Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?

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 [https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/nearly-50-000-lake-tahoe-residents-have-to-find-a-new-power-source-after-their-energy-source-looks-to-redirect-lines-to-data-centers/ar-AA2319cx?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6a053272dcc2450e82b9be3ebb868a9f&ei=50], 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 [https://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/sites/ca10/files/opinions/010111205718.pdf], 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 [https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/08/georgia-data-centers-water-00909988] 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 [https://substack.com/profile/22713961-swarnali-mukherjee]’s incredible writing on Britain’s wealth extraction [https://berkana.cc/p/awakening-from-the-colonial-dream?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=381164&post_id=141358600&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=2cyoe&triedRedirect=true] 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 list examples all day, many of them within an hour’s drive of where I live. I’m sure everyone reading this can think of any number of similar examples within seconds. During a conference I attended a couple years ago on the Doctrine of Discovery, Steven T. Newcomb, author of Pagans in the Promised Land and co-producer of a documentary on the Doctrine of Discovery [https://originalfreenations.com/the-doctrine-of-discovery-unmasking-the-domination-code-2/], said that private property rights do not in fact grant ownership. What they do is grant a right of domination: “Property isn’t a right of possession,” he said, “it’s a right of domination.” If you “own” land, you have the right to extract from it, abuse it, forbid other humans from stepping on it, or even care for it if you wish. You could stop treating land as “it” and instead treat land as kin. But there’s no requirement that you do so. And if someone more powerful comes along who wants to dominate that land in a different way, the bedrock contained in the idea of private property allows them to do so. The same is true of water, electricity, seeds, air, trees, rare earth minerals; knowledge, imagination, your mind, your relationships. The law as it currently stands does not protect life. It doesn’t even truly protect rights. It protects property. And the transformation of property into power compounds over time. The reality we live in is, in fact, exactly the kind of economy that Adam Smith, the famous advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and author of The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), warned against: one controlled by monopolists and rentiers, in which those who already own extract their wealth from everyone else. The only way to shift this reality is to build a world around the collective good—of people, but also of wildlife and wild waters, of Tamarack trees and Mountain Chickadees, of starry nights and air you can breathe, of mountains as sacred and oceans as sovereign. And of histories that deserve sunlight and reparations. Some places are beginning to enact those values in real time. In the state of Oregon, the Public Service Commission just passed a rule that forces data centers to pay for any needed infrastructure upgrades, rather than passing that cost on to individual ratepayers. In Idaho, the state legislature is moving on legislation that restricts data centers’ use of water. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance [https://ilsr.org/podcasts/] (ILSR) has been working on community-controlled electricity for over 50 years, and their work expands to all kinds of community power. In countries all over the world, people are pushing back against the rights of data centers’ owners to extract water and electricity and land and make the rest of us pay for it. Ownership will never guarantee rights, much less safety. Security lies not in pride and what we can own individually—not in our ability to dominate—but in humility and in what we can care for and manage together. Enclosures of the commons destroys all forms of relationship—with land, water, animals, and one another. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, TRESPASSING has no paywall and uses no AI in writing or research. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute [https://www.thesalishinstitute.com/home]. Receipts of revenue return can be found here [https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return]. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 [https://humansandnature.org/elementals/]Elementals [https://humansandnature.org/elementals/] anthology [https://humansandnature.org/elementals/]: “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 [https://antonia.substack.com/p/border-unruly?utm_source=publication-search] 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 [https://antonia.substack.com/p/moral-codes-that-withstand-the-wreckage] 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 [https://antonia.substack.com/p/fox-owns-herself] 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 a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute [https://www.thesalishinstitute.com/home]. Receipts of revenue return can be found here [https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return]. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

When the world shut down

Somewhere between 112,000 and 121,000 years ago, a person walked along the muddy residue of a lake [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/footprints-oldest-evidence-humans-arabian-peninsula] 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 [https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-walking-life-reclaiming-our-health-and-our-freedom-one-step-at-a-time-antonia-malchik/6dd026c2cc49b577?ean=9780738234885&next=t], 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaX02XQV09I]. Our ability to love and care for one another, to treat all life as relations, goes back, I learned from Dr. Feldman [https://aeon.co/essays/why-care-and-the-scare-are-inseparable-when-you-love-someone], 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 deeper question, one that asks us to sink into our evolutionary inheritance and decide at every moment, in every encounter, whether with humans or not: am I being relational, or am I being transactional? And likewise, to have the discernment to know when we ourselves, or others, are being treated transactionally rather than in relationship. This second aspect can be more difficult: it can be easy to excuse how someone treats people in their personal life when we perceive their public actions as beneficial, without realizing the interpersonal and even soul-level harm that’s perpetuated by private cruelty and lack of personal accountability. One of the gifts of the work I do, whether when editing, or research and writing, is being constantly reminded of the vast timeframes of human existence, and the even vaster ones of life itself. One of the fossils I wrote about in A Walking Life is of Sahelanthropus tchadensis, dated to around six or seven million years ago. There is nothing that has made me believe in miracles and magic more than getting grounded in the millions of years and countless tiny shifts of evolutionary biology that somehow resulted in our own lives, in today. Excuse my language, but it’s f*****g awesome. It really is. Somewhere in that biological history we evolved a capacity for partnership, interdependence, and caring, and it’s been far more influential in our continuing evolution than traits for domination and competition. I don’t know how the latter started to become predominant in human societies reaching back nearly 10,000 years ago—there are theories related to a shift from hunter-gather to settled agricultural societies and the subsequent rise of city-states—nor do I know fully how to make the former the expected norm again. But I think we can begin by each strengthening our own innate capacity for relationship. By slowing down, observing and being part of the lives we exist within; by getting to know people well enough to see them clearly, and ourselves well enough to see us clearly. We all have the right, and the capacity, to shape a world around relationship. Billions of feet are wandering Earth right now. Each of them leaves a story, whether it’s fossilized for the study of scientists and poets 100,000 years from now or not. Whether those stories will show future generations our time’s shift from harm to care, from extraction to kinship, rests partly on obvious and visible choices our societies make now, but also on the thousands of imperceptibly small steps each of us takes next. Enclosures of the commons destroys all forms of relationship—with land, water, animals, and one another. In keeping with the integrity of the commons, this newsletter has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Until June 30, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to The Salish Institute [https://www.thesalishinstitute.com/home]. Receipts of revenue return can be found here [https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return]. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/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,” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55410/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” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55424/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 [https://daily.jstor.org/haunted-soldiers-in-mesopotamia/] 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 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgPRdMBjSgU]: 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 longer serve a use. In Teahan’s words, “Power does not love you,” but all have to live with what they have done. Many Black and Tans, when the the force was disbanded, were rehired and posted to then British-ruled Palestine. Teahan’s story reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenneger’s personal video a few years ago [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsETTn7DehI], about his father, an angry man hiding in alcohol, the inevitable outcome of rage and shame many men experienced after participation in World War II as Nazi soldiers: “They drank to numb their pain. Their bodies were riddled with injuries and shrapnel from the evil of war, and their hearts and their minds were equally riddled with guilt. . . . They were all broken in the same way.” The perpetrators of violence have to live with what they have done, but so do their victims, and descendants of both not even born. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that all of us carry widely varying degrees of ancestral hardship, oppression, violence, and shame deep in our marrow. I wonder about the grief of those who saw the sacred groves felled or witnessed the massacres of their mothers, sisters, and brothers as witches; and what is carried by those who themselves participate in massacres of people, and what each passes onto their descendants, and for how long. I wonder, a lot, about my own lineage, how an ancestral legacy of fear and oppression and violent prejudice that extends back millennia can transmute itself. How it turns, in cases like my grandparents, to unshakeable moral codes of honesty, hard work, and generosity; yet in others warps into a strangely shaped sense of entitlement, license to perpetuate the violence of generations on others. The neurochemical balance that helps humans maintain a sense of right and wrong, love and hate, is shaped by shadows, some of them ancient, some of them hiding in our own cells. Maybe my yearning for Russia is a short intergenerational root, or maybe it comes simply from having lived there and fallen in love with it as a teen. Maybe if I visited my grandfather’s Ukrainian village I’d feel something entirely different, something closer to what I feel in Montana, as if I want to spend every day of the rest of my life walking the lands barefoot and drinking the waters unfiltered. Or maybe I’d feel the terror of generations living with that land under the threat of violence and expulsion, never quite able to feel safe, never able to feel at home. Never feeling a sense of belonging at all. The say ars longa, vita brevis—roughly translated as “skill takes time, life is short”—but maybe vita is far longer than we care to think about. One story might take a lifetime to write well, but it draws on years and generations beyond count. Our stories don’t just live on by being told. They live on because the lives of those long gone are carried as complex messages in our DNA, as sparks in our hearts. They live on because we live on. “A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.”—Marina Tsvetaeva, “a kiss on the forehead,” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55422/a-kiss-on-the-forehead] 1917 On the Commons seeks to reclaim the commons, and to revive our sense of belonging with home—all our homes. In keeping with the commons, it has no paywall. To support further research, please consider a paying subscription. Until March 31, 5% of On the Commons revenue will be given to the 2026 James Welch Native Lit Festival [https://www.jameswelchfestival.org/]. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance [https://firekeeperalliance.org/]. Receipts of revenue return can be found here [https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return]. Get full access to TRESPASSING at antonia.substack.com/subscribe [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 [https://antonia.substack.com/p/reading-who-owns-the-earth-by-andro]? * The limitations of meditation and lure of silence [https://antonia.substack.com/p/on-silence-and-not-meditating-through]. * Walkability when a problem is systemic, or: you can’t solve for traffic [https://antonia.substack.com/p/when-a-problem-is-systemic-or-you]. ✔️ Join over 7,000 On the Commons readers. Upgrade here [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe]. 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 [https://account.venmo.com/u/AlisonShipmanThompson] if you are looking for a way to contribute: https://account.venmo.com/u/AlisonShipmanThompson [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 [https://issuu.com/americanprairie.org/docs/american_prairie_journal_vol._2_-_2025].” (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 [https://www.jameswelchfestival.org/]. Last quarter’s 5% went to Firekeeper Alliance [https://firekeeperalliance.org/]. Receipts of revenue return can be found here [https://antonia.substack.com/p/revenue-return]. 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 [https://antonia.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]