Trespassing

Antonia Malchik
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Trespassing is a podcast version of the newsletter TRESPASSING, about ownership, private property, power, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons. You can listen on most podcast platforms, including YouTube. Links below. antonia.substack.com

  1. 16h ago

    Fighting traffic

    In 1922, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the U.S., dedicated a memorial to the 286 children killed in car crashes the previous year. More than 5,000 people attended the ceremony, which was inspired by a previous Safety Week in Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City’s Safety Week procession of 10,000 people, including 1,054 children marching to represent the 1,054 children killed in accidents—mostly traffic crashes—in 1921. Campaigns like this were common all over the U.S. in the early 1900s. After four years of trench warfare in Europe capped by the staggering death toll of the 1918 influenza epidemic—a minimum of 21 million dead worldwide, with closer estimates being 50 to 100 million—an exhausted country found itself battling a rising number deaths and injuries on another front: those caused by the invasion of private automobiles on public roads, and the seeming unwillingness of drivers to take seriously the fact that they were driving deadly machines, an unwillingness that persists to this day. We are often told that North America is dominated by highways and freeways, and our country roads and city streets ruled by car drivers, because this was a reality we chose. We wanted a world where not only we can get anywhere by car, but a world where there is often no other method of going places. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the early 20th century, resistance against automobile dominance—against speed in particular but even against cars using crowded public roads—was enormous. People, including children, died by the thousands every year due to car drivers’ negligence, and nobody at the time was blaming pedestrians, much less children playing in the public road as they had always done. Our public streets and roads used to be exactly that: public. They did not belong to car drivers, who simply had equal access and use like everyone else, including children playing, nor did highways, freeways, or motorways—whose only purpose is to enable car drivers getting from one place to another as quickly as possible—exist. With all the flaws and oppressions of the Industrial Revolution, cities, towns, and roads were still largely designed for people, not cars. While cars were initially tolerated, resistance against their presence, and particularly their speed, grew fierce in response to lives lost and other damage caused by drivers. For years, large American cities erected memorials to the dead and held massive protests against the recklessness of drivers. A car-centric world was never desired. It was never even tolerated. From the beginning, it was fought. The industry fought back. Throughout the 1920s, automobile executives and lobbyists built up marketing blitzes framed as safety campaigns; and created think tanks and government roles to further the needs of not people or communities, whose transportation requirements were served by public transit and a walkable world, but instead the narrow interests of the automobile industry. By 1956, President Eisenhower had become an enthusiastic proponent of building an interstate highway system, using plans that had been in the works for years. While for the car industry the network meant faster speeds and less friction for traffic flow, translating into more sales of private automobiles; for communities it meant degraded air quality, constant noise and pollution, and, in city after city, neighborhoods—mostly in poor communities and communities of color—were demolished to make way for freeways. In writing about this destruction in my book A Walking Life, I focused on the St. Paul, Minnesota, community of Rondo, but there are countless others across the U.S., communities still trying to repair and rebuild decades after they were crushed or ripped apart in order to build highways meant to serve better-off, usually white, suburbs. The interstate highway system eventually cost well over $600 billion in today’s money to build, and in the process stole uncounted current and future billions of equity in homes and businesses—private property taken through the government’s power of eminent domain. Nearly a hundred years from the peak of automobile resistance, during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, I came across an Instagram post responding to projected deaths from Our World in Data if measures weren’t taken to mitigate Covid’s viral spread. (That data and graph continue to be updated.) I’m sure many of us remember that graph, the projected millions of deaths—what the authors termed “excess mortality”—that even temporary lockdowns and slapdash masking requirements prevented, not to mention how much more could have been done if we had leadership that cared more about human well-being than about the stock market. Not everyone saw it that way. “40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents,” the writer of the post said, going on to make a point along the lines of we shouldn’t panic, much less invite the slightest discomfort or inconvenience into our lives. Potential Covid deaths, after all, compared favorably with deaths from car crashes. Meh. I was still on Instagram at the time and reposted the comment immediately, with livid energy. That’s exactly the point, I wrote, my book having been published less than a year before and all the issues fresh in my mind. We shouldn’t accept all those deaths from car crashes as normal or acceptable. Those 40,000 lives should never be a price we as a society are willing to shrug off for the convenience of getting everywhere by car. That 40,000 deaths (actually slightly under; the estimate was a little over 36,000 in 2019 and again in 2025, a slight decrease from over 39,000 in 2024) includes over 6,000 cyclists and pedestrians per year, people who weren’t even in a car. It does not include the astronomical numbers of people injured in car crashes, people often left with lifelong disabilities like paraplegia or traumatic brain injuries. Nor does it count the incredible cost to human health a car-centric world inflicts on everyone, from removing the most accessible and least expensive exercise available—walking, including walking with assistive devices—to the magnetite particles and other heavy metals from car exhaust found in the brains of people who’ve died with diseases like Alzheimer’s, and the up to 20% reduced lung capacity of children who grow up near busy roads. Or the innumerable wildlife killed and habitats fragmented. The stories that open this essay come from Peter Norton’s 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. Norton is an historian of technology and associate professor at the University of Virginia whom I interviewed extensively for A Walking Life. Fighting Traffic is his meticulously researched and well-told history of how cars and highways came to dominate Americans’ lives, cities, and landscapes over the course of the 20th century. Norton and I have stayed in touch over the years, and recently exchanged posts on LinkedIn about the ways in which industry rhetoric around LLMs and AI data center megaprojects parallel the tactics used by the automobile industry to take over American roads and communities. As a friend said to me recently, at least when the highway system crushed neighborhoods—including the home of one of her close relatives—the car industry promised something in return: mobility, and a simulacrum of freedom. With AI, the industry instead employs menacing warnings: use our product, even if it’s built by stealing your own labor and creativity, or get left behind. We’ll take your water, your electricity, your homes and your jobs, and might wipe out the human species while we’re at it, but you better get on the rocket ship or . . . what, exactly? You’ll become irrelevant, worthless, thrown on the toxic discard pile left by the illusion of progress? It sounds like that’s the intention whether or not I willingly help the LLMs learn to do what I do for a living. It reminds me of a cartoon I once saw, drawn in response to the U.S.’s draconian, standardized-test-bloated 2002 No Child Left Behind education act. The cartoon is by David Horsey and shows a classroom of miserable students diligently being brain-fed test prep material, while one student is standing at the window looking out at a vibrant world of arts, physical education, and nature, her teacher urging her back to her desk with “You don’t want to be a child left behind, do you?” “Sounds good to me,” the student replies. The tech industry messaging differs in its level of threat but I feel that student. Please, leave me so far behind that you forget I’m up at my stepfather’s off-grid cabin, wading in the creek and watching Marsh Hawks and Sandhill Cranes, a thunderstorm rolling all day along the John Long Mountains and the wood-fired cooking stove taking an hour to boil water. I’ll take that over even a few minutes spent in service of digital industry. But it’s not as if most people have that option. The automobile industry was more subtle than today’s tech companies, and more patient in the face of resistance, anger, and budding local and state laws that threatened its bottom line. It took decades of dedicated lobbying and careful propaganda, and then, not only did cars take over what had once been public spaces for all to use equally while the highway system eviscerated neighborhoods, but the industry ensured its win by removing what people had left: choice. Street cars, trams, and train lines used to dominate American cities, but they served rural America, too. It might have been overbuilt and underfunded, but at least the network provided communities with a service. One of the details in Willa Cather’s early 1900s novels I’ve always been fascinated by is how easily her characters got around the American midwest and west by train. You can’t do that now. America barely has a minimal pas

  2. Sep 4

    Poverty isn’t invisible

    Where did August go? Into wildfire smoke and the heat of exhausted ecosystems. “What do you notice?” “A lot of grief. And there’s something like . . . an internal flinch. Not a physical flinch, almost a psychological one.” The clinician raised his eyebrows and wrote something down but said nothing. “Okay. Ready?” No. “Yes.” I picked up the little plastic paddles again. This exchange, from a recent therapeutic session, is indicative of my experience of EMDR: a murky, weird journey into my own mind and memories during which I’m encouraged not to force anything or narrate, but simply observe what’s going on, note it, and keep going. EMDR, which stands for “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy,” is a therapeutic treatment that relies on bilateral stimulation and is used primarily to treat trauma. When I first started EMDR, the clinician tipped two fingers back and forth while I followed their movement and let my mind wander where it willed, prompted first by whatever painful memory we’d chosen from the list I’d brought in. Now we do it with small handheld paddles that alternately pulse or vibrate; even with my eyes closed I notice they’re still following the movement back and forth, like a metronome. EMDR was discovered accidentally by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1987, who was walking in a park when she noticed the effect her own eye movement had on difficult memories. She developed it to treat PTSD in war veterans, and later trained clinicians treating people who’d survived horrific traumas like genocide or mass rape. It’s been shown to be extremely effective for PTSD but, as Stephanie Foo related in her memoir What My Bones Know, it wasn’t intended for the chronic, long-term trauma that’s known as complex trauma or C-PTSD, the kind that can develop from an abusive childhood or relationship. EMDR often doesn’t work in those cases. It didn’t for her, nor for many other people I know with childhood experiences similar to mine. For some reason, it has for me. For the past two years I’ve been doing it almost weekly, with months off now and then because, while EMDR is a surprisingly effective tool for trauma, it’s also exhausting. Many sessions feel almost brutal, a surreal word to use because neither the person being treated nor the clinician is really doing anything. I sit there letting my mind wander—“stop trying to control where it goes,” the clinician has had to constantly remind me—through memories, that day’s stresses, visualizations that have become familiar places in my years of half-assed meditation, dreams both recent and old, worries about my kids, and, reliably, “What am I doing? Is this working? Am I ever going to get ‘better?’ Is the therapist bored?” That last one comes up a lot. A couple months ago I asked if we could try EMDR for what I described as financial fear: all the outsized worries of poverty, of finding myself even more poor than I had been growing up, of the invisibility and dehumanization that accompany poverty. Specifically of living on the streets with my teeth falling out because for some reason that’s what I’m most consistently worried about. My teeth. Maybe that will happen; maybe it won’t. I’d just like to stop being so overrun by fear of it that I find it hard to get my work done, perhaps turning poverty into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The EMDR process aims to take strong emotions like fear and underlying beliefs like “I am unsafe” or “I am unworthy” (there’s a whole list that I keep in the back of my planner, and I can’t say I enjoy tracking down what my frightened inner two- or twelve-year-old is feeling that day) and reframing them into positive cognitions. Nobody knows quite why it’s so effective for PTSD but dozens of clinical trials have shown that it is. All my previous sessions had been focused on single events, specific scenes of violence or abandonment or other cruelty and the associated emotions. My reactions to those sessions are intense. After my very first one I had a splitting headache for two days, and on the third I hid in the cupboard under the stairs to sob for two solid hours. I f*****g hate EMDR. It’s probably saved me from spending the rest of my life lost in a dark labyrinth of disconnected emotions and avoided memories, but it’s painful as hell and it’s hard to see when or how you’ll ever be free of all the grief, fear, and other emotions it brings up. Like you might just be stuck wandering those dark paths forever. It’s worked for me but I hesitate to recommend it to anyone. It’s painful in almost all the ways humans can experience pain. At one point I wondered if facing one’s shadow simply isn’t something most people could or even should handle. The sessions on financial fear have been different from the others. Less intense for one thing. I’ve done several now, and they all seem to lead nowhere except toward an increasingly large, dark mass in the center of my being, a mass that would rather stay hidden. Interestingly, I had a brief conversation just this week with a friend going through a similar process, and she also described coming across some enormous mass. I keep wandering in mental circles, or spirals, or maybe just turning around and around in one spot, opening doors to just about every difficult issue I have ever carried. When I walk away from these sessions, desperate for sleep but needing to get home to make dinner, it’s almost always with the same question: how do variations on these same fears show up in humanity’s worst habits and most destructive societal structures? Which aspects of my own fears are universal? The fear of poverty is inherent in but not exclusive to capitalism—the Soviet Union under communism had poverty. Despite rhetoric about fair and equal distribution, Party leaders had access to privileges and resources not available to anyone else, most of whom, like my father and his family, stood in line for hours for bread or the occasional sausage or fruit. Without wealth inequality and the theft of shared resources for the profit of a few, there would be no poverty, or at least not poverty as we currently conceive of it. No world where a medical emergency or loss of a home or job could mean bankruptcy. Like all words, “poverty” carries its own historical weight. It is a measure of worth in a society designed to be unequal. Scarcity is another story. Fear of starving or freezing to death is primal. I don’t think you could go back far enough in time anywhere on this planet and find people who didn’t face scarcity at one point or another. A winter harsher and longer than usual, a summer scant in berries, a season when the animals were hard to find. In lands like Russia, where my father and stepmother are from, people lived on berries and mushrooms and sometimes meat, the country’s soil being what historians have called agriculturally marginal. Ukraine’s rich, fertile “black earth” soil and access to the Black Sea are two of the reasons Russia’s leaders have persistently tried to take over and control the country. My fears of poverty are informed by a hungry childhood. It’s a fear that threads through my days even though, for now, I have a home and work I love and can feed my kids. It threads just as much through the days of a billionaire who cannot let go of his wealth because anything less might be not enough. Poking at those fears during EMDR sessions have started to convince me that there’s something ancient in them, too, something, yes, universal. When the commons of England were stolen and privatized, and the same damage later inflicted on Scotland and Ireland, it threw people into deeper poverty by taking their homes and means of survival while at the same time making their homelessness and destitution illegal. Many of those same people, both the thieves and the people they stole the commons from, went on to enact the same theft on a broader and more violent scale in North America. Colonial powers wrecked systems where almost everyone had enough, or at least that was the goal; and ever since, those powers have tried to persuade the world that a few people owning or controlling all the land, water, knowledge, and power is what ensures maximum freedom and security for everyone. How differently would my financial fears, or yours, feel if you knew you would not starve, or be unhoused, or slide into unmanageable debt while those who own the debt live in luxury. Avoiding scarcity is never guaranteed. But neither is the security supposedly granted by wealth and ownership. As I wrote recently, the growth of data centers and the damage they inflict are a clear reminder that ownership and wealth are only a measure of power, not of security. If someone with more power wants your home or your electricity or your water, they’ll find a way to take it, no matter what deeds of ownership you hold. But if people know the commons are shared, if they’re managed at the levels of community, region, and planet, then the prospect of scarcity—not poverty—is a shared one. There’s a big difference between the buffalo herd not showing up in its usual place one season and your people needing to manage the winter’s food needs differently that year, and an invading power deciding to massacre all the buffalo so that you and your community don’t have food. There’s an essay I wrote here a couple of years ago, about getting stranded at a cabin with my younger kid and dwindling food supplies, whose central question I think about constantly: what would it take to have faith that the universe or Creation or Mother Earth or whatever gods you do or do not believe in will take care of you? What would it take to release the need to hustle and earn and own and work ourselves so hard simply to survive, and to know instead that there are other ways to provide for ourselves and one another? What if our

  3. Jul 5

    A price above rubies

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

  4. May 20

    Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?

    I recently came across a news story about the community of Lake Tahoe, California—a place known as a ski resort, as my town in Montana is also known but, also like my town, a place where thousands of people live full-time. People who keep the community running, whose taxes and labor pay for the infrastructure necessary to make ski vacations and second homeownership possible; and who, like the majority of humans, struggle to survive. The company that provides Tahoe’s nearly 50,000 full-time residents with electric power has informed them that they will have to find another electricity source within a year. NV Energy, the electricity distributor, told Liberty Utilities, the electric company serving the Tahoe community, that it needs to divert all of Tahoe’s previous capacity to power AI data centers. This isn’t really a new situation, but the scale of it is mind-boggling. The details, which I recommend reading the original reporting for, are tangled in a complex knot of jurisdiction and state law—NV Energy is located in Nevada, while Tahoe is in California. The legalities of cross-state electricity production and consumption in the U.S. depend on federal regulations from FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), as well as each state’s laws and regulatory oversight from that state’s Public Service Commission. In Montana, where I live, three PSC members are elected to well-paid, powerful positions, all of which are currently held by zealous anti-regulationists; other states vary on PSC positions being appointed or elected, and their power over ordinary people’s lives through regulatory oversight of utilities—or lack thereof—is often overlooked. Like most of the commons we rely on, electricity is being treated not as a public good, a technology necessary to living in this modern world, but as a resource ripe for further privatization and enclosure. It’s treated as a property right that can be taken from those with less power (pun unavoidable) and given to those with more. There’s a line I’ve often heard among environmental and conservation groups: “private property is bedrock.” Local and regional resistance to conservation is more likely when private property rights are perceived as threatened, so private property is a third rail that environmental advocates rarely touch. This concept was evident in a 2025 court case that came before the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals regarding what are known as “corner crossings”—the practice of stepping over (but not physically touching) intersecting corners of private land in order to access public land. Without corner crossings, private property owners can, in effect, privatize public land by denying access. The case originated in Wyoming, and the 10th Circuit found that that corner crossing was legal; the practice remains illegal elsewhere, like in Montana. In the decision, the judges referenced a previous 2021 case in finding first that “protection of private property is indispensible to the promotion of individual freedom,” which in turn referenced an even earlier 2017 case that came to the U.S. Supreme Court out of Wisconsin: “Property rights are necessary to preserve freedom, for property ownership empowers persons to shape and to plan their own destiny in a world where governments are always eager to do so for them.” In the 49-page decision, the judges waded into the U.S.’s own laws against enclosure (or “inclosure”) of public land, passed in 1885 to “‘prevent the absorption and ownership of vast tracts of our public domain’ by the cattle barons.” Though that Wyoming case was a win for public lands and public access, it’s clear that the judges first made an effort to solidify the “private property is bedrock” notion—avoiding, or attempting to avoid, the third rail of private property rights. In America, private property is akin to religion. You do not touch private property, we’re told. To do so is anathema—property ownership is the bedrock of American individualism, and innovation, and freedom. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. America was built on stolen people, stolen labor, and stolen land. The taking of property—the creation of property—through violence and dishonored treaties was exactly what created this country. And once you accept that that taking, that theft, was justified or at least irreversible—once you accept that the creation of private property in land, water, and other forms of life and necessities is an immovable foundation of a society and nation—then by that same logic you must accept that nothing is in fact so insecure as private property ownership. That is, if the original theft is accepted, if it’s left standing, then any subsequent theft is just as easily justified. Once you’ve created an idea, a value, a story, that acts like bedrock in the imagination, it becomes almost impossible to fight against. Any land or right can be taken for any reason. The person or entity—a corporation, for example—doing the taking need only have more money or more power, and the two often go hand in hand. Take the following examples of private property’s fragility, just two from my piles of research: * Residents of New London, Connecticut, lost their homes when the city took their properties, via the government’s power of eminent domain, to sell to a private developer. The 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case (Kelo v. New London) expanded the power of eminent domain “for public use” to essentially cover any kind of economic development, even if the public couldn’t access those benefits. The homes were bulldozed for shopping, a hotel, and luxury condos—high-end development that was in fact never completed. * In 2016, a family of Maple tree farmers lost 558 trees on their land when crews working for a natural gas pipeline company, arriving with the protection of armed federal marshals, cut down the trees to make way for a gas pipeline. The natural gas company had won a court case in 2015 to take the family’s land via eminent domain. (The pipeline was never built, and in 2020 the family won a court case regranting them ownership of the land. They were planning on replanting trees to replace those lost.) Societies structured similarly to the United States are forced into an odd juxtaposition: on the one hand, ownership of property is almost our only security—just ask anyone whose rental apartment building was bought by an investment company and their rent doubled or more—and on the other, relying on ownership as the basis of security is ridiculously tenuous. Private property rights are less “bedrock” than a narrow, sometimes maintained and sometimes neglected, path on a steep, shale-covered mountainside. The kind of trail I’ve hiked countless times, knees quivering at the thought of a single slip, a single step out of place that can send me and half the hillside heaving uncontrollably downhill. Traversing the terrain of life under a private property regime without understanding how fissile these rights are is like walking that path in fog. I’ve done that, too, and in snowstorms and heavy rain. It’s terrifying, not knowing where your steps are landing, what might send you and all you hold dear into the abyss. Another recent story came out of the U.S. state of Georgia, where over the last year a Blackstone-owned AI data center drew 29 million gallons of water from the local utility without permission, and without paying for it. When the usage was revealed—only through a local resident’s government records request—the water company collected back pay from the data center but there was no fine, no accountability, and no reconsideration of how local water is used, and by whom. Instead, the water company said, “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners. It’s called customer service.” I live in an area served by a small cooperative electricity company, which sounds fairly secure until you find out that most of its power comes from the massive Bonneville Power Administration and its many hydropower dams all through the Columbia River Basin, starting in Canada. Some of those dams were powering data centers and damaging salmon habitat long before AI was more than a pipe dream—all those photos in the cloud, all the emails from online retailers, all those GoPro videos that seem necessary every time someone bikes a trail or skis a line. All these Substack essays. I have little confidence that Bonneville would choose local communities’ electricity needs over corporate-backed AI data centers. It’s not even about the kind of money that corporations have to wield influence over policy; the people who cover these stories have also noted that individual rate payers are stuck paying for the needed infrastructure upgrades and expansion for years to come, even if they don’t benefit from it. I’ve seen it happen with our regional natural gas company’s insistence on buying a struggling coal-fired power plant and recouping that cost from their customers over the next few decades. This is what power and wealth grant, whether they come from individual people or corporations: the right to take from others who have no real recourse. That was true when wealthy landowners privatized the commons—that is, stole them from the people—for private profit in 15th-century England; when the East India Company and the British Crown stole generations of wealth and resources from India from the 1600s until 1947 (read Swarnali Mukherjee’s incredible writing on Britain’s wealth extraction from India); when the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan conquered, controlled, and extracted so much wealth from other regions in the 12th–13th centuries, including areas of China, Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan, that from my understanding Genghis Khan remains, corrected for today’s values, the wealthiest individual in history. I could l

  5. May 1

    Trespass against

    All wild waters have a different flavor. The North Fork of the Flathead River, the river near the off-grid cabin I stay at most often, is wide, and fast enough I wouldn’t risk trying to swim across it. Its headwaters are in Canada, and it has so far been saved from toxic selenium levels by an international agreement that turned its sister rivers, the Elk and then Fording Rivers, into a sacrifice zone for the waste of mountaintop removal coal mining in British Columbia. The saved river tastes of snow and rock, a little pine and something of the young otters I once watched playing in the rapids just off the opposite bank. The uncanny warmth of ice. A little-visited creek on the other side of the mountains where I search for caddisfly casings in late summer tastes of dirt, like fresh-planted geraniums, and the fireweed and kinnikinnick where its waters gather high up in the eastern portion of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Caddisflies, like many macroinvertebrates, are a sign of a water’s health. They need water that runs, chortling and burbling along rocks and moss, well-aerated and low in pollution. Caddisfly larvae build tiny, nearly perfectly cylindrical casings out of various materials, usually gravel. They’re hard to spot, bits of washed-bright gravel clinging to similarly colored rocks under rushing water. I fell in love with caddisflies during my son’s fifth-grade field trip to a local wetland, less than 10 years ago. Although I grew up fishing Montana’s waters, and my mother is an expert fly fisherman, the kind of fishing I did involved worms rather than flies, and I was never taught much about the waters themselves, much less the tiny creatures that make up their vast ecosystems. I’d never seen a caddisfly before that hot spring day with my son’s class, learning about rescue birds of prey and macroinvertebrates at a hidden wetland sanctuary in the shadow of the ski mountain on the edge of town. Caddisflies fascinate me. Miniscule creatures! Maneuvering miniscule bits of rock to form perfect little temporary homes! What more does one need to be awed by creation? Learning about them and other macroinvertebrates from scientists near where I live, I learned about rivers, too—the level of cleanliness they need for health, the way their ecosystems spread underground, far beyond the borders of their visible shores. Architect and planner Dilip Da Cunha wrote a book I haven’t yet read called The Invention of Rivers. He wrote in the book’s introduction, of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns, that they were not just empire building projects, but “more fundamentally and necessarily to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.” “. . . to articulate an earth’s surface with a line separating land from water.” I bought the book after hearing an interview with Cunha, floored by his obvious but revolutionary argument that of course rivers don’t have solid boundaries. How could they? Maps of rivers’ flow, length, shape, and course are deceptive. Rivers are living, breathing creatures. Expecting one to adhere to a mapped route is like expecting a toddler to fall in line with your expectations of behavior just because you read a seemingly smart book about parenting your spirited child. I was recently able to turn back to No Trespassing, the book I’ve been promising readers here for far too long, and came across a passage in Chapter 2—the chapter on water—that I ended up repurposing in an essay for the “Air” volume of The Center for Humans & Nature’s Elementals anthology: “Trespass is fluid. It’s a transgression. In the case of pollution, trespass is far more physical than simply breaking through somebody’s property line. If I sneak through my neighbor’s yard to get to the nature preserve on the other side I might annoy them, but if my neighbor burns a pile of tires in that same yard and I don’t go near it, his waste will trespass into my family’s bodies just the same. This form of trespass, though, is exactly what the law currently allows.” In the published essay, this passage is about what is carried through the air and into all living beings, contrasted with barbed wire fencing and No Trespassing signs that keep our physical bodies from wandering. In the unpublished chapter, though, it follows a section I wrote about Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case involving decades of pollution from a mining company layered in the soil of Anaconda, Montana. The court’s opinion leaned on lack of jurisdiction, but Gorsuch’s dissent went straight to the issues residing deeper within legal history: the plaintiffs’ arguments, he wrote, relied on “ancient common law causes of action like nuisance and trespass.” The majority decision, he wrote, “strips away ancient common law rights from innocent landowners and forces them to suffer toxic waste in their backyards, playgrounds, and farms.” This wasn’t what the law was written to do, Gorsuch claimed, “it was what it was written to prevent.” (For my American readers: Gorsuch, right? I know. He can surprise, as in he did in McGirt v. Oklahoma.) The most commented on essay I have ever published here was about borders, particularly the violence that borders perpetuate by their very existence. The most read essay remains one I wrote about my Russian-Jewish grandparents in the Soviet Union, of their time during dictator Josef Stalin’s violent political purges, which killed millions. It’s an essay about moral codes that might not defeat the face of evil, but will withstand the wreckage of history. The second most read essay is about an early American court case involving a fox, a hunter, and a landowner, and provokes the question of ownership contrasted with a right to exist. The commons, I believe, is all of this and more. It is all that is shared, cared for, carefully managed and husbanded. Enclosures of the commons sought to wall in land’s abundance for a privileged few. For nearly 800 years those enclosures were fought by commoners in England and elsewhere, often in bloody battles that killed thousands. Those people knew what was at stake when the commons were stolen. Their thriving, livelihoods, and even survival were trespassed against. And so they trespassed back—against unjust laws, in defense of life and freedom. I firmly believe that just about everything imaginable and unimaginable is connected to a commons—air, water, ideas, food, soil, stories. Survival. Thriving. Liberty. A person’s right to determine their own identity. But I am aware that my writing here strays in and out of a strict scholarship definition of the commons as a subject. Because of that, the title of this newsletter has been bugging me for a while. The concept of trespass is more fitting for what happens in this space. It is, after all, what sparked rebellions against theft of the commons in the first place. Who gets to define what is trespass, and what is law? The answer, as is always true of hardened borders and hardened ideas: they are defined by those in power. A river embodies trespass. It refuses to remain where it’s told. It lives not simply according to its needs, but also the needs of all the beings that rely on its unique ecology. When circumstances demand that a river change its borders, it does not hesitate, even when human expectations have relied on it staying put. A river can be dammed, drained, poisoned, siphoned off for agriculture or hydro-fracking for fossil fuels, built against so heavily that its banks erode, but it cannot, in the end, be conquered. In whatever form, its waters refuse to stop living. Like wild waters, every form of trespass in every fold of Earth has its own flavor, its own unique ecology. Trespassing, really, is what this newsletter is about. I am writing this at a cabin near a lake where my family used to camp regularly when I was growing up. I have many memories of this place. Most of them are not great—my childhood was defined by fear, violence, and poverty—but the ones that involve the water itself feel so lively, so embedded as small sparks of joy, that by now, in my fourth year staying here alone as an adult, I feel welcome. This lake knows me. And I her—the pounding falls at the far end, pouring out of the western half of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the mountains still covered in snow at the end of April. The Loon that called this morning (stupid Canadian wolf-bird for you fellow Heated Rivalry fans; shout-out to my younger sister for getting me hooked on that show), the Eagle that soared for hours yesterday, the Red-breasted Nuthatch I spent some time watching clear out a nest cavity, and the Ruby-crowned Kinglets who will not shut up. The Grizzly Bear whose very fresh, very large pawprint on the trail turned me right around a couple years ago. The memories of my sisters and me jumping from the rope swing you could only, in those days, reach by canoe. The laughter of children and murmurs of lovers echoing across the water for hundreds of generations before colonialism sought to dominate these places. Caddisfly casings, like rivers, aren’t built like nuclear bunkers. If you watch them for long enough, you can see the insects crawl partway out the end now and then, gather more material and wiggle back inside. Their boundaries are fluid, like water. Like life. Waters trespass against the demands of a world that asks too much, gives too little, and yet somehow is still granted so much life, so much abundance, that nature’s generosity is almost a trespass itself. Against capitalism’s need for scarcity. Against the desire of a few to own everything. And against our own fear that we’ll never survive it all. Like the Red-breasted Nuthatch whose home needs some maintenance, my newsletter takes work. To support further research and writing on the commons, ownership, and private property, please consider

  6. Apr 12

    When the world shut down

    Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a person walked along the muddy residue of a lake that today is so long gone it might be found only in myth. And maybe not even there—the oldest known story of humankind reaches back only 100,000 years. Whoever walked those shores, whoever it was who pressed their toes in the mud of an area that has recently been called Alathar, left a ghost of their own life behind: seven of their footprints were fossilized and remained long after the land turned to desert and became known as Saudi Arabia. Left alone, the fossilized footprints could remain long after even the memory of that country—of all the nation-states we know now—disappears. In my book A Walking Life, I wrote about another set of fossilized footprints, left by another species of hominin (likely Homo antecessor) between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago, on the coast of what is now Norfolk in England. Those footprints included children—an indication that the people were living in that relatively inhospitable climate, not just a group passing through in search of food. In reports of findings like these, timeframes are given casually: “between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago”; “between 850,000 and 900,000 years ago.” In the case of Dink’inesh’s people—Australopithecus afarensis, of which Dink’inesh, popularly known as “Lucy,” was one—it’s 3.2 million years ago, such a vast reach of time it’s usually not even given a range. Can you imagine how many lives, worlds, stories, are folded into even one decade of those hundred thousand- or million-year time ranges? Eyes reflecting the starscape and watching every rise of Sun, following the phases of Moon, ears tuned to the rustle and brush of trees, feet wandering in search of food or some other urge of the heart or mind familiar to us, leaving a ghost of story on the shores of Alathar. Lingering on the life of just one person in that vast stretch of years can make time feel infinite. It often makes me wonder: How have we survived this long? The first year or two of Covid have come up in conversation frequently over the last several months. Quiet, muttered exchanges with women I meet briefly or barely know, mentioning how Covid broke them. Mothers especially, and people working in the health care industry, anyone with a disability or long-term illness, caregivers, and many working in the service industry. It has always stuck in my head that, at least for the first year of the pandemic, the cohort with the highest death rate were line cooks. When I think of my own years dishwashing, prep cooking, and waiting tables to make ends meet, and the chronic exhaustion and lack of health care access combined with poor ventilation and the heat and steam of a commercial kitchen, it makes sense. When I’m in conversation with other mothers in particular, all I can say in response is that Covid broke me, too. Six years ago, the world shut down. That’s what we say. Though heaven forbid anyone in a caring or serving profession shut down. Six years ago, the world shut down. But during that shutting down, much of the world re-enlivened, like the water and air overstressed by billions of people dependent on fossil fuels. And for a brief time, care and mutual aid were considered governmental priorities. For a brief time, before such community and public-minded thinking was considered too risky to economic growth. Even before governments large and small ditched that modicum of responsibility, the amount of effort required simply to hold a family together was crushing. And afterward? The only comparison I can think of is the final book of Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, in which a weapon called Dual-Vector Foil is deployed, curving spacetime to flatten entire solar systems and all the life within them from three dimensions into two. My life felt like that, crushed under immense gravity and flattened beyond repair. Six years we’ve been living not only with the virus and its continuing risk, but also with that whisper of a promise—what a society could be if care, kinship, and an ethos of community were our priorities. Despite persistent Long Covid effects in many aspects of my own health, the beginning of that six years feels like a lifetime ago. Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a hominin person walking along the shores of a lake was having their own six years. In that timespan, hundreds of generations of peoples had six years that to us, to now, feels so inconsequential that we mention 9,000 years as if it’s nothing. A brief period. One in which entire civilizations could rise and fall and be forgotten. Entire creation stories shared and spread and handed down from so many ancestors that their beginnings can only be found in rock itself. The persons walking the Norfolk coast that 850 or 900 thousand years ago had children with them. Their footsteps are scattered and energetic, like those of any kid intent on the world around them. I wonder sometimes if it was their parents with them, or aunties and uncles, grandparents, other relatives, all of the above. Human infants are uniquely helpless among mammals; we evolved to work in community to care for our young and help one another survive. There’s a reason our species is described as being obligatorily social. Hominin brains evolved to be interdependent. That is, humans are wired to respond to one another, to rely on and trust one another. We might also have learned how to manipulate, dehumanize, and reject one another, but that reality can’t change billions of years of evolution. I recently finished editing an incredible book that will be published next year, by the neuroscientist Dr. Ruth Feldman. Our ability to love and care for one another, to treat all life as relations, goes back, I learned from Dr. Feldman, to the earliest evolution of life on this planet, before hominins or any other mammals even walked this Earth—before there was even much Earth to walk. Our own species, Homo sapiens, is estimated to be around 300,000 years old, give or take. Barely a hairsbreadth on Earth’s timeline. And yet we’re still the inheritors of evolution’s incredible gifts—of the ability to walk upright and use our clever hands, but also of the highest intelligence of all: how to care for one another. How to love and be loved. How to value life. Thousands of years of “civilization” have never yet broken that inheritance, though it has tried repeatedly. The determination to keep wealth and power flowing to a few needs a different kind of shut down, that of our stronger evolutionary instincts, the ones that allow us to simply care for one another. The continued press and violence of domination societies leave us with a choice each of us makes every day, consciously or not: Do you give up, or do you stand by your values and what you know to be moral and just? What are you willing to compromise, or to risk, so that the world might become welcoming to all, so that future generations might have a chance for a fully realized life? Before my father returned to Russia most recently, we had lunch together, and I got him to tell me again the story of a family relative, his Uncle Oskar, who came home from World War I in 1918 to find German soldiers occupying his village in Ukraine, a German captain living in his mother’s house and treating her as a servant. “He expressed his displeasure in a very aggressive way,” as my father describes it, and fled through a window when the captain took out his gun. Oskar then had to escape, secretly and on foot, to Romania, where he worked as a doctor in the next war. We meandered to more recent history, my father’s 30 years running a small coffee roasting company in Moscow, Russia, and his regret at not having made better use of the contacts and connections he made during those decades. The following clip of our conversation is more me talking than him, for once; a reminder that when you live life in relationship, measures of success will look very different than what’s considered the norm in the dominant culture. The TL;DL if you don’t want to listen to the whole clip: Aleksandr (Sasha) Malchik: “If you’re a businessperson, you have to use this.” Me: “As much as you wanted to be successful, and to be visible, and public, and seen, in my experience of you as my dad—for my entire life—I have never known you to want a relationship to be transactional. And as far as I’ve seen of people who use it the way you’re ‘meant’ to, the ‘right’ way, those relationships are always transactional. Always. Even the personal ones. . . . Anybody who doesn’t treat those relationships as transactional is shifting the paradigm, even if it feels like those opportunities slipped away. . . . That’s huge.” Even when it feels like we’re losing, if we’re living relationally, there’s a chance that in the long run we might be winning. I would bet a jar of chokecherry jelly that the person walking the shore of Alathar 100,000-some years ago dealt with manipulators and abusive people, greedy leaders and selfish relatives. I would also bet that there were plenty of others who weren’t. That maybe, even, the manipulators and abusers and selfish people became outcasts from the community. As David Wengrow and David Graeber covered comprehensively in their book The Dawn of Everything, humans have formed pro-social and community-minded societies, as well as destructive power-rewarding ones, all over the world, many, many times over the past few thousand years. Depending on who you are and what kind of agency you have, there is an element of choice in these formations. An enslaved person in 4000 BCE Uruk—6,000 years ago—had almost no choices. But the middle class and elites probably did. And so do many of us. How and where to take action, what to do in the fact of injustice and violence, are questions constantly in the ether. They follow a

  7. Mar 26

    Bound for hell

    My father recently sent me a photo from outside the apartment he and my stepmother share in Moscow. It’s a tiny one-room flat that once belonged to my stepmother’s grandmother, Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Anastasia’s sister, Marina Tsvetaeva, is still one of the most beloved poets in Russia; it was lesser known that Anastasia wrote poetry, too, but the hardship and heartshatter that both women endured is well documented. I once read Anastasia’s own poetry back to her in that tiny room, poems she’d written in English but could no longer understand. The memory of sitting with her there, next to the piano that took up most of her small room, has the flavor of another time, another life. Sometimes it makes me miss a Russia I never knew. “No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardentAnd lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Bound for Hell,” 1915 The photo my father sent shows snow-covered sidewalks and bare birch trees, someone shoveling in the distance. I have older photos very similar to it—different apartments, different winters, a different someone shoveling in the distance. Different times I’ve sat in small rooms being served cucumbers with dill, or blini pancakes. Though I was born and mostly raised in Montana, I’ve been homesick for Russia ever since I left in 1991 at the age of 14, just weeks before the coup that collapsed the Soviet Union. Even while watching Moscow and St. Petersburg morph into unrecognizable cities, I missed it, that land, that language, some indefinable, ancient pull. It’s an ache of belonging, and of loss. I’d like to say my longing is generational, since my father was born in the Ural Mountains and grew up in Leningrad. But his parents weren’t from Russia, at least not as its current borders lie. They were Jewish, and so were confined, as all Jews in the Russian empire were, to shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, the only band of territory Jews were allowed to live, their lives and occupations and movement strictly controlled and their communities at the mercy of violent pogroms. My grandfather came from a small village in Ukraine, my grandmother from another near Belarus. The history of that entire part of the world is thick like blood. Miles of forests, birch and poplar, and wide grasslands, holding fast through shifting territorial lines and allegiances all through Eastern Europe and the Caucuses, lands and peoples linked by thousands of years of invasion, control, tribute, and trade with the Ottoman and Mongol Empires. Its history runs like blood, too: there’s the raiding and enslavement of Slavic peoples, who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands or more kidnapped and sold away from their homes to the wealthy in empires south and west of the Black Sea. That slave route operated unbroken for nearly a thousand years. There are the Jews whose ancestors had migrated to Europe centuries before, who ended up in lands controlled by the Russian empire after over a thousand years of oppression, expulsion, and massacres so violent and comprehensive that it’s estimated the DNA of almost half of Ashkenazi Jewish people comes from only four mothers. Four women who survived in a community that by their time had been massacred down to a few hundred people. That land bears other scars, too, ones that run a different kind of heartblood. Lithuanians were the last people in Europe to convert to Christianity, first enduring over a century of invasions and battles pursued by the Crusades, and other pressures from Catholic and Orthodox powers—all that after the previous century’s attacks from the Golden Horde in the north of the Mongol Empire. Jogaila, who in 1386 was crowned king of Lithuania in exchange for being baptised and forcing conversion on his people, subsequently allowed Christian churches to be built for the first time. He also ordered sacred oak trees to be cut down. Household grass snakes, who were kept in homes as protective spirits and were considered dear to the sun goddess Saule, were ordered killed. The cutting down of sacred groves and the destruction of sacred springs throughout Britain and Ireland as the lands and people were bent to Christianity—having spent previous centuries recovering from Roman occupation—is more well-known than the histories of the same happening throughout the European continent. But those lands, too, are laced with memories of spiritual land, water, and animal connections that power spent centuries erasing, usually with violence. What became of the people whose cultures the Roman general Tacitus recorded in 98 CE in his Germania—the Vangiones, Triboci, Nemetes, the Gauls, and countless other peoples? Tacitus wrote that their sacred places were trees and waters rather than human-built temples, and he wrote of the role of women in leadership. What memories does the land hold of those peoples? When were their holy trees cut down and how did they cope with the loss? “To your mad world—one answer: I refuse.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poems to Czechoslovakia”, 1939 When I was researching my first book, I read a great deal on the science of epigenetics, related to what’s become known as intergenerational trauma, focusing on the work of scientists like Rachel Yehuda and Lars Bygrov. “What Yehuda found in her early research was that the children of Holocaust survivors were three times more likely to develop PTSD if exposed to a traumatic event than were demographically similar Jewish people whose parents were not Holocaust survivors. This is not, to be clear, a change in a person’s genetics; it’s a change in how a person’s genes will respond to their particular environment.” Yehuda repeated those results in studies of the children of women who were pregnant and present at the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center. Other researchers have shown epigenetic effects in children whose mothers survived the Dutch Hunger Winter; and still more comes from Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart’s research on historical trauma in Native American people. Epigenetics is still a relatively new field, but its conclusions about intergenerational trauma are well established. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsardom in favor of communism, my grandparents came to Leningrad. They walked straight out of the pogroms, massacres, restrictions, and theft of children that Jews had endured for over 2000 years, a history that had not yet ended when they each left their villages behind to help build a new nation. My grandparents, Jacob and Anna, enjoyed an extremely short few years of believing they could finally live and work in the world simply as people. A few years, before Russia’s—and especially dictator Joseph Stalin’s—anti-Semitism kicked back in. They endured returned restrictions on Jewish people, Stalin’s paranoia and threats of violence against and expulsion of Jews, and then the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, which my grandfather barely managed to survive, almost becoming one of the thousands dying each month of starvation. Jacob and Anna endured war and poverty, dictatorship and societal upheaval, and never escaped the millennia of prejudice and hate that had stalked their ancestors. I’ve often wondered what of their experiences I carry in my own genes. And that of their parents and their parents and on and on and on. Those histories, and my own personal traumas, made their way into my children, through the blood and cells we shared as they became. The effects that accumulation will have on their lives is unpredictable. As far as I know, there is no study on intergenerational trauma that gives it an end date, an end generation. I read a study a while back on probable PTSD symptoms showing up in the medical records of men of ancient Mesopotamia who’d been at war. The reports say they were haunted by ghosts. What happened to the man of 14th-century BCE who’d just come home from his mandatory three-year rotation in the Assyrian army? Could he find healing in the land, or in his children; or did his pain turn inward to depression or outward to attack others? What happened to the young mother in 1226 who’d been kidnapped by slave traders in her Swedish village and found herself serving in an Ottoman household? Did she ache for home, for the relatives and sacred trees and waters she’d been torn from? What happened to those people’s children, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and those of their villages and nations? What happens to us? Patrick Teahan, a licensed therapist who maintains a YouTube channel specializing in childhood trauma, recently posted a video of a bit of his own family history: One day in the winter of 1920, his great-grandmother, who had just days before given birth to twins, was at home in County Kerry, Ireland, when members of the Black and Tans, a paramilitary British force, dragged her, her newborn twins, and the rest of her children, outside while the soldiers raided their home. Teahan’s grandfather, who was 14 at the time, came home to find the house ransacked. His mother died the next day. The experience, Teahan says, reverberated in cycles of violent abuse, from his grandfather to his father and onto him. “My grandfather’s home invasion was 106 years ago. The trauma didn’t just pocket in 1920 and filter out. It went through the generations until someone did something different.” His point in telling the story is to demonstrate the ways intergenerational trauma plays out. He gave background on who the Black and Tans were, how they were recruited and trained, and the enormous violence they inflicted on Irish people; and the parallels between their makeup, recruitment, and training, and that of the U.S. government’s ICE terrorists today. Those who inflict violence on others, he reminds us, are rarely rewarded in the end—power will discard them as soon as they no

  8. Jan 21

    Healing Long Covid

    If you’re new here, welcome to On the Commons! Some places to roam: * How, and and why, does anyone own the earth? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here. One of my oldest and closest friends, a roommate from my undergraduate days, is a public school art teacher in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the Twin Cities’ current federal government-driven violent crisis, she is part of a team arranging rides for kids, raising money for rent assistance, etc. She has given me permission to share her Venmo if you are looking for a way to contribute: https://account.venmo.com/u/AlisonShipmanThompson Recently, I stopped at the county landfill to tip my recycling into their dedicated bins. The region I live in doesn’t have much recycling. Cardboard, paper, and aluminum cans. No plastics. We used to have glass recycling but the person who owned that equipment got ill, and nobody else has been able to find enough market for the recycled products from glass. I pay for a weekly compost service, which makes me feel a little better, especially when I order compost from them in the spring and bury seed potatoes in it. Going to the landfill is both gut-wrenching and surreal. When I was a teenager, the dump was a pit in the ground. Now it’s an ever-growing small mountain. A few years ago, the county I live in purchased 90 more acres to expand the landfill, a reality that’s a bit of a brain-twister: arable, beautiful, life-giving, and expensive land is needed so that we can dump our waste, probably most of which is the result of entirely unnecessary consumption, including my own. All I can say is that most of that waste stays local. There is no out of sight out of mind; you can see the landfill just off the main highway. The recycling bins are near the appliance dump: a growing hill of dishwashers, washing machines, stoves, and refrigerators backed by stands of spruces and lodgepole pines. I often see Bald Eagles at the dump. While the sight is sad—it’s obviously the trash that draws them there—a Bald Eagle never fails to be majestic. The soul bows, as I wrote once, at the sight of that grand white head, or the speckled one of a juvenile, those enormous wings almost unmoving through the air, staying aloft with only an occasional downdraft. This time, I glanced around for Ravens and instead saw a Bald Eagle fly to the top of a tree. Then I looked more closely, my car still running with Nine Inch Nails on the CD player, and couldn’t help saying out loud to myself, whoa. I counted fifteen Bald Eagles roosting around the appliance area of the landfill, occasionally lifting off to soar over to another tree. Fifteen Bald Eagles. When I was a kid, I could not have imagined such a sight, at the dump or anywhere else. From consuming DDT in fish and other dangers—like the lead from hunting bullets that linger in animals the Eagles eat—Bald Eagles were in crisis. It was something we learned about in Montana schools, or at least the ones I attended. A passing mention: they were an endangered species but the adults had it covered, we were assured. They were fixing it. I’m going to turn 50 this year, and for about the last decade those long-ago lessons have been one of the most hopeful things I carry with me, somewhat unexpectedly. Bald Eagles were delisted from being endangered in 2007, and though we obviously live in a world run by a domination ethos, one that does not value life and in which there are very few adults “fixing” anything, a dominant culture whose soul does not bow to Eagle overhead, whether in the wilderness or at the dump, I now see Bald Eagles quite often. As a child growing up in Montana I can barely remember seeing even one. A week or two after counting fifteen of them at the dump, I was away for a weekend with some of my closest friends, near home but out of town, with long views to the mountain ranges and over farm fields. Two of my friends kept spotting Bald Eagles flying back and forth over the fields, and resting in the trees across the road. I took a few very bad photos of said Eagles. We cooked food and smelled the snow and two friends taught me and another to play pinochle. All my friends but me ventured out for forest walks and cross-country skiing. Much as my physical and mental self ached to be moving through the woods, I am only just beginning to feel a bit of strength and stamina return after at least two years of being flattened by Long Covid, and recovering from a hip surgery in October. The reality of Long Covid has been maddening. I’m tired all the time, struggle with brain fog, really feel like I shouldn’t be driving but where I live it’s almost unavoidable, and want nothing more than to lie for hours in the sun by a river. Any river. Last summer I regretfully canceled my volunteer wilderness trail crew commitment and didn’t sign up for a single barbed wire fencing removal weekend. My entire being desperately needed wilderness, and barbed wire removal in particular is one of the world-repairing tasks I like doing most, but I knew I couldn’t handle the long miles of hiking into camp, much less the longer days of manual labor. Long Covid has no real fixes from medicine yet. I am very fortunate to have a number of friends with extensive experience on both sides of medicine, both providers and patients. They have advice, and send me scientific studies and reports of treatment trials. I try different remedies. So far, what’s worked best has been excrutiatingly slow, gentle exercise, along with any long hours I can spend by myself lying on rocks near running water, doing nothing at all. I hesitate to say that nature cures, even though I believe it does and research backs that up, but it feels like about the only thing that might work in the long run. The slow, frustrating reality of trying to heal Long Covid—which I don’t even know is possible—reflects a little too closely the slow, frustrating nature of trying to heal the scars left by several millennia of domination cultures and subsequent intergenerational traumas. If we could just get a start, I keep thinking, the way I finally got a start on slow, frustrating exercise by grumbling my way to the community gym last month because the sewer backed up into my basement and I needed a place with a shower. But all those forces of domination and commodification, they don’t want to give room for a start. They might lose profits, and they might lose power, and for people whose only sustenance, whose only meaning, comes from those two things, the thought of losing them probably feels like death. The rest of us have to find our way to stopping them anyway. And in the meantime, as I try to remind both myself and readers here, there are people all over the planet getting a start on healing, on revitalization and life-giving practices, on reclaiming the commons despite forces that want nothing but more extraction, more oppression, more pain and poison and harm. The only reason humanity has survived this long is that enough people have fundamentally refused to give up caring, no matter how slow or how frustrating its results might be in coming. While hanging out on the couch of the house my friends and I were staying at, where Bald Eagles flew across much prettier landscape than that found at the dump, I thought about longstanding debates over what is deemed “natural.” About why wilderness was invented in the first place, and why protection of it is fought for: quite simply, because the dominant culture can’t seem to help destroying everything else. I had an essay published recently in American Prairie Journal with the title “Where Land Repairs the Soul.” (My essay is on p. 38, or 40 on the Issuu platform; excellent reading throughout this issue!) Among the subjects of enclosures of the commons and the meaning of wilderness, the essay was really about belonging. About what it would take for every person in every place to feel, even for a few moments, what it might mean to belong to land. Not to own it, not even necessarily to use it. Simply to belong to it. That sense of belonging comes easily to me out in the million-acre wildernesses around where I live, where I take photos to share here, photos that try to evoke some of the incredible sense of rest and being-aliveness those places give me. But if I take enough time and give enough attention, I feel it, too, at the dump, watching a Bald Eagle soar and knowing right through the soles of my feet that under and even within the appliances and mountain of trash, everything is alive. I can never disentangle myself from interconnection with it all even if I wanted to. And I don’t. I don’t want to. Learning to repair both the world and our individual selves might turn out to be one of the greatest gifts humanity has ever received, right below the gift of this miraculous planet herself. I wish the repair weren’t necessary, but it’s a process worth doing well. Who knows what this landfill will look like in a hundred years, or five hundred, or a thousand, what world the Bald Eagles’ descendants might know. Your trash might be a Bald Eagle’s treasure, and in some strange way it’s mine, too. Until March 31, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to the 2026 James Welch Native Lit Festival. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance. Receipts of revenue return can be found here. On the Commons seeks to reclaim the commons, and to revive our sense of home and responsibility to the same. In keeping with the commons, it has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Trespassing is a podcast version of the newsletter TRESPASSING, about ownership, private property, power, and what we lose in the privatization of the commons. You can listen on most podcast platforms, including YouTube. Links below. antonia.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Antonia Malchik
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Antonia Malchik
  • Show Website
    Trespassing