Nature's not here for the stoke

Walking composition

“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to see it.” —The Marrow Thieves, Cherie Dimaline

Quick note: Starting in April, I will be donating 5% of the proceeds from this newsletter to Indigenous-run organizations and nonprofits, with a focus on my local region. My intention is to donate to one organization each quarter, starting with FAST Blackfeet. I have more ideas lined up but please feel free to make suggestions, especially if it’s in my general region.

I’m telling you this less to encourage paid subscriptions than to encourage looking around wherever you live and seeing what you can do to support sovereignty in all its forms.

The last three walking compositions were open to everyone for reasons of content or photos (the most recent, on faith and atheism, had a lot of thought-provoking comments, including on the complexity of the word “faith”); these posts are usually for paid subscribers only. If you want access to paid subscriber material but can’t or don’t want to pay, just email me the code word “tribble” and I’ll set you up.

But if you can, and find this work valuable, give it a whirl, as my bagpipe teacher used to say.

Last Saturday morning I headed out of the house before sunrise to meet a friend on the ski mountain to go skinning, the first time in weeks I’ve been able to go on a weekend early enough to miss the ski crowds.

A crescent Moon, looking enormous and golden-yellow in the pre-dawn light, hovered over the far range that, once we got to a higher elevation, would reveal the peaks of Glacier National Park behind it.

But we never got that far. We clicked our toes into bindings and skinned up the bunny slope, past a couple of guys standing outside the high-end rental condos staring at the sky. Maybe they’re looking for late stars, I thought, until I saw the drone one of them was controlling hovering above us.

“Is that legal?” I mumbled to my friend, this technically being National Forest Service land leased by the resort.

“Probably not,” she said. I thought about saying something to them but the bone-deep weariness that’d been dragging at me for days met up with my wariness of confrontation, and I left it. I didn’t even have the energy to persuade myself the guy was probably an asshole. He looked nice enough, and how many condo renters do I ever see out enjoying the early morning?

We kept skinning until we got past the bunny slope and to the bottom of the first major hill, where we stripped off layers and I switched from gloves back into thick mittens. Even with the vigorous climb, my hands were freezing.

The first significant hill is intense. I’ve always disliked it. It’s steep and grueling, with a curve at the top around a continuous grade that seems to keep going and going. It’s where all the super-fit people first start zipping uphill past me. But that’s not why I dislike it. I dislike it because there are certain patches where the groomed snow’s often frozen enough that my skins slip. Usually, I can manage these spots by sneaking further out into the hill a little ways, where the grip is better. Saturday, though, even that didn’t do it, and I kept slipping back and catching myself with my poles until, finally, I fell over and had to stop myself sliding down the hill. Below, I saw other people struggling with the same issue, which made me feel slightly less idiotic but not less precarious.

I tried a few different methods of getting myself up to the top of that first hill, but knew that even if I made it, there were two other patches partway up the mountain that would be just as bad. Finally, while one guy wandered to the middle of the hill and struggled past us and another fell over below, I looked up at my friend and told her I didn’t think I could do it. “You go ahead,” I said, since her skins seemed to be gripping better. “I’m going to try to figure out how to get down.”

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There was a magazine article I read years ago that I can’t remember the title or author of, or even the subject of, but I do remember some version of a line that stuck with me: Nature doesn’t exist for your stoke.

It felt important to read at the time because outdoorsy activities like cross-country skiing, mountain biking, trail running, rock climbing, and the like (I’m sure there are lots of others) tend to be represented as an unalloyed good, barely having an impact on the non-human natural world, especially when compared to, say, gold mining. Which, obviously, is true. Last week I signed up for a 6-day wilderness trail crew in August organized by the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance; and even though, as I’ve written before, I’m not convinced that hacking out vegetation to make room for trains of pack mules is how people should be approaching nature, I guess I’d rather be supporting backcountry campers, outfitters, and guides than, say, the bank accounts of Rio Tinto executives.

There’s really no comparison between the scale and impact of those uses. But just because there’s no comparison doesn’t mean the question shouldn’t be asked. Even plain old hiking can have devastating impacts on elk populations, if trails are sited close to calving grounds. The scale of impacts matter, but what also matters is how humans approach the world we share and depend on. Our attitudes toward it. Is it there for our use, including recreation, or for its own, to be engaged with on the terms of its own needs and desires?

In the comments on the post about John Locke, a subscriber (thanks, Stefanie!) recommended Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism, which I started reading a couple days ago. Some of the theoretical language is complex to get my head around, but Fraser’s points are clear:

“Structurally capitalism assumes, indeed inaugurates, a sharp division between the natural realm—conceived as offering a free and constant supply of ‘raw material’ available for appropriation—and an economic realm, conceived as a sphere of value, produced by and for human beings. Along with this goes the hardening of a preexisting distinction between Humanity—seen as spiritual, sociocultural, and historical—and (nonhuman) Nature, seen as material, objectively given, and ahistorical.”

Fraser went on to make the point that this divide is strengthened by a forced separation between the rhythms of human life and that of nature:

“Capitalism brutally separated human beings from natural, seasonal rhythms, conscripting them into industrial manufacturing, powered by fossil fuels, and profit-driven agriculture, built up by chemical fertilizers.”

There’s something about an outdoorsy lifestyle—which I engage in plenty of, from hunting to hiking—that constantly risks becoming absorbed into this framework, where the “sphere of value” is narrowed down to what gratifies us. At what point are we imposing our activities on the world we live in, rather than making forays within the limits and needs of our local ecosystems?

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It took me half an hour to get off of that hill. Bracing myself against the slick, groomed slope, I managed to strip the skins off my skis and twist the bindings back into position, but couldn’t find a place to put them back on that wouldn’t risk the ski just taking off downhill on its own. I finally dug my heels into the frozen snow and inched across to the edge of the run, where the groomers hadn’t been and there was more friction and a couple of moguls I could use to stand my skis and then myself on. I skied down the harsh, frozen snow until landing at the bottom, where I dug a thermos of tea out of my pack and read my friend’s text saying she’d only made it a few minutes further and would be down shortly.

I was sore for two straight days after that, in all the places that those of us who don’t physically labor much usually have to make special efforts with machines at the gym to strengthen, like the top of the chest and backs of the shoulders. I don’t really recommend trying to keep yourself from sliding down an icy slope into other skiers as a reliable workout regimen, though. There are a lot of bruises.

I have to watch out for my own expectations from this world all the time, not just when trying to go skinning up an icy hill. I get frustrated with people where I live complaining about snow and winter and gray days, and sometimes remind them (nicely) that without the snowpack, the rivers and lakes suffer in summer. But I’m no better. We recently had three straight days of cloudless, sunny skies, and before the end of the first one I could feel myself starting to grumble. The sun just kept shining. But just because I personally might be happy with, say, two sunny days every couple of weeks, it doesn’t mean that’s what the ecosystem needs.

This bird doesn’t really care what I think about extended daylight hours and too much sunshine.

We all need more than we’re getting. We need more rest, care, connection. True community, friendship, love. We need laughter and time to wander in the world and put our hands in soil and sit by rivers. We need more movement and real stimulation for our minds, wildness within ourselves and within the world. We need more of a lot of things, and to let go of a lot of other things. The one thing we don’t need are any more ways to demand that nature to serve us.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• On the Land Clinic newsletter, a guest post by Ione IronHorse Martel Jones about land that was taken from her family by eminent domain to build a dam on the Snake River, and the fight to get it back: “My family’s story is challenging for a reason, it’s been buried in a system that is intentionally complicated and emotionally draining. This hard place is forcing us to think about other ways to imagine land return. Could there be such a thing as a reversal of eminent domain?”

• Science writer Jill Neimark wrote a deeply reported piece for STAT on the effects of the toxins released through the Ohio train derailment. One of her interviews was with Rebecca Gasior Altman, an environmental sociologist currently working on a book about plastics. If you’ve never read Altman’s Aeon essays “American petro-topia” and “Time-bombing the future,” I highly recommend them.

• I’ve been working my way through history professor Timothy Snyder’s recorded Yale lectures on Ukraine (link is to his Substack explainer, with links there to podcasts and YouTube videos). If you’re interested in the history of that region, lectures 1-6 in particular dwell on the more ancient history of Kievan Rus and its precursors, reorienting the history of the region away from Europe and more rightly toward Africa and the Mediterranean. (If you’re more reading- than listening-minded, Orlando Figes’s recent book The Story of Russia covers a lot of the same historical ground.)

• On the Reframing Rural podcast, author of Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West Dr. Ryanne Pilgeram talked about a high-end housing development built on the site of a closed mill in her hometown of Dover, Idaho, and the effects it’s had on locals: “On the ground, the issues boil down to the haves and the have-nots: the person with multiple homes paying for sole access to the best beach in Bonner County, and a community raising funds for their one and only community hall.” (This is an excellently produced story, and I don’t disagree with anything in it. But as with many of these stories, there is still a de facto acceptance of the original theft of land in North American, even with a thoughtful telling of that theft.)

• The Rev. Dr. Donald Perryman and Kennedy Smith on Building Local Power on the fight to keep “dollar stores” (in the form of Dollar General) out of neighborhoods in Toledo, Ohio: “The reality is that they’re gonna hire three or four people, and they’re gonna to pay poor wages, and they’re going to artificially promote people to assistant manager so that they don’t have to pay overtime, and they’re going to overwork them. And, they’re going to harm a lot of locally owned businesses.”

• On the subject of intellectual property, the commons, and language, I keep rereading this article about elders who worked with the Lakota Language Consortium to preserve the Lakota language, only for the nation to later find that the Consortium (not affiliated with the Lakota nation) expected them to pay for materials that had been created from their language. This is one of those areas of property where I think the dominant culture can blind many to the damage it does through claiming ownership by adding a bit of labor and materials to something that by rights belongs to others.