Nothing in excess

Okay, maybe some things in excess

Welcome! For those new here, On the Commons explores the ancient roots and ongoing consequences of private property and commodification—from the Doctrine of Discovery to ancient enclosures of the commons, and more—along with immersion in the offline, off-grid world, and examining the various systems that can make it difficult to simply be human.

A reminder that the tab “Research & Resources” above has posts listing some of the resources I’ve used in this work, including on land ownership and Land Back.

5% of last quarter’s On the Commons went to the Flathead Warming Center. This quarter’s 5% will go to Ríos to Rivers. Watch their short documentary (on Vimeo), Paddle Tribal Waters, about training Indigenous youth to be the first people to paddle the Klamath River after impending dam removal.

Audio version (in which I complain about the heat and completely forget to use the word “estivate”—the heat/summer version of winter’s “hibernate,” to be very unscientific about it—a major oversight on my part because it delights me that that word exists):

I recently spoke with a class at Michigan State University about walking, health, and cultural views of wellness. As happens during most of my talks with college students, at least one came prepared with a question that left me scrambling for an answer.

Undergraduates consistently show up with a broader range of interests than I find elsewhere—when I spoke at Dartmouth earlier this year, I stopped in the middle of our two hours just to comment that I had never spoken with a group that had such persistent interest in bus systems. It gave me hope, I said, because public transit might seem boring to many people but it’s central to finding ourselves in a cleaner, more just, and less extractive world. At the University of Montana a couple years ago, it was one about propaganda and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which I hadn’t read in years.

During this most recent talk, among several excellent questions was one about the architecture of prisons.

Incarceration and abolition matter to me, but, as I told the student, those subjects are well outside my areas of expertise.

The moment I said that, I paused, remembering a study I’d read very early on in my walking research about psychology, mental health, and architecture. I’d wanted to make more use of that study than I did—my editor was, rightfully, constantly reining in my enthusiasm for straying into research that was, at best, adjacent to walking. In the end, that study only informed one sentence.

I couldn’t remember the details of the study, but managed to scrape a memory that it had said something about how the designs of prisons and schools affect people’s self-perception, along with something that has stuck with me from Jane Brox’s book Silence about the design of a near-silent early prison in America.

What does it do to people, I asked the students, to have every aspect of your life controlled as a constant message that you aren’t to be trusted? Which related to the student’s secondary question about neighborhoods—if you live in a neighborhood that doesn’t have sidewalks or parks, or shade or access to green spaces, or is cut through by a 4- or 5- or 6-lane road and there’s no way for kids to walk to school safely—much less if you live in a region under constant oppression and surveillance, ripped from freedom by razor wire and armed patrols—that’s a pretty strong message about whose neighborhoods and lives are valued, whether by your own city officials or a colonizing imperial power.

Extend that to the criminalization of anyone who can’t afford a home at all, and the message about who matters couldn’t be clearer.

When my literary agent and I were first sending around the book proposal for A Walking Life to publishers, I had phone calls with a number of editors. On one of them, with a publisher that leaned more literary, the editor said, “I could see you know your subject, but I didn’t realize you were a policy wonk.”

It wasn’t a compliment.

That editor wanted the book but wanted me to restructure it as a kind of international intellectual and literary stroll, which was the kind of writing about walking I explicitly wrote my book to move away from. I was tired, and still am, of walking literature being by and about people, largely people of great privilege, wandering the world in their heads. Maybe that’s why I’ve been walking barefoot so much in the last year. I want to feel the ground, not just think about it.

His comment stumped me in the moment because I’m not really a policy wonk. What I thought of—a week after our conversation, of course; I’m a slow thinker—is that there is a difference between being into policy, and knowing your subject well enough to be able to talk about it as knowledgably as possible.

That aspect of writing nonfiction is important to me. I over-research nearly everything I write. It’s absurd. But it matters to me because, when someone has taken the time to read my book or one of these essays or shown up for a talk, I want to be able to respect their—your—time and attention in return. I do that by being as thorough as I possibly can for each aspect of a subject that captures my interest.

When editing my recent piece for High Country News, my focus on centuries of violent rebellions against enclosures of the commons in England came after back and forth with the editors about the current-day relevance of enclosures: when nobility and other landowners enclosed what had been commonly shared and carefully managed land, eviction of tenants, often entire villages of people, was usually part of the process. The Highland Clearances in Scotland is one of the best-known mass evictions in Britain’s history, but millions of acres were stolen and hundreds of thousands of people evicted throughout England before landowners turned their full attention to Scotland.

Mass homelessness inevitably followed, and in the wake of enclosure acts, the government pursued criminalization of being without work and/or a place to live: the Vagrancy (or Vagabonds) Act of 1547, for example, in which any “able-bodied” person who was found to be out of work for three days was to be branded with a V and sold into slavery for two years; or the Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1494, in which “vagabonds, idle and suspected persons” were to be put in stocks for three days and nights and given nothing but bread and water and then evicted from the town.

“Evicted to go where exactly?” is just as relevant today as it was then. The fact that the Vagrancy Act turned out to be impractical to enforce isn’t the point.

The city of Kalispell, Montana, just a few miles from me and where my father and stepmother live, recently stopped short of pulling the operating permit for my region’s only low-barrier houseless shelter after years of complaints by those who seek to criminalize being without a home; while Missoula, Montana, followed in the steps of many municipalities to make it illegal to camp in city limits overnight.

During a discussion on land ownership and enclosure acts last year, one commenter noted on a section about anti-homeless laws in 1500s England—relating them to the U.S.’s current affordable housing crisis—that, “‘Skin in the game’ counts, while skin itself doesn’t.” People’s lives, in other words, matter less than property values. It matters that this was true during centuries of the theft of the commons, because it’s not new. Like most injustices, it takes different forms, but we’re still living with it.

On the Commons is entirely reader-supported. Until August 13th, 20% off subscriptions and a copy of A Walking Life for new paid subscribers (in whatever format but email me—I’ll need to know where to send it!).

I’ve read more books than I care to count at this point on land theft and the commons alone for this book I keep promising you all. In every one I learn something new, most of which will never make it into narrative. But I know by now that there’s always a chance that some fact or story that I can pull out of my bedraggled brain will be useful to someone someday, and while I don’t think that makes me a policy wonk, it does give me a lot of satisfaction.

But policy knowledge doesn’t hurt, either. Holding knowledge about walking’s gifts and potential along with knowing about the systems, legacy infrastructure, and ongoing policies—like road designs that are mandated (not just suggested) to optimize traffic flow, even at the expense of healthy ecosystems and human lives—helps me, and I hope helps everyone I share it with. It can be easy to see that a road is unsafe for anyone walking, but you can’t change that reality if you don’t know that federal requirements determine its design. We have to know where the barriers are in order to dismantle them.

Similarly for land ownership and private property: knowing the history of enclosure and rebellions, and the lack of any true foundation for, say, exclusive private property rights in land, matters for how we perceive the paradigms and stories we function within.

Changing a paradigm is hard, involving as it does a massive upheaval of perception and possibility, and especially hard if you can’t see it for what it is. The ancient Greek maxim to “know thyself”—inscribed on the Temple of Apollo—applies equally to knowing the structures that shape our world and our expectations of it. If we want life to count more than skin in the game, more than profit, we have to know what we’re fighting.

Also inscribed on the Temple was the maxim “Nothing in excess,” which, when it comes to research, I’m not very good at adhering to. But then, who defines “excess”? I’ve been reading Guy Standing’s Plunder of the Commons, which turns out to have very little information I need, but even if I never write about the Lauderdale Paradox of 1801, in which James Maitland, the eighth earl of Lauderdale, showed how public wealth decreases as private wealth increases, someday it might be exactly the historical link that someone out there needs.

I don’t generally wonder if the research I do is excessive—I assume it is—but it feels like the excesses of nature: the way I can walk around town right now and eat handfuls of serviceberries, or how there are so many ripe raspberries coming out of the garden that three families can’t eat them all, which means I had enough to make a batch of seedless raspberry jam last week.

The research I do is frequently boring, written as it is for academic expectations and requirements, but it is rarely without some kind of gift, some spillover of story or insight or simple information that makes me feel like I’ve been rewarded. It leaves a richness, and like all true gifts, the greatest pleasure is in being able to share it.

THIS JAM IS SO GOOD