Hello good readers of Unsettling! I hope you are all handling the seasonal transition with ease. Here in the western half of Turtle Island we experienced a final flare-up of wildfire activity in the last few weeks, and if you’re on Washoe Territory (Lake Tahoe area), where it’s still going, my thoughts are certainly with you. (For anyone looking to support relief efforts for the Mosquito Fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills right now, there are many GoFundMe efforts for individuals online and both Placer and El Dorado Community Foundations are collecting funds as well.)
Myself, I’m on the coast just now, on the lands of the Clatsop and Nehalem other peoples affiliated both with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and of the Siletz Indians. (Some #LandBack in action took place last year nearby, with the Clatsop-Nehalem tribes resuming stewardship over acreage just a few miles north of here.)
Wildfire smoke gets strange in coastal air; never as thick and heavy as the inland valleys, the tang of sea salt remains an undercurrent. One picks out notes of charred chaparral laced with damp sand dune, as though less healthy air were some kind of fine wine. But it’s not just the aroma that shifts the mood, it’s the change in light. The time of day already gets a little muddy in marine environs, gray cloaks of cloud drifting down whenever they please, and the gritty orange glare joining in just heightens that effect.
Sans the extra orange cast—which only lasted a few days—the light is why I’m here. This is the third year I’ll be at the coast for the fall equinox, a practice I came to unintentionally at first but that seems to have stuck. The beach is a marker of summer, of course, so being here at the season’s end feels like a proper place to bid the sun farewell. But there’s also something about being on the western edge of the continent as the light swiftly changes. Watching the sunset is an esteemed activity here, with a bit of competition by locals and visitors both to snag the limited seating available on the benches one can find where the streets dead-end at the sand. The benches sit a bit lifted from the beach itself and offer excellent views of Sol dropping down into the water.
Yet this close to fall, the actual time for sunset changes rapidly; by the month’s end it will go down nearly one full hour earlier than when I first arrived. The entire end-of-day sunset viewing ritual keeps me alert to the waning light and the opportunity I have to be with it, more so than when I am further inland and may suddenly notice at September’s end that dinner seems to happen after sundown.
What I love most, though, is that even while the light grows less and less as measured by time, when taken by volume it feels as expansive as ever. It bounces big and high with each bit of wave it catches, and shimmers grand and heavy when the water slows. I feel surrounded, hugged and kissed by sunlight in these last weeks before the sky pulls it all away and leaves us with the oncoming cold embrace of winter. And I feel held, balanced between the two seasons in tandem with the sun, not just tumbling into the flurry of change brought on by autumn.
Why a newsletter mostly about sunset at the beach? Well, to be honest, because it’s been a couple weeks since we wrapped up the “Moving Beyond Muir” series (Parts 1, 2, and 3 in case you missed them) and we’re due for a piece, but I got myself rather entangled in reviewing Interior Department documents in prep for our next posts, and felt as though I owed you at least this note between now and when those get finished.
Being caught up in bureaucratic memos makes me think it’s also a good moment to offer some transparency about how Unsettling gets produced; even pieces here that seem that seem predominately drawn from personal or travel narratives often have a fair amount of research behind them. That’s because I do my best to be as accurate as possible, and this can take one down some surprising routes. For instance: in the Prepping for Fire Season series, I thought I might build an essay focusing on the interaction of water and fire, with charcoal as a key image. We use charcoal to filter water in many contexts, and I had heard someone comment that wildfires may actually improve water quality because they help put charcoal into streams and creeks. I liked this idea very much and was having fun playing with the water/fire theme.
However, after a couple hours of searching through and reading abstracts in various science and industry journals, I had no verification about this phenomenon at all. There’s a lot of evidence for the ways wildfires negatively impact watersheds, but also very little study done on the subject overall and quite a few unanswered questions. Is charcoal filtration a bit of Traditional Ecological Knowledge that has yet to make it into academic papers? Possibly, but either way, I certainly didn’t know enough about it. The metaphor I’d been building got dropped; that particular piece got scrapped. Such labor is often invisible when it comes to writing, but it’s there, and part of why it’s never bad to buy a book or find other ways to support the authors you know and like. Especially if they’ve done their job well, and the piece seems both informative but easy and natural, there was probably a lot of unseen labor behind it.
With that, here’s the link to subscribe and support Unsettling, should you like what you’ve been reading here:
Setting all that aside, I think there’s also something to be said for attending to seasonal cycles as we consider questions on land and shared governance and all the other things that fall under our rather wide umbrella here. We—humans, that is—go different places and do different things in different seasons, and not just our patterns of activities but our internal experience, our emotions and thoughts, often shift seasonally as well. These are mundane and cliché observations. And yet, I would ask you, in what way are they really taken into account in the way we think about and plan for land use in the modern era?
I live in a territory where people once moved from mountain to river to coast and back again, for different purposes at different times. It’s an extremely sensible way to live here: there are fish in the rivers at some times, and not at others; berries in the mountains during only a few months; better and worse times to dig for clams or seek out crabs on the coast. And there are changing conditions calling us to play or gather in different ways in all these places in different seasons as well. Yet, somehow, the predominant infrastructures and institutional frameworks we have created socially presume, for the most part, that we are in one place most of the time, that those places are static, and that we ought to be able to do the same activities uniformly throughout the entire year.
Put in another way: we have made rather impossible the existence of social structures that would allow a large portion of the populace (or all of it) to move across the land in seasonally appropriate manners—save for those with excessive material means who are able to lay claim to multiple places at once (summer beach condo, winter ski cabin, house or large apartment in the city—those folks). The mismatch between existing infrastructure and the desire to move is obvious in the conflicts and negative impacts of the digital nomad class that has grown with the increase in remote work during the pandemic. Some of that conflict is pure and simple class conflict; some is because too many people lack an orientation that could produce respectful and aware engagement with the morés and needs of local communities; and some is because we don’t have built into our social fabrics ways to easily absorb mass movement across the landscape. Our housing structures are too rigid and too expensive, our property lines too deterministic; it’s all set up to keep people out, not to welcome them in with flexibility and ease.
It will be unfortunate if conversations about “nomadism” in the coming years focus only on the new wave of van life travelers and remote workers. For there is, I think, a great deal we might learn if we begin asking very practical questions about how we might facilitate movement, rather than restrict it, as a way to both reconnect with natural solar and land cycles and processes, and as a way to take away our fear of “refugee crises.” What if mass movement wasn’t a crisis because casual movement due to social and natural causes (disastrous but also not) was simply accounted for in how we structured our social world?
There’s plenty to work through there. But just, for a second, ask: what if?
There’s a long tradition in Marxist-influenced history and social theory on the topic of “primitive accumulation,” the process by which capitalists seized the most basic entity of production (the land), and, simultaneously, created the laboring class by removing them from said productive land, and then also restricting and policing their movement, requiring their presence in cities and towns. Such thinkers point to the way that enclosures and vagrancy laws happen at the same time, for a shared purpose. Get out of the forest, work in the factory, or end up in jail, was basically the threat and order of the day.1
Which I bring up as a way to also suggest: maybe those economic and social structures that keep us bound to one place, or let’s say, tied to a desk and tied to an address, have other reasons to be questioned?
Whelp—from beach sunsets to primitive accumulation—this has turned out to be a bit more than the short “note” I first intended. A sign that some of these themes and questions that have been simmering all year might be ready to boil over and out, I suppose. For some of these thoughts echo what I wrote back in February, in “Questions For and From the Road”:
Now, here I am, and now, it is time for new questions: What does right relationship to place mean when one is not a permanent resident? Can we avoid the harms so often caused by the more mobile classes? Can we make meaningful, deep attachments to multiple places? The phrase “polyamory of place” came to mind recently, as I thought about how poly folks attempt to love multiple people deeply at the same time, against social expectations that would limit the number of our intimate relations.
Can answering these questions help us see an ethical path forward, for those of us who cannot claim indigeneity, whose ancestors were themselves settlers with broken roots, or otherwise displaced, memories of home discarded or forgotten? What might I learn when aiming merely to be with a place, rather than seeking or presuming either ownership or belonging?
And most of all, what questions have I been missing, have I not yet learned to ask? What questions might each new place teach me to raise?
Well, here’s a tentative answer, from the edge of the continent at the edge of summer: maybe “permanent residency” in narrowly defined territories has never been how we were supposed to live. Maybe we have always been meant to seek cooler air on the coast or up in the mountains in the hottest months; to stay down where it’s warm in the winter; to follow the Chinook runs in the spring. Or to come visit the sun and sit in its presence before it slips away for the fall.
What if?
More coming soon. Public Lands Day is just around the corner, so we’ll be sharing some of my favorite stories about successful efforts on keeping land for public use, and also looking at what the Interior Department has (and hasn’t) accomplished thus far under the Biden administration. Plus Landback updates and more.
If that all sounds great to you, here’s that subscription link once more:
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg
Personally I continue to draw on the work of Silvia Federici, which offers a feminist analysis of primitive accumulation to talk about how, beyond enclosure and the criminalization of vagrancy, we also ended up with witch hunts and more restrictive gender norms at that same time. See her Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.