life-supportive, locally adaptable, self-aware, and achievable. St. Paul’s Rondo, for example, has never stopped working to repair the damage done by the building of a freeway, and restore its community.

It’s not sexy or loud or charismatic, and it’s not going to topple globally powerful and corrupt international criminals hell-bent on making everyone else suffer. It certainly won’t make me or anyone else whose attention is directed that way famous or rich, nor will it save us all from authoritarians and murderous dictators next week or feed all the children tomorrow.

But it’s still work that’s needed, and in the long run, with enough people, its own power might surprise us.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

—from 17^th-century protests against English enclosures

I recently wrote an essay for Psyche/Aeon’s “one thing that changed me” series that’s probably the most personal thing I’ve ever published. If you came here from that essay, I’m very glad to see you here. This newsletter is generally not the space for that kind of personal essay, but I hope you’ll give it a try and explore what it means to be part of a commons—including our relationships with one another.

“Ma’am, watch this.”

Two teenage boys stopped me on the footbridge, right where they’d been jumping into the river. One of them was about to attempt a backflip off the railing, and the other was betting it would turn into a belly flop.

I stopped, and thought briefly of my father’s childhood stories—growing up in Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg) in the Soviet Union, he and his friends jumping (illegally) from a bridge into the Neva, near the Peter & Paul Fortress. Living under a dictator, a life structured around fear, rigid rules, almost nonexistent interpersonal trust, and waiting in hours-long lines for bread. And still, laughing, challenging one another, unwilling to resist the lure of the water.

The boy jumped, did not belly flop. “That was actually pretty cool,” I agreed with the other kid, and went on my way.

I’d been sitting at the other end of the footbridge for a while, on new stone steps that the city had just had put in to make access to the river at that spot easier, and to repair the worrying degree of erosion from years of people walking up and down the slope. Although there are easier access points and several public docks all along the river, the ends of the footbridge see heavy use, people drawn down to the water with dogs, with kids, with themselves.

But it was a steep slope and slippery from time-ground dirt eroding away from the bank. In ten years I’ve gone down to the water at that spot maybe two or three times. In the week since the steps were finished, I’ve been down them, walking into the water, sitting on the lowest steps doing nothing, almost every day. The steps didn’t change how I relate to the river—I visit it at plenty of other points that have gentler slopes and docks to sit on—but they did transform my relationship to it at that particular point. I feel invited now to sit with the water, drawn to greet it. From what I’ve seen, a lot of other people do, too.

When I was a teenager—over thirty years ago now; I’ll be fifty in less than a year—this river was not one people swam in. My younger sister says she used to go in, but it wasn’t common. It was so polluted, so contaminated from nearly a century of pollution leeching from the rail yard’s containment ponds, that in decades past it used to catch fire.

In 2009 a years-long Superfund cleanup began on the river, which runs wide and slow right through our town from its outlet at the lake, eventually down to Flathead Lake, all the water collected in this basin eventually funneling out to the massive Columbia River watershed. Superfund, for those outside the U.S., is a designation implying a degree of pollution that might take decades, more likely centuries, to repair.

The first time I visited the new steps was with a friend who was in charge of that Superfund cleanup. Like many of my friends, her work —cleaning up oil spills in rivers for the railways—is far more interesting and important than mine.

To remedy the extensive contamination, the river was drained completely. Blocked at its outlet from the lake and the water removed. I’ve seen pictures but hadn’t moved back home by then. It’s hard to wrap my head around the enormity of the project.

In late 2014, the year after the initial cleanup completed (there have been small leakages and spills since then; the rail yard area remains a Superfund site and the river will likely always be at risk), a several-mile stretch of the river was designated non-motorized. Now, as soon as winter begins to loosen, the water is popular for paddleboarding, kayaking, swimming, jumping off the footbridge at that one spot where the water’s deep enough to do it safely for most of the summer, and now, with the new steps down to the water, for those of us who simply want to sit by it, let it welcome our feet and our thoughts. An invitation to rest.

The river will never be the same as it was before the rail yard was built and contamination started to seep into the water, at least not for generations beyond count. Not everything can be fixed. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to repair.

Recently, the novelist and physician Abraham Verghese came to give a talk at our local community college. The region I live in is not, to put it mildly, a place where people of that stature and renown come to speak. We might never get to listen to someone like him again in person, but the hospital sponsored the talk (a friend quipped, I’m sure rightly, that it was probably cheaper than doing what they needed to be doing, hiring more nurses), and it was close to sold out.

Verghese was a generous and thoughtful speaker, full of compassion and insight. Before answering questions from the audience—packed with people who worked at the local hospital or their relatives, including some of the friends I’d gone with—talked about his childhood in Ethiopia and the books that shaped who he became as a writer as well as a doctor.

And then he spoke about being a doctor serving HIV/AIDS patients in Tennessee in the early 1980s, when HIV was terrifying and unknown—it hadn’t even been labeled human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) yet—and had no treatment.

It was at that time, he said, when he began to understand that, for all the medical profession’s fixation on curing illnesses, there is an equal or perhaps even greater need to understand what “healing” means. There was no cure for his HIV patients at the time. The end was known and usually not far off and involved a great deal of suffering. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t work with healing, for them and their families.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since—curing versus healing, along with Verghese’s calm, generous presence with this tired audience tucked into an often huffy, even angry, and stunning little corner of Montana.

I think it’s what I want to say when I talk so often in this space about compassion and caregiving, whether it’s in our interpersonal, private relationships, or with the world at large. Why the ethos of “burn it all down” makes me chafe, knowing as I do—and most of us should—that when worlds fall apart, those who suffer most are those who are already suffering most, those who always have suffered most.

Dismantling structures of oppression and violence requires building and repairing alongside collapse, lest we simply allow the same harms to grow in the ruins. Not easy. Still necessary.

It made me think of ’s work—as an end-of-life doula and carer of baby birds at a wildlife sanctuary—and her writing at Death & Birds. What is at the core of life in the end but death, and the compassion and care that is its cosmic twin? But also of ’s regular journeys with milkweed and mending on The Gussett, which fascinate me, as if her foraging, spinning, and weaving represent a life I was meant to live, the ways that nature can be literally woven into our lives if we learn how, and allow her to do her work.

Heal. Mend. Repair. So many words we have to acknowledge damage, and what we might attempt to soothe the harms that linger.

As a handful of people here already know, I’m in the midst of a marriage dissolution that is almost finding its way to an ending, which of course for both me and my spouse will be another beginning. It’s been a slow, painstaking process focused on prioritizing our two teenage kids, and repairing of friendship and a different kind of partnership after 26 years of marriage. It surprises me with a shock of gratitude on a regular basis that we’re able to do this with a focus on mending, rather than rending one another apart. (That’s probably the last thing I’ll ever say on this subject except that it’s amazing to be able to make a legally binding commitment essentially as a child that requires a career in accounting and a PhD in psychology to undo.)

To be surrounded in life with people who heal, whether rivers or relations, animals or animosities, is a kind of magic. I’ve learned the hard way that not all those who speak with reverence of the importance of relationships think it’s equally important to live by it, and am all the more grateful for people who live true to those expressed values.

The first time I sat on the new river steps by myself, one warm evening after a busy day, there were no other people nearby. I allowed myself a tiny proprietary twinge because, although I recently gave up my seat on the town’s Board of Parks, I was there for the years of planning and permitting of these steps and it felt good to know I’d been a tiny part of something built for the good of the public, a miniscule contribution to repairing our local commons.

A yellow warbler sang from a willow tree draped over the water a little upstream. The particular psithurism that comes from a breeze catching on the branches of lodgepole pines and larches drifted from the opposite bank.

I wish I could bottle that sound for people, or record it effectively. It fills me with a feeling that change is coming. It always has, ever since childhood. There is something about the way the needles of those trees shatter the air, maybe, that gives it a different sense than wind among aspen leaves, or old oaks. Something . . . impending.

Sometimes—or in times like our own, often—it feels like forces of destruction, greed, hate, and even evil are insurmountable. That nothing good can be saved, nothing can be repaired.

But my town, my wider region, is full of people doing their utmost to repair the commons. People dedicated to affordable housing efforts, to the seemingly neverending struggle for a county-wide bike and pedestrian trail system, to building places for homeless people to rest and feeding the hungry, to cleaning up rivers and lakes and restoring wildlife habitat, to helping refugees find homes and settle into this winter-shaped, sometimes strange place.

There are so many people everywhere working to fix the wounds of the world, knowing that pain and scars will remain.

The river that I’m now spending a lot more time in has a long way to go in repair. Though it’s designated endangered bull trout habitat, there are almost no fish in it except for a few bottom feeders. I like watching them; they’re a reminder of how far the water has come from the damage inflicted on her slow current.

Not all can be cured. Maybe nothing can. But the potential for healing is infinite.

Subscribe now

Here, we explore questions as varied as:

• The disastrous and ongoing legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

• Is it possible to consume without exploitation?

• What Is Wrong With Russia?

✔️ Join a community of 6,900+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of June. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

My mother sent me a birthday card years ago that I have put above my desk everywhere I’ve lived since. On the front is a reproduction of a painting by Deborah DeWit Marchant, dated 1994: a woman, brown-haired and pale-skinned like me, is sitting in a booth at a diner, next to a window. On the table in front of her are an empty plate with what looks like the remains of pie, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, and an open book. Her left hand rests against her face and she is reading. The street looks wet with recent rain. The woman’s hair is even braided back, as mine almost always is.

The painting is titled “The Artisans Cafe.” There’s a sense of peace in it I’ve always loved, a sense of allowance—this woman can sit there getting lost in a book, no other demands on her attention for at least a little while.

For years I’ve looked at that picture with both longing and an internal struggle. It speaks to me of the kind of permission to rest that too few people in this life, including me, feel they can allow themselves. I’ve been caring for others since I was four years old, when my younger sister was born, and when I look at that picture I see a moment for myself when everyone is fed and occupied, all the dishes are done, and the floor swept, the laundry folded and put away, the endless tasks of housekeeping and people-caring soothed and calmed and, for the moment, finished. Complete. It’s a moment that never comes.

Maybe it’s the pie plate that gets me. This woman has eaten, and has time to enjoy her book, and her coffee while it’s hot, and doesn’t even have to wash the plate. What a luxury.

I long for the moment in that picture nearly every day. It takes a lot of mental effort to give it to myself once in a while, breathe into the moment, any moment, even while the laundry remains overflowing and last night’s frying pan is waiting to be scrubbed and the peas need picking and the strawberries weeded and forms filled out and the bank account stressed over . . .

In the original draft of this, I followed that line with a list of all the things I’m behind on, everything that keeps piling up, but those details aren’t important. Each of you has your own list, your own burdens and worries and piles of laundry.

None of it will ever be caught up on permanently, much as I long for that moment, and in the midst of it all is my own work, which has been intensive for a while and will be for a few months more. An essay for this newsletter about the conflation of wealth and power that I keep needing to cut down (really, there’s no need to quote every book on this subject I’ve ever read but it’s hard, and do you really want to know exactly how Aristotle advised overthrowing oligarchy? yes, probably), essays for non-Substack outlets, and a lot of editing. A lot of editing.

Over the past six months I’ve been helping my friend Kathleen McLaughlin, longtime journalist and author of the fantastic book Blood Money, with a new anthology of essays by Montana writers she’s putting together for University of Oklahoma Press. It’s been a project she’s been shepherding for over two years and it’s finally taking “holy crap this is real” shape. I have an essay in it, but far more interesting to me is that I’ve been working with over twenty writers copy editing and helping develop their essays about Montana. In over twenty years of copy editing, which I mostly do for K-12 textbook publishers, it’s one of the most satisfying and challenging projects I’ve ever worked on.

It’s interesting being immersed in this editing just at the moment when what is marketed as artificial intelligence—but LLMs, or large language models, are not in fact anything of the sort, not yet—is being pushed as capable of taking over work like mine and I wonder, between rounds of essay edits, if I should take up the manager of the local tire shop on his persistent job offers. That job comes with health insurance and in America that’s far more precious than gold.

There are many levels to the speed of this technology’s adoption that are worrisome but out of my control, from people’s willingness to believe it truly is revolutionary simply because they’re told it is, to a complete bypassing of the reality that most of these systems are built entirely on stolen labor and stolen work—my book is among thousands used to train the LLMs with neither compensation nor my permission—and deployed not to improve people’s lives but to further bloat tech companies’ profits, to the deep, disturbing willingness to withdraw the possibility of creative work (much less income for it) from human beings who sorely need it.

A subscriber here once recommended this post to me, by science fiction and fantasy author Catherynne M. Valente, about artificial intelligence and creativity, that I’ve hung onto, while watching people who, for various reasons, justify the use of a product built on stolen labor and being used to replace the creative work not just of writing, but of editing:

“It can and will get ugly. But oh my god, people won’t stop writing or creating or performing, and they won’t stop coding, either, not the ones who love it and are passionate about it, certainly not because AOL Instant Essayist can, too. That shit is compulsive. From hands on a cave wall to these words on this screen, we cannot stop trying to express ourselves, and if one thing about our dumbfuck monkey dance on this call of salt will never change, it’s that. The unending plaintive scream of people trying to connect, to be heard, to be seen, to be known, to take what is inside us and make it manifest on the outside. . . .

Take away art and we’re going to art harder just to spite you.”

It’s also a really funny essay (while managing to be both slightly depressing in its realism and also empowering in its “fuck you we’re going to be human anyway” manifesto), so I’m going to quote another paragraph just because:

“This is not the optimistic part of the essay. Sorry. This the god dammit we spent literally all of science fiction telling you not to do this can you actually not for once part of the essay. Oh you’re definitely doing it anyway? And shoving me in my locker afterward? Perfect.”

For those who’ve never done it, this might be hard to believe, but editing is at least as creative as writing is. It is art. There is something almost indescribable about helping a writer tell their story or find how to say what they want to say in the best way possible, and in the way that is truest to who they are. It’s psychology and architecture, sociology and tailoring. It’s working with live wires of human storytelling all the damn time.

A writer I used to be friends with once told me that he thought my work as a copy editor simply involved “fixing commas and stuff.” I laughed, but was surprised at his assumption, since I figured he had to have worked with copy editors on his own writing once in a while. I do fix commas, true, but it’s a very small part of my job, which is far more about communication and storyweaving than it is about grammatical rules—which I know well enough to, frankly, not care. At least, not unless I’m being paid to. I’ll never correct your typos, unless you want to pay my hourly rate.

Copy editing is, for me and the copy editors I’m friends with, the people I respect, something far more in-depth. Something vibrant. It’s working with language at the level where it lives, before it gets pinned down in a dictionary like a butterfly specimen on a corkboard.

This really came home to me working on this recent project. So many writers, each with their own voice, style, strengths, and stories to tell. Editing is never just working with words or narrative; it’s approaching that narrative as an animal whom you have to get to know before touching. That animal could be affectionate, happy, traumatized, wild. Anything. The animal is alive and individual, their own self. That’s the point.

It’s working with who the writer of that narrative is, and the readers they want to reach. Sometimes, sadly to me, that means accepting when a writer is allergic to revision and balks at editorial feedback, meaning I only do the bare minimum. Frustrating, especially when there’s talent and potential, but I can’t force people to do their own stories credit. I just accept that they don’t want to know their work any more deeply than they want to know themselves and move on.

Other times, it’s the delight of working with someone who’s never published before and is eager to learn how to bring the best out of their own story in their own voice; or the delight of working with longtime, professional writers who feel the same. There are copy editors who will dictate to writers how to shape their story, but it makes me happy not to be one of them. It’s more fun.

This anthology project has eaten up an enormous amount of my time and energy over the past six or so months. It’s reminded me why I almost never teach or lead workshops: giving feedback in the way I do comes from the same creative place my writing does. I give of myself to other people’s work the same as I give of myself to my own writing, or to my kids, and I have to be careful with that. A couple of times I told Kathleen I had to take a break because my creative well was empty, and since she was of course doing even more work on the project than I was, she understood.

But it’s been far more of a gift to me. In the midst of a lot of personal and global turmoil, it has been a sheer pleasure to challenge myself, to be part of something I think is valuable and important, and to work intensively with such a large and varied group of writers, to be reminded that each one of them is an absolutely unique human being. As we all are.

It’s been both creatively fulfilling and soothing to my humanity—with each exchange and round of edits with each writer, with email conversations that veered into moments of shared experience and running jokes in their essays’ comments, I was reminded that there are no seething, personality-free masses of humanity, only people each with their immediate and intergenerational traumas, their struggles, hopes, memories, and battle-scarred heart.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sound of a sandhill crane passing by, making me think of a few weeks ago when I heard my first of the spring as I waited in line at the tire shop before dawn to get my winter tires switched over and wondered if my ten-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it can handle another decade.

And earlier this week I came back from a self-guided Montana history trip with my younger kid (who’s been homeschooling this academic year) to meet the lilacs at home just beginning to open, and the two resident hummingbirds back in the caragana bushes. The tobacco plants and tomato starts thriving under the grow light my brother-in-law gave me, and the onion sets accusing me silently of neglect while the sweetgrass is thriving.

That night I stayed up to watch the full Moon rise in the southeast, an eerie green-blue glow through the night’s slight fog, the western sky still darkening from Sun who sets far too late this time of year for my taste, lover as I am of the cold and dark of winter.

It was, I’ve heard, a full Moon in Scorpio, a Moon for letting go, a release of what no longer works in our lives. I’ve got plenty of that, I thought, and hoped the murky moonlight would help some of it dissipate.

I have a new editing project starting just as this other one is finishing. It’s a book by someone I’ve worked with before on her audiobook, which I’ve often recommended, about algorithms and bias. She’s a roboticist who worked for NASA on the Mars Rover and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to know in this life. My creative editor self is excited to immerse in that work.

Her book? It’s about the promises, pitfalls, and prejudices of artificial intelligence, by someone who knows these technologies better than almost anyone else—and, unlike many of us who criticize them, loves them while being clear-eyed about their flaws and risks.

Talking about this project with her brought me back to Ursula Franklin’s book The Real World of Technology, based on her talk in the 1980s that was recommended to me ages ago by a subscriber here and has become one of my touchstones since then.

“While we should not forget that these prescriptive technologies are often exceedingly effective and efficient, they come with an enormous social mortgage. The mortgage means that we live in a culture of compliance, that we are ever more conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, and to accept that there is only one way of doing ‘it.’”

Enormous social mortgage. What of our future freedoms and choices do we give up with every unquestioned technology adoption? Who else’s choices and freedoms do we strip in the process without their consent?

In times of darkness as well as times of rapid change, having clarity can feel almost impossible. It’s one of the reasons that I wrote before last year’s U.S. presidential election that one factor many people were missing was keeping the right to protest at all, to fight back, something that is currently—and unsurprisingly—quickly being criminalized. What kinds of choices can you make when the rights you thought were foundational, at least in theory, are being broken up and carted away?

There are at least as many answers to this question as there are human beings alive at any given moment. My own is to look at my Russian-Jewish grandparents and the kinds of choices they made living under the authoritarian dictator Joseph Stalin.

But it’s valid to look also, I think, to that unique human gift of creativity. The messy, tangled, most often unproductive and unprofitable, process that has been somehow fundamental to the history of our entire species, across the planet and over hundreds of thousands of years. One of the answers to how one remains free is—thank you, Catherynne M. Valente—to art harder.

Until all the children in the world live without fear of hunger, violence, oppression, or abuse and every border is marked only by a tree, a greeting, and a bit of cultural orientation, claims of technological progress are, for the most part, mirages obscuring accumulation of wealth and profit. (I’m not talking about developments like vaccines. Vaccines are great, as are many other technologies. But technological “progress” is not the unmitigated good it’s assumed to be—see the entire century of building a car-centric world and the attendant pollution, severed communities, and human health consequences.) They might be developments most of us have no control over, but we can choose to keep our humanity as intact as possible.

I see no reason to give up writing or editing, even when so many believe the marketing hype that says LLMs can do those tasks just as well. I don’t, frankly, care whether they can or not. I care that people believing it’s true will probably eviscerate my ability to make a living doing something I love, but that won’t stop me from doing it. Storytelling, as I’ve written before, is for me paired with walking—a fundamental human experience, core to who we are as a species. I don’t intend on giving that up, even if I need to get a job at the tire shop to pay the rent and feed my kids. It’s not a bad job and the people there are nice.

Editing and writing are, for me, represented by that old birthday card above my desk. Every word considered or line scratched out in my notebook, every minute sitting with a writer’s essay and trying to sink into what it is they’re truly trying to say, and to whom, is a moment of rest, clarity, and the ineffable spark of insight. It’s life, interwoven with the hummingbird outside my window and the river that runs through town and the heartaches and losses and beauty of human experience. It’s connection to whatever it is that holds it all together—holds us, all, together.

It is my chance to live in the Artisans Cafe whenever and however I can.

My kid and I stopped in Missoula on our way home from the history trip, took a wander along the big-shouldered ponderosa pines of Maclay Flats and were rewarded with fresh beaver chew. Every moment of our lives is a struggle between contributing to technology’s social mortgage, which we can’t always escape, and . . . this.

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

✔️ Join a community of 6,800+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of March. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

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, though I maybe wouldn’t count the ocean moments trying to avoid bluebottle jellyfish—but those were wonderful despite the border and residency struggles, not because of them.

Last year, I spent a few days in Canada cross-country skiing and cooking with some longtime friends. 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 with my friends last year 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 were non-smokers. Our carful of mothers in their forties was waved through easily.

And yet there was nothing about that 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 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. They are arbitrary yet all-powerful creations of nation-states, creations that have no recognition from water, air, rock, wildlife, or human relationship, yet maintain the say of life, death, and the birthright of wandering that belongs to every human being even if it’s denied.

Borders 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 can be taken.

When I published the original version of this piece, left a comment that included a link to an essay on borders I hadn’t read before, by Leslie Marmon Silko, whom I’d always only known as a fiction writer.

“I will never forget that night beside the highway,” Silko wrote.

“There was an awful feeling of menace and violence straining to break loose. It was clear the uniformed men would be only too happy to drag us out of the car if we did not speedily comply with their request (asking a question is tantamount to resistance, it seems).”

Silko wrote that essay in 1994, of a border—in the U.S.’s southwest—that has been increasingly militarized since at least the 1980s. Over half of U.S. citizens live within the jurisdiction of border patrol—which was extended in the early 2000s to cover 100 miles within any land or maritime border. Consciousness of that barrier’s power pervades how all of us behave and perceive ourselves and our freedom to varying degrees.

wrote a small poetry collection on borders last year, partly in response to that borders essay but unfolding out into ideas of perception and belonging, the way that borders of the mind and body spill into each other.

“The mind
constructs
borders
but bodies
cross them.”

she wrote in the poem “Border stories.”

Borders are physical, but they are also psychological and emotional. There is a great deal about my life and myself that I don’t include in this newsletter because doing so could have consequences that would make my life at best difficult. I don’t include yet others because they are not my stories to tell. Those are borders I mostly created and maintain myself. I will dismantle them when I feel ready, which is probably never.

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.)

My stepbrother and his family weren’t able to come camping with us the past couple summers because they are Russian and can’t readily leave a country that’s been waging war on a neighboring one. They, and my cousins, friends, and other relatives in Russia, 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. What borders constrict our lives and how much of a choice we have in their construction and enforcement.

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 was 22 years old and had used my last speck of savings from waiting tables to pay for a root canal at the dentist. I was scared and sad, but had a multi-lingual friend 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 by border patrol about 70 miles from the Canadian border. My spouse, who only became a U.S. citizen a few years ago, is English. Our friends who were going hiking with us were also stopped. The wife was American, while her 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 possible 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. He had to leave the country within ten days of his visa denial, and so they did. Permanently.

I look back on all of these interactions, and more, like the innumerable run-ins I’ve had with the police in Russia trying to get a bribe out of me, and see a world laced with borders. Borders 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 last year, my friends and I passed several herds of grazing bighorn sheep, and slowed for a flock of pine grosbeaks 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.

My younger kid and I recently spent a few days in Canada for their spring break, in a small town similar to our own where we did little but walk by the river in between sitting in a coffee shop reading books. Our border crossings were uneventful and took seconds. That same week, my kids’ father and our son were crossing the border with Canada by train and bus north of Seattle; their experience in both directions was harsher.

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.

I encourage people to go back and read the comments in the original version of this piece from last year, the range of chilling and threatening experiences people have had crossing, or trying to cross, borders. Share your own here. Read one another’s. This is an experience that affects everyone, even those of us who think we have the privilege to remain unaware until something happens.

This is a reality I’ve lived with my entire life—my father grew up in the Soviet Union, a country he was not allowed to leave for a long time. When he was finally given permission to emigrate with my mother and older sister, both American, he was given 3 days to leave the country and told not to return. He was almost 30 years old. He lived in exile for 17 years and never saw his own father again.

The original version of this essay probably had the most comments of any I’ve written on this platform, which longtime subscribers know is saying a lot, and it’s not without reason. The experience of borders is like air pollution full of poisons and invisible heavy metals, seeping into every aspect of our being.

A world of boundaries and respect, but no borders, could truly be one where traveling smells of freedom, a way of being in a world that can be read and known through our footsteps, this shared planet 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.

Here, we explore questions as varied as: Why are three little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, freedom, and public lands? Or for something different: What Is Wrong With Russia?

✔️ Join a community of 6,800+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Messengers for Health, founded “to improve the health of Apsáalooke (Crow Indian) men, women, and children using solutions that respect and honor Apsáalooke strengths, culture, stories, and language,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of March. Blackfeet ECO Knowledge received last quarter’s 5%. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

Audio version:

My first semester of college, I had a neighbor who had a nice stereo system. I don’t know anything about stereo systems so I had to take her word for it that it was nice, or at least expensive.

My neighbor set up her CD player and speakers inside her closet, against the interior wall that separated it from my closet, and when she played music loudly, which she liked to do, especially at night, it thumped right into my room. Sometimes I asked her to turn it down, and at one point asked if, in general, she could not turn the volume so high because it was just as loud in my room as it was in hers. Or if she could even just keep it off at night.

Her response was one of my first encounters with the particular kind of entitlement that comes with having money: “What’s the point of having a nice stereo system if you can’t play it?”

I remember struggling with a vague feeling of injustice, of thinking about shared space and why her right to play her pricey stereo system shouldn’t come at the expense of my right to quiet, or sleep. I didn’t have vocabulary for that feeling until many years later, not until I’d lived overseas for a while, gotten married, and moved back to the U.S. to bumble around inarticulately and angrily liberal during the entirety of the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s. I’m still liberal and often angrily so, but I hope more articulate.

Entitlement is a vague thing to try to pin down, an unvocalized feeling that one person, or group of people, has more of a right to exist, to take up space and air and attention, than other people. It is often accompanied by an expansive idea of ownership, a feeling that the fact of possession, whether of property or money or achievement or identity, implies a right to the unconstrained use of the thing possessed, no matter how the possession was gained or at whose expense it’s employed.

Being wealthy is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for entitlement—some of the people I know who act most entitled do so due to their status, professional success, identity, or sense of grievance—but they do often seem to correlate. Wealth entitlement infects our civic and social life and the functions of our political and social systems at every level. Why buy an expensive car if you’re not allowed to drive as fast as possible wherever you like? Why own land if you can’t mine it, or build a plastics factory on it, or claim ownership of all wildlife who happen to live on it? Why finance a politician’s political campaign if you can’t use their influence to forward your own interests?

Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History podcast and related newsletter, was on an episode of TrashFuture a few years ago talking about some of these issues, and he said quite a few things about wealth entitlement that have stuck with me:

“It’s very hard for them to accept the fact that the system that produced them and made them people who matter, people whose needs and whims are catered to and who feel like they have some positive role to play in society—the idea that the systems that put them where they are might somehow be bad or might have negative consequences . . . it’s very hard to wrap their heads around.”

Wyman and the podcast hosts were discussing a kind of capitalism divide prevalent in the January 6, 2021, attempted U.S. insurrection and the movements leading up to it, which they said were partly a result of two different kinds of wealth opposed to each other: “the Davos guys versus the boat dealership guys,” a “revolt of the regional elites, the regional gentry.” An opposition that seems to have dissolved in the past couple of years in favor of shared purpose and the acquisition of unbelievable political power.

Who comprises regional gentry rather than the international über-wealthy is something Wyman got into in a newsletter he wrote about the kinds of wealth you see in the power players of small North American towns and mid-sized cities—not the ilk of the Koch and Mercer families, or the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but people who run McDonald’s franchises or large local construction companies. People who are much better off than you’d think but who also work hard. People like car dealership owners, which made sense to me—the owner of the local Subaru and Chevy dealership where I live seems to be incredibly well off, and there’s no other place within hours to buy a Subaru. He’s also the former head of the Montana Republican Party, which I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t become more vocally right-wing and anti-democracy over the past several years.

These are people, Wyman pointed out, who derive their wealth from ownership of actual, physical assets rather than from salaries like a doctor or lawyer or hedge fund manager would. Their wealth is still more tied, if with thin and fraying threads, to their local communities than that of the billionaire class.

“Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. . . . We’re not talking about international oligarchs; these folks’ wealth extends into the millions and tens of millions rather than the billions. There are, however, a lot more of them than the global elite that tends to get all of the attention. . . . It’s not hard to spot vast apple orchards or sprawling vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, or the kind of riches the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield might generate.”

It’s ownership, Wyman said, that creates the basic divide between the two kinds of ruling capital. “To what extent is ownership central to your identity? The more central ownership is, the more likely you are to fall on the right side of that spectrum.”

Wyman drew a solid line between different kinds of ownership—physical assets like an orchard versus, say, savings in a Swiss bank account—but that line has never really existed. Wealth and ownership morph into each other, both feeding the possessor’s sense of entitlement. Of deserving more than, being more than, other people, much less the rest of life.

I’m reminded of 19th-century British novels, Jane Austen in particular, and the class divide that the landed nobility tried to make between themselves and those who’d become wealthy through “trade.” It’s a line drawn through socioeconomic class that tries to maintain entitlement only for certain types of wealth: inherited wealth. But the truth is that all kinds of wealth provide opportunities to purchase and hoard power.

A real-life example of ownership, wealth and entitlement closer to the Davos end of the capital class was covered in a feature in High Country News in 2021: When Gunnison County, Colorado, tried to exile non-resident homeowners in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, those property owners (who tend to extreme wealth; David Koch owns a vacation home there) fought back with a breathtaking display of entitlement, rather than relying on either the law or a cooperative attempt to address the community’s concerns.

Whether banning non-resident homeowners from staying in their homes was a wise or legal choice for the county isn’t something I know enough about to comment on, but the homeowners’ responses reflected not arguments for what would be best for the community or even what their own legal rights were but what they personally felt entitled to no matter the consequences to anyone else.

In addition to setting up a PAC (political action committee, a non-profit created to fund political campaigns) to raise money to unseat county commissioners and replace them with more congenial candidates, a group of non-resident owners set up a private Facebook group as they worked against the ban, and some of the comments that have become public were . . . telling.

“‘People who rely on others for their livelihoods should not bite the hand that feeds them,’ wrote one second-home owner.”

“‘Where is the appreciation and gratitude for the decades of generosity?’ wrote another.”

“‘Maybe don’t run your mouth so much on social media when you depend on those people to help pay your bills,’ one Facebook commenter wrote.”

“According to the second-home owners,” wrote the author of the article, Nick Bowlin, “Gunnison County’s economic survival and most of its residents’ livelihoods depend on their economic contributions and continued goodwill.”

It’s easy to see the logic of this thinking, but it also shouldn’t take that much work to pause, for a moment, and comprehend more fully the expectations of those who see themselves not as integrated members of a community, but as generous and gracious people of means to whom local residents should be grateful—but also for whom the health of that community itself is a matter of choice and leisure rather than necessity. People who have no bonds to the community but still feel it owes them something.

When I buy books from the local bookstore, I don’t expect the clerks or owner to be grateful to me. I am part of my community, interdependent with it; the continued existence of the bookstore and the coffee shops and the library and all the small downtown businesses also make my life whole. I am grateful to them. It is their existence that makes our community thrive, along with the hard work and many non-monetary contributions of people who live here. When the non-resident homeowners of Gunnison County lambasted a local restaurant server who’d publicly disagreed with them—“One of those big mouths is slinging drinks for tips—I’ll be sure to leave her a little tip,” wrote one of the Facebook group’s members—it was clear that what those residents expected was not service but subservience.

Escaping this kind of landed gentry vs. villein, serf, or tenuous and beholden tenant relationship was exactly what originally drove so many people like my ancestors out of Europe and into North America. We’ve been recreating feudalism under the guise of property rights right here, and it’s only getting worse.

Bowlin tried to talk about the wealth divide in Gunnison County with Jim Moran, who launched the PAC to attempt a takeover of the county commission and whose vacation home in Crested Butte was worth, according to Zillow (referenced in the article) at the time, $4.3 million:

“I pointed out Gunnison County’s housing shortage to Moran, who, from 2008-2011, was an advisor of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds—the biggest buyer of distressed mortgage securities in the world after the 2008 financial crisis. After the crash, the firm acquired billions in bad mortgages and aggressively foreclosed on thousands of homes, according to The New York Times. I asked Moran if, compared to locals who struggle to pay rent, people who own two or more properties should be considered wealthy. ‘I think that’s wrong,’ he replied.”

Once you’re in a position of wealth and power and mostly surrounded by people who are the same, it can be very, very difficult to see yourself as wealthy, or powerful, much less to understand how your position affects the lives of everyone around you. “These people exist in a world that caters to them,” Wyman has said.

That characterization applies to both types of capital classes and most of the spectrum in between. I don’t think my former neighbor in college was from serious wealth, but from my vantage as someone who grew up on food stamps and who was in college by the grace of that institution’s generous financial aid program, she was pretty well off. She had a bank account. With savings in it. Nobody in my life had ever come near such a thing. Maybe it’s ungenerous of me, but I could easily see her going from insisting she had a right to turn up her music to becoming one of those non-resident homeowners making disparaging comments on Facebook.

“So what do we know about them, these vocal second-home owners?” wrote Bowlin in High Country News. “They worked hard for everything they own. They are clear on this. Their critics, they believe, are often motivated by jealousy. “‘I’m certainly not ‘rich.’ I’ve worked for my entire life to have the properties I own,’ wrote one group member.”

Properties. First of all, owning more than one property of the type described in the article, in a country where millions of children go hungry every day is, yes, rich, no matter how hard you’ve worked. Secondly, we have a problem when the very fact of ownership becomes its own justification. How is that wealth gained? At whose expense? And what impact is one’s ownership having on the local community?

As someone who also lives in a resort town with a high percentage of non-resident homeowners, these are not a minor questions to me. Wealth that translates into property ownership frequently has a terrible and nearly immediate downstream effect on the affordability of homes for people who live and work in that community full-time. Those effects cannot be counterbalanced by tipping generously when you go out to dinner.

Ownership in and of itself is not a value-neutral position. Its injustices compound over time, as the wealthy gain power, influence policy, and use both to acquire yet more wealth. My state’s current multi-millionaire governor, Greg Gianforte, not only used his millions to fund his several political campaigns but last year, with the conservative-dominated state legislature’s help, quietly lowered taxes on the wealthy and raised them on the poor and middle class—a direct wealth transfer from those who have the least, to those who already have the most and are now guaranteed to have more.

The arguments in favor of these kinds of tax policies—that somehow the benefits will “trickle down” to everybody else—wore thin decades ago, as real wages and salaries declined while the wealthy bought more vacation homes. And yet the mindset persists: making the wealthy wealthier will eventually be good for everyone. Someone with wealth can use those assets to benefit the community, if they desire.

But they often don’t desire, and if they do, it often comes with demands that reflect the power wealth has bought. My own community saw this play out less than two years ago, when a billionaire who’d built what looks like a literal palace overlooking the town objected to a zoning adjustment that would have allowed a new development to include affordable housing. The intricacies of that development’s proposal are less important here than the fact that that billionaire went to the town’s community foundation and told them that if the proposal passed city council, the local housing non-profit would never see another dime from him. His wealth, he thought, gave him the right to decide what was best for the community as well as for himself.

“Equating wealth,” wrote Wyman,

“especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class. They stand at the apex of the social order throughout huge swathes of the country, and shape our economic and political world thanks to their resources and comparatively large numbers, yet they’re practically invisible in our popular understanding of these things.”

Entitlement whitewashes wealth’s questionable values within the owner’s own mind. It makes all that one does and thinks automatically valuable. It grants people, they believe, the absolute right to do whatever they like with their property regardless of the consequences to others. And just like the problems of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, entitlement isn’t the sole province of high-profile stories located in a few specific enclaves. It’s everywhere.

The fact that there exist wealthy people who don’t buy into the sense of entitlement in a way proves the point: it’s not a requirement of wealth. It is at some level a choice. There are plenty of examples of people with wealth who would prefer less of it in favor of a society where everybody thrives. Musician Brian Eno, for example, has recently spoken out and advocated for higher wealth taxes in Britain, saying,

“I don’t like the thought that half of the population are struggling, and I don’t think there’s any need that they should be struggling. . . . wealth doesn’t trickle down to anybody. I trickles up, actually. . . . Rich people really piss me off.”

People like Eno, and others who quietly do whatever they can with their money to benefit the rest of life, are far outnumbered by, say, those covered in the High Country News article, those who believe that nobody should tell them what they should or can do with their wealth, and very definitely that their wealth shouldn’t be taxed, no matter how detrimental extreme wealth is to a society or how ethically questionable the accumulation of that wealth has been. Only those who own the wealth are entitled to determine what they’re allowed to do with it.

And if the rest of us do benefit from the choices the entitled make in how to employ their wealth and property? Well, we should be grateful that they’re willing to share—or, at the very least, grateful that they’re begrudgingly willing to turn down their music once in a while and throw a few tips our direction.

Maclay Flats just outside Missoula, Montana. I sat right here to record the audio version of this essay. Nothing like running water for some much-needed restoration. I forgot to mention in the audio that it’s a place with a tremendous number of ponderosa pine trees, just behind where I was sitting. My part of Montana further north is not rich in ponderosas and I always like spending time with those big-shouldered relatives when I’m down there.

✔️ Join a community of 6,700+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Audio version:

I’ve taken so many pictures of this particular curve of this particular river I couldn’t begin to count them. Pictures of sunrise from behind those mountains, of the rocks and ice where I sit to watch that sunlight grow hour by hour before finally flashing above the peaks, my scorching coffee pouring heat back into what a frozen early-morning river dip has snatched away.

Pictures of alpenglow, that rose quartz soaking the snow and rock, the late-struck sunlight from the west slipping slowly up and off the mountains as the sky behind turns purple, then indigo, then something dark and rich that takes hours to reach anything like true black, drizzled with stars and blanked by the light of a half-full Moon high in the western sky.

The last two years, I was there this same time but over a full Moon, watching Her rise slowly from the same spot in the east where Sun comes up hours later. I still have a four-minute video of one of those nights, when I sat in the Forest Service cabin embroidering under the single propane-powered light and listening to mice run around the walls.

During my Master Naturalist course a couple years ago, we learned about phenology journals, a way of tracking sightings, behaviors, noticings, and movements of the natural world over the seasons and years. To be able to compare Moon phases and birds, temperature and river’s ice coverage even over three or four years is a little thrilling—for a modern person. For the vast span of human history, in any part of the planet, it would have been expected and shared knowledge, a matter of survival as well as of culture. Such a short time of industrialization, and in that time how much has been lost, how much there is to relearn.

There is something about reminding myself of the Moon phases and bird encounters from last year, and the year before, that has begun to give me a settled sense of belonging to this place where I’ve spent most of my life. A sense of responsibility, even, that I’ve been quietly working on ever since moving back home to Montana in 2014—serving the land and lives I live among starts with knowing them.

While at this most recent offline, off-grid cabin visit, I reread a couple of books I read last fall: How Wealth Rules the World by (more about that in another essay), and Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, edited by Nick Hayes (of The Book of Trespass) and Jon Moses and written by people involved in England’s Right to Roam movement.

Wild Service takes its ethos from the serviceberry tree, an intersection of both worldview and metaphor with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry—the service is native to both England and North America, and is similarly under-valued by modern industrial culture.

In the introduction to Wild Service, Nick Hayes speaks to the concepts of kinship and belonging, and the book’s overriding theme that there is no “saving nature” (however one interprets that) by placing it in some sort of walled garden never touched by humans. Humans need to re-relationship with nature, re-kin, reconnect. Recommon.

To learn the lands and waters of one’s home, ask permission and feel one’s way into a sense of welcome and belonging, is one of the best antidotes I can think of to a culture and power structures that seem intent on destroying every single bit of good and beauty in the world.

I started going to these forest service cabins, and often camping by myself in the woods, to, frankly, get work done. The life of a caregiver is, as anyone who does it knows, even in the best circumstances characterized by nearly nonstop interruption. When I’m somewhere alone, and especially without internet or phone access, I suddenly have time to read a book, sort through research, brainstorm ideas. Write, edit, revise, edit other people’s work for my copy editing job. Write again.

But over the last couple of years I’ve started to let myself spend that time—usually two or three nights—to just be. The last two times I was at that cabin, I lay by the river for up to four hours a day doing nothing but listening to the water run and watching the shift of Sun through the spruce and pine trees. Catching an occasional glimpse of raven or bald eagle, northern flicker or chickadee.

This time, all four were present, along with a pair of Canada geese and some Canada jays (Canada seemed to be in the air, go Canada).

And one day, there was a wolf.

I had lingered by the river at sunset, as usual, and that night it snowed. The next day, toward sunset again, at that same spot, I almost walked right over fresh wolf tracks in the fresh snow. Struck still in amazement—we must have been there within hours of each other, if not minutes—I followed them down to the river, where the wolf had probably taken a drink of water not twenty feet from where I’d been sitting much of the chilly afternoon.

The next morning, I followed the tracks a little way back into the forest, toward a spot I’d camped above the river one hot weekend the previous August. I didn’t go very far, not wanting to disturb or stress the wolf or wolves, since they prefer to keep their distance from humans when given the choice.

I’ve been going to that cabin and river for years and though I know wolves live in the area—the packs there originally repopulated those mountains from Canada over 40 years ago, as local wildlife biologist Diane K. Boyd writes about in her recent memoir A Woman Among Wolves—it’s a vast, mostly unpeopled, region and I’ve never seen tracks anywhere near that cabin.

A wolf came by. Being a brief part of a wolf’s story is the most thrilling thing that’s ever happened to me there, even counting full Moonrises over Glacier and the time one of the packrats ran off with my best tea strainer.

There is something about these experiences to bring back home, something that eases the chew of guilt at even having the privilege of time itself to go sleep by a river alone for a couple of nights. Of having two flexible freelance careers, a reliable co-parent and an able-enough body and kids who don’t need round-the-clock care. These times make me whole, they keep me human. But due to a combination of early training against any hint of selfishness, and a tradition of service to others from both sides of my family, it nags at me to luxuriate in them.

I tell myself I can do my work more effectively by spending these times away, by having hours and days where influences and rhythms are given by starlight and free-flowing water rather than clocks and news cycles and dinnertimes and the finicky washing machine. I tell myself that, because it helps me feel better about simply doing and being what I want to do and how I want to be for a few days.

I recently read Pico Iyer’s new book Aflame, about the monastery in California he’s been spending time at for decades, and found much to connect with in the conversations he had with people over the years, their struggles with mortality and service, how we live with one another and the world. I keep going back to one line toward the beginning, about the writing Iyer does while staying there:

Which reflects the shift over the years in how I, too, spend my time in these places. There’s a lot I stop caring about or stressing over. Priorities are shaken loose and values realigned. I’ve got one life. How do I care for, and even treasure, the stardust that makes up each of its days, each of its moments? Where is the balance between attending to oneself and attending to the world?

What I often come to on these trips is that anything approaching balance is found in accepting that those two things are often one and the same—a tricky idea with many complications, not least of which is a warping of “attending to oneself” into a wellness culture that too often encourages our own personal little walled gardens and No Trespassing signs.

“Protect your peace” is vital advice, and at the same time a slippery slope. When does self-care turn into selfishness? Yet how much giving or service is too much? At what point does providing support turn into taking away others’ agency? When does focusing on “internal stability” rather than “external security”—which is another way of phrasing Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl’s insight that the final freedom is in choosing one’s attitude to external circumstances—turn into accepting injustice? The very real value of self-sovereignty can be weaponized against societal and cultural change the way the idea of “grit” has been in education.

Do any of us have any idea what we’re doing here?

Probably not.

Many times over the years, people have told me that they would not want to imitate these trips, because the prospect of being that alone for that long is too daunting. As someone who’s always been most comfortable in the company of only herself and nature, I try to sympathize, to enter into what it feels like to not crave this alone time as badly as I crave sleep, as I crave gulps of water taken straight from the river, as I crave quiet. I’ve got some frustrating issues going on that have limited more far-flung ventures recently, but in general it’s no feat for me to do this, go to the woods and be alone for a few days, barely a hardship. I sleep best far away from other humans.

Which always leads back into a circular wondering of how selfish taking this time is. I know that coming to these places, holding this time sacred for whatever relationships exist between me and the river, me and the trees, me and the ravens, me and myself, me and that wolf, makes me somehow more human, more real, more alive, and much more capable of managing all the obligations and cares in my life. But I need it, and isn’t it selfish, to take time for what we need?

I know most everyone reading this is generally kind and sympathetic and will say of course not—at least, those of you who comment and email—but it’s a haunting question, embedded in my psyche, that I’ll probably never be fully rid of, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Wild Service refocuses these questions, forcing readers to ask how much we can truly do for the world, or even love the world, if we don’t understand it, don’t know it. While it’s true that over a century of car-centrism and living indoors and, now, digital lives have increasingly disconnected humans from nature, private property and private land ownership did so centuries before, by removing people from their relationship with lands. Recommoning means re-belonging.

“Service is the foundation stone of belonging. While ownership imposes a simplistic, one-way relationship with the land, easily transferable in the passing of deeds, legal spells that confer dominion, belonging takes more work. . . . Belonging is the democratic antidote to despotic ownership, and it requires active engagement with the land, lived experience, knowledge and shared stories.”

If the only answer I can ever find to my own personal quandary is not in words, but in actions—in spending time with family and friends, in laughing and struggling together—and a great deal more in simply learning to belong, letting myself belong, with rivers and starlight, wolves and ravens, basking in Moonfall in the middle of the night under a bare-branched cottonwood tree shaking ice shards and Orion’s Belt off her fingers, in learning to serve the world, and especially the place I live and love, as it is, then I can’t imagine, when I get to the end of my life, I’ll regret having done so, having spent some time to see what, in each of those moments, was worth doing.

Half-Moon barely visible high over Glacier National Park, where I stopped to watch a bald eagle soar for a long time on my drive out of the North Fork.

Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: Why are 3 little-known 15th-century papal bulls still being weaponized against Indigenous sovereignty today? How is the right to forage for food related to the Magna Carta, and freedom?

✔️ Join a community of 6,600+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Blackfeet ECO Knowledge, founded and directed by Tyson Running Wolf “to increase and promote community access to critically needed methods of promoting language, culture, ceremony, history, and Indigenous traditional knowledge sharing,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of March. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

Audio version:

Over half a lifetime ago, I was walking with some friends along the harbor road of Ephesus, once an embattled, storied, and thriving city of Ionia (and then Greece and then Rome and various lesser-known empires in between and after), and now an archaeological ruin in Turkey with just enough intact or restored architecture to hold our then-20-year-old selves in awe.

The harbor road, we were told, had once ended at the sea, which was now miles away after thousands of years of change and silt. We walked along the broad, flat stones and one of my friends said, “3,000 years ago, people were walking this same road, flirting with each other. Can you picture them?”

I’ve been picturing them ever since—people, just like you and me, full of hopes and heartaches, their particles sifted amongst the harbor’s silt for thousands of years, even their names forgotten for generations beyond anyone’s count. Someone worried over their child’s illness, another holding back tears at the cruelty of a former lover.

I’ve been working on an essay about the unholy marriage of power and wealth. I keep stalling on finishing it because every day brings another example that leaves me wondering: isn’t it obvious now? How wealth buys power and they feed off of each other? To write about Alexei Navalny’s long and eventually ill-fated battle against oligarchs and corruption in modern Russia, or the sacrifice of 18th-century Poland by prosperous nobles who cared mostly for their own comfort and position, or countless other instances of the ruin brought by unchecked wealth and its hold over unchecked power, feels . . . well, yes, obvious.

I could write for years about the compounded injustices and cumulative wealth inequality engendered by private land ownership alone—and in fact have been writing about it for years—but to find something different to say about it when the results are playing out not just in the daily news cycle, but almost the hourly, feels a bit like trying to hang onto a soap bubble.

While I try to find ways to keep that soap bubble intact—describing its shimmers and form without popping it into nonexistence—I’m going to republish a revised version of a related essay on wealth and entitlement (the psychological kind) in a few days.

Over the last couple weeks, as I kept asking myself how to bring some more foundational purpose to that essay on power and wealth, I took a break and started some vegetable seeds for this year’s garden.

I don’t usually start seeds. I don’t have a greenhouse, my kitchen isn’t generally warm enough even for fermenting sauerkraut, and it’s usually so overcast in winter here that there’s barely enough sunlight to keep a spider plant alive. But my brother-in-law gave me an old grow light to try to keep a medicinal tobacco plant growing over the winter (it did! it’s small but still living! the aphids love it) so I thought I might as well try to get a start on the garden, since where I am in Montana we don’t get enough warm summer days most years to coax a tomato plant from seed outside, much less pumpkins or melons.

Sorting through my box of seeds turned out to be one of the most hope-generating things I’ve done in a long time. I don’t know why. I wasn’t thinking about “well, life goes on” or “no matter what, people still need to eat.” It was the seeds themselves, like they were wrapping little tendrils of magic light around my fingers as I tried to figure out what I’d need to buy and what I had too much of. They took me completely out of myself and the most recent text threads of news from family and friends. Life. No narration or clever turns of phrase, just a few moments of life, of feeling alive and part of it all.

It felt really good.

Some days later, I was driving toward home and a truck with the U.S. Forest Service logo stamped on the side—not an uncommon sight where I live, among well over a million acres of wilderness and non-wilderness land overseen by the USFS—turned through an intersection in front of me and I started crying.

Among the insanity of what’s going in the U.S.’s ongoing hostile corporate takeover of a government, the professions and lives wrecked and overturned, and uncertainty and fear of Forest Service and many other employees, the goal of selling off and profiting from public lands is clear. It was an aim in 2017 and remains one. It’s why I wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about the commons and the kind of freedom held in public lands in 2019.

All land “owned,” public or private, has in fact been stolen, and it can be stolen over and over and over again. As I wrote shortly before the 2024 U.S. presidential election of my relatives in Russia, “Nobody in my family takes democratic freedoms for granted, but perhaps it takes living under dictatorship or oppression to realize that even the right to fight for something better can be stripped away.”

Which is just as true of nature, of the more-than-human world, of clean water and freedom to roam, of foraging for huckleberries and sleeping by wild rivers, as it is of the right to protest and to vote. This week I am going once again to my favorite Forest Service cabin, and wonder now if it might be for the last time, if I might never again be able to walk into the freezing waters of one of the only free-flowing and minimally polluted rivers on this continent, might never again listen to the packrats thumping around at night.

The day after I cried at the sight of a Forest Service truck, for all my friends and acquaintances who had lost their jobs or were worried about losing them, for the lands and waters that gift us so much, I gave a talk to an audience largely composed of public lands and wilderness advocates.

The talk was half about walking and evolutionary biology, and half about the commons, the stark injustice of privately owned land, and the vital role that public lands play in ensuring freedom. (It was recorded; I’ll post a link to the recording when it’s available.)

It felt right to give that talk, to say what I thought needed saying, but it also felt like a bit of mustering before a battle, when few besides those in the room knew what was to come, or how to prepare for it.

The residents of Ephesus lived and died, planted seeds and fought for what they loved, for over a thousand years. The city was ruled by tyrants and overtaken by emperors eager for land, spoils, and subjects, including Alexander the Great and later, at various periods, as part of the Ottoman Empire.

They are forgotten, almost every single one of those people. Every seed they planted, every hand that worked a chink into the Library of Celsus or wrapped a cloth around a newborn baby. Every bit of laughter echoing along the harbor road, every flirtatious side-glance and jealous narrowing of the eyes. “History” wants to leave us only with Mithridates, king of Pontus, not the 80,000 Roman citizens throughout Asia he ordered murdered. It wants us to to credit the emperor Titus with building the Colosseum, not the tens of thousands of Jewish slaves who were forced to do the actual work.

Most people who have ever lived are forgotten.

So will I be forgotten, and almost every single one of us. But how we treat one another, and the stands we take against injustice, and for a better world, still matter.

The past few nights I’ve watched the thinnest slivers of Moon low, and on subsequent nights higher, in the western sky, and thought about where my particles will be, what soil I’ll have been fortunate enough to fertilize, in a few thousand years when other eyes are watching that same Moon, Venus low and bright nearby, perhaps kept awake by a lover’s betrayal, a child’s worrisome cough, next month’s bills, or the battle of eons against the power of tyrants whose wealth has made them seem unstoppable.

History might be written around the names of those who destroy, and take credit for others’ labor, but it is lived, lost, and sometimes won by the rest of us. Those who plant seeds of all kinds, who nurture and care. In truth, history is never fully won or lost. It is a living record, the concerns and tasks that wend through our days, the neverending struggles for justice and against oppression. History is lived. It is life. It starts over again every time we plant something new.

When I went to Turkey in 1997, I had a cheap little travel camera and only found out after the pictures were developed that I’d grabbed black and white film instead of color. Below is Ephesus: the Library of Celsus, a stone carving detail, and the harbor road from a vantage up in the ampitheater.

Here, we explore questions as varied (but related) as: What are the ongoing consequences of land enclosures in England from the 1400s onwards? How do each of us perceive ourselves as kin with the rest of the living world? What do true believers and echo chambers have to do with authoritarianism?

✔️ Join a community of 6,200+ On the Commons readers. Upgrade here.

Subscribe now

Blackfeet ECO Knowledge, founded and directed by Tyson Running Wolf “to increase and promote community access to critically needed methods of promoting language, culture, ceremony, history, and Indigenous traditional knowledge sharing,” will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of March. (Accountability: this page shows receipt of revenue return from each quarter.)

Audio version:

In late 2016, a . . . situation, let’s call it, battered my town. A neo-Nazi site had picked up a disagreement over a local building’s ownership, and the result was months of online and telephoned threats to many people in town, one family in particular, and a threatened armed march that we all prepared for but that never materialized. Possibly because it was never going to but also possibly because that was a bitter winter; if I remember, the day of the proposed march was -17°F (-27°C).

Reporters covered the situation so thoroughly that for a long time you couldn’t google my town without white supremacists being the top story.

The targets of the attacks were pretty much all Jewish, or even seemingly Jewish. At least one business in town was attacked until the neo-Nazi site’s owner found out the owners weren’t Jewish. The “troll storm” (a term I dislike; it makes it sound like a game and attacks like that are anything but a game) was vicious, and left scars that will probably never disappear.

As the attacks started, a friend asked me for help figuring out if there was a way to protect the identity of one of the victims. I’m not a cybersecurity person or even an investigative journalist, but I tried. I spent a night crawling through 4chan and 8chan threads (I do not recommend this for anybody ever) but it was too late to stop personal phone numbers and names from getting out.

That same week, by sheer coincidence, an op-ed I’d written was published in the Los Angeles Times, tangentially related to the already-ongoing situation. I’d written it because one person had already made my hometown synonymous with white supremacy and, since I’m a writer and had an editorial contact at the paper, writing was all I could think of to help.

That op-ed turned me into a target, too. What I experienced was absolutely nothing like what other people went through. I describe it as receiving barely a splash from a tsunami that hit others with full force. I wrote about that in more detail a couple of years ago, including screenshots of the Twitter posts directed at me, in an essay about the digital commons and the ignorance in thinking that what happens online has no true real-life consequences:

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

Who had given my phone number and my family’s personal details to white supremacists? It was someone who knew me.

Even before someone posted my phone number on Twitter, before I had much of a personal reason for fear, I was scared. The relentlessness of this “troll storm,” the sheer hate and dehumanization behind it, still makes my skin crawl seven years later. I was scared for my friends and acquaintances, my community. I was scared for what it said about what kinds of forces were being empowered worldwide.

I’m not the only person who coped by drinking a lot, by spending time only with people I trusted absolutely.

I stopped being able to sleep much. I mostly consumed chicken wings and booze. I had been walking or biking my kids to school day in and day out for two years, morning and afternoon, ever since my son started first grade, and was suddenly terrified to be physically outdoors, with them, visible. Being a target myself was bad enough; I didn’t want anybody to know who my kids were.

The day of the march came. None of the threatened participants showed. The town had shut down in preparation anyway, so as to withdraw as much attention from the attendees as possible, and a group hosted a matzo ball soup gathering in an emptied downtown. I wasn’t there. I can’t remember what I did that day—watched The Lego Movie with my kids, maybe, for the tenth time (my choice, not theirs; I enjoy that movie). I think we had a fire going in the wood stove all day. Hunkered down in warmth and seeming safety, even if safety is always a mirage, a veneer. Temporary.

The troll storm faded away but the fears and damage didn’t. Everyone, I imagine, learned something different from that time. Everyone, I imagine, learns something different from all such times.

I’m under no illusions that the threat has faded. Anti-Semitism is perhaps, except for misogyny, the oldest and most universal prejudice on the planet, stretching back through massacres, wholesale expulsions from entire countries, theft of children, and vast, structured oppressions for nearly 2000 years. There’s a reason Daniel Goldhagen titled his book about anti-Semitism The Devil That Never Dies. My grandparents in Russia lived that history. Anton Treuer, known most for his work on Ojibwe language and culture revitalization and his YouTube channel featuring an Ojibwe Word of the Day, but whose father was Austrian Jewish, has said that the scope and scale of this history should make Jews, of all people, most acutely aware of the injustice and horror of oppression and genocide.

If it’s not anti-Semitism, there are plenty of other targets for hate, fear, and power-hungry greed, as likely everyone reading this already knows.

Everyone, I said, learns something different from these times, is damaged differently and finds different ways to cope. I’m not here to tell you how you should feel when times are frightening or worrying, or that your fears or worries are greater or lesser than another’s. I can only share my own story. Really, that’s all any of us can do.

The troll storm and threats happened just a couple of months after I signed the book contract for A Walking Life. That time had a lot to do with the parts of the book that focus on social capital, social and interpersonal trust—including their fragility and how authoritarians can weaponize them—and the ways in which authoritarian regimes use loneliness and a sense of isolation to fracture the power of resistance, a dynamic that Hannah Arendt covered decades ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

In times like these—in all times—trust is essential. But it is easily broken and easily coopted, especially with the reach of the online world we now live with. One of the things that came through during those months, for me at least and this is part of why I wrote about community and interpersonal trust so much in my book, is that the voices I’d followed online, or in national or international news, were most often almost powerless to help my community, and in some cases caused more damage than good, even when well-intentioned. And not all of them were well-intentioned.

Lauren Hough recently wrote a brilliant piece mentioning the creation of “an entire industry of resistance grifters” after the 2016 election, and Dr. Len Necefer, founder of NativesOutdoors, also recently wrote something addressing that idea more directly:

It’s worth pausing to ask yourself: Why do you follow the influencers you do? This question isn’t about what they say or how they frame their ideas but about the underlying mechanics of why they have your attention in the first place.

I added the emphasis in Necefer’s because it strikes me as an essential question each of us needs to ask ourselves, especially when we’re living with uncertainty and looking for direction.

Both those pieces are necessary reminders of the power of attention, how it can be manipulated, and how it can be used to others’ advantage.

They’re also reminders that not everything or everyone you already agree with, or who seems to care about the same things you do, is acting with anyone’s interest but their own in mind.

In times like these, it’s tempting, it’s human and natural, to look to others for guidance. But as helpful as that can be, there are risks inherent in it, too. More than once I’ve been an avid follower of a writer who seemed to articulate my own thinking to me, who seemed to care about the things I cared about, only to watch that person grow in success and lose their mask, become more truly themselves—prejudiced in various ways, desirous of power over others, unwilling to promote a cause or event unless they were its main star. I don’t know whether enormous ego is born from mass attention and some level of success, or if ego is drawn to the same and feeds off of it, but I’ve watched it happen to enough people whose work I used to like and ideas I used to look up to—during that “troll storm” and again as Covid spread over the world—that I began to question my own judgment. I see it happening again now.

Voices and people we trust can be corrupted by the lure of power and influence, by the attention of masses, and they can forget, if they ever knew, why their work, words, and influence matter. It can happen to anyone. Be wary, is what I’d say, of anyone telling you they’re on a divine mission, especially if they’re asking you for money.

We are all unique, brilliant beings with our own purposes, full of hope and doubt and hidden shadows most of us don’t like to acknowledge. If any one human has a divine mission, we all do. But maybe none of us do. Maybe being alive, being able to touch and smell and love the world, is enough. And no matter how charismatic, how compelling, how persuasive, nobody can be you for you any more than anybody can take you from you. Finding a way to believe and understand that with one’s entire being might be an essential survival skill—collectively as well as individually.

There are some books that helped me in the last eight years, books that I turned to to regain perspective and that I might pick up again: We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth; The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World, by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler; Walking the Ojibwe Path, by Richard Wagamese, Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger, bell hooks’s Belonging, and The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexeivitch. They’re books that at least try to eschew generalizations, that insist on the specific, the individual, narratives that question and explore rather than demand or insist. They remind me, in fact, of why I’m such a big fan of good science fiction writers like N.K. Jemisin, Arkady Martine, and Martha Wells. Stories that remind readers that we often know far too little of any other person’s story and motivations, that caution us against assuming we know anything of their lived experience, of who they are.

But I can still only be me, with my own story, so I go back to my ancestors, especially my grandparents, all of whom I’ve been spending more thought-time with recently, looking for guidance and resilience that I know will never truly be found outside of myself.

My ancestors didn’t gift me with much tendency toward hope, and, despite my Russian grandfather being sent to fight on the German front in World War II with one rifle and no bullets shared between three people, not much of a fight instinct. But they did leave me with a kind of determination and—I feel extremely lucky in this—a strange capacity for joy and humor even in the darkest times. One of my favorite quotes, “Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves, for we shall never cease to be amused,” by an anonymous author, is a personal mantra.

On the nights I allow myself to crumble into tears, fear, and despair, I think of my Russian grandmother as a refugee from the four-year Siege of Leningrad, in the Ural Mountains, her hands bleeding from hoeing potatoes to keep her children and mother-in-law alive, and I look at the pictures I have of her, her soft smile and eyes kind after a lifetime of oppression, prejudice, and hardship. I think of my grandmother in Montana, the decades she spent in Great Falls working as the director of public assistance for three counties, her compassion and absolute dedication to public service, the lives she touched, and the quiet ways she lived out one of her favorite lines: “Those of us entrusted with positions of power must remember never to abuse it by failing to respect those who seek help.” I remember how unassuming and intensely private she was, how much she loved dogs, and the way she smiled, with her whole being, when amongst friends.

I don’t know what the next months or years will bring. But I know what my community has shown itself capable of withstanding and standing up for over the decades, and I know that chicken wings and booze will not erase my fears when they overcome me. Nothing will. (No judgment here—for someone else, chicken wings and booze might work just fine.) My fears and heartbreaks can only be faced with as much strength and compassion as I can muster in between the fallings apart. And with that fragile trust built within actual relationships with actual people. And maybe the occasional basket of tater tots and my newfound addiction to watching tarot readers on YouTube.

Gandalf’s words when Frodo said, in The Lord of the Rings, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” are never not apt: “So do I. And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Just before my father and my stepmom went back to Russia this week, we had dinner together and my father read a poem he’d translated himself, by Aleksandr Kushner. I recorded it and am ending this by sharing that with you. It’s called “We Don’t Get to Choose . . .” and this link goes to a more formal translation, but I prefer my father’s interpretation of it, pictured below, with the title “Any Age Is Iron Age.”

The time is not for us to choose.

Something about the way bunches of mountain ash berries receive and hold the season’s snow makes me feel like they have wings, or that I do. Aloft.

I grew up poor—or at least, poor for America. One of the chronically hungry kids in the classroom, in school after new school as we moved from town to town and rental to rental, scarfing down the mediocre free lunches that public schools provide to poor children. One of the kids whose hand-me-down winter coat was always too small, who never knew what a regular dentist visit was. Who read the same ten books over and over for years because that’s all I had and in almost every town we lived in the library was meager.

It is never not a luxury to me that I can buy my kids both new books and new socks.

In a way, my upbringing is a large part of why I didn’t hesitate to keep writing this newsletter while my book project on the topic, No Trespassing, was out on proposal, and kept doing it even after that book idea was turned down by mainstream publishing. It’s knowing in your gut—literally, when you never forget what it feels like to be hungry—what it means to live constantly on the edge, and how that knowing can lead you to think more deeply about what it means to share and to own, or to simply care for one another and be cared for.

On the Commons does not have a paywall. It did briefly, for less than a year after I enabled paid subscriptions. It took me a while to realize that the paywall didn’t make me uncomfortable because of the classic “artists have trouble asking to be paid for their work” mentality (although that is just as true of me as of anyone else); it was because throwing up a barrier to reading went against the very reason that I believe in this writing and research, some of which comes from my values and some of which comes from my life experiences.

I don’t have judgments about anyone else’s use of paywall—whether to have one, what to put behind it, and my focus here means that I mostly send more personal essays, the vulnerable stuff, the stuff I’d maybe reserve for a smaller and more invested audience here, elsewhere. But for On the Commons, I feel like there is too much to share, too much to know and learn, to lock any of it up.

I started writing about private property, ownership, and the commons in 2016, starting with this Aeon essay titled “Who owns the earth?” I’ve been obsessed with the subject ever since, and spent over a year working on a book proposal about the topic with my agent.

That book proposal did not make it past the publishing world’s barriers, but for reasons that at the time confused me. Two editors said the writing was comparable to Rebecca Solnit and Eula Biss but they couldn’t figure out the audience (thank you?). Several said that they were interested in it but the author (me) lacked a platform—which was true; I’d deleted my Twitter account in 2018 and my Facebook account in 2017, and have written for many major magazine and newspaper outlets but never had a staff position at one. One editor said he liked the proposal but was working on a very similar book with one of his authors. That was Simon Winchester’s Land. I read it when it came out and had . . . thoughts.

A few editors said they loved the idea and writing and wanted to read the book but couldn’t figure out how to “package” it. I have never quite gotten my head around that last one.

I wrote an entirely different book proposal, more of a memoir centered around Willa Cather’s novels and my move back to Montana, where I’m from. It’s not a bad proposal. It would be a fun book to write. And I have a great literary agent—she’s one of the few people who understands how my mind works and also understands the publishing industry (the fact that she’s also Robin Wall Kimmerer’s agent is just more evidence of her quality). She was on the cusp of sending it out to editors and I’m sure could have sold it.

But as much as I love Willa Cather—whose book My Ántonia I was named after—and enjoyed rereading all of her novels for that proposal, my heart wasn’t in it. It was here, in the messy, weird, almost always semi-hidden world of private property, theft of the commons, control of people, commodification of nature, and my growing understanding that the hoarding of wealth and power that enables injustices and economic inequality goes back not just centuries, but millennia. I read James C. Scott and Karl Polyani and Abdullah Öcalan and Sylvia Frederici and Rianne Eisler and Jack D. Forbes (if you haven’t read his Columbus and Other Cannibals, I strongly recommend it), and learned from all of them that the roots of what we face are far deeper than capitalism, far older than European colonialism.

I had started this newsletter with the idea that it would accompany the eventual book, which is still my intention, and I won’t go into the realities of my life that have repeatedly delayed my full dedication to that larger work. I’ve rewritten the first chapter five times. It’s a start!

I wrote an essay a couple of years ago about the creative commons and the paywall (this was when I still had a paywall), and in it I said that,

“I do think of this entire project as a kind of commons. I might be sitting here alone at a desk shaping narrative as best I can, but copyright law aside, nobody really owns these stories, much less the ideas that seed them.

What that means I’m not sure. I do know that, if you’re here with me, then I am equally here. With you.”

Some things in my personal life feel like they’re calming down, and I’ve been digging back into the more in-depth kind of research that has made up the core of this newsletter. If you find that this work brings you something of understanding and perspective in a difficult world, I hope you’ll consider supporting it with a paid subscription, if you can.

Following are some of the essays that will be coming in the next couple of months—and through all of them it remains true that if you are here with me, then I am equally here, with you:

• The relationship between resource and power accumulation, informed by the work of Abdullah Öcalan (particularly The Sociology of Freedom) and my recent read of the book The Dissident: Alexey Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner.

• Who gets to say no? No to exploitation, extraction, to commodification of soil or spices, culture and the sacred? Or even to research, as detailed in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book on research and Indigenous peoples, Decolonizing Methodologies. Who gets to define “the common or greater good”? It is very easy for power to force marginalized and less-powerful people everywhere into positions where there is only one “choice” that results in a chance at survival. Saying no isn’t always an option.

• An updated and heavily revised version of one of my most commented-on essays here (which is saying a lot), on borders.

• A revisit to commodification. I wrote about this briefly in a post or two or five very early in this newsletter’s life, but it has been a long time since I wrote directly to that issue. Commodification of local resources, whether they’re huckleberries or eider down or sand, are necessary to create the artificial scarcities that wealth and power hoarding—and by extension capitalism—rely on.

• There will continue to be writing of wandering barefoot in the mountains, of unspooled time by rivers, of nights of moonfall, and maybe a sun halo if I’m lucky enough to run into one this year. And birdsong as the planet spins spring into my region of Earth. This is how I find enough centering and groundedness in an unstable world to tell the stories of property, and this is also how I stay sane.

• I’ll try not to overwhelm you.

  Subscribe now

Comments are closed on this one. Take care of yourselves. 💚

In the spirit of Sarah Kendzior’s ability to investigate authoritarianism while nurturing a love for the world, and whose most recent Q&A I recommend if you’re feeling a lot of anxiety about imminent changes in the U.S.’s federal government, please enjoy this northern pygmy owl who was hanging out in my neighborhood last week.

The following is a reprint of my essay “Trespassing,” published in the Air volume of Elementals, a new anthology from the Center for Humans & Nature.

You can read other republished selections from the anthology by Eiren Caffall in Orion, Andrew S. Yang in Bioneers, Robin Wall Kimmerer also in Bioneers, and register to join the first of five virtual book clubs, with contributors to Earth, Vol. 1, Wednesday, January 15th, 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, hosted by Point Reyes Books.

Audio version:

It was late September, and the aspen trees were just beginning to yellow. They grew thick on the hillside, a broad grove giving way to small meadows that sloped upward, transitioning after less than a mile to heavy stands of spruce and pine. The group I was with rambled along an old logging road just south of the eastern side of Glacier National Park while a biologist among us talked about the ecotone we were walking through: a mingling of prairie and forest that stretched all down along the Rocky Mountain Front, the eastern-facing slope of the Rockies, where the mountains spill onto the prairie. A light wind blew constantly.

As we left the aspens and walked into evergreens, the wind became a whispering—psithurism, a sound that’s like a rustle and a shush at the same time. That sound characterized almost my entire Montana childhood, but I never consciously noticed it until a few years ago, shortly after moving back to my hometown. One day, a few months into my return, I was walking home through town and stopped to listen to the wind blowing through a stand of tall lodgepole pines bordering the path. That sound, I thought, remembering its company in the Rockies on many a family hike that I had dragged my feet on as a child, and later on treks as a teenager with friends. That sound is home.

***

The place along the Rocky Mountain Front I was hiking that late September day is a two-hour drive east from the valley where I grew up. In another region, it might not be considered anywhere near my home. But this is the American West: expanses are vast, yet their very vastness and sparse human population are part of the intimate familiarity that welcomes those of us who live here. Montana is often called a “small town with very long streets.” The psychological network of what I think of as my homeland encompasses the Rocky Mountain Front. For a white settler like me, a fifth-generation descendant of Montana homesteaders, the question of homeland and belonging is constantly shifting. But there is one constant: wherever my feet happen to be, my heart has always longed to be right here, among the cold mountains and prairie grasses.

Hiking along the prairie-forest ecotone, every aspect of the air felt like home—the smell of pine, the sound of wind in the evergreens, the way the sun was almost warm enough but the air kept me chilled. That same air had wound itself eastward from the valley I live in through a pass in the Rockies and unfurled here, to race down the foothills and speed its way across the prairie and farmland to the little agricultural town of barely two hundred people where my mother is from.

Although I never lived in my mother’s hometown, or even on the kind of spread-out farmland she knows so well, the air of her childhood landscape calls to me almost as insistently as that of the stream-saturated peaks I was raised in: I can smell it now, sitting at my desk on the other side of the Rockies in a mountain valley with its different kind of big sky. I love the way virga strolls across the miles of prairie and farmland like it’s got all the time in the world, how I can watch it for hours, how my skin tightens slightly at the drop in temperature, and how I can still smell the ozone of rain’s promise, with its dust-tang, months later in the back of my nose. I can’t understand why that air also smells like home to me, why I can look at those houses surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat and feel in my gut what it is to be a child growing up with your eyes on that far horizon, nothing between you and the rainstorm but the air and wind who make constant companions. Companions who can issue either invitation or warning, for those who listen closely enough.

There is one stark difference between these places, a difference that I too often take for granted and that most people might not notice: where I live, I’m not far from access to millions of acres of designated wilderness and national forest areas and a national park, places where my feet are as free to roam as the air itself. However, when I go out to eastern Montana, my mother’s home ground, everywhere I turn is blocked by fences. You can drive for hours and see little else but weather-beaten houses huddled together on the prairie, their siding bitten with winter and the fierce, scorching sun of August. These vast counties, where you can drive past more visible wheat silos than homes and only the occasional hawk or pronghorn, are squared out and fenced off with countless miles of forbidding barbed wire.

My body can’t pass through these fences without permission, but the air has no such limitations. It’s a freedom that has an underacknowledged impact: No Trespassing signs are ubiquitous in America (in Montana, Trespassers Will Be Shot is a threat I always take seriously), yet at the same time, air pollution trespasses into our bodies every moment of the day. When I walk around my hometown, it’s impossible not to breathe in vehicle exhaust, especially on days when an inversion layer holds it close to the ground. Out where my mother’s from, on those expanses that feel like they host some of the cleanest, most unadulterated air on the planet, on any given visit I might see a crop-dusting plane emptying loads of pesticide or herbicide over the fields and still smell the strange, metallic tang in the back of my nose the next morning.

Trespass can be turned back on us. With bodies and lungs and circulatory systems porous to the air, neither humans nor the rest of life have much defense against the kinds of airborne attacks that other people have unleashed upon us. And I don’t use the word attacks lightly. Air pollution from vehicle traffic can decrease children’s lung capacity by 20 percent and significantly affect cognition in their growing brains; recently, it has been found that carbon pollution from car exhaust crosses the placental barrier and affects fetal development and even ovarian egg production in women. Living near a landfill raises a person’s risk of lung cancer due to the hydrogen sulfide that’s released from decaying trash. Fully 95 percent of the world’s human population lives with levels of air pollution considered unsafe. Air pollution is one of the leading causes of premature death worldwide.

Without clean air, humans are denied an inherent right to health and flourishing. If billionaires’ dreams of colonizing Mars were ever to be realized, the first mission, the second mission, the millionth mission, the missions for generations far beyond our imaginations would be to secure water and breathable air. Air is so vital that a common right to it was recognized in legal code as far back as the Roman Empire. “The following things are by natural law common [to] all—the air, running water, the sea and consequently the sea-shore,” declared the Institutes of Justinian in 535 CE.1 In 1972, after decades of relentless air and water pollution, aided by political corruption paid for by the powerful men of industry known as the Copper Kings, Montana’s legislature passed a new state constitution that guaranteed a “clean and healthful environment” as an inalienable right, including the right to clean air.

Air is a shared commons: it’s an entity we all rely on for survival, and it moves freely across the world. The air I breathe that smells of dry pine needles and early snow was somewhere else a few hours ago, a few days ago, a few weeks ago. Maybe it was bringing some other hikers the smell of their own woods, or picking up sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, and soot from a coal-fired power plant, whose particulates are now seeping into my lungs, unasked for and unwanted on a cool September day. We all depend on and all share the air, and yet the ability to pollute it is treated as a private property right. Legal systems around the world make air the recipient of industrial waste; in turn, that means that all of us are, too. Air knows no international boundaries, and neither does the pollution it carries.

When I think of trespass, what first comes to mind is the Lord’s Prayer, which I recited with my parents and sisters Sunday after Sunday in Episcopal and Lutheran churches, and often around the dinner table, throughout my childhood. The lines “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” refer not to who crosses whose property lines but to committing sins that the deity has forbidden. The word trespass occurs many times in the New Testament. In some translations it’s replaced with sin or debt.

Trespass, in other words, is a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more invasive than simply breaking through a property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the public nature preserve on the other side, I might annoy him, but there’s no actual harm done. If my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same, pouring itself into my children’s lungs with the law’s consent. The polluted air has trespassed into us, but it wasn’t by choice. The first crime of trespass was against air itself. When air has been violated, it is forced to violate in turn.

***

I was hiking along the Rocky Mountain Front in late September 2022 with a group working to stop oil leases in what is known as the Badger-Two Medicine. It’s an area bordered by Glacier National Park to the north, the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wildernesses to the west and south, and the Blackfeet Reservation to the east. The Badger-Two Med is sacred to the Blackfeet Nation. Under laws written and enforced by the federal government, it’s legally part of the US National Forest Service, but it was carved off of Blackfeet land in 1895, along with the eastern part of Glacier Park, in yet another land seizure accomplished with a deceptive treaty signed under duress, one in a long history of betrayals.

I hadn’t been to the Badger-Two Med before, although I’d been following the oil lease situation—which has been ongoing for nearly forty years—since before moving back to Montana. This was the first time I’d managed to visit it, on a hike sponsored by the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, which was founded in the 1980s to fight oil leases granted in the area by the Reagan administration. Most of the leases have been successfully canceled over the years, but in late September 2022, one oil company had just won a court appeal to keep its lease.2

Emerging from the aspen groves and into pines and spruce, my group walked a path that ran parallel to a buried natural gas pipeline; the organizers pointed out where a road to the remaining proposed site of the oil well would be built if the lease were upheld. A few miles further in, we would see a hillside already scarred by preparatory clearing.

It’s hard to imagine a place that feels more like the white European settler’s idea of pristine wilderness. Pristine wilderness and its ideals of unchanging purity have never really existed, of course, but perhaps places like this offer something better: I felt whole on that hillside. The air’s movement and scent felt like a welcome. And even though I know that there is no clean air, really, anywhere in the world—everything from dioxins to Chernobyl radiation has been found in polar ice, carried by the air and dropped even on places where few humans have ever stepped—I felt an extra surge of resentment at the thought of the trespass that would come not just from the physical invasion of an oil well but from the particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, and volatile organic compounds that have been found in the air around and downwind of oil-drilling operations. At what the air would be forced to carry through no choice of its own.

***

As we walked to the top of a hillside where we could see out toward the plains of eastern Montana, the air shifted from a gentle breeze to a wind traveling east—stiff, but not quite the hard-blowing kind that is almost a constant presence on the wheat and cattle ranches that cover what’s known as the Golden Triangle, the wheat farming region my mother grew up in.

The wind blew the smells of encroaching autumn in my face, dried grasses underfoot and fecund soil under bear-claw-scarred aspen trees. The tiny bit of late-September chill reminded me that snow would be coming soon. There is nothing that smells more alive to me than that air. It feels conscious: the warm pine in summer, the tang of ice in winter, traveling down from these mountains to kick prairie and dirt-road dust in the faces of children growing up in the same tiny town my mother had over seventy years before. The heart that has always insisted on calling this place home, even during the twenty years I lived elsewhere, tells me, quietly, that this air I love in all its moods and seasons is conscious. It has a life of its own and a right to live it unviolated.

The crime of trespass goes both ways—what happens when we require the very source of life to carry sickness instead? Is this not a violation of the gods of life, of home, and of air’s own right to exist?

Acquiescence to the abuse and neglect of air is a trespass against humanity—against all of life, even against the air itself, for its own sake. Every living being has a common right to air that not only allows us to live the healthiest lives we can but also smells like pine and snowmelt, desert dust and prairie flowers, swamp grasses and moss. Air that feels like home.