The two-year anniversary of Unsettling has come and gone with the recent holidays. Like many others who observe the winter solstice, I took that day to reflect upon what I might leave behind in the dark and what I hope to grow with the light. My own ritual tries to make the practice material, sitting in the actual dark until I am sure of what I am releasing in the old year and only then lighting a candle as I speak aloud what I wish to grow as the sun returns.
This year I sat in the dark a long, long time, trying to sense and see the themes of the year, assess personal challenges that were ready at this particular moment to be looked squarely in the face and then let go of. Only I came up empty.
Ritual can accomplish many goals. One of them is a sense of agency, the performance of intent. This gets extra play in a culture centered on individualism, with all its related focus on self-help or self-actualization. That this is the focus in my own solstice ritual may be why it took a very long time for me to accept that there were no personal demons to lay to rest just at this moment—that what would be staying in the dark had been chosen for me, and that “laying to rest” was, this year, quite literal. It felt too obvious, but the truth of it was bare and real, the memory of gathering with all of my siblings to bid farewell to one of our parents not yet a week old.
At the beginning of this year, I wrote a lot here about rivers—the harm that human industry has wrought on them, our attempts to control them, the resulting consequences on ways for living in common. On the solstice, the image of a river kept appearing to me once again. Rivers, those vast and shifting beings that channel and carry so much.
One of a river’s powers is its ability to carry the earth along with it—be it boulders moved by rapid glacial melt or the tiniest grains of sand—and then, just as importantly, to leave that earth behind. Neither the carrying nor the leaving perhaps quite fits with our sometimes narrow notions of agency. But the growth of so much life—including our own—depends on rivers as major agents of change: all those centuries of delta deposits have made much of human civilization possible. The mountains cut down and the oceans swell and all the world is fed along the way as rivers pick up and let go, pick up and let go.
No wonder rivers are classic metaphors for both change and life. There in the dark, though, I began to wonder if we aren’t overly stuck in one particular riverine analogy. I’m thinking of the classic “you never step in the same river twice,” which places us humans on the banks, separate from the water, choosing when to step in and out of the flow of change. This emphasis may not have been intentional, coming from Heraclitus, famous for thinking about flow and impermanence. Still, we end up some place quite different if we conceive of ourselves not as spectators on the shore but as rivers ourselves, receiving and carrying unexpected gifts and weights from the world, all of which we must leave behind, thereby transforming both the channel in which we flow and the objects we have borne as surely as they transform us. That we may not actively choose what we carry or when we must bid it farewell in no way diminishes neither the importance of our action nor or power as actors.
So what have we channeled this year at Unsettling? Where all did we go and where do we find ourselves now at year’s end, and what got polished or broken apart on our way? Here are some of 2022’s major themes, some planned and some pleasantly unexpected:
Commons Resources, Old and New
Our reading list early in the year was full of titles examining the potential for common ownership, and in a separate post we bluntly tried to persuade you to check out The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking. Recently, we provided a quick overview of one of the newer experiments in collective land ownership, the Agrarian Commons, and shared how your subscriptions are supporting one specific project in Central Virginia (“Funding Collective Land Ownership: The Agrarian Commons”).
Rivers as Commons
How well do we know the rivers around us, and have we lost skill in assessing their life? That’s the question I posed after learning more about my own local rivers in January’s “This River is Super.” Then, we connected rivers to shared land use by learning about dams as a means for destroying the natural commons that rivers create. We took a look at parallel processes of enclosure by dams across the globe (“For the Greater Common Good?”) before diving more into related issues like access to water, efforts for connecting to watersheds, and the movement for taking down dams across Turtle Island (“Rivers and Dams Resource Roundup,” Part 1 and Part 2).
Movement and Change
Might our conceptions of place or land change if we cease to think of them as mostly static, background entities? Do we have better understandings of ourselves and where we live if we see people and place both as entangled mobile entities? These are just a couple of the questions raised in a number of essays on movement, migration, and change. In “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet,” we looked at how seemingly still parts of the desert landscape are more mobile than they appear at first glance. In “Return of the Turkey Vulture” and “A Note from the Beach,” we wrote about ways to celebrate cycles of movement; the latter piece dove a little into the history of the enclosures in Europe and forceful attempts to halt the free movement of others. And in “Questions From and For the Road,” I took some time to reflect on the complex nature of mobility and belonging, including the benefits of being still and the forces that keep us from doing so, while wondering if the impulse to keep on the go might have its uses:
I had taken the internship that summer to learn how to build connections between people, that we might achieve something greater together, but I left understanding that the broader cultural change for which we advocated required other forms of connection as well, and that somehow I was going to need to know about trees and fish and streams, not just how to get people to a city hall meeting. Most of all, I was coming to see that this would take time; that to steward a place, or protect it, one needed to stick around, see its own cycles of change for enough years to know when something was off—to recognize when the number of logging trucks was unusually high, to notice a new bit of fence or a “keep out” sign where none should exist.
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?
Opening our eyes to movement in the supposedly slow-moving landscape is one way to stay attuned to and accepting of the fact of change, as we find ways to stay emotionally grounded and prepare for a future of almost constant change and uncertainty. That was the theme of one of the year’s more popular pieces, “Living Through the Unlivable,” where we learned from poet Lucia Perillo’s encounter with chronic illness about how to adjust to sudden and unexpected changes in fate.
Living With Fire
To really apply these lessons about living with change, we dug into the fear that can inform our perspective on one such agent of change—fire—and attempted to look at it from different angles. In the opening post, “Prepping for Fire Season,” we asked:
What happens if we pause to look at fire without fleeing or freezing? What can the experience of fire offer us? What happens when we sit with the loss? Do we mentally write off places that have burned, think of them as ‘gone,’ when there might be a moment of connecting with that land instead? Can we imagine living through, or living with, fire, rather than simply suppressing it or running away from it?
And we followed that up with a meditation on the benefits of fire in “Through the Smoke, A Clearing”:
Before the era of fire suppression, and thus before the era of big fire, people knew fire in this way: as a tool for crafting the kind of empty space that invites new life. A friend with which to forge a meadow. Fire could be brought to the overly busy underbrush, allowing, after its passage, straight new chutes to be gathered and made into baskets—baskets, themselves the keepers of a welcoming emptiness, absences summoning future fullness.
Then we got up close with the fallout of fire, finding new forms of beauty in burns with the photo essays “Texture of a Burn” and “Fire Season Arrives: Fire as Sculptor.”
Connecting with the Substack Community
In our fire series we took a moment to make use of some of the features this particular platform is building to connect writers and readers, using Substack’s ‘Recommendations’ tool to share about Jan Selby’s Fires.
We also directed you to Trevor Smith’s Reparations Daily(ish), as a way to get more regular updates on the fight for reparations.
In the spring we celebrated that you can read Unsettling while avoiding your email, by using the Substack app. And in the fall we experimented with the new option to include audio recordings with a reading of “The Anthropocene is Haunted.” (I didn’t sense quite enough enthusiasm from you all to warrant my acquiring better recording equipment to do more of these, though; tell me if you disagree!)
Catching up With Deb Haaland and the DOI
Also this fall, we reviewed efforts at the Department of the Interior that are knitting together cultural restoration with practices like tribal co-management of public lands, setting the stage for a very different relationship between tribal nations and the U.S. government more broadly. (See “Meanwhile, Back at Interior” and “Back at Interior: Reconciliation, Repatriation, Reparations?.”)
While there’s plenty of reason to remain skeptical that large federal agencies create more solutions than they do problems, our foray into understanding how both the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are playing out at Interior, and with regard to climate policy specifically, led us to feeling unexpectedly hopeful, and I took a stab at talking about the potentially tedious topic of state administration with a more mythic and adventurous tone in October’s “Wizards of Bureaucracy.”
Shifting Culture, From Heroes to Holidays
Federal policy at Interior is one way of achieving change. We also took some extended time poking apart the cultural beliefs that underpin our conceptions of wilderness and land, and argued that shifting these may be just as important; national land management, after all, has long depended on strange divisions between humans and nature and an ideal of “wilderness” as something set apart from cultural practice.
In the first part of our series “Moving Beyond Muir,” we asked both how we might let go of cultural icons that shore up those self-defeating ideals, and shared the conversations that took place during my travels along the Nüümü Poyo—aka the John Muir Trail—in an attempt to further the process of reimagining and re-remembering that landscape.
Part 2 highlighted some notoriously racist passages from Muir’s writings, and asked us to consider why we find ourselves so tempted to write them off as unimportant. Then Part 3 connected Muir’s beliefs to the image we have of him as the heroic and solitary naturalist and mountaineer, and asked whether that perspective, and the resulting naturalization of the idea “wilderness,” is really taking us where we want to go.
In November, we offered ways to support land return efforts while shifting one’s practices at the Thanksgiving Holiday in the post Rethinking and Reshaping Thanksgiving. Building on that, I shared about my decision to fast on that day as a way to honor the National Day of Mourning while interrogating my own experience of abundance (“To Feast or Fast?”).
For right relationship to abundance—in fact, the ability to even see the plentitude around us as abundance—has everything to do with how we think about land and all our co-inhabitants. This was the theme as well in the April essay “For the Many Hands and Many Beings”:
I can spin out ideas about how to build community while itinerant, or the responsibilities of the visitor or remote worker, or elaborate whole theories of a place-based ethic. But none of those are really going to land, or have much effect, if they aren’t rooted in this kind of sensibility first. Can you see all the beings around you? And would you, foolish though it may feel or no, stop to offer them thanks?
That pause, that offering of appreciation, is basic. It’s fundamental. And it flies in the face of all the boot-strapping pioneer ideology that props up the dominant conception of what we call the United States, and all the harried individualism of modern capitalism. Whatever we build to replace these social structures, it will need to start here: with a pause to see and to acknowledge, and with offerings of gratitude and grace.
Ending this recap with such gratitude seems more than appropriate. Many thanks both to all of you who have come along this entire year, and to the many new readers who have joined along the way. If you like these varied explorations and know others who might as well, please consider sharing this post with them:
Until next time,
Meg