Reading your essay, I was reminded of something I heard while listening to one of the “Landed” podcasts a few weeks ago: “You cannot love what you don’t know.”
And how are we to love the land when all the driving forces underpinning our culture—radical individualism, human supremacy, technology, consumerism, urbanization, and the myth of progress—conspire to alienate us from the non-human natural world? How are we to love the land when these very forces drive us ever further into a world purely of our own making such that everything else becomes a mere commodity? How are we to love the land when we’ve rendered nature to nothing more than fodder for our greed, ambition, and hubris, all generously bestowed upon us by a god we created in our own image? A god who all too conveniently blesses our wars, our hatreds, our otherizing, our plundering and profit taking, our self-indulgence, our amusements and recreations, our ravenous exploitation of the land and each other, our hoarding of wealth and property, and our wastefulness. What a blessed people are we to have imagined such a god!
If we cannot truly love the land without first knowing it, then just how are we to know the land such that we can truly love it? Will we know it by driving as far as the asphalt will take us, and then fawning over the beauty and majesty still generously allowed to exist beyond the surveyor’s boundary lines, the developer’s heavy equipment, and the corporation’s balance sheet? Will we know it by way of picture books, colorful documentaries, or fun-filled vacations spent at “scenic” resorts? Will we know it by hauling our pleasure boats and ATVs behind luxury motorhomes and fifth-wheels—some with romantic names such as “Montana High Country,” and many with all the conveniences and accoutrements expected of the civilized human being attempting to live the good life amidst the untidiness and unpleasantries inherent in nature? Can we really know the land by flattering it with our outdoorsiness and our recreational pursuits?
Perhaps the only way to know the land, to know it in that intimate way that begets a deep and abiding love, is to have experienced nursing our very lives from its bosom. To be born from the land, to toil with it, to sweat with it, to bleed with it, to mingle ones soul and share one’s destiny with it. To see the land, and all those fellow creatures who depend upon it for their sustenance, as family. To see the land as sacred.
"Can we really know the land by flattering it with our outdoorsiness and our recreational pursuits?" THIS is one that, living in the mountain West, as you do, always gets under my skin. I really don't think "bagging peaks" or the ubiquitous mountain biking or any of the other numbers of high-energy pursuits really nurtures that connection, though that's even more true of the luxury homes and huge boats. Something that was in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine years ago has really stuck me, that looking to nature to replenish us -- much less looking for "stoke" -- without seeing it as a reciprocal relationship is just another form of extraction. I think about that a lot.
All I can think, honestly, is to go back to my book on walking and things I wrote about there: it starts with walking, which is about reconnecting with the world and at the same time reconnecting with ourselves as embodied, evolved beings on this planet. Maybe the first disconnect is internal? I don't know. I do feel better when I go for walks, though, no matter where they take me or what's going on in my head. I feel more connected.
So that's a big part of why I work on walkability infrastructure and issues in my community: everyone should have the right to walk wherever they want and need to go, and through that walking I think we all begin to feel more connected. Or at least I hope so. It's a thought. Or a step.
Through that walking, though, wow am I faced with the consequences of shaping a community around tourism every day, and the entitled expectations of visitors. But not even close to those faced by my sister and my son, both of whom work in service jobs in town. The level of entitlement from visitors has gone through the roof the last couple of years. It's hard to imagine change when so many people have doubled down on feeling entitled to subservience in whatever form of life they happen to be living at the time -- subservience from nature and other people at the same time. It's awful.
I forgot to mention: I love your photography, and Cassiopeia would make a great name for a cat, or perhaps a fancy goldfish.
Also: I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer read her essay "An Economy of Abundance" again last night while cleaning (I have no idea what got into me), and I am now thinking of inviting her to address the 2024 opening session of the Idaho State Legislature.
I think it's an excellent idea but not sure the legislature would agree. I would love to hear her speak. Cleaning or not, I'm sure that essay made for good company. :)
Good question! I've never had much luck with PTs for a bunch of other back and neck issues, but I did get some advice from a massage therapist last week that I'm going to try. These aches can be so frustrating, especially when you can't identify a cause besides "getting older"!
Thanks for writing this, Antonia. I really connected with it, even before the Lord of the Rings reference!
I live in Iowa currently, the state with the most altered landscape in the US. I've always wanted to move west, somewhere where more land exists for its own sake. As that wish is starting to look like a reality I'm starting to feel a vague sadness, looking out from my balcony at the soybean field at the edge of my town, that we have to leave the Midwest to experience the feeling of connection to the land in the way you wrote about here.
I'm so glad you connected with it. Thank you for being here! And haha, yes, I have to keep myself from referring to LOTR in just about every post. It's definitely a touchstone for me, and clearly for others. And I don't know, in a way private property is the One Ring: rules us all and in the darkness binds us. (Ooh! I have to thank you; I'm going to change my About page to include that. 💍<--why is there not a better ring emoji than that?)
I've heard that about Iowa's landscape before and believe it. And your observations on the sadness and the soybean field really strike home. I feel that a lot in eastern Montana, which can look beautiful -- and is -- until you really understand the extent to which cattle ranching and wheat cultivation have stripped down the soil and altered the landscape, a process my family has been intimately involved in for generations. I heard something similar once from a podcaster I really like who grew up in southern Idaho, too, just the sheer massive scale of how farming had industrialized the land he lived on, to the point where he had a hard time figuring out how to connect with it.
I guess that all makes conservation important, too. We need places where we can connect with the land as its own whole, live entity.
This is the sadness I feel for the land in Oregon. I no longer recognize much of the Eastern and Northern parts of the state.
And like you were told to think about, I cannot imagine that sadness after sixteen thousand years.
That sadness, and the climate that is there now because of all of the loss, keeps me from looking there for land to connect to. But also keeps me from feeling like land in other places is open for connection. Maybe I need to end my own wandering, in order to not feel lost.
This feels like the beginnings of its own long and important essay. How do we feel connected to places that have been so damaged? Do we try to go deeper? Do we go somewhere else?
The idea of "belonging" has been coming up a lot in personal conversations I've had recently, and I just read bell hooks's book "belonging" in June. She was so passionate about her belonging to the land she loved in Kentucky, what that meant for her. I think it's a book I'll go back to again and again and recommend to others. And I have 3 other books on my to-read pile on the same subject. I feel like it's in the air. Maybe a shift is coming in how more people relate to land and place? Maybe.
I was having a hard time picking my next bell hooks for my winter reading pile, so that's done now.
It does feel in the air. Along with a balance of letting go and holding on - what is within our control and also within our limited energy. And what is ok being let go of, even if that means things we thought weren't ok to start with... But that "ok" wasn't ours, it was foisted upon us ages ago and it's time to sit and hold it and study it and decide for ourselves.
And yes, it does feel in the air. Maybe it's just the people I talk with but yeah ... how you describe it, letting go of what we thought was "ok" but realize is an "ok" that was forced on us. Whether personal or societal. A lot of that.
"What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where ... the animals don’t need refuges to survive?" That's the one we're all trying to love our way toward, isn't it! I love all the river and water metaphors. And maybe, just maybe, using them over and over instills in us some of the presence, the wisdom, of water.
So many things I could say about all you wrote here, but since everyone else has commented so beautifully I will instead simply revel on the pleasure of thinking of you wielding a Pulaski for days at a time while almost feeling the familiar heft myself.
Perhaps your community of readers and writers might join you on the next trail adventure so that we can share ideas on these big questions, not the least of which, at least for me, would be: "I can’t tell you why I love this land so much, but I do." Maybe it's because metaphors for love are feeble in comparison to actual love? All I've got is a simile: that love is like the speed of light, an absolute, you can't go any faster. Even so, as writers, we nonetheless reach into the void for ideas and words. Maybe we'll find them, or get lucky.
In the meantime, please do continue to seek for us answers to those questions you posed, which so resonated with me, in your passage about "...a culture so bent on domination that the only way it can keep itself from destroying life is to severely limit interaction by making some of it off-limits." (Or we'll discuss it on the trail.)
Oh, by the way, as your former photography instructor, I award you an A+ on the images!
That’s a fun idea! It’s a pretty big commitment. Maybe I’ll put it out where when next year’s sign-up comes up, though it can be hard to get on some of the crews. They fill up fast, and those who’ve volunteered before usually get to sign up a few weeks early. But it’s a possibility. And what about similar opportunities in other areas? These kinds of things must exist all over the place.
That is beautiful, love is like the speed of light. I suppose Shakespeare cornered the phrasing on that, as he often did: “it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests, and is never shaken.”
If I find the answer to that question it’ll probably be at the same time everyone else does, but I’ll keep looking. Let’s discuss it all on the trail! And haha, thank you. Not sure I can’t take much credit for land that was so breathtaking all on its own (and that rainbow, really, what a thing). I was pretty happy with the dragonfly photo I took, which I put up on iNat!
Mmm, you've got me craving the backcountry. I've been outside a lot this summer, but mostly in cell service and mostly in day trips. I feel that desire to just *hang* with a place; little to no schedule, few to no distractions, just being there in time and space. Talk about a geography lesson.
I've been thinking a lot about land ownership this summer, in part due to the job I'm working, as well as your missives about it as you write No Trespassing. We need to be active and urgent in many of our conservation efforts, to mitigate ecological collapse and climate change's potentially disastrous impacts, and in our current system of land ownership, private land conservation is one of many tools to do this. And yet. There are days when I look at the mountains to the west, and I think, "we are truly just a blip, and we are foolish to pretend we have real control over anything here." Jenny Odell talks about this a bit in her fabulous new book, Saving Time. In the least nihilistic way possible, it's unlikely that we will be on this land in a similar fashion to how we are now for a geologically significant time. I'd like to think that maybe we are still here, long term, just in a different format that's more respectful of place and people alike.
Hanging in a place without the distractions really is something else. Such a mind-body shift. Even though, to be fair, we were pretty scheduled! But it was still in line with what the body was doing if I think about it -- eating, moving, resting. Wish I could live like that all the time.
Yeah, geologic time has been a big influence for me ever since childhood. Probably spending all that time out in places like this. Looking at mountainsides and understanding the tens of thousands of years each little streak of color represented. The only risk I find with this thinking -- or I guess what I see a lot of people doing -- is using it to not do anything to improve or at least mess up less the world we live in right now. Tyson Yunkaporta -- whose book Sand Talk I loved and have read twice and will read again -- has mentioned in interviews that we're at the beginning of a 1000-year cleanup. Which means being active in beginning to clean up rather than figuring the next 1000 years will take care of themselves. I mean, they will! We won't be here. But it doesn't mean we don't start.
The chapter on water I'm going to be writing focuses on selenium pollution from mountaintop-removal coal mining in British Columbia. It's estimated that it'll be 700 years before that pollution has worked itself out. Pro-mining concerns often use those timeframes to justify continued mining, so I feel like it's important to do what we can to stop damage sooner rather than later.
We are just a blip. And yet we matter; the choices we make matter. Which also matters that we love these places, too, and find our own relationships with them. Hang out and take in a geography lesson. 😉💚
Woof, ain’t that the truth. I think in the context of geologic time, it helps me to consider the concept of reincarnation. I don’t know if I believe in it literally, but at least as a metaphor, it has a lot to offer. In 1,000 years we may not remember our past lives, but the echoes of what we do (or the lack of action) will still be reverberating. Did we take the initial steps to stop/reverse/remediate all the stuff we’ve messed up? Or did we kick the can down the road? That’s something that bothers me about climate discourse; a lot of adults say that those who are kids and young adults now are inheriting this world. It also bothers me with the discourse that kids are so lonely (and really, many of us are). These things are only true if we let it be! We could make choices toward conservation, community, equitability and justice, but it’s easier to hunker down in our McMansions with our privately manicured open space fenced off from each other and our non-human neighbors. There’s a different relationship with a place that you own, versus a place that is greater than your capacity to own it (unless you’re mega-rich, in which case I point to the buying up of ranches by billionaires for less than ideal purposes). This is kind of an American problem, too.
Anyways. I’m excited to read more of the book, especially that water chapter. It’s hard to make the argument to folks that some pollution, especially mining and nuclear activities, doesn’t just fix itself in a few years, or with a fresh layer of topsoil. And yet, like you say, we need to start somewhere and sometime if we’re going to rectify these harms. So why not now, eh?
That's a great way of thinking about it. It's basically John Rawls's starting point of moral philosophy: what world would you create if you could find yourself in any possible position? There's a whole book on it, but essentially most people would create the most just world they could think of, because you don't know what your own position will be and can't influence it. It seems an easy thing to imagine and make choices from but most people don't! I like your karmic/reincarnation approach.
I can see why you must love this beautiful land, it is gorgeous beyond words! And this
“What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where you don’t have to run away to mountains or wildlife refuges to breathe clean air and listen to birds instead of traffic? Where the animals don’t need refuges to survive?”
I thought about this when last month drove through a 100 km stretch of tiger reserve to reach a particular mountain town in southern India from my city. I literally rolled down my window and breathed in the air as if I never ever had one single change in life to inhale fresh oxygen in my entire life. I can assure you I looked like a maniac with my head popping out - a gesture to reach and dissolve into the forest. And from now on every time I cross that stretch I’m gonna think about it with your words ringing in my head.
The settler’s land concept is also ubiquitous across the planet. I respect the settler guilt that you feel but it’s not really the fault of the current generation as long as they take ownership actively and acknowledge that the indigenous people are the real warden of the land. With mutual respect, conversation, and alliances almost all differences can be dissolved.
Thank you for another thoughtful essay Nia. Please share the link to your book so that I can find a way to acquire it. 💜🌼
A tiger reserve! I cannot even begin to imagine how beautiful that is.🐯I bet you did NOT look like a maniac. I bet you looked like someone absolutely in love with a beautiful place and eager to drink it in. I would love to see some photos of this place. I wish we could all dissolve in these forests ...
I think the taking ownership you mention is really what I mean -- it's not about guilt for me so much as a sense of responsibility, if that makes sense. Some years ago I attended a presentation by a Nakoda Elder that was powerful beyond words. As in, I haven't yet found the words to describe it. And the reason is that almost the whole presentation was him sharing his own pain and anger about his personal experience of settler colonialism, especially in Canadian "residential schools." It was a point when a settler/colonizer could either have felt guilt and been too uncomfortable and rejected all of what could be learned and felt there; or absorb it as fully as possible and commit to doing whatever was in their power to repair the ongoing damage. I don't know how many people there went one way, and how many another, and how many were unaffected.
Anyway, it's been very influential on my thinking and feeling about all of this. It's not an experience that will ever leave, I don't think. I can still feel it in my skin. I really should write about I, but every time I consider trying, all I can think is that it's an experience that needs to be told orally.
Thank you for reading, Swarna, and for making me think of tigers today! For the book, if you mean "No Trespassing," only the introduction is written yet and it's published right here! First installment: https://antonia.substack.com/p/no-trespassing
I can also mail you a copy if that's better. I've sent one to England already.
Next chapter will probably be the end of October. Already running behind ...
Your book cover looks beautiful. It's available on Amazon yayy!! I shall share some pictures of the reserve in my next post for sure. It pains me that tigers were driven to the verge of extinction that they literally need protection from human beings, says something about our species doesn't it? A wild magnificent apex predator needing protection from a civilized ape. How dangerous are we, really?
It is easy to turn blind eye to someone else's experience of systemic oppression, their pain is often brushed under the rug of 'policies' and 'inclusion'. The minority is still minority, no matter from what lens we choose to look at them, to justify their position is to deny their suffering. The best one can do is to listen, deeply, intently and in response to act in any way that can stop the ongoing of it all. That is why I find your work valuable because you never forget these details, you listened, let it sink in, let it percolate into your work. Maybe there could be podcast segment where you talk about indigenous land and conservation or the interconnectedness of it all to colonialism. I am not sure how that might transpire but you are the expert here. I know I would be very keen to read or listen to it.
I will share a picture of my copy of your published paperback soon. 🧡
I did personally like the cover, though my agent thought it was “twee.” I’m not a very visual-minded person, so I sent them some examples (totally different from what they did) and said simply that I wanted it to feel like an invitation.
“Tigers were driven to the verge of extinction that they literally need protection from human beings” — you know, along with the theft of land, that is ALSO something we should sit with for at least a decade. What’s been done to all these other species we live with and should be caring for. Really feeling the weight of that, the despair it should invoke in us and what we can do then to start repairing the damage done.
There are definitely people more expert than me out there! It’s one of the reasons I keep harping on the various podcasts, webinars, and books about the Doctrine of Discovery — it’s SO important, international, ongoing, … you know; I don’t need to tell you. I *have* heard on some other podcasts some sharp criticisms of the 30 by 30 movement (to conserve 30% of the world’s wild lands by 2030) because it can only really be achieved, and is being pursued, once again on the backs of Indigenous people around the world. I hadn’t thought of that until hearing other people talk about it and what it means for people who live on those lands.
One of the things that’s been coming up a lot in my reading recently is some form of “who has the power to say, ‘no’?”
And yes yes yes to the experience of systemic oppression. It takes so many forms, all of them too easy for the dominant culture and those living without it to ignore or care about only on a surface level.
Which is also why I appreciate your work and find it valuable!
You made me think deeper with this one - “who has the power to say, ‘no’?” This has hit me hard and brought tears to my eyes. Aren’t most of the suffering and violence ensues indeed because some underprivileged people, other species, mother earth do not have the power to say no?
Thank you for this Antonia, I want to read more about Indigenous people’s contributions towards conservation and how the land theft has actually eventually contributed to destruction of ecosystems - assuming that it had some role in it, as colonialism always do have had some role in wrecking ecosystems.
YES. Absolutely yes. Over and over, suffering and violence ensue and whether it's deemed "justifiable" is all down to who has the power to say no. (This really has been coming up a lot in my reading, and the first place I saw it expressed was in Arundhati Roy's work on dams. Who benefits from them, and who doesn't get to say no?)
And also yes about that reading. I'll have to think of good examples. It's tricky because the reality is that conservation didn't need to be a concept until colonialism started stealing land and wrecking ecosystems. First thing that comes to mind is in Nick Estes's book "Our History Is the Future" when he wrote about dams (again, dams!) in the U.S.'s midwest.
There was a screening of that documentary. It is directly about that, land theft and Indigenous people's fights for conservation and against colonial practices like mining and deforestation in the Amazon.
Wow, my weekend plan is set. Stepping softly on earth, appropriate name! I haven’t read Roy’s work on Dams but in general Roy’s voice is a strong one of reason and dissent. And thank you for introducing Nick Estes, did not know about his work.
16,000 years was what he said but I've heard up to 30,000. Unimaginably long and deep in any case -- at least to someone like me whose roots are so comparatively new here. Thank you so much for reading!
"I don’t think our societies will ever be able to begin solving our many problems until we both sit down and walk with that reality for a really long time—a historical reality but also an ongoing one."
Sometimes I daydream about everything stopping for at least a decade solely so we can all give almost all our attention to this. And the rest to mutual care, feeding all the children, cleaning up the rivers ...
Loved this, and love the calm, contemplative vibe of it.
I wonder about the people who say "this is mine now," about how much time they actually spend in the lands they claim to own - as in, out in the wildness of it, instead of within the human-build structures they've placed within it, or even worse, in a skyscraper hundreds or thousands of miles away. Doesn't immersion teach a lesson about owning? Like those bear tracks, saying, "you think you can ever truly control all this? Look at these paws."
Sometimes I feel like abstraction is the great enemy of the natural world, where we cook up these Sweepingly Grand Ideas and generalise away all the details. A true dumbing-down of the world in the service of unchecked capitalism, where the idea goes to the point of production and someone makes the decision to slam the door on all those inconveniently messy details because they're "impractical".
I worry about this, because I love those Big Ideas! (And write about them.) Who doesn't get excited at such things? But - you also have to leave the door wide open, and let everyone stroll through and present their complications and treat them respectfully (if they're presented respectfully) because that will make your ideas smarter and wiser and more useful. I get how that's hard, but...
But I really feel like a lot of problems can be solved by letting some business-powerful people be truly *in* some parts of the world before they make sweeping ownership decisions about them. Let the land speak to them in all its voices, adding to the argument in ways that often bypass simple language. Close the distance completely and open all the doors wide. I bet it'd help.
I wonder if that's been the problem with metaphors for me, that they're used to swipe a veneer over abstraction?
I think Aeon essays tend to do that really well. That publication is entirely about Big Ideas, but the best of them move from the huge overview to the details in beautiful ways that make the ideas feel alive, personal, and relevant. Which your writing also does on a regular basis! Think about that in contrast to, say, daily political reporting, which isn't unimportant but tends to be hyper into the finer details and evoking limbic responses without giving that kind of perspective. Even most regular writing that claims to focus on "why does this matter?" doesn't really. It's relatively easy to give context through in-depth research without really going deep into meaning or lack thereof or how to truly find ways to make change.
I'm uncertain about the immersion. I used to think that would be a solid answer but two things changed that: One was seeing how many Silicon Valley devotees and tech bros do things like Burning Man and intensive meditation retreats and psychedelics and all they seem to get from that shift in perspective (supposed shift) is an intensification of how to make money off of everyone and everything else in the world. How to extract more from life. Like they tended toward severing a feeling of interconnection anyway and somehow those experiences release them from any feeling of responsibility toward any other form of life than their immediate selves.
(Not that that's everyone, obviously. There are some examples of, say, conservation by wealthy people where there does seem to be an authentic form of responsibility. I'd say most of it still refuses to acknowledge other humans' connection to land and life, too, though.)
The other was an old friend from my teen years who went deep into conspiracy land when Covid started. He's super smart and one of the things I respected about him was that he always seemed really grounded, too. Spends tons of time deep in nature. I'm not sure it tells him much about ownership but it definitely didn't provide the kind of perspective to stop him pressuring me to watch the Plandemic video. Which I did, and then we had a long conversation about it, and I'm left over three years later still wondering at the fact that being grounded in a real-world, nature-rich life does not save you from magical thinking -- abstraction in particular.
The ability to discern objective reality is a completely different skill set that you have to be taught by your parents or school education. It's possible to gain from reading books I suppose as well. Immersion in nature doesn't give you critical thinking apparently. No surprise there. Look at Ted Nugent! Haaaaa
what does green want from us. Thank you for sharing your experience in such vivid beautiful detail—i feel like i just got to spend time along the creek-river and in those regenerating spaces too. And this: “What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where you don’t have to run away to mountains or wildlife refuges to breathe clean air and listen to birds instead of traffic? Where the animals don’t need refuges to survive? Where your caution is around not attracting bears to your camp instead of avoiding the infinite ways humans harm one another?” yes. To imagine is at least a way to move forward on some level—but i constantly think about land management and conservation and what it would be like to know something intrinsic and old about the lands we live on so that we wouldn’t have to cede the care of them to population studies and regulations. It feels like an enormous failure really. But that doesn’t take away from what a beautiful reverie all of this was to read. 💜
It constantly feels like a failure, even while at the same time it’s a kind of success—if there weren’t something of that sensibility remaining, none of those lands would be protected from mining, drilling, and rich ranchers at all. So there’s that.
Lovely reflective piece. This part caught me, “What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary?” Such a good question… thank you for your words… :-)
Reading your essay, I was reminded of something I heard while listening to one of the “Landed” podcasts a few weeks ago: “You cannot love what you don’t know.”
And how are we to love the land when all the driving forces underpinning our culture—radical individualism, human supremacy, technology, consumerism, urbanization, and the myth of progress—conspire to alienate us from the non-human natural world? How are we to love the land when these very forces drive us ever further into a world purely of our own making such that everything else becomes a mere commodity? How are we to love the land when we’ve rendered nature to nothing more than fodder for our greed, ambition, and hubris, all generously bestowed upon us by a god we created in our own image? A god who all too conveniently blesses our wars, our hatreds, our otherizing, our plundering and profit taking, our self-indulgence, our amusements and recreations, our ravenous exploitation of the land and each other, our hoarding of wealth and property, and our wastefulness. What a blessed people are we to have imagined such a god!
If we cannot truly love the land without first knowing it, then just how are we to know the land such that we can truly love it? Will we know it by driving as far as the asphalt will take us, and then fawning over the beauty and majesty still generously allowed to exist beyond the surveyor’s boundary lines, the developer’s heavy equipment, and the corporation’s balance sheet? Will we know it by way of picture books, colorful documentaries, or fun-filled vacations spent at “scenic” resorts? Will we know it by hauling our pleasure boats and ATVs behind luxury motorhomes and fifth-wheels—some with romantic names such as “Montana High Country,” and many with all the conveniences and accoutrements expected of the civilized human being attempting to live the good life amidst the untidiness and unpleasantries inherent in nature? Can we really know the land by flattering it with our outdoorsiness and our recreational pursuits?
Perhaps the only way to know the land, to know it in that intimate way that begets a deep and abiding love, is to have experienced nursing our very lives from its bosom. To be born from the land, to toil with it, to sweat with it, to bleed with it, to mingle ones soul and share one’s destiny with it. To see the land, and all those fellow creatures who depend upon it for their sustenance, as family. To see the land as sacred.
And where do we begin?
"Can we really know the land by flattering it with our outdoorsiness and our recreational pursuits?" THIS is one that, living in the mountain West, as you do, always gets under my skin. I really don't think "bagging peaks" or the ubiquitous mountain biking or any of the other numbers of high-energy pursuits really nurtures that connection, though that's even more true of the luxury homes and huge boats. Something that was in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine years ago has really stuck me, that looking to nature to replenish us -- much less looking for "stoke" -- without seeing it as a reciprocal relationship is just another form of extraction. I think about that a lot.
All I can think, honestly, is to go back to my book on walking and things I wrote about there: it starts with walking, which is about reconnecting with the world and at the same time reconnecting with ourselves as embodied, evolved beings on this planet. Maybe the first disconnect is internal? I don't know. I do feel better when I go for walks, though, no matter where they take me or what's going on in my head. I feel more connected.
So that's a big part of why I work on walkability infrastructure and issues in my community: everyone should have the right to walk wherever they want and need to go, and through that walking I think we all begin to feel more connected. Or at least I hope so. It's a thought. Or a step.
Through that walking, though, wow am I faced with the consequences of shaping a community around tourism every day, and the entitled expectations of visitors. But not even close to those faced by my sister and my son, both of whom work in service jobs in town. The level of entitlement from visitors has gone through the roof the last couple of years. It's hard to imagine change when so many people have doubled down on feeling entitled to subservience in whatever form of life they happen to be living at the time -- subservience from nature and other people at the same time. It's awful.
But I'm still walking. 🧡🧡🧡
I forgot to mention: I love your photography, and Cassiopeia would make a great name for a cat, or perhaps a fancy goldfish.
Also: I listened to Robin Wall Kimmerer read her essay "An Economy of Abundance" again last night while cleaning (I have no idea what got into me), and I am now thinking of inviting her to address the 2024 opening session of the Idaho State Legislature.
A good idea?
Thank you! And yes it would, wouldn't it?
I think it's an excellent idea but not sure the legislature would agree. I would love to hear her speak. Cleaning or not, I'm sure that essay made for good company. :)
So many beautiful things to read about, and so many beautiful photos of a beautiful landscape...
Thank you! 🙏🧡
Jumping sideways: have you tried PT for your knee? So many aches I thought I'd have to carry into older age have been tended well with some PT.
Good question! I've never had much luck with PTs for a bunch of other back and neck issues, but I did get some advice from a massage therapist last week that I'm going to try. These aches can be so frustrating, especially when you can't identify a cause besides "getting older"!
I hope it works!
Thanks for writing this, Antonia. I really connected with it, even before the Lord of the Rings reference!
I live in Iowa currently, the state with the most altered landscape in the US. I've always wanted to move west, somewhere where more land exists for its own sake. As that wish is starting to look like a reality I'm starting to feel a vague sadness, looking out from my balcony at the soybean field at the edge of my town, that we have to leave the Midwest to experience the feeling of connection to the land in the way you wrote about here.
I'm so glad you connected with it. Thank you for being here! And haha, yes, I have to keep myself from referring to LOTR in just about every post. It's definitely a touchstone for me, and clearly for others. And I don't know, in a way private property is the One Ring: rules us all and in the darkness binds us. (Ooh! I have to thank you; I'm going to change my About page to include that. 💍<--why is there not a better ring emoji than that?)
I've heard that about Iowa's landscape before and believe it. And your observations on the sadness and the soybean field really strike home. I feel that a lot in eastern Montana, which can look beautiful -- and is -- until you really understand the extent to which cattle ranching and wheat cultivation have stripped down the soil and altered the landscape, a process my family has been intimately involved in for generations. I heard something similar once from a podcaster I really like who grew up in southern Idaho, too, just the sheer massive scale of how farming had industrialized the land he lived on, to the point where he had a hard time figuring out how to connect with it.
I guess that all makes conservation important, too. We need places where we can connect with the land as its own whole, live entity.
This is the sadness I feel for the land in Oregon. I no longer recognize much of the Eastern and Northern parts of the state.
And like you were told to think about, I cannot imagine that sadness after sixteen thousand years.
That sadness, and the climate that is there now because of all of the loss, keeps me from looking there for land to connect to. But also keeps me from feeling like land in other places is open for connection. Maybe I need to end my own wandering, in order to not feel lost.
This feels like the beginnings of its own long and important essay. How do we feel connected to places that have been so damaged? Do we try to go deeper? Do we go somewhere else?
The idea of "belonging" has been coming up a lot in personal conversations I've had recently, and I just read bell hooks's book "belonging" in June. She was so passionate about her belonging to the land she loved in Kentucky, what that meant for her. I think it's a book I'll go back to again and again and recommend to others. And I have 3 other books on my to-read pile on the same subject. I feel like it's in the air. Maybe a shift is coming in how more people relate to land and place? Maybe.
I was having a hard time picking my next bell hooks for my winter reading pile, so that's done now.
It does feel in the air. Along with a balance of letting go and holding on - what is within our control and also within our limited energy. And what is ok being let go of, even if that means things we thought weren't ok to start with... But that "ok" wasn't ours, it was foisted upon us ages ago and it's time to sit and hold it and study it and decide for ourselves.
Oh yay! Never enough bell hooks.
And yes, it does feel in the air. Maybe it's just the people I talk with but yeah ... how you describe it, letting go of what we thought was "ok" but realize is an "ok" that was forced on us. Whether personal or societal. A lot of that.
"What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where ... the animals don’t need refuges to survive?" That's the one we're all trying to love our way toward, isn't it! I love all the river and water metaphors. And maybe, just maybe, using them over and over instills in us some of the presence, the wisdom, of water.
It is! I love that, "the world we're all trying to love our way toward." What a beautiful and true way to put it. Like water. 💚
So many things I could say about all you wrote here, but since everyone else has commented so beautifully I will instead simply revel on the pleasure of thinking of you wielding a Pulaski for days at a time while almost feeling the familiar heft myself.
Ooh … someday we’ll swap Pulaski stories! (It is my favorite tool after the crosscut saw.)
Perhaps your community of readers and writers might join you on the next trail adventure so that we can share ideas on these big questions, not the least of which, at least for me, would be: "I can’t tell you why I love this land so much, but I do." Maybe it's because metaphors for love are feeble in comparison to actual love? All I've got is a simile: that love is like the speed of light, an absolute, you can't go any faster. Even so, as writers, we nonetheless reach into the void for ideas and words. Maybe we'll find them, or get lucky.
In the meantime, please do continue to seek for us answers to those questions you posed, which so resonated with me, in your passage about "...a culture so bent on domination that the only way it can keep itself from destroying life is to severely limit interaction by making some of it off-limits." (Or we'll discuss it on the trail.)
Oh, by the way, as your former photography instructor, I award you an A+ on the images!
That’s a fun idea! It’s a pretty big commitment. Maybe I’ll put it out where when next year’s sign-up comes up, though it can be hard to get on some of the crews. They fill up fast, and those who’ve volunteered before usually get to sign up a few weeks early. But it’s a possibility. And what about similar opportunities in other areas? These kinds of things must exist all over the place.
That is beautiful, love is like the speed of light. I suppose Shakespeare cornered the phrasing on that, as he often did: “it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests, and is never shaken.”
If I find the answer to that question it’ll probably be at the same time everyone else does, but I’ll keep looking. Let’s discuss it all on the trail! And haha, thank you. Not sure I can’t take much credit for land that was so breathtaking all on its own (and that rainbow, really, what a thing). I was pretty happy with the dragonfly photo I took, which I put up on iNat!
Mmm, you've got me craving the backcountry. I've been outside a lot this summer, but mostly in cell service and mostly in day trips. I feel that desire to just *hang* with a place; little to no schedule, few to no distractions, just being there in time and space. Talk about a geography lesson.
I've been thinking a lot about land ownership this summer, in part due to the job I'm working, as well as your missives about it as you write No Trespassing. We need to be active and urgent in many of our conservation efforts, to mitigate ecological collapse and climate change's potentially disastrous impacts, and in our current system of land ownership, private land conservation is one of many tools to do this. And yet. There are days when I look at the mountains to the west, and I think, "we are truly just a blip, and we are foolish to pretend we have real control over anything here." Jenny Odell talks about this a bit in her fabulous new book, Saving Time. In the least nihilistic way possible, it's unlikely that we will be on this land in a similar fashion to how we are now for a geologically significant time. I'd like to think that maybe we are still here, long term, just in a different format that's more respectful of place and people alike.
Hanging in a place without the distractions really is something else. Such a mind-body shift. Even though, to be fair, we were pretty scheduled! But it was still in line with what the body was doing if I think about it -- eating, moving, resting. Wish I could live like that all the time.
Yeah, geologic time has been a big influence for me ever since childhood. Probably spending all that time out in places like this. Looking at mountainsides and understanding the tens of thousands of years each little streak of color represented. The only risk I find with this thinking -- or I guess what I see a lot of people doing -- is using it to not do anything to improve or at least mess up less the world we live in right now. Tyson Yunkaporta -- whose book Sand Talk I loved and have read twice and will read again -- has mentioned in interviews that we're at the beginning of a 1000-year cleanup. Which means being active in beginning to clean up rather than figuring the next 1000 years will take care of themselves. I mean, they will! We won't be here. But it doesn't mean we don't start.
The chapter on water I'm going to be writing focuses on selenium pollution from mountaintop-removal coal mining in British Columbia. It's estimated that it'll be 700 years before that pollution has worked itself out. Pro-mining concerns often use those timeframes to justify continued mining, so I feel like it's important to do what we can to stop damage sooner rather than later.
We are just a blip. And yet we matter; the choices we make matter. Which also matters that we love these places, too, and find our own relationships with them. Hang out and take in a geography lesson. 😉💚
Woof, ain’t that the truth. I think in the context of geologic time, it helps me to consider the concept of reincarnation. I don’t know if I believe in it literally, but at least as a metaphor, it has a lot to offer. In 1,000 years we may not remember our past lives, but the echoes of what we do (or the lack of action) will still be reverberating. Did we take the initial steps to stop/reverse/remediate all the stuff we’ve messed up? Or did we kick the can down the road? That’s something that bothers me about climate discourse; a lot of adults say that those who are kids and young adults now are inheriting this world. It also bothers me with the discourse that kids are so lonely (and really, many of us are). These things are only true if we let it be! We could make choices toward conservation, community, equitability and justice, but it’s easier to hunker down in our McMansions with our privately manicured open space fenced off from each other and our non-human neighbors. There’s a different relationship with a place that you own, versus a place that is greater than your capacity to own it (unless you’re mega-rich, in which case I point to the buying up of ranches by billionaires for less than ideal purposes). This is kind of an American problem, too.
Anyways. I’m excited to read more of the book, especially that water chapter. It’s hard to make the argument to folks that some pollution, especially mining and nuclear activities, doesn’t just fix itself in a few years, or with a fresh layer of topsoil. And yet, like you say, we need to start somewhere and sometime if we’re going to rectify these harms. So why not now, eh?
That's a great way of thinking about it. It's basically John Rawls's starting point of moral philosophy: what world would you create if you could find yourself in any possible position? There's a whole book on it, but essentially most people would create the most just world they could think of, because you don't know what your own position will be and can't influence it. It seems an easy thing to imagine and make choices from but most people don't! I like your karmic/reincarnation approach.
Oh wow, it's been a long time since I thought about Rawls! Bring Rawls Back Into The Discourse 2023!
Always, always bring Rawls back into the Discourse!
I can see why you must love this beautiful land, it is gorgeous beyond words! And this
“What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where you don’t have to run away to mountains or wildlife refuges to breathe clean air and listen to birds instead of traffic? Where the animals don’t need refuges to survive?”
I thought about this when last month drove through a 100 km stretch of tiger reserve to reach a particular mountain town in southern India from my city. I literally rolled down my window and breathed in the air as if I never ever had one single change in life to inhale fresh oxygen in my entire life. I can assure you I looked like a maniac with my head popping out - a gesture to reach and dissolve into the forest. And from now on every time I cross that stretch I’m gonna think about it with your words ringing in my head.
The settler’s land concept is also ubiquitous across the planet. I respect the settler guilt that you feel but it’s not really the fault of the current generation as long as they take ownership actively and acknowledge that the indigenous people are the real warden of the land. With mutual respect, conversation, and alliances almost all differences can be dissolved.
Thank you for another thoughtful essay Nia. Please share the link to your book so that I can find a way to acquire it. 💜🌼
A tiger reserve! I cannot even begin to imagine how beautiful that is.🐯I bet you did NOT look like a maniac. I bet you looked like someone absolutely in love with a beautiful place and eager to drink it in. I would love to see some photos of this place. I wish we could all dissolve in these forests ...
I think the taking ownership you mention is really what I mean -- it's not about guilt for me so much as a sense of responsibility, if that makes sense. Some years ago I attended a presentation by a Nakoda Elder that was powerful beyond words. As in, I haven't yet found the words to describe it. And the reason is that almost the whole presentation was him sharing his own pain and anger about his personal experience of settler colonialism, especially in Canadian "residential schools." It was a point when a settler/colonizer could either have felt guilt and been too uncomfortable and rejected all of what could be learned and felt there; or absorb it as fully as possible and commit to doing whatever was in their power to repair the ongoing damage. I don't know how many people there went one way, and how many another, and how many were unaffected.
Anyway, it's been very influential on my thinking and feeling about all of this. It's not an experience that will ever leave, I don't think. I can still feel it in my skin. I really should write about I, but every time I consider trying, all I can think is that it's an experience that needs to be told orally.
Thank you for reading, Swarna, and for making me think of tigers today! For the book, if you mean "No Trespassing," only the introduction is written yet and it's published right here! First installment: https://antonia.substack.com/p/no-trespassing
I can also mail you a copy if that's better. I've sent one to England already.
Next chapter will probably be the end of October. Already running behind ...
My published book, about walking, should be available anywhere in all formats, though it's only been translated into Hebrew (for some reason). I get a fair number of letters from readers in India so I'm sure you can get it there! This is it: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/antonia-malchik/a-walking-life/9780738234885/
🌼🦋🧡
Your book cover looks beautiful. It's available on Amazon yayy!! I shall share some pictures of the reserve in my next post for sure. It pains me that tigers were driven to the verge of extinction that they literally need protection from human beings, says something about our species doesn't it? A wild magnificent apex predator needing protection from a civilized ape. How dangerous are we, really?
It is easy to turn blind eye to someone else's experience of systemic oppression, their pain is often brushed under the rug of 'policies' and 'inclusion'. The minority is still minority, no matter from what lens we choose to look at them, to justify their position is to deny their suffering. The best one can do is to listen, deeply, intently and in response to act in any way that can stop the ongoing of it all. That is why I find your work valuable because you never forget these details, you listened, let it sink in, let it percolate into your work. Maybe there could be podcast segment where you talk about indigenous land and conservation or the interconnectedness of it all to colonialism. I am not sure how that might transpire but you are the expert here. I know I would be very keen to read or listen to it.
I will share a picture of my copy of your published paperback soon. 🧡
I did personally like the cover, though my agent thought it was “twee.” I’m not a very visual-minded person, so I sent them some examples (totally different from what they did) and said simply that I wanted it to feel like an invitation.
“Tigers were driven to the verge of extinction that they literally need protection from human beings” — you know, along with the theft of land, that is ALSO something we should sit with for at least a decade. What’s been done to all these other species we live with and should be caring for. Really feeling the weight of that, the despair it should invoke in us and what we can do then to start repairing the damage done.
There are definitely people more expert than me out there! It’s one of the reasons I keep harping on the various podcasts, webinars, and books about the Doctrine of Discovery — it’s SO important, international, ongoing, … you know; I don’t need to tell you. I *have* heard on some other podcasts some sharp criticisms of the 30 by 30 movement (to conserve 30% of the world’s wild lands by 2030) because it can only really be achieved, and is being pursued, once again on the backs of Indigenous people around the world. I hadn’t thought of that until hearing other people talk about it and what it means for people who live on those lands.
One of the things that’s been coming up a lot in my reading recently is some form of “who has the power to say, ‘no’?”
And yes yes yes to the experience of systemic oppression. It takes so many forms, all of them too easy for the dominant culture and those living without it to ignore or care about only on a surface level.
Which is also why I appreciate your work and find it valuable!
You made me think deeper with this one - “who has the power to say, ‘no’?” This has hit me hard and brought tears to my eyes. Aren’t most of the suffering and violence ensues indeed because some underprivileged people, other species, mother earth do not have the power to say no?
Thank you for this Antonia, I want to read more about Indigenous people’s contributions towards conservation and how the land theft has actually eventually contributed to destruction of ecosystems - assuming that it had some role in it, as colonialism always do have had some role in wrecking ecosystems.
YES. Absolutely yes. Over and over, suffering and violence ensue and whether it's deemed "justifiable" is all down to who has the power to say no. (This really has been coming up a lot in my reading, and the first place I saw it expressed was in Arundhati Roy's work on dams. Who benefits from them, and who doesn't get to say no?)
And also yes about that reading. I'll have to think of good examples. It's tricky because the reality is that conservation didn't need to be a concept until colonialism started stealing land and wrecking ecosystems. First thing that comes to mind is in Nick Estes's book "Our History Is the Future" when he wrote about dams (again, dams!) in the U.S.'s midwest.
And I met the director of this documentary at the conference I was recently at: https://pisarsuavementenaterra.com.br/en/
There was a screening of that documentary. It is directly about that, land theft and Indigenous people's fights for conservation and against colonial practices like mining and deforestation in the Amazon.
Wow, my weekend plan is set. Stepping softly on earth, appropriate name! I haven’t read Roy’s work on Dams but in general Roy’s voice is a strong one of reason and dissent. And thank you for introducing Nick Estes, did not know about his work.
16,000 years...at least. It's achingly brutal to think of that pain and rage and sorrow. Thank you so much!
16,000 years was what he said but I've heard up to 30,000. Unimaginably long and deep in any case -- at least to someone like me whose roots are so comparatively new here. Thank you so much for reading!
Thank you, Nia, as always!
And amen to:
"I don’t think our societies will ever be able to begin solving our many problems until we both sit down and walk with that reality for a really long time—a historical reality but also an ongoing one."
Sometimes I daydream about everything stopping for at least a decade solely so we can all give almost all our attention to this. And the rest to mutual care, feeding all the children, cleaning up the rivers ...
Thank you, Greg!
Loved this, and love the calm, contemplative vibe of it.
I wonder about the people who say "this is mine now," about how much time they actually spend in the lands they claim to own - as in, out in the wildness of it, instead of within the human-build structures they've placed within it, or even worse, in a skyscraper hundreds or thousands of miles away. Doesn't immersion teach a lesson about owning? Like those bear tracks, saying, "you think you can ever truly control all this? Look at these paws."
Sometimes I feel like abstraction is the great enemy of the natural world, where we cook up these Sweepingly Grand Ideas and generalise away all the details. A true dumbing-down of the world in the service of unchecked capitalism, where the idea goes to the point of production and someone makes the decision to slam the door on all those inconveniently messy details because they're "impractical".
I worry about this, because I love those Big Ideas! (And write about them.) Who doesn't get excited at such things? But - you also have to leave the door wide open, and let everyone stroll through and present their complications and treat them respectfully (if they're presented respectfully) because that will make your ideas smarter and wiser and more useful. I get how that's hard, but...
But I really feel like a lot of problems can be solved by letting some business-powerful people be truly *in* some parts of the world before they make sweeping ownership decisions about them. Let the land speak to them in all its voices, adding to the argument in ways that often bypass simple language. Close the distance completely and open all the doors wide. I bet it'd help.
I wonder if that's been the problem with metaphors for me, that they're used to swipe a veneer over abstraction?
I think Aeon essays tend to do that really well. That publication is entirely about Big Ideas, but the best of them move from the huge overview to the details in beautiful ways that make the ideas feel alive, personal, and relevant. Which your writing also does on a regular basis! Think about that in contrast to, say, daily political reporting, which isn't unimportant but tends to be hyper into the finer details and evoking limbic responses without giving that kind of perspective. Even most regular writing that claims to focus on "why does this matter?" doesn't really. It's relatively easy to give context through in-depth research without really going deep into meaning or lack thereof or how to truly find ways to make change.
I'm uncertain about the immersion. I used to think that would be a solid answer but two things changed that: One was seeing how many Silicon Valley devotees and tech bros do things like Burning Man and intensive meditation retreats and psychedelics and all they seem to get from that shift in perspective (supposed shift) is an intensification of how to make money off of everyone and everything else in the world. How to extract more from life. Like they tended toward severing a feeling of interconnection anyway and somehow those experiences release them from any feeling of responsibility toward any other form of life than their immediate selves.
(Not that that's everyone, obviously. There are some examples of, say, conservation by wealthy people where there does seem to be an authentic form of responsibility. I'd say most of it still refuses to acknowledge other humans' connection to land and life, too, though.)
The other was an old friend from my teen years who went deep into conspiracy land when Covid started. He's super smart and one of the things I respected about him was that he always seemed really grounded, too. Spends tons of time deep in nature. I'm not sure it tells him much about ownership but it definitely didn't provide the kind of perspective to stop him pressuring me to watch the Plandemic video. Which I did, and then we had a long conversation about it, and I'm left over three years later still wondering at the fact that being grounded in a real-world, nature-rich life does not save you from magical thinking -- abstraction in particular.
The ability to discern objective reality is a completely different skill set that you have to be taught by your parents or school education. It's possible to gain from reading books I suppose as well. Immersion in nature doesn't give you critical thinking apparently. No surprise there. Look at Ted Nugent! Haaaaa
Good lord, I'd forgotten about him!
PS the essay was a delightful, beautiful poem 😍
Aw, thanks!
what does green want from us. Thank you for sharing your experience in such vivid beautiful detail—i feel like i just got to spend time along the creek-river and in those regenerating spaces too. And this: “What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary? A world where you don’t have to run away to mountains or wildlife refuges to breathe clean air and listen to birds instead of traffic? Where the animals don’t need refuges to survive? Where your caution is around not attracting bears to your camp instead of avoiding the infinite ways humans harm one another?” yes. To imagine is at least a way to move forward on some level—but i constantly think about land management and conservation and what it would be like to know something intrinsic and old about the lands we live on so that we wouldn’t have to cede the care of them to population studies and regulations. It feels like an enormous failure really. But that doesn’t take away from what a beautiful reverie all of this was to read. 💜
It constantly feels like a failure, even while at the same time it’s a kind of success—if there weren’t something of that sensibility remaining, none of those lands would be protected from mining, drilling, and rich ranchers at all. So there’s that.
Thank you! <3
Lovely reflective piece. This part caught me, “What would it take to interact with our world, including the human-built world, in ways that make conservation efforts not obsolete exactly, but increasingly unnecessary?” Such a good question… thank you for your words… :-)
Thank you for reading! Maybe that’s a question we should all be asking constantly. It might give us more places to start.