Wood and Questions

Walking composition

“If we want to understand the origins of violent domination in human societies, this is precisely where we need to look. Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure.” —The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow

Some years ago when we still lived I upstate New York, I began working at a sawmill. A micro-mill, to be specific, run by a woman (also, coincidentally, from Montana) who’d bought a Wood-Mizer LT40 and specialized in milling wood from downed and diseased trees on public and private land. It was more of an internship really, as I didn’t get paid and had asked if I could come a couple days a week. I’d recently gotten into rustic woodworking (partly because motherhood was driving me insane) and 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 maple, and how bad black locust smells but how useful it is. I learned how mold causes spalting and how beautiful its lacy effects can be. The owner sent me on a day-long chainsaw safety course, where I stood in knee-deep snow and cut down a pin oak and decided I never wanted to use a chainsaw again because I am clumsy and it was terrifying.

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 its life continued.

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Reading The Dawn of Everything left me with more questions than answers, which I suppose was part of the authors’ purpose. I thought (hoped) that they would bring me some solid ideas about questions they posed toward the beginning of the book, notably how wealth—or an ability to take and hoard resources—translates into power over others and if there are ways to prevent that (the prevention part came up in several of their societal examples, but not in ways that I found actionable in modern times—would love perspectives if anyone else has read it).

An intriguing idea presented in the second half revolved around the “ecology of freedom,” which

“describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigors of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death.”

Which sounded a lot like why lockdown ended up being beneficial in unexpected ways for my family, and why public lands matter so much, presenting time and freedom to engage in cultivation and foraging as well as walks together as our jobs scaled back a bit. It sucked in a lot of other ways, and far more for many people without our circumstances, but that was a lesson I’ve hung onto.

This description of freedom’s ecologies expands somewhat on the authors’ idea of “primordial freedoms,” which consists of “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relationships” and leads to one of their unanswered questions:

“How could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom, or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable—in a nutshell, bureaucratized.”

There is far more to unpack there than I am prepared to do on a first reading, without sitting with this book for a great deal more time. Every definition, every idea, leads not to a safe answer but instead to another culture, another model of living and shaping society, all presented to break apart the idea that somehow our present moment is the result of any kind of linear timeline or an arguably outdated concept of civilizational progress. The original root of civilization, they point out, was in the Latin word civilis, “which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition.”

Is this just another tired form of libertarianism pretending to be utopia, or a better-worded case for anarchy? Or an argument for how government can be formed to better serve people and ecosystems?

What it is instead, I think, is a continuation of the goal stated toward the beginning of the book: to ask better questions.

That is, after all, how paradigms begin to shift. By realizing that our imaginations have been constrained by what we thought was possible.

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It only occurred to me today to wonder why at the sawmill that day we didn’t take 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 make it workable again. It obviously would have been a waste of time but the entire endeavor could be classified a waste of time, by the standards of capital and efficiency. Even though I was working for free, nobody else was, and 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. One guy and I once spent an entire day planing someone’s recovered stack of cedar planks. They probably could have bought something similar from IKEA for far less money than that day’s labor cost.

But that really is part of the point. What does efficiency in our lives get us? The question is 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 clients connection to their ecosystem and its cycles, why not engage in that kind of work? Why are we prevented simply because it doesn’t provide enough income to feed our families?

The real question is, one perhaps Graeber and Wengrow were getting at, is how do we recraft our systems to give us some kind of choice in the matter?

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Some stuff to read, listen to, or watch:

• Jessica Handler writing in Full Grown People about how we grade ourselves and our parents, and what stays in our permanent record: “My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.”

• A short video presentation on Inka khipu—knotted strings used for communication and record keeping—from the British Museum via Aeon. The different styles of knots relate to position in a decimal system, and spaces and unknotted strings were probably used to show “0.” Which, if you know anything about the history of 0, is extra fascinating and now I want to learn more about mathematics in pre-Colombian Americas.

• Via MIT Technology Review’s newsletter (which has a “We can still have nice things” section), a website that is simply a Weird Old Book Finder. I have not played around with it yet but it looks like a fun place to get lost in!

• In Sapiens, an excerpt of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas: “If the ‘Out of Beringia’ model is correct, Beringia wasn’t a crossing point but a homeland. It was a place where people lived for many generations, sheltering from an inhospitable climate and slowly evolving the genetic variation unique to their Native American descendants.”

• W. Robert Connor writing about Thucydides and pandemic in a time of war in The American Scholar: “The effects of the pandemic in Athens, Thucydides observed, were not limited to individual patients and those close to them, but also extended into the very fabric of society.”

• Genevieve Bell in MIT Technology Review on how the metaverse is a recycling of an old idea—not Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash but London’s 1851 Great Exhibition: “Our history with proto-­metaverses should make us more skeptical about any claims for the emancipatory power of technology and technology platforms. . . . Yet this history should also let us be alive to the possibilities of wondrous, unexpected invention and innovation, and it should remind us that there will not be a singular experience of the metaverse.”

• Backcountry Hunters & Anglers podcast host Hal Herring steered a pretty hard-hitting conversation about changing elk hunting rules in Montana and what it sounds about the state’s changing relationship to the public trust and its new eagerness for privatization.

• An activist and a fashion scholar talk about “defashioning the future” on Frontiers of Commoning: “We need to bust the myths of fashion. The whole system is held up by myths that are projected out to us by the marketing. . . . It’s getting at the culture of it.”

• Anthropologist Dr. Beth Singler on Futures podcast about artificial intelligence, and how we forget that part of the problem is treating human like machines: “We need a broader understanding of what intelligence is. . . . It does come with a stereotype that intelligence is putting away your childish toys. It’s humanity civilizing itself to the extent that rationality is coded out. It’s about seeing the millennia of evolution as a messy, destructive process that not much good came out of.” (They also discuss one of the more persuasive arguments I’ve heard that techno-utopianism is a religion because it’s based on faith in innovation.)

• Threshold’s new season is finally out, this time on climate change and the time to a 1.5-degree temperature increase: “Even if we go and move off to another nearby planet, we’re going to have to do a lot of work to make that atmosphere something we can work with in the same way. Science fiction literature is rife with options of what you can do in those situations. None of them are, ‘Take spaceship to Planet X, get out, enjoy life, done.’”

• Cory Doctorow was on the War on Cars unraveling starry-eyed views of Uber and Lyft: “When you’re the beneficiary of billions of dollars of subsidy, it’s easy to kid yourself that, ‘I must be missing something here.’ This is one of the things that differentiates transit from travel, is the micro-case, the individual case for how to run a transit system is completely unlike the macro case for how to run a transit system.”

• I absolutely loved this episode of Scotland Outdoors, with Steward of the Falkland Estate Ninian Stuart talking about how to reimagine community and humanity re-integrated with their local landscape, while reckoning with the histories of slavery and oppression that led to the creation of vast wealthy estates in the first place.