Trespassing

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1. Poverty isn’t invisible from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Sep 4, 202621 min

   Where did August go? Into wildfire smoke and the heat of exhausted ecosystems. “What do you notice?” “A lot of grief. And there’s something like . . . an internal flinch. Not a physical flinch, almost a psychological one.” The clinician raised his eyebrows and wrote something down but said nothing. “Okay. Ready?” No . “Yes.” I picked up the little plastic paddles again. This exchange, from a recent therapeutic session, is indicative of my experience of EMDR: a murky, weird journey into my own mind and memories during which I’m encouraged not to force anything or narrate, but simply observe what’s going on, note it, and keep going. EMDR, which stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy,” is a therapeutic treatment that relies on bilateral stimulation and is used primarily to treat trauma. When I first started EMDR, the clinician tipped two fingers back and forth while I followed their movement and let my mind wander where it willed, prompted first by whatever painful memory we’d chosen from the list I’d brought in. Now we do it with small handheld paddles that alternately pulse or vibrate; even with my eyes closed I notice they’re still following the movement back and forth, like a metronome. EMDR was discovered accidentally by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987 , who was walking in a park when she noticed the effect her own eye movement had on difficult memories. She developed it to treat PTSD in war veterans, and later trained clinicians treating people who’d survived horrific traumas like genocide or mass rape. It’s been shown to be extremely effective for PTSD but, as Stephanie Foo related in her memoir What My Bones Know , it wasn’t intended for the chronic, long-term trauma that’s known as complex trauma or C-PTSD, the kind that can develop from an abusive childhood or relationship. EMDR often doesn’t work in those cases. It didn’t for her, nor for many other people I know with childhood experiences similar to mine. For some reason, it has for me. For the past two years I’ve been doing it almost weekly, with months off now and then because, while EMDR is a surprisingly effective tool for trauma, it’s also exhausting. Many sessions feel almost brutal, a surreal word to use because neither the person being treated nor the clinician is really doing anything. I sit there letting my mind wander—“stop trying to control where it goes,” the clinician has had to constantly remind me—through memories, that day’s stresses, visualizations that have become familiar places in my years of half-assed meditation, dreams both recent and old, worries about my kids, and, reliably, “What am I doing? Is this working? Am I ever going to get ‘better?’ Is the therapist bored?” That last one comes up a lot. A couple months ago I asked if we could try EMDR for what I described as financial fear: all the outsized worries of poverty, of finding myself even more poor than I had been growing up, of the invisibility and dehumanization that accompany poverty. Specifically of living on the streets with my teeth falling out because for some reason that’s what I’m most consistently worried about. My teeth. Maybe that will happen; maybe it won’t. I’d just like to stop being so overrun by fear of it that I find it hard to get my work done, perhaps turning poverty into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The EMDR process aims to take strong emotions like fear and underlying beliefs like “I am unsafe” or “I am unworthy” (there’s a whole list that I keep in the back of my planner, and I can’t say I enjoy tracking down what my frightened inner two- or twelve-year-old is feeling that day) and reframing them into positive cognitions. Nobody knows quite why it’s so effective for PTSD but dozens of clinical trials have shown that it is. All my previous sessions had been focused on single events, specific scenes of violence or abandonment or other cruelty and the associated emotions. My reactions to those sessions are intense. After my very first one I had a splitting headache for two days, and on the third I hid in the cupboard under the stairs to sob for two solid hours. I f*****g hate EMDR. It’s probably saved me from spending the rest of my life lost in a dark labyrinth of disconnected emotions and avoided memories, but it’s painful as hell and it’s hard to see when or how you’ll ever be free of all the grief, fear, and other emotions it brings up. Like you might just be stuck wandering those dark paths forever. It’s worked for me but I hesitate to recommend it to anyone. It’s painful in almost all the ways humans can experience pain. At one point I wondered if facing one’s shadow simply isn’t something most people could or even should handle. The sessions on financial fear have been different from the others. Less intense for one thing. I’ve done several now, and they all seem to lead nowhere except toward an increasingly large, dark mass in the center of my being, a mass that would rather stay hidden. Interestingly, I had a brief conversation just this week with a friend going through a similar process, and she also described coming across some enormous mass. I keep wandering in mental circles, or spirals, or maybe just turning around and around in one spot, opening doors to just about every difficult issue I have ever carried. When I walk away from these sessions, desperate for sleep but needing to get home to make dinner, it’s almost always with the same question: how do variations on these same fears show up in humanity’s worst habits and most destructive societal structures? Which aspects of my own fears are universal? The fear of poverty is inherent in but not exclusive to capitalism—the Soviet Union under communism had poverty. Despite rhetoric about fair and equal distribution, Party leaders had access to privileges and resources not available to anyone else, most of whom, like my father and his family, stood in line for hours for bread or the occasional sausage or fruit. Without wealth inequality and the theft of shared resources for the profit of a few, there would be no poverty, or at least not poverty as we currently conceive of it. No world where a medical emergency or loss of a home or job could mean bankruptcy. Like all words, “poverty” carries its own historical weight. It is a measure of worth in a society designed to be unequal. Scarcity is another story. Fear of starving or freezing to death is primal. I don’t think you could go back far enough in time anywhere on this planet and find people who didn’t face scarcity at one point or another. A winter harsher and longer than usual, a summer scant in berries, a season when the animals were hard to find. In lands like Russia, where my father and stepmother are from, people lived on berries and mushrooms and sometimes meat, the country’s soil being what historians have called agriculturally marginal. Ukraine’s rich, fertile “black earth” soil and access to the Black Sea are two of the reasons Russia’s leaders have persistently tried to take over and control the country. My fears of poverty are informed by a hungry childhood. It’s a fear that threads through my days even though, for now, I have a home and work I love and can feed my kids. It threads just as much through the days of a billionaire who cannot let go of his wealth because anything less might be not enough . Poking at those fears during EMDR sessions have started to convince me that there’s something ancient in them, too, something, yes, universal. When the commons of England were stolen and privatized, and the same damage later inflicted on Scotland and Ireland, it threw people into deeper poverty by taking their homes and means of survival while at the same time making their homelessness and destitution illegal. Many of those same people, both the thieves and the people they stole the commons from, went on to enact the same theft on a broader and more violent scale in North America. Colonial powers wrecked systems where almost everyone had enough, or at least that was the goal; and ever since, those powers have tried to persuade the world that a few people owning or controlling all the land, water, knowledge, and power is what ensures maximum freedom and security for everyone. How differently would my financial fears, or yours, feel if you knew you would not starve, or be unhoused, or slide into unmanageable debt while those who own the debt live in luxury. Avoiding scarcity is never guaranteed. But neither is the security supposedly granted by wealth and ownership. As I wrote recently, the growth of data centers and the damage they inflict are a clear reminder that ownership and wealth are only a measure of power, not of security. If someone with more power wants your home or your electricity or your water, they’ll find a way to take it, no matter what deeds of ownership you hold. But if people know the commons are shared, if they’re managed at the levels of community, region, and planet, then the prospect of scarcity—not poverty—is a shared one. There’s a big difference between the buffalo herd not showing up in its usual place one season and your people needing to manage the winter’s food needs differently that year, and an invading power deciding to massacre all the buffalo so that you and your community don’t have food. There’s an essay I wrote here a couple of years ago, about getting stranded at a cabin with my younger kid and dwindling food supplies , whose central question I think about constantly: what would it take to have faith that the universe or Creation or Mother Earth or whatever gods you do or do not believe in will take care of you? What would it take to release the need to hustle and earn and own and work ourselves so hard simply to survive, and to know instead that there are other ways to provide for ourselves and one another? What if our access to resources matched nature’s abundance? What if our work could be fulfilling while leaving time for the beauties and pleasures of living instead of that work being a grind and a threat? The amount of fear underlying financial worries is immense and very real. Money controls our access to food, health care, transportation, and housing, but often also joy, pleasure, fun, warmth, connection, knowledge, and curiosity. It’s easy to scoff at that last list of experiences, but I remember the times in college when I was working five outside jobs at a time to make ends meet and how much more difficult it was not just to learn in my classes, but to care about learning. I was often too tired and too stressed to muster the motivation. There’s this guy on YouTube, Joe Hudson, whose coaching videos I’ve watched off and on, usually the ones about money. (This is not a recommendation; it’s just something I clicked on out of curiosity.) It’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen, watching people he’s working with dig into their own financial fears to find that what they’re scared of is not lack of money as much as it is being invisible, unloved, and worthless. That’s what poverty is: a millennia-old story humanity has created, to mark wealth as a measure of worth. In his extensive 5,000-year history of wealth accumulation, exploitation, and freedom titled The Sociology of Freedom , the Kurdish freedom fighter Abdullah Öcalan wrote that, “In the central civilization systems, the subject always stems from capital and power. It represents consciousness, discourse, and free will. . . . The objects are the barbarians, the peoples, and the women excluded from power. They are only thought of—as is the case with nature—when they serve the subject as a resource.” That is, those with capital and power are considered people, human in the way that everyone else isn’t. Everyone else, human and more-than-human, is an object, a resource. The philosopher Aristotle, who lived in Greece in the 4th century BCE, argued vehemently that some people were simply “natural slaves.” A defender of the ideas of private property and ownership (though not of greed and hoarding), he had no trouble counting humans not as people but as part of that property. In a way, the fear of scarcity that comes with being living beings on a living planet has been turned into a weapon. Or a threat, one inherent in the word “poverty:” fall behind, and you become an object. Worthless except in your economic value to someone else. Invisible. I didn’t expect the EMDR sessions to lead me down these paths, but then I don’t expect them to lead me down any particular paths. If I did, they probably wouldn’t work. And I imagine that every person who journeys into that darkness finds themselves on their own paths stumbling over their own stories. It’s when our ways intersect that I begin to wonder if there’s a lost wholeness we’re all yearning for whether we know it or not, a true kinship most of humanity once had with the rest of life and the knowledge, the faith perhaps, that when we care for or neglect our commons together, and benefit or suffer together from that care or despite it, everything will be alright. Even, somehow, when it’s not. Maybe the journey into this shadow is something we’re meant to take collectively. Maybe it’s meant to remain as private as I’ve kept these experiences most of my life. Or maybe it’s just meant to remind us that nobody, no matter what their circumstances, is invisible. To make each of us see our own worth. I’ll let you know if I ever get there. This was a weird one, but that’ll happen sometimes. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, TRESPASSING has no paywall. To support further research and writing, please consider a paying subscription. Thank you to all who pay to keep this AI-free work open to all! Keep the commons weird 🙃 Until September 30, 5% of Trespassing revenue will be given to the Flathead Warming Center . Receipts of revenue return can be found here . Paintbrush in bloom just outside the Bob Marshall Wilderness, northwest Montana, early July 2026 Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

2. A price above rubies from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Jul 5, 202613 min

   I have a story to share with you. It’s a strange turn of phrase, “I have a story.” Or maybe not strange. In cultures all over the world—and once, I imagine, in every culture—stories are sacred. Some you may only tell in certain seasons, others only to people allowed to receive them. “Have a story”: like any form of possession and ownership, that concept carries its burdens as well as its gifts. For me, at this moment, “I am currently holding a story” is closer to the truth. I am currently holding many stories, as are, likely, you, even stories you’re unaware of. “Having” a story, as in possessing it, claiming ownership of it, is possible too, in the same way it’s possible to “own” seeds or the right to pollute air and water. What are proprietary recipes and black box algorithms and copyright and the closed contract details of public-private partnerships if not claiming ownership over a story? Over the last six weeks I’ve been moving house, a process full of headaches and financial surprises (the bad kind), but also the reminder of how fortunate I am in friends and family. Many people have helped in many ways, and in such a manner as to make me feel not only grateful, but in some undefinable way integrated within an ecosystem of reciprocity and care that is wider and more linked than I’ll ever be able to comprehend. Amidst all that—packing up from one home, living for a while on others’ couches, finally moving into another home—the strawberries in the garden I and my extended family share with my ex-husband finally started ripening. Growing food where I live is a time-short endeavor. At best we get four months without an overnight frost, and this year we had a late May snowstorm and days of constant, cold rain in June. Right now, my stepmother and I are picking strawberries daily. Overflowing containers of berries, so many that we end up filling our freezers with them. So many that my kid and nieces have gotten tired of eating strawberries every day. Even the Robins and Eastern Kingbirds nibbling from the edges of the beds don’t count for much of a dent. Can you imagine getting tired of fresh strawberries, grown under sun and rain and picked warm just as the day brightens and the bees start working among the not-yet-ripe raspberries? Red all the way through, juicy and sweet with the tiniest tart bite to remind me, as I pick and eat next to the sweetgrass bed on a quiet morning, of the constant presence of cold where I live even on hot days. Strawberries, like all food, like all plants and animals, including us, carry the story of where they are from and how they are treated. Fresh fruit has long been, for me, a mark of true wealth. Growing up in Montana in a very poor family at a time when Montana itself was generally very poor and the grocery stores more closely reflected our local climate and distance from supply chain hubs, fresh fruit was not something I had much access to. I was fortunate in having a mother who was, and is, an incredible gardener. Having grown up in a farm family herself among wheat and cattle, during my childhood she cultivated a mix of red currants, crabapples, chokecherries, and strawberries among tomatoes and her knowledge of lesser-known plants like Jerusalem artichokes, and edible “weeds” like lamb’s quarters. Alongside staples like powdered milk and Velveeta cheese, stripping red currants from their bushes and eating them by the handful lingers as a memory full-flavored. Some years ago a post on some social media platform or another prompted one of those interminable online debates, this one about poverty and food access. The post in question was a photo of a food bank with a line about “getting some fruit and vegetables in there.” Which then prompted counter-posts about judging people without much money for buying candy. All I could think was how, throughout my childhood and to this day, there has been nothing I find more luxurious than a fresh peach. There is nothing richer, nothing more desirable. Expensive jewelry and gems don’t interest me and new technology only draws my attention out of necessity. I want enough income to live on but can’t imagine coveting a second home somewhere else, or a private jet, or even new clothes more often than necessary. It all sounds . . . boring. But a fresh peach? Perfectly ripe, sweet and flavorful, soaked with the hot sun of eastern Washington state (the best fruit I can get comes from Yakima), eaten messily while standing in the garden watching bees working the borage and radishes I let go to flower? That feels like wealth. I had plenty of access to candy and sugar-filled pop growing up, and the ongoing dental bills to prove it. Fresh, ripe, local, and financially accessible fruit was something rare. Can you smell the most recent fresh strawberry you had? Or blueberry? Mango, gooseberry, starfruit, apple, peach? Can you taste the story of their growth and husbandry? The soil they drew from, the rain that fell, the hands who picked them and the other hands packing carefully enough to avoid bruising or crushing? The breath of a Robin’s wing as he tried for an early morning bite? A fresh strawberry. Even the past few days when the garden’s been glutted with rain and berries rotted on the stem, there’s nothing like that flavor. A wealth that cannot be measured, and a story that must be tasted to be known. My father mentioned recently that Moscow, Russia (where he and his wife, both Russian natives, live part of the year), is suddenly full of electric bicycles. Well-strategized drone attacks from Ukraine have taken out a significant percentage of Russian oil storage and refinery capacity, and gas has become hard to find. My stepbrother finally found petrol for his car after traveling well outside the city and waiting 45 minutes in line. Many years ago, I published a personal essay in a literary journal about being pregnant and stranded with my toddler during a heavy, wild snowstorm and coming to terms with the awesome hubris and fragility of building a world where almost everything from food and medications to central heating is dependent on a fossil fuel-powered grid network. As strawberry plants produce, they send out runners—stems that grow new plants. This autumn, my stepmother will clip many of the new runners and replant them in the original strawberry bed, removing the older plants that have gotten leggy and produce fewer berries. We have three beds now, from the original 10 plants a friend gifted from his garden, and could expand to more if there were room. This is the strawberry cycle, a seemingly infinite loop of berry abundance that can, if cared for, feed many more people than just my family. As far as I know, no fossil fuel makes more of itself. Oil pockets don’t send out runners like strawberries; coal seams don’t try to take over a space with new shoots every year the way raspberry canes do. Natural gas doesn’t reseed with abandon like tomatoes or borage or tobacco. My stepbrother in Russia is, like my mother, an excellent gardener. But he cannot prune gas lines to encourage growth, even if the planet could handle more burning and extraction. And yet he, like most of us, has little choice but dependence on fossil fuels, in a world where those in power have fought every move away from them for decades. Oil grows profit, not life. Strawberries can grow profit, too, at least for a few people who own corporate berry farms. They do so at the expense of soil, wildlife, local water, farm workers, customers thousands of miles away who end up paying too much for a disappointing cousin to ripe berries; at the expense of the farmed bees trucked around to pollinate monocrops, and the berry plants themselves. As I wrote those lines, news came of a drone attack in central Moscow. These things are not unrelated—Vladimir Putin grasping for empire in senseless violence that has already lasted longer than World War I, world leadership that forever values profit and their own personal monetary wealth and power over anything that truly nurtures and sustains, anything that truly matters. I lied in the opening line. I don’t have a story to tell you here. I have, or hold, an idea for a story that I want all of us to create together. It’s a story of abundance versus scarcity, fresh strawberries versus fossil fuels, life versus profit and extraction. It’s a story where everyone has access to fresh fruit and nobody needs to wait in line for gas. One where we walk away, somehow and together, from individual striving and fear of scarcity, to the wealth that this planet has gifted us for millions of years—humans’ entire evolution and beyond—while asking nothing in return except that we learn what care all that life needs from our time, hands, minds, and hearts. We all need money. There’s rent, property taxes, electrical bills, medical treatment, shoes, food. Most things require money, and most of us could use more of it. Goodness knows I could. But there are infinite varieties of wealth. Every single one of them is under threat from privatization, from vegetable seeds and fruit plants to our personal connections in our not-so-private lives. They are not, however, lost. The enclosures are not complete. Our shared commons is always within reach, whether it’s strawberries feeding multiple families and reproducing themselves, or friends who show up for us in hard times and in unexpected ways. Just yesterday, some friends helped me and my father move some old bookcases into my home, along with the many boxes of books that have been stored in my ex-spouse’s garage for the last year. I urged them to snack on strawberries while we worked. I do have a story to share with you. Many stories. My life is finally, I hope, recalibrating back to a steadiness that will allow me to recenter and focus on the work I do here and the stories I want to find and share. But I don’t have, or even hold, your story. You do. What’s your wealth? Short bonus audio — Swainson’s thrushes on a recent short hike just outside of town Enclosures of the commons destroys all forms of relationship—with land, water, animals, and one another. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, TRESPASSING has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

3. Private property: bedrock . . . or shale? from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   May 20, 202618 min

   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. 10th 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 10th 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 15th-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 Swarnali Mukherjee ’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 12th–13th 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. Enclosures of the commons destroys all forms of relationship—with land, water, animals, and one another. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, TRESPASSING has no paywall and uses no AI in writing or research. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute . Receipts of revenue return can be found here . Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

4. Trespass against from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   May 1, 202614 min

   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.” “. . . 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. Like the Red-breasted Nuthatch whose home needs some maintenance, my newsletter takes work. To support further research and writing on the commons, ownership, and private property, please consider a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute . Receipts of revenue return can be found here . Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

5. When the world shut down from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Apr 12, 202619 min

   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 f*****g 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. Enclosures of the commons destroys all forms of relationship—with land, water, animals, and one another. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, this newsletter has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute . Receipts of revenue return can be found here . Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

6. Bound for hell from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Mar 26, 202615 min

   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. “No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardentAnd lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Bound for Hell,” 1915 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? “To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poems to Czechoslovakia” , 1939 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. “A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, “a kiss on the forehead,” 1917 On the Commons seeks to reclaim the commons, and to revive our sense of belonging with home—all our homes. In keeping with the commons, it has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. 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 . Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

7. Healing Long Covid from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Jan 21, 202611 min

   If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons ! 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 . 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 . On the Commons seeks to reclaim the commons, and to revive our sense of home and responsibility to the same. In keeping with the commons, it has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

8. How bad does it have to get from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Jan 15, 20266 min

   Following is a revised essay originally published in 2021. People leave home for all kinds of reasons. This essay is not a judgment; the relevance of this question— “What would it take for a person to leave?”—never fails to fascinate and sadden me. Friends sometimes ask me how long I’ll stick it out in Montana. It’s natural, I suppose, to wonder why, if the politics of a place is oppressive or repressive, one doesn’t just move. And yet, when you feel that you belong to a place—not that it belongs to you, but that you belong to it—picking up and leaving isn’t a light notion. As a born-and-raised Montanan who’s the daughter of on the one hand a born-and-raised-Montanan, and on the other of an emigre and exile who was not allowed to see his family or return to his home country for nearly twenty years, the questions of home and belonging are almost always with me. When I read or watch news stories of refugees, whether from Syria or Honduras or elsewhere, all I can think of is how bad it has to get to force a person to pick up sticks and leave home. My own Russian-Jewish grandparents were refugees in the Ural Mountains during the Siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t a choice they made willingly, and it’s one many people didn’t survive. How bad would it have to get for me, for you, to turn your back on your home and know you might never be able to return? How many people actually choose to leave their homelands? What imagined countries do they carry in their hearts? —- These subjects, of home and belonging, are trickling around the world, finding outlets in places I didn’t expect to see them. I keep coming across conversations of community and the drawbacks of fierce individualism, and the damage that absolutist private property rights cause. I bump into these concepts in random places, and just in the last few weeks an essay of mine about private property versus the health of the commons , published five years ago on Aeon, went from around 6,000 Facebook shares (where it had stuck since it came out) to nearly 70,000. It’s clearly hitting some kind of nerve, though where exactly, I don’t know. One of the recent readers of that essay shared a music video that they’d helped to make to advocate for preservation of a waterway in India, teaching me the concept of “poromboke.” In their comment on the essay, they explained: “The Poromboke is a medieval tamil agrarian revenue term that denotes lands reserved for shared communal uses. Such lands cannot be traded or built upon, and yield no revenue to the crown or the government. The term and its legal essence have survived well into present times. But the quality and health of the Poromboke commons began its decline when the property making agenda of the British colonial masters collided with the notion of the commons. Perhaps because it was strictly not property that could be traded, it began to be seen as worthless. Today, the word poromboke has degraded culturally to refer to worthless persons or places.” One of the lyrics of the music video they shared sticks with me: “After Ennore got its power plant, acres of ash, but river scant.” The whole ensemble reminds me of a short video I shared a few months back, about sand mining in Cambodia for Singapore’s expansion that ruins island fisheries. Sometimes we don’t even need to flee home. Sometimes, maybe most often, someone steals it from underfoot. —- I listened to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson recently where he talked about being a citizen of the soil. It came up partly in a discussion on individual rights—the eternal pull between “freedom from” and “freedom to”—and dovetailed strangely on my watching of Adam Curtis’s documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head . There is something freeing about knowing that you can’t have everything exactly as you wish, that you owe something to the communities around you. I know Montana has a lot of narrow-minded people and especially narrow-minded politicians. So does everywhere else. But it remains just about the most beautiful place I have ever been. It’s my home. And I don’t see why I should let the Christian nationalists and uber-wealthy and resource-extractors have all of this life-richness to themselves. Besides which, most people can’t afford to just leave, and the rivers and trees and wildlife certainly can’t pick up and relocate somewhere else. I can’t imagine living far from the rivers that have so often saved me. If I think of myself as a citizen of the watersheds I rely on, the dynamics of this place and its struggles look very different. It’s worth fighting for, even if I lose. The roots will remain. Some stuff to read or listen to: * This two-hour episode of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with conservation biologist and Aldo Leopold scholar Curt Meine was so interesting I might have to listen to it again: “We’re at an inflection point because the convergence of concerns can no longer be avoided. . . . The long-term has hit the short-term.” * Scotland Outdoors talked with a former paratrooper walking the coastline of the UK. If you need another reminder that physical and/or real-world interaction can help restore a faith in humanity, this episode has it: “What [people] do to go out of their way to want to help you is quite phenomenal.” * I also loved this Scotland Outdoors episode on the importance of land connection for refugees . It presents a number of ideas I’d never thought about before, and reminded me of Jonathan Stalls telling me about the group of Iraqi refugee women he often walks with in Denver, and the kind of community they’ve built. * The growing problem of rural America as a dumping ground for corporate waste , by Alan Guebert in Farm Forum. * American Scholar has a pair of essays pinpointing the disconcerting idea that people might be willing to forego any attempt to fight for liberal democracy if given enough physical comfort, one on China and one on Russia . * The Smarty Pants podcast rebroadcast a fun interview with historian and Women Warriors author Pamela Toler about the ample evidence for women warriors throughout history and some of the ways that past historians pretzeled evidence to erase the existence of women who were honored for their fighting abilities. * I keep forgetting to share this piece from The Guardian cracking open the idea of the literary canon and pointing out that Māori have a canon, too . * Using ethnography and the insights gained from the close observational skills of mushroom hunters to inform AI development and improve medical diagnostics, by Anne Harris and Lisa Herzog in Aeon’s sister magazine Pysche. * If we needed another reminder that highways are destructive and that you can never, ever solve congestion by keeping people dependent on cars, Arch Daily has a good article about highways and their futures . (I have never been to Houston and knew it was car-centric but not that one highway has 26 lanes?! And that after it expanded, traffic increased by 30% — “induced demand” is the name for that phenomenon.) Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

9. Everlasting mythologies: Anglo-Saxon identity from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

   Nov 3, 202523 min

   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, some thing —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.’ 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.” 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

10. On greed: how much is enough? from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Oct 30, 20258 min

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons ! 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 . 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. On the Commons has no paywall, in keeping with the ethics of plum trees and rivers. Telling these stories takes time, resources, attention, and, most importantly, care. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription. 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. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

11. Hope is the heartwood from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Aug 25, 202513 min

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons ! 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 . 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. On the Commons has no paywall. To support this work digging for the entangled roots of injustice, inequality, and environmental degradation, please consider a paid subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

12. Oligarchy: the power of wealth from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Jul 12, 202528 min

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons ! 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 . 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 18th 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 18th 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. “The freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” “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 s**t 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 ha

13. Repair from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Jun 1, 202514 min

    To new subscribers—welcome to On the Commons! To those of you who’ve been around a while, welcome back! Today’s post comes to you amidst birdsong. 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. On the Commons has no paywall. Paid subscriptions support the research and writing, and help keep it an open commons for all. “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 Chloe Hope ’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 Sarah C Swett ’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. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

14. Art harder from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    May 17, 202524 min

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons . 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 . 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 s**t 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 d******k 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 “f**k 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. Art harder, think more deeply, slow down, reconnect, with On the Commons. 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. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

15. Border control from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Apr 24, 202521 min

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons ! 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 . 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, Kristin DeMarr 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. Shaina Fisher Galvas 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 mindconstructsbordersbut bodiescross 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 F*****g S**t 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. On the Commons is without borders. Please consider helping to keep it that way with a paid subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

16. Writing is a commons of ideas from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Feb 11, 202310 min

    I finished my master’s degree in creative writing a couple of decades ago, when I was in my late twenties. With a few exceptions it was an off-putting experience: the program felt designed to promote competitive jealousy and a slash-and-burn attitude toward others’ work. I’m not sure why I stuck with it except that it was a ten-minute walk from my Boston apartment and at that age I still believed it was a necessary step toward becoming a writer (and that “becoming a writer” was itself necessary, rather than just writing). I’m still friends with two of the people I met there, so it wasn’t a total loss. Everything I learned about writing came after that. I eventually met good editors at various publications who taught me how to pare down my wordiness (not a lesson that seems to have stuck) and to really think about what I was saying. To question myself and the conclusions I came to, to broaden my perspectives. Good writers might be rare, but good editors are far rarer. Those editors taught me to write. More importantly, they taught me that writing a narrative with some meaning for readers is nearly always a collaborative process. This was not something that my master’s program ever highlighted, and not something that aspiring writers usually get advice about. It’s always “Get an agent,” “Get a book contract,” “Get your pitches accepted,” not “What allows me to do the best possible work?” I can’t think of anything I’ve published, anything I think well of at least, that didn’t lean heavily on an editor’s input, and often also on that of a few particular colleagues whose judgment I trust. Feedback isn’t always easy to receive—writing is a weirdly personal thing, even if the subject matter itself isn’t all that personal—but it made all the difference for me. Having my own newsletter means I can follow where curiosity leads and explore ideas that aren’t trendy enough for bigger publications, but I do miss having editorial feedback from people who know what they’re doing. Enough so that, as was the case with this essay, I often send On the Commons pieces to my older sister for feedback and corrections before I post them. There is a group of people involved in writing who came up even less often than editors did in my MFA, if they came up at all: readers. The interaction between readers and writers is very different in the full-on internet age of today from what it was when I finished my degree in 2003, when print still dominated and readers didn’t have such easy access to writers. Even once writing started going online, for many years the hard rule was, “Don’t read the comments.” Because they were junk or abusive or both. (They really were.) Things have changed. I’m not exactly sure when. I remember publishing my first essay for Aeon in 2015, and how thoughtful and well-moderated the comments were, and how I was surprised to enjoy the dialogue they fostered. That essay had tens of thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. Not one of them was a waste of my time to read, and in fact several led to further research that informed my first published book. Something shifts when readers opt into someone’s writing, and it’s not just the tone or content of the comments. It’s the way readers’ ideas and enthusiasm and questions become, for me, part of the thinking and writing process itself. What shows up here comes from me, the result of whatever happens in the strange internal process called creativity. But the content isn’t purely individual. It’s “my” work, but also “this” work, something that readers have a stake in. Or a voice. Or something I can’t find the words for, something collaborative but not collective, or maybe vice versa. Many of you send me emails with thoughts on something I’ve written, or suggestions for videos or books or podcasts, or personal stories of your own. Some of you post comments, or simply open and read the posts enough to remind me that people are giving their attention to whatever happens here. This writing comes from me—it is my mind, in a way. But that mind isn’t working in a silent bubble, absorbing books and articles and contemplative walks and conversations and churning out finished ideas. I think about you as I write. My first drafts, almost always written longhand in a notebook, are for me alone, but they can’t help but be informed by anyone who’s been reading and responding to what’s come before. The revision process also happens silently in my head, but it’s still a conversation with this group of readers and the world in general. Where does this put ownership of the writing itself? And what changed once I started asking for people to pay for this work, even though there is no paywall? Who owns it? Legally, I do—that’s what Substack and copyright laws say and let me tell you there’s a rich and tangled history behind creative ownership and copyright law—but isn’t it all of us? Isn’t this an ideas commons, too? I can’t even claim full ownership of this essay idea. It was Mike Sowden of Everything Is Amazing who presented the idea of “narrative ownership” to me. When I switched to the paid version of Substack, I decided to make these essays free and shorter pieces paid—this was for a brief period before I removed the paywall entirely—because the “some stuff to read/watch/listen to” lists I used to include represented about a quarter to a third of what I read/watched/listened to and took me a significant amount of time to compile. Obviously, all the writing I do here is also work, but those lists were a particular type of work that felt more like easily identifiable labor. I offered the option of a paid-subscription-for-free-on-request because I didn’t want anyone to be shut out for lack of funds, but as time went on I realized that it was also partly because I wanted people to have the option of opting into something. I’ve personally unsubscribed from a lot of otherwise good writing (mostly on Medium) because I felt flooded with content I could never keep up with. I don’t want to do that to people. Artists of all kinds struggle with being paid for our work. I don’t think it’s a struggle that we’ll ever resolve, even within ourselves, but it’s always worthwhile acknowledging that it’s there. And that, without art being paid for, generally the only people who can afford to do it are the already well-off. “You’re commodifying art” vs. “Then only rich people get to write” was an argument we had repeatedly in my MFA program. Capitalism isn’t dead yet, and until it is we’re kind of stuck with the trade-off. When I described to someone last spring what I was going to do with my book No Trespassing , publish it here as I slowly write it—I didn’t realize quite how slowly—he asked me what would happen if a publisher later approached me about publishing it in edited book form. I told him I’d thought about that a lot, especially after analyzing my own feelings when a couple of Substack writers I subscribed to moved to big-name publications. I didn’t begrudge them that—a steady paycheck is nice!—but there was a sense of loss after their announcements. A sense of, “Hey, you invited people to support your work; I was happy to help you build that and a lot of other people felt the same.” It felt weird, like some sort of rejection, especially as I didn’t want to follow them to the publications they landed at. It’s an interesting feeling, not one I’m proud of or even fully understand, but one that did make me think carefully about what I was doing here. It feels akin to starting a relationship, I think, reaching out slow, tenuous tendrils that you can’t just retract on a whim if you change your mind, not without injuring both others and yourself. Whether you’re sharing writing or relationship, each tendril is made of trust, and you can’t impulsively walk away from those things without damaging that trust. I told this person that I wouldn’t be averse to the idea, if a publisher were interested, but there’d have to be something in it for all the people who’d already been supporting this work, financially or otherwise. That I wouldn’t want to give a sense of “Thanks for your support, on to bigger and better things now.” What that would look like I don’t know and it’s purely theoretical at this point (and will probably remain so). Free copies? Acknowledgments? A promise to keep doing this work, here, together? It’s not a simple question, but to rebuild the commons—all the commons—it and others like it have to be answered, in some form, eventually. No matter what, though, I can’t think of this Substack as something I myself own, that I myself am creating and can be possessive of any more than it was solely me who created any other piece of published writing with my name on it. Copyright law tells me one thing, but what I’ve learned from working with good editors over the years; and how I feel about ownership; and what I envision as a better, more reciprocal, way of doing this collective thing called life could be, is quite another. I don’t plan on doing guest posts here, or interviews—I can barely keep up with my life and work as it is, and really isn’t everyone already overwhelmed with material to read and listen to anyway?—but 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. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

17. A culture of domination from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Nov 9, 202119 min

    In the third book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, Voyage of the Dawn Treader , there’s a scene that has stuck with me as a good lesson for many times and circumstances, but especially those that require adaptability when facing great change. In the book, Eustace, a self-entitled and unpleasant cousin of two of the main characters, has been pulled into Narnia along with them, tumbling from our world onto Prince Caspian’s ship Dawn Treader . He is having a miserable time. One day, as the ship’s crew is exploring an island, Eustace wanders off and finds himself in a dragon’s cave. The aged dragon is breathing his last just outside. After he dies, Eustace, his heart full of the treasure hoard he’s stumbled upon, falls asleep on piles of gold. He wakes up a dragon. There are lots of little lessons in Eustace’s story about greed and grace (I had read these books many times as a kid before being told they were Christian allegory), but I’ve always been most taken by the scene where the god-lion Aslan tells Eustace what he must do to be free of the dragon self he has become: he must scrape off the dragon skin and then wash himself clean of it in a well. Unable to interact fully with the other humans in his new form, Eustace is even more miserable as a dragon than he was as a boy; isolation and loneliness have become his defining experiences in just a few days. He is ashamed of himself and desperate to become human again. So he follows Aslan’s instruction and scraps the skin off, layer after layer, increasingly desperate each time he descends to the well water and sees his reflection, still a dragon. He can’t seem to make any progress. Finally, Aslan tells him he’s not going deep enough. The lion offers to do it for him, but warns him that it will hurt. Eustace recounts his experience to his cousins the next day: “I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.” Aslan then tosses Eustace into the well water, where he discovers himself to once again have the skin of a boy. I’m told that C.S. Lewis intended this as a tale of conversion and baptism, but I’m far more interested in what it says about the pain of facing change in our own identities, in how we perceive the world and our place in it. Change is hard. Until we face it, we don’t know how painful it is, especially in a culture that devalues or even scorns adaptability and willingness to change. When we see adaptability as a weakness, we’re almost destined to experience change as something as brutal as ripping off our own skin. We experience rupture, fear, and mistrust. It’s a lot easier to lash out with any power we have in an increasingly desperate need to force everyone else into the worldview that makes us feel safe. Riane Eisler makes sense of this reaction in her book on domination versus partnership cultures, Nurturing Our Humanity , showing, for example, the links between authoritarian upbringings and a tendency to support authoritarian politics. Referencing research from psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick, developer of the F scale that gauges comfort with fascism, Eisler writes that: “People who scored high on this F scale had typically grown up with a great fear of punishment in families with powerful authority figures. [Frenkel-Brunswick] also found that people from these kinds of backgrounds—in her words, people from families where roles were ‘clearly defined in terms of dominance and submission’—tended to develop an ‘us versus them’ mentality and to support strongman leaders. . . . People from authoritarian families also tended to lack tolerance of ambiguity and have a strong aversion to complexity. And that is not all. Recent brain experiments indicate that the experiences that lead to this mental rigidity actually leave their mark on the brain—and that these brain patterns appear to affect people’s political orientations.” People who described themselves as “very conservative,” wrote Eisler, were slow to shift away from “preconceived or habitual ideas.” “For children in abusive domination families, it is far too dangerous to disagree with their parents, let alone blame them for the pain they inflict. . . . Hence the frequent idealization of punitive parents by their adult children, as well as the tendency of people brought up this way to idealize ‘strong’ leaders and scapegoat ‘weak’ out-groups.” For children raised in this way, authoritarian leaders feel safe because they conform to what the child’s brain was forced into accepting and adapting to as “safe” while they developed and survived. Eisler’s research came to mind a lot as I finished Blake Watson’s legal book Buying America from the Indians , in tandem with listening through the second season of the This Land podcast about the current court cases that seek to dismantle the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Buying America from the Indians is a hard book to describe. I read it because I wanted a better understanding of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision Johnson v. McIntosh that declared outright that Native American people—the people, if anyone needs reminding, who had been living on this continent for time immemorial or at least tens of thousands of years before Europeans showed up—couldn’t sell land because they didn’t own it. They had right of tenancy, wrote Chief Justice Marshall, but not right of ownership. Ownership, the decision declared, came only with discovery and “improvement”: “Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives. The sovereignty and eminent domain thus acquired, necessarily precludes the idea of any other sovereignty existing within the same limits. . . . The law of every dominion affects all persons and property situate within it; and the Indians never had any idea of individual property in lands. It cannot be said that the lands conveyed were disjoined from their dominion; because the grantees could not take the sovereignty and eminent domain to themselves.” Because these sovereign nations didn’t share Europeans’ conceptions about property ownership, the decision declared, their right to the land was washed away by European nations’ claims. “They were admitted to be the rightful occupants of the soil, with a legal as well as just claim to retain possession of it, and to use it according to their own discretion; but their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it .” Buying America is specifically about the history of one particular piece of land that a group of European men originally purchased from the Piankeshaw nation, and how changes in the law regarding ownership (during a time bridging America’s Revolutionary War and the question of royal jurisdiction) played out over decades in legal battles, political corruption, broken treaties, and—its most consistent theme—land speculation. One of the more interesting things about the early part of the book is how many legal arguments, as far back as the earliest settler-invaders, made the case that of course Native people owned the land they lived on. To assume otherwise, these authors of early pre-America said, was nonsensical. Watson includes extensive discourse on this evidence over several chapters before even getting to the Revolutionary War. These settler-invaders couldn’t conceive of a system where people didn’t “own” land but instead lived in relationship with it, but they likewise didn’t believe that they had an automatic right to claim it simply by appearing. Unfortunately, as shown by the fact that Johnson v. McIntosh enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery (the 1493 papal bull that gave Catholic nations the “right” to own any land they came across and its resources, including its people as long as they were non-Christian) into U.S. law in 1823 and it is still in force to this day, those early arguments remain mostly the knowledge of historians like Watson. Oddly, Chief Justice Marshall went on to contradict his own decision in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia , stating that: “The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties, and with the acts of congress.” “In fact,” wrote Watson, “one can credibly argue that Worcester v. Georgia implicitly overruled Johnson v. McIntosh .” But the damage was done. With Johnson v. McIntosh , then-president Andrew Jackson had the tool he wanted to justify forced removal of several Native Nations to Oklahoma. The Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations suffered horribly in the forced removal, and one quarter to a half of Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole people died as a result of it. Reading about the lengths that land speculators and political leaders (often the same people) were willing to go to steal Native land—and the ways in which they were willing to justify the theft to themselves—you can almost see later systems like reservations, allotments, and residential schools coming. The This Land podcast gives shape to the ensuing history, picking up the story where Worcester v. Georgia leaves off. No matter what other ideals America-the-nation’s founders expressed, their commitment to taking land was greater than anything else in the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson might have written that he had “sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (in an argument against establishing any form of Christianity as the U.S.’s official religion) and written repeatedly of an “empire of liberty” but he had little interest in extending those ideals to the people who already lived on this continent and whose land he coveted—or anyone who wasn’t white. Jefferson wrote to William Henry Harrison (governor of the Northwest Territory and then the Indiana Territory and responsible for many land-grab “treaties”) that to facilitate greater transfer of land, he wanted to drive Native people into debt as quickly as possible. Watson quotes his letter verbatim in Buying America : “‘[W]e shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good & influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they come willing to lop [them off] by a cession of lands.’ Jefferson urged Harrison to treat with the Kaskaskias and purchase ‘their whole country’ in light of the impending occupation of Louisiana by the French. ‘Whatever can be obtained,’ he advised, ‘must be obtained quickly.’” Despite Jefferson’s stance against the establishment of a state religion, I doubt he would have been opposed to church-run residential schools, used as they were to force the relinquishing of land along with culture, language, identity, and life. To Jefferson, there was no empire of liberty for those whose land he wanted. Buying America portray’s a new nation’s leadership that could afford to perceive itself as generous in its ideals, but who were always ready to force Native Nations off of land when European-descended people wanted it. And it soon became apparent that settlers would never be satisfied, would always want more and would always resort to nearly any means to get it. This was true back in Europe, too, with England’s enclosures of the commons starting in the 1200s and accelerating in the 1400s and later; and the Highland Clearances, both practices of land theft—appropriation of land used by commoners for subsistence to the wealthy and ennobled, for their private profit—that led in the long run to many people fleeing or being forced to migrate to North America, where they thought that they might be free to carve out a little space to support their families. But they brought the exclusionary land ownership mindset with them, both the entitlement of the wealthy to hoard as much land as they could (beginning with people like George Washington and many others who dove into land speculation on a massive scale right from the beginning), and its consequence: the terror of scarcity that had defined most Europeans’ lives for generations beyond count. Some part of their minds must have told Europeans that if they could just get their hands on the land that North Americans lived on so freely, then they, too, could finally be free. But as long as they maintained fealty to the hard models of private property and land ownership that had made life on the European continent untenable for so many, only whose who started out with power and resources, no matter how ill-gained, could prosper, and at the expense of everyone else. No matter how high-minded some of the writers of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were in some ways, I’ll never again be able to see them as anything but land-hungry speculators looking for a quick way to get rich, no matter who suffered in the process. One of the disconcerting things about learning history through the stories of more ordinary people—rather than what Patrick Wyman and others term the “Great Man” theory of history —is first of all coming to terms with knowing that there have never been accepted narratives of how things should be, even within a dominant culture (otherwise you wouldn’t have revolutions and peasants’ rebellions and fights for human rights); and facing the consistency with which humans can be either shitty or decent throughout that history. The difficulty of coming to terms with this truth for many Americans is real. Christopher Columbus was nothing more than a “replacement-level” (Wyman again) merchant in debt. But those whose identities are bound up in seeing him as a bold explorer and discoverer, and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson et al. as noble patriots, find the teaching of such realities deeply offensive. When your identity is so fundamentally bound up in seeing the world in one particular way, any facts that undermine that worldview feel like an attack. Yuval Noah Harari put it succinctly in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century : “If we are outraged that somebody insulted our nation or our god, what makes the insult unbearable is the burning sensations in the pit of our stomach and the band of pain that grips our heart. Our nation feels nothing, but our body really hurts.” Buying America from the Indians unpacks a tremendous history with a rotting injustice at its heart. That 1823 court decision, and the Doctrine of Discovery centuries before, wrapped the right to steal from and inflict horror on people within civilized-sounding legalese. Until the precepts behind these legal precedents are cracked open and dismantled, those injustices will continue to eat away at any pretense our societies have to being “civilized.” Rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery , and all that has followed from it, would be a momentous start. We just have to be willing to see it for the unwanted dragon skin it is and be ready to adapt to its absence. In 1998, Matthew Fletcher, then a law student at the University of Michigan and now its director of Indigenous Law & Policy Center and a judge for several Nations, published a paper on what it was like to learn about Johnson v. McIntosh as a law student and a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. How pivotal the case is, how much it still affects, and how briefly it’s dwelled on when the stories it hides are so enormous: “The twenty minute talk about Johnson v. M’Intosh lasts only about ten seconds in the weird temporal scene in Hutchins Hall. Before it sunk in, the professor began talking about the property issues of fox hunting. I wanted to raise my hand, but what would I say? The story was told. It was over. The wheels had been greased over time to make the story move so effortlessly, it made no ripple. No one will argue with it. No discussion. No dissent. The story is huge. I cannot emphasize that enough. The story’s many strands and fibers contain the fate of ten million, or twenty million, or maybe even 100 million, people living in this land before the Vikings or Columbus arrived. Now imagine how many stories we all have, stories that shape us, define us, restrict us, lead us, teach us, and evolve with us. I have so many, I cannot keep track of them. And I always want more stories. Now imagine how many stories there were in 1492 or 255 B.C. or 1823 in North America. Where did those stories go?” A culture of domination requires control to function. It requires absence of nuance and knowledge. It requires that its hearers accept a shared narrative of history that casts the dominant culture in the best light, a narrative that becomes so powerful that millions find questioning it too painful to contemplate. It doesn’t just want to keep Eustace within the body of a dragon, collecting gold and slowly dying of loneliness; it wants to erase any desire he ever had to be free of it. Keeping the real stories alive, reopening them and reframing history—no matter how painful the process to some—is the only way to ensure it doesn’t win. On the Commons has no paywall. To support this work digging for the entangled roots of injustice, inequality, and environmental degradation, please consider a paid subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

18. You can't solve for traffic from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Sep 24, 202123 min

    Several people have sent me notices of the Wall Street Journal Facebook investigation regarding harmful content, harm to teens from Instagram, and many other issues. (I’m not putting in a link because it’s paywalled, but here is a summary from the Los Angeles Times .) In return, I recommend an episode of Your Undivided Attention on the subject, with Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger. What do we do, the host asked Schmachtenberger, with technology that has such enormous influence over our lives? To which he answered: “As we follow an exponential curve of power, there’s this core governance question of, we’ve never done all that good of a job being great stewards of power, and now we have radically increasing exponential power. How do we govern it?” The main reason I follow futurist and tech conversations like these is that, having spent years immersed in research on how a car-centric worldview took over and fractured our lives, I deeply believe that in a century we’ll see similar damage caused by a failure to define the roles of digital technologies like social media. The history of the battle against car dominance is one of extensive pushback in the 1920s in particular, followed by automobile interests forming think tanks that served as feeders into government, where pro-car people were able to shape a future around cars and highways rather than people and communities. (That’s a very sweeping description of a more detailed history—good books related to the subject include Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law , and more specifically Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic and Jeff Speck’s Walkable City , my own book A Walking Life , and Tom Vanderbilt’s four-part series “ The Crisis in American Walking ” in Slate.) I spent a good chunk of my book writing about this, so I don’t want to repeat it all here, but when talking about walking I often find that people focus on the pleasant aspects of it—the mental health, the connection to nature, the physical release and creative depth, among the countless other benefits, all of which are real—and forget the key point, which is that in North America we have spent a century creating a world where walking as a way of life is almost impossible. The damage this shift caused is incalculable, from the nearly 40,000 deaths in car crashes each year in the U.S. (over 6,000 of those pedestrians and cyclists, and these numbers do not count severe injuries like loss of limbs, paralysis, traumatic brain injuries, or the estimated 20,000 near misses every year) to the air pollution caused by exhaust (which likely contributes to health issues from Alzheimer’s to miscarriages to reduced lung capacity in children who grow up in high-traffic areas) to micropollution from abrasion of tires on the road, to climate change. The weight of cars on our lives, on this planet, is more immense and comprehensive than most of us seem able to comprehend. And yet the deepest damage might be one of imagination. Our views of how we get places is so entangled with driving that it’s rare to find regular drivers who can envision a car-free life. Who can see their own community as a place where a child could roam to school or a friend’s house without fear of being run over. Our collective minds have been colonized by the car. I was at a presentation a couple of weeks ago, online, given by the consultants and PR representatives hired by Montana’s state department of transportation to come up with a redesign for the highway that runs through the center of my town. The group was great. They’d worked hard and really thought things through. And if you didn’t have knowledge of the rigid systems that force states and cities to spend money on cars and traffic rather than promoting literally any other form of mobility, you’d leave the meeting thinking that the redesign option they came up with—which involves adding a lane each to two already busy roads—was the obvious choice. One we have to accept because it’s the only one that truly eases traffic congestion. When we talk about problems being systemic , this approach to road and highway design is a case in point. How federal road money is spent depends on easing traffic, not on building places where people can live and work and move around under their own power. Federal guidelines are packed with rules about how roads can be built and what needs should be considered, and pretty much every single one of them is from the perspective of “how can we make driving faster and more seamless?” One of the most useful resources in this sphere is the podcast Talking Headways, which is about transit and all of the issues surrounding it, which means it includes a lot about American society’s addiction to the car. Take a recent episode with Zabe Bent , director of design for the National Association of City Transportation Officials. If federal transportation funding were visualized as a food pyramid, Bent said, almost every single category would be full of cars, with all the other ways we get around packed into the final section. It’s how you end up with things like this incredibly dangerous intersection in front of our local middle school and right near the highly pedestrianized town center, where I have almost been hit by drivers on multiple occasions—when people are turning left or right, they’re often doing it at speed and not paying any attention to whatever else is going on in the road. I’ve been asking the state for a scramble crossing at this location for a few years now purely for the safety of the middle school students who have to navigate the intersection at particularly high-volume traffic times, but so far to no avail. And there’s a reason for that. Or several hundreds of pages of reasons, resulting in systemic barriers to change. Bent and the host discussed at length the MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways, a document originally published in 1971 that regulates traffic control devices on public roads, most recently updated in 2009), and brought up the recent slate of public comment on proposed changes—over 25,000 comments (mine among them), most asking for a complete revamp of the way we envision our roads. To finally prioritize mobility and safety of people over ease of car travel. A selection of those comments are compiled on America Walks’s website, the general theme being that the manual is outdated and actively prevents communities from designing safe, livable streets. “American streets are unsafe because of how they are designed,” wrote Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America. “And the way they’re designed often comes down to five letters: the MUTCD.” An attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center called the document a “relic.” Whether or not those comments will result in meaningful change is up in the air right now, with no word on the feedback from the people in charge of the MUTCD, the people who have the power to improve it. One way problems become systemic is by being written into some obscure guideline like the MUTCD where almost no normal person is ever going to hear of it, and then leaving people to wonder why, to take one example, it is so hard for pedestrians to cross a street. As Bent pointed out, requesting a pedestrian signal at a crossing usually gains no traction until five people have been killed at that location. How many people are aware of that rule? And of how little sense it makes unless you understand that traffic engineers’ number one priority is to enable speed? I don’t know how my city managed to get a pedestrian signal at this other location, which is a popular crossing for kids going to the elementary school. I’m glad they did. But no version of beg button is going to make this already extremely busy road—a federal highway heavily used by logging trucks—safe if another lane is added to it, as is planned by the state DOT. Years ago I gave up counting the number of days my kids and I pushed the button at this crossing and then waited as people drove blithely past, often looking down at their phones rather than at the roadscape. The number of people hit and killed by drivers in the U.S. has risen 45% in a decade . But that reality will not stop the widening of this road. And I have little sympathy for the tendency to blame distracted walkers. A human walking, biking, rolling a wheelchair, etc., is not maneuvering several thousand pounds of deadly machinery. It’s just not a realistic comparison. Walkers could be as distracted as they liked if we didn’t have a world built for cars rather than people. When I went to this presentation, which I again attended in person at a recent open house evening, no matter which way I phrased the damage this would cause in our community—decreased sidewalk space, severed access to a walkable school route for large numbers of kids, increased exhaust fumes (which in our town is no joke, as an inversion layer keeps particulates at breathing level for many months of the winter), noise, the high stress levels that come from having to live in or navigate areas with high traffic, and always, always induced demand because it’s been shown repeatedly that the only long-term change you get with added highway lanes is more driving —the very capable and informed consultants and PR people answered with some version of “meeting the needs of users.” By which they did not mean “helping your community shape a livable future, which is what your steering committee said you want ” but simply “making it easier for drivers to get through town.” That’s it. That’s the only true priority the state asked them to consider because that’s the only priority that gets you funded. It’s maddening, too, that fostering biking and walking isn’t considered as part of reducing traffic congestion. How many cars would be taken out of the traffic equation, making it less congested for people who just need to drive through town, if large numbers of people could safely walk or bike places within town? In a recent episode of his Strong Towns podcast , engineer and planner Charles Marohn read an excerpt from his forthcoming book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer , in which he detailed how the values of speed and volume are baked into road design, in ways that most people will never see: “At the foundation of traffic engineering are deeply infused values. These values are so deep and so core to the profession that practitioners do not consider them values. They bristle at the suggestion. For practitioners, these values are merely self-evident truths. . . . This would not be a problem, and we could allow the profession to retain their sacred texts and practices unchallenged by heretical viewpoints, if they could find a way to address the damage traffic engineering is doing to our communities. They cannot do this for a simple reason: The damage being done is a culmination of those values.” The values of the traffic engineering profession, he says, in order of importance, are: * traffic speed * traffic volume * safety * cost These values aren’t American values, says Marohn. “They’re not even human values.” This isn’t sustainable. And yet it’s what’s baked into our system, along with other designs most of us don’t notice, like how corners are often steeply curved to make it so that drivers don’t have to slow down as much when they turn—resulting, again, in reduced safety for pedestrians. Or the super wide lanes designed to make it easy for large numbers of drivers to move quickly but resulting in an almost impossible crossing for pedestrians and cyclists: The particular road pictured above usually has a lot more traffic, and has been a known barrier and danger for years. My city recently finished building a pedestrian tunnel underneath it using grant funding—a demonstration of the kind of infrastructure we can manage when we’re focused on a livable future rather than short-term traffic reduction. There is a tremendous amount of writing and research out there on these subjects. Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in America gives an extensive history on how we lost the right to our streets, not because we somehow wanted a car-dependent life but because it was imposed upon us: “In most cities for most of the 1920s, engineers fought traffic by restricting the private automobile. They treated the private car less as an intruder upon the rights of street railways than as an abuse of the street as a public service.” The reality of car dominance—which entailed confining pedestrians to sidewalks and the formalization of car-favoring signals that eventually led to guidelines like the MUTCD—came to define our streets not because it worked for people and communities, but because it was necessary for cars to become integral with middle class American life: if driving means being stuck in traffic, buying a car becomes much less attractive. No matter how many people died as a result of speeding drivers, the automobile industry objected to any limits on speed within cities: “An auto industry executive later explained that ‘the motor car was invented so that man could go faster’ and that ‘the major inherent quality of the automobile is speed.’” This is the system we’re stuck with today, one structured around enabling speed for the private driver and reducing congestion, no matter what the ambient cost, even to drivers ourselves. You could widen highways enough to cover half my valley, crush the town center, and it would be considered a win if it reduced traffic congestion for five to ten years. And then what? With the planet projected to have ten billion humans by the middle of this century, I have to wonder what people think our communities will look like if we insist that every single person get where they need to go by car. We might want less traffic or a faster drive, but have we thought about what are we truly willing to sacrifice for it? In another Talking Headways interview , Melissa and Chris Bruntlett, authors of the book Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives , discussed what it’s like to live in a city (Rotterdam in their case) that prioritizes human mobility over car access. Many articles over the years have dissected the fact that bicycle-friendly Holland used to be full of car-packed cities just as the U.S. is. But, the Bruntletts explained, a shift occurred when “shock” became too much for the Dutch system to absorb: “The example we use of the Netherlands in the 1970s was this outside shock of an oil crisis, a gasoline shortage—six weeks of car-free Sundays and the sale of bicycles doubling, this was really a turning point where the Netherlands said, ‘ A car-based mobility system, a car-dominated mobility system, is no longer acceptable for us as a society because it’s so fragile to outside shocks. ’ . . . As a result now, the Netherlands is much better placed to deal with these outside shocks and fuel shortages and extreme weather and the like. Inversely, the United States, which was subject to the same oil crisis, pursued an engineering resilience and went right back to its original state, maybe even doubling down or tripling down on this car dependence and dominance.” And as I wrote about in my book and the Bruntletts evidently talk about in theirs, a car-dependent mobility system damages the independence and freedom of both children and people who for reasons of age or disability cannot or don’t drive. It never seems to occur to complainers of “kids these days” spending too much time on their phones that we’ve built a world where children have zero option but to be driven places by their parents—why wouldn’t they connect with friends in any way they could? Many of them literally cannot walk places; there’s nowhere to go. (The Bruntletts also discuss some of the damaging mental health effects to children living long driving distances from schools or activities, leading to lost sleep, greater stress, and higher levels of depression.) In my book, I also wrote about my grandmother, a wonderfully independent woman who lost much control over her own life when she was diagnosed with macular degeneration in her mid-80s and could no longer drive. The Bruntletts said that with our longer lifespans, people are living on average 7-10 years past the age when they can realistically drive. And yet we continue to demand a world that prioritizes the private car above all else, buying into a mirage of freedom and convenience that’s been sold to us. “The automotive city took back much of the freedom it promised,” wrote Norton in Fighting Traffic . “When street users are free to use cars, the freedom of all street users (including motorists) to use anything else is diminished. A city rebuilt (socially and physically) to accommodate cars cannot give street users the good choices a truly free market can provide.” But the deepest issue here, to go back to the main point, is that the vision of ourselves as drivers rather than residents—rather even than as citizens—has embedded itself into our psyches and our bodies. When the consultants for Montana’s state DOT explain that their new highway design is necessary to ease traffic, even the most progressive-minded finds it hard to argue. This is the true damage caused by our car-centric century, that we cannot find it in ourselves to imagine the kinds of deep change that would make our communities truly livable, much less imagine ways to enact that change. This is why chatter about the Wall Street Journal investigative series on Facebook is actually important. Digital technology is clearly going to define our lives at least as much as cars and highways have. We have little idea what kinds of effects, good and bad, it will have on future generations. But we can look at what happened with cars and act accordingly. Returning to the Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger conversation on Facebook, AI, and digital tech in general, I appreciated Schmachtenberger drilling down to the core issue not just of governance but of democracy, and the lost understanding that democratic, representative government is meant to be government of, by, and for the people: “The whole thing with ‘we don’t trust Washington’ is, Washington was never meant to be a thing separate from a for and by the people governance. It’s supposed to be that the state was given the ability to regulate predatory market interests while still allowing healthy market interests to ensure the values of the people that were encoded into law. . . . But the state could only check the market if the people checked the state. . . . When the people stop checking the government, the government gets captured by the market.” This is obviously an idealized vision of democracy, maybe especially in the U.S., but the general point stands. Though I hesitate to define a time in U.S. history when the government wasn’t captured by the market, and wonder if it’s more a matter of degree. We’ve seen what happens when industry insiders and monied interests get to control both the conversation and the policy. We get freeways smashed through neighborhoods, humans cut off equally from access to jobs as well as to nature, almost incalculable damage to the biosphere that’s necessary for our survival, a society that serves the car rather than the car serving us. And we get a population persuaded that this is a life we want. Our collective relationship to cars is, frankly, the main issue that makes me fairly fatalistic on climate change. To make any meaningful progress, car travel can still be possible but car dependency needs to go . Electric cars and autonomous vehicles will not solve the problem; as urbanist Coby Lefkowitz has written , “Simply transitioning to electric vehicles does nothing to address the underlying cause for our unsustainable living patterns in which private vehicles are the default mode of moving from place to place” (

19. Buying America from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Sep 19, 20216 min

    My younger sister and I made a deal once a long time ago—I was maybe 13 or 14 or 15; over 30 years ago anyway—just before or after we’d moved to a new town. I think it was one of our very brief stints in California, or after we’d returned from the Soviet Union. The deal was: we wouldn’t talk to anyone about our previous life, schools, or friends. We’d moved a few times by then and had learned that most people just weren’t that interested in us, in other people. We’d also learned how painful their lack of curiosity—which felt like lack of care—could be. It didn’t feel like a shutting down or closing off so much as coming to the realization that it was rare to meet someone who was interested in the worlds that other people carry around in their own lives and within their own minds. Maybe we weren’t interested, either, though that was harder to know since we spent several formative years adapting to new places, new people, and new circumstances. We were continually reshaping who we were according to where we landed. We decided that this time we’d keep our precious memories, our selves, to ourselves. We pinky swore on it. One or two or a few years later I tried to draw on those memories for a high school essay and found them frustratingly locked away even from myself. —- I am halfway through Blake Watson’s Buying America from the Indians . Books like this take me a lot of time to read. It’s dense—not dense like a headache to read but dense with information, following the various land deals speculators in America made for several decades leading up to 1776 and beyond. Wealthy people like Lord Dunmore, who complained when he was moved from governing New York to governing Virginia because he found that Virginia looked much less kindly on his rapacious land grabbing. Dunmore partnered with land dealers who made questionable bargains with various Native tribes, and swept up ownership of as much land as he could but chose the losing side when the revolution came. Lucky him, though—in 1784, after America’s independence was recognized, he filed for and was granted reimbursement from the British Crown for loss of lands in large parts of America. Buying America from the Indians is about the crucial U.S. Supreme Court case of 1823, Johnson v. McIntosh , which decided that Indian people had no right to sell land—only European settlers could do that. In circular reasoning, the decision first articulated and then reiterated the Doctrine of Discovery’s logic: only people who discovered land could own it. People who already lived in North America simply resided there; they had no right of title. That reasoning still dictates many Supreme Court decisions with regards to Native American land rights. The part I’ve read up to this point lays out the groundwork for that case. It revolves around power struggles between the British Crown, which claimed that all North American land under its jurisdiction belonged to said Crown—that is, only the Crown could grant legal title to settlers—and people (usually already fairly wealthy) who wanted to buy land land directly from local Native Nations. A number of America’s “founding fathers” were simply land speculators. Leading thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin wrote eloquently on the right of Indians to sell land to willing buyers not because they saw them as equal partners or even equal people but because they, and others, wanted that land and the Crown wouldn’t recognize their ownership. Maybe I’m not giving all of them enough credit, but reading this book it’s hard not to think of the entire American Revolution as having nothing to do with life, liberty, or even taxation without representation, and everything to do with a few powerful people frustrated that those with even more power wouldn’t let them gather up and claim as much land as they wanted. It’s particularly enlightening reading this book after having read Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass and gaining (I hope) a deeper understanding of the kind of land-hoarding mentality people brought with them when they flocked to the North American continent. They badly wanted to chuck over feudalism, but only because doing so would benefit their land speculations. —- It’s strange, moving to new places and meeting new people. One of the things that startles me about writing is how often people read and connect with something I’ve written, maybe because of those long-ago experiences of moving around and coming to terms with the fact that most people aren’t particularly curious about others’ lives. But isn’t the mind an amazing thing? I imagine when my sister and I were having to adapt to different schools over and over, it was a time of life when we as well as other kids were simply deeply absorbed in our own selves, the growing, fumbling, seeking self that is the mind mediated through the body’s experiences of this world. These days, I am heartened and amazed by how many people are curious. Who try harder to understand lives at far remove from their own. I don’t know if we have made progress as a species on that front, or if I just spend a lot of time with grown-ups who happen to read books, but it’s hair-curling to think of all those powerful people colonizing this continent and other continents, people who just wanted and wanted and wanted, who took what they wanted and did not, it seems, ever pause to wonder about the lives and experiences of those they were taking from. And all the people in the thousands of years before that who did the same and how many are still doing the same. Like they pinky swore to never let another’s experience make the slightest crack in their own worldview. The mind-blowing thing is how many people try to be better than that. How many people seek out stories and experiences different from their own, simply in an effort to understand one another better. When you think about what goes on in people’s minds when they want to find points of empathy and understanding, it’s truly, remarkably, beautiful. —- Bonus photo: The top photo is of my stepfather’s cabin, which we spent a couple nights at last weekend. While there we walked the property lines to find the corners, and scouted two original survey stones, one pictured below. I am a little obsessed with survey markers and the stories they tell about how we view and occupy land. That’s how my whole commons/private property fixation began. —- Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch: * Speaking of stones, a recent episode of the Scotland Outdoors podcast focused on geology, which is a subject I never get tired of. Although it always throws me off when we (I do this all the time) talk of rocks being however-many-million years old since . . . well, isn’t everything on the planet just reformed matter from when the planet coalesced to begin with? And all that simply reformed matter from the universe? We’re all stardust, but sometimes it takes a lot of digging to be reminded of that. * Since half my family is employed in the specialty coffee business, I get pleasure out of simple pieces like Jessica Easto’s “How to enjoy coffee” in Psyche. Having had many cupping sessions placed in front of me over the years, I can affirm that she is right when she writes that, “The first time you drink coffee that tastes like more than coffee, you’ll never forget it.” * Archaeologist Lindsey Büster had a fascinating piece in Sapiens about the tendency—and ongoing and inexplicable human need—of Iron Age people in Britain to hang onto objects owned by deceased loved ones, not grave goods but simply stuff that people couldn’t let go of, like bone spoons or grinding stones: “Our relationship with objects (especially those that become problematic through, for example, the death of a loved one) has surely always been complicated. Knowing that we are not, and have never been, alone in these feelings offers a degree of comfort.” * I watched this 52-minute Aeon video because I’ve been looking for deeper explanations into why “personal responsibility” seems to have morphed from “take responsibility for my actions” into “I can do anything I want and you just have to deal with it.” It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but as an exploration of how we think about poverty it did help reorient my perspective (especially pertinent for all of you interested in the role that individualist ideology plays in fractured society). How did we get from a sense of obligation and responsibility to one another, to its opposite? * I don’t know where else to put this because it really has nothing to do with anything, but in a passage of Buying America from the Indians that dwells at length on Virginia’s insistence on its claims to western lands being opposed by land-locked Maryland, and how that disagreement held up signing the Articles of the Confederation for years, Watson quotes a New Hampshire delegate who wrote in a letter that, “There now remains only Maryland, who you know has seldom done anything with a good Grace. She has always been a froward hussey.” You go, Maryland. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

20. People / on the prairie from Trespassing, opens in a new tab

    Sep 8, 202122 min

    A couple weekends ago my family went to a cabin at American Prairie Reserve. APR is a private initiative that started as a World Wildlife Fund partnership in the early 2000s with the aim of purchasing private land in eastern Montana, land that would eventually link federal wildlife refuges and other open space to eventually preserve three million acres of connected prairie, part privately owned, part public. The initiative is described as a public-private partnership but I’m not sure it’s exactly that. It’s more open in its aims and methodology than I’m used to seeing from PPPs (the details of PPP deals in, say, urban planning or transportation are often kept from the public), but it’s possibly more completely privately owned in its structure, at least for the non-public parcels. I haven’t met many public lands advocates who know exactly how they feel about APR. The point of public lands is that they’re part of the public trust—held in trust for the people (not, as they’re often mischaracterized, owned by government). APR’s lands are not publicly owned—and never will be, according to their website —though they are open to the public. On the other hand, the private lands that make up APR were privately owned ranches for decades, and without APR’s purchase they most likely would have passed into other private ownership, ownership that probably wouldn’t have used them for conservation and certainly wouldn’t have allowed public access. I’ve wanted to visit APR for years because the project intrigued me, but also the idea of looking at and roaming in vast, intact prairie—with the chance of seeing a bison herd, though we didn’t—sounded wonderful. And it was. I’ve never been anywhere so completely quiet. The dirt roads are tricky (in rain they’d be nearly impassable and I would not want to drive them in winter); barely any cars passed, and even flight paths seem to be mostly routed somewhere else. One lone cottonwood tree sometimes rustled in the wind, and toward evening a couple packs of coyotes howled and yipped in the near distance. No cell phone service, no internet. Just silence and stars and the gentle flow of the Missouri River. It really was wonderful. Wonderful to me, and probably to anyone else interested in conservation and intact ecosystems. Not so wonderful to a small group of nearby property owners who have, at least twice, tried to make APR for all intents and purposes illegal via bills forwarded in Montana’s state legislature. I’ve tried to understand the objections to APR over the years. The most vocal group mounting resistance to the project insists that the organization harms families, communities, and the nation by taking the ranchland they purchase out of cattle production and turning it back into bison-supporting prairie. (The details of anti-APR arguments are on the group’s website .) The most recent legislative effort involved a bill that would have banned nonprofits from buying agricultural land. The bill specified “certain nonprofits,” exempting schools and churches while limiting the purchases by land trusts and conservation organizations, and it was widely understood to be aimed at APR. To say that the area where APR is located is sparsely populated is an understatement: slightly under 7,000 people live in one county of just over 4,000 square miles (10,360 square kilometers). As with communities in the western U.S. who felt left behind and betrayed by the 1980s to early 1990s timber wars, the effects of ranching families selling up or drifting away in regions like this leaves significant psychological scars. When your community feels like it’s hollowing out—schools half-full, jobs sparse, volunteer firefighters hard to come by, the only hospital an hour or two or more away—people want to know why. And in communities where environmental concerns play a factor in constraining resource extraction or management, conservation makes an easy scapegoat. Even when the economics of farming and ranching have been well known to batter family farms (and the soil itself) into debt for decades now. As drove closer to APR, we began seeing this sign posted on fencing that lined properties along the highway: Save the cowboy . Like so many other things in the world, this argument isn’t truly about economics or even community: it’s about identity. It’s about who we think we are entangling itself in how we think the world should be structured . It reminds me of Joe Wilkins ’s novel Fall Back Down When I Die and how Wilkins so deftly characterized an anti-environmental resentment of nature itself, and how those attitudes were passed down from the characters’ homesteading ancestors, people who were gifted land in the first place from the U.S. government, at the expense of the people it was stolen from. One of the members of the Save the Cowboy campaign said in an interview that, because private donors fund APR’s efforts, it’s “basically a takeover of this area by just a few individuals with vast financial resources.” This objection, while clear and perhaps even fair, ignores the fact that other ranches nearby have been purchased by wealthy out-of-state residents who spend very little time there and have closed off rather than opened public access, as well as denied neighbors previously permitted grazing access. Nor is it unique to the area. Near where I live in a different part of Montana, an enormously wealthy couple who live mostly in Texas recently bought 126,000 acres of former Weyerhauser timber land that previously had been publicly accessible. I have serious doubts that their expressed desire to continue welcoming hunters and walkers will last long; their other local property, 200 acres near my town where they’re building a house with umpteen chimneys, boasts the largest “No Trespassing” sign I have ever seen in my life. If that anti-APR rancher really wanted to dig out the root of her complaint, it would be in land access and control being solely at the whim of wealthy landowners. That rancher’s complaint of APR being “basically a takeover of this area by just a few individuals with vast financial resources” is also a fairly accurate description of what happened with colonialism throughout the U.S., including Montana. Homesteading families notwithstanding, land speculation by wealthy individuals, corporations, and railways fueled much of the European settlement of the West, and the rest of America before that. George Washington himself was a land speculator. In addition to being the main beneficiary of lands granted to soldiers for helping to build a fort east of the Ohio River—he was gifted 20,000 acres for that and bought another 25,000 from fellow soldiers—he later scouted out lands west of the 1763 Proclamation Line (past which the British king had declared that his subjects were not meant to settle), writing to his land agent in 1767 that: “I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light . . . than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians. . . . Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them , will never regain it.” George Washington was little more than an individual with vast resources who chafed at limitations placed on his accumulation of more wealth through land speculation. I read an interview with a white nationalist a few years ago, someone who lives local to me, in which he gave a non-answer to a journalist when asked about Native American people. After he said that non-white people should “go back” to wherever they came from (not that it matters because the whole argument is nonsensical, but wouldn’t it be more straightforward for us pale-skinned people to “go back”?), the journalist asked him something along the lines of “what about Native Americans?” and the white nationalist said, “We won the war.” This might seem like a tangent but I think it’s at the heart of these tensions. Aside from the fact that Europeans won pretty much zero significant battles with Native American nations,* “the war,” whatever people envision that to be, encompasses far more than believing that hard work, strategy, perseverance, and noble self-sacrifice somehow conquered a continent. It’s a way of life, an ethos, that we think “won”: Cattle, not bison; sheep, not wolves; cultivated wheat, not shortgrass prairie; fences and property and resources, not land and life. This vision of community and neighborliness, not that one. *(In a 1985 lecture in his Montana history series, historian K. Ross Toole said that, “When I say that we never beat the Indians militarily, I mean it. We killed the buffalo, we wrecked them with smallpox and with booze, but we never beat them militarily.” Smallpox probably played the largest role in how those dynamics played out; less “winning” than benefiting from the numbers lost to disease and massacres, compounded by treaty betrayals, residential schools, and the Dawes Act of 1887 .) There is nothing about this perspective that doesn’t in some way trace back to the Doctrine of Discovery, the papal proclamation of 1493 that gave the Christian nation of Portugal, and later Spain, right of ownership over any non-Christian lands, resources, and people they came across. It was the Doctrine of Discovery that the U.S. Supreme Court referred to in its 1823 decision Johnson v. McIntosh that declared only white people could sell North American land because Native people were incapable of ownership: “their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whomsoever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle, that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it .” Living here for tens of thousands of years—or even just living here first—wasn’t enough. By “discovering” this continent and then putting it to recognizable use, Europeans and European-descended people were imbued with the seemingly divine right of ownership. Efforts like APR’s to restore both prairie and bison directly question the stability of that so-called victory. Facing the reality that it was perhaps never absolute seems to terrify many people, and being scared makes people angry. We heard similar kinds of virulent objections when the National Bison Range (now just Bison Range ) was finally returned to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Cherokee elder Stan Rushworth has talked about this relationship , not with bison specifically but with Western civilization and its fear of Native nations and non-commodification paradigms that often exist in tandem: “A deep fear of Native people tilts over into anger, and I’ve seen it time and time again. . . . What we have now with Covid, what we have with climate change, they’re the same thing—and they’re really outgrowths of a predatory dynamic that the United States and perhaps Western civilization and how that’s spread out into the world through what people call capitalism, which is one form, really, of the desire to exploit and the right to exploit people and Mother Earth. It’s a dynamic of exploitation. . . . Fear and hatred go hand in hand.” This sensibility came up obliquely in one of the Threshold podcast’s first episodes on bison , when a cattle rancher near Yellowstone National Park was asked if she would feel differently about bison if it were proved to her that brucellosis—a disease that causes cows to abort their calves—almost always comes from elk, not bison. Her response was unequivocal: “I don’t think in Montana there is a place for free-roaming bison.” “Even without brucellosis?” “Even without.” “Why not?” “I don’t think there’s enough resources.” She was referring, the host and interviewer explained, to grass and grazing lands. In her mind, the resources, the fodder and habitat for animals of all kinds, belong rightfully to the cattle she and other ranchers care for. No matter how the interviewer presents the idea—only tested brucellosis-free bison and elk roaming, and only on public lands—the rancher cannot see room for bison in her world. That vision is a threat to her way of life and the cattle she loves: “You have all these people out there fighting for free-roaming bison, and it’s a concept, it’s a vision that they have of the Old West and bison just roaming and being happy. And we’re fighting for our ability to survive here, and make a living. . . . They don’t have anything to lose in their vision, and we have everything to lose.” There are some fair points here about who stands to lose when land uses shift, though I’d hazard that the rancher is mischaracterizing pro-bison advocates just as much as she feels mischaracterized in return. In the case of APR, which is in a different part of the state, there might be some very valid questions about forms of gentrification that affect rural areas (Montana journalist Kathleen McLaughlin had a wonderful interview on her Substack this week about rural gentrification), but it’s all very hard to reconcile with the whole colonial reason many cattle ranchers live in places like Montana in the first place. Introducing free-roaming bison is a huge shift, one that forces enormous change on people who already have a life characterized by hard work but also somewhat reliable expectations. And I sympathize with people who feel that their way of life is being taken or damaged by forces outside of their control. I’ve felt it myself many times, watching Montana grow and change throughout my life, and I don’t like it when wealthy people from elsewhere buy up and close off all the land, either. What I don’t understand (or maybe I do understand but am just tired to death of it) is why it doesn’t go the other direction, why it’s so hard for people to see their own pain mirrored in people they don’t identify with. Valid arguments about loss become intertwined with identity and entitlement, leaving little room to see points of commonality, or even of other people’s equal claims to survival: We belong here. We won. Any narrative or act that feels like it threatens or questions that victory—like turning cattle pastures back into the bison-dominated prairie it was before ranching came in—is a threat not just to livelihood but to identity. You can see it in the most visible campaign against APR: “Save the cowboy.” Not “save our ranches, our communities, our jobs.” No—save a mythical creature who only truly existed for a few years when cattle drives from Texas to Montana over open, unfenced ranges were still common, a myth that has fed American imaginations and fantasies of rugged individualism for over a hundred years. Save an image, a dream, an identity. In truth, the resistance to APR and its mission isn’t about cowboys or even about agricultural production. It’s about protecting people’s sense of who they are, who they feel they have a right to be and how they envision their communities surviving. None of us are immune to this. We all crave a sense of identity that feels unshakable; that’s very human. Do we, though, have a right to preserve our identities and ways of life no matter what the cost to others? Are we required to save people from the painful realization that maybe the victory over people, over land, over bison—whatever we or they perceive that victory to be—was never final? That the “war” never ended? What about the other way around—do we have a right to impose a vision of land use on communities that never asked for it? There’s a real estate office in the next town over from mine that has one of those “Save the Cowboy” anti-APR posters on its window. Inside, it also has a “Cows Not Condos” bumper sticker stuck on a fish tank. The disconnect doesn’t seem to register with anyone. Nor do the anti-APR campaign’s statistics on jobs and economic benefit manage to counter the fact that APR also provides jobs in the area, contributes to the community, and works closely with at least one local Native American nation. I’m a deep believer in the idea that true community is built in some ways through mutual self-determination and difficult compromise, but it’s telling that in any interview I’ve read with anti-APR advocates, residents lovingly describe the area’s sense of neighborliness and tight-knit community, while making it clear they don’t see APR or its employees to be part of that community, no matter how they behave or what they contribute. The only thing, it seems, that would make them acceptable is to stop trying to restore bison and the prairie. I’ve seen the same thing in my own community: it’s consistently described as tight-knit and neighborly, which it is, while also pervasive with complaints about “outsiders” who “don’t understand our ways.” (This is all aside from the fact that, according to some of the ranchers themselves, their cattle operations are set up to raise calves for sending to feedlots. No matter how good their own ranch’s practices might be, when we talk about the climate change and environmental damage caused by beef consumption, it’s largely feedlot-raised cattle that’s under discussion. You can eat bison, too—it’s even supposedly far healthier than beef —and APR grants a certain number of bison hunting permits per year through a lottery.) I don’t think you can solve problems if you don’t know where other people are coming from—really know it, not just assume you know it because they vote or look or act a certain way or live in a particular place. But that doesn’t mean that all worldviews are reconcilable. Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast said something beautiful about this once when talking about deforestation, about how you must grant everyone’s right to exist and to have their own views and opinions, but that doesn’t negate your right to oppose their actions. In the case of APR, both “sides” have claims to defending or restoring something precious. I still don’t know how I feel about the APR model of conservation with its reliance on private property, though I do know the prairie itself is an incredible place to be, full of starlight and absolute silence broken only by coyotes and that one cottonwood tree. And that I’d rather have wealthy people restoring places like this for the benefit of the public than locking away land as “legacy property” (as the new owners of 126,000 acres near where I live described their purchase of previously publicly accessible land), or, say, trying to establish human residence on Mars. In the ownership and domination paradigm we’re currently stuck in, APR’s strategy feels like one of the most effective tools currently available. The anti-APR legislation hasn’t passed the Montana state legislature because other conservative legislators were shocked at the assault on private property rights. But even with Montana’s supposed devotion to those rights, the current loathing for conservation is powerful enough that they might win another time. The Doctrine of Discovery is still with us today: no use of land is acceptable that doesn’t fit within its paradigm. How you deal with identity is a question nobody has an answer to yet, at least not that I’ve seen. People know how to weaponize identity, as Eric Hoffer wrote about so vividly in True Believers , but have not yet figured out how to reconcile it when expectations and values shift and evolve. A view of “how things are” resists change and must insist on a static past—in this case, that history begins only with the influx of ranchers and homesteaders, and it’s a history that, for the sake of present people’s sense of identity, must be seen as inevitable, as progress. Any unwinding of those original settlers’ work is a reversion to something lesser. We haven’t yet figured out how to ease the fears the drive aggrieved entitlement and terror of change, nor how to make injured identity whole. Perhaps that will become one of the essential projects of our time. I don’t know. I don’t know how to heal the scars of the timber wars or the resentm