Unsettling's 2022 Reading List
The books helping shape this year's inquiries into land, ownership, and reparations
We’re a week into the new calendar year, a good time to ask: where to for Unsettling in 2022?
One way to gauge what’s likely to appear here in future months is to take a look at my my reading piles: what I’ve read lately, what’s half-finished and piled on my desk, and hopeful lists of future reading for the year. (As a former bookseller, I use book piles to navigate not only intellectual pursuits but pretty much my entire life.) Here’s a little tour of potential themes, subjects, and questions for 2022, seen from the vantage point of my bookshelf and nightstand.
COMMONS AND TRUSTS
On top of the to-read pile? Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance by Peter Linebaugh, with a note to find a copy of Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici.
There are some conspicuous topics pertaining to land ownership that we haven’t touched on much here, most specifically notions of ‘the commons’ as well as various formations of land trusts. In part I didn’t jump right in on these because they seemed so obvious, and it can often be useful to hold off a moment on those approaches that appear self-evident, to see what else might come up instead. Nor is the intent of Unsettling to be solutions-style journalism, necessarily, and reporting on land trusts and cooperative land ownership often takes that tone. Such prevaricating over with, it also seems silly that we have yet to dive either into the history of common land ownership and ‘the commons’ (as it is generally called in the often Anglo-centered discourse within certain leftist circles, though there are other names for it as well), the history of enclosures and land theft, and the incredibly rich research into how we might revive or invent practices of cooperative use and care of the commons, and some of the overlapping experimentation happening in the world of land trusts seeking to remove land from typical market influences (or at least ameliorate the impact of such influence on parties of concern, be it low-income home owners or endangered species).
Next to Linebaugh’s Stop Thief! is a copy of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, with a bookmark not too far in, which I placed there as I paused to go read some introductory game theory to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. (Nothing has felt too over my head yet, just wanting to make sure I keep pace, and if the rest of this reading list is any indicator, the Econ department is not usually where I hang out.)
I expect to learn much from Ostrom, who argues for cooperative institutions that defy modern expectations of either centralized state action or large private enterprise. One might think that such a perspective could dovetail well with a book titled Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, but the Nobel Prize-winning economist is notably missing from the index in this worked jointly authored by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl. The long list of entries under “common ownership,” however, as well as the first chapter’s declaration that “Property is Monopoly,” suggests that there will be some intriguing questions raised, even if I expect Posner and Weyl to be a little more aligned with the established liberal order than I tend to be myself.
I’ve yet to stumble into great books on land trusts, relying more upon online sources such as Shelterforce. But I am looking forward to reading Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present when it comes out later this year, and learning more about the present solidarity economy strategy of Cooperation Jackson as it strives to build a local network of community land trusts and worker-owned cooperatives in Jackson, MS.1
COLLECTIVE GOVERNANCE
“The commons” and “common ownership” are deeply intertwined with questions of collective governance, both its past and future potential shapes. The belief in the possibility of such governance and in cooperation as a central theme in human history, as well as our ability for practicing freedom and collective care, has always played an important role in the thought of anthropologist David Graeber. Although Graeber unfortunately passed away in the fall of 2020, he left us with one final book, a collaboration with archaeologist David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The two set out to tell a new story of history, one that avoids being trapped either in Hobbesian myths of the Leviathan state as inevitable and necessary or in Rousseaian dreams of a return to our ‘unfallen’ happy state (be it pre-agriculture or pre-city). Human history, they argue, is as full of experimentations in social organization as one might expect, given the playfulness of the human species. They don’t pretend that they can capture all that history in a single volume, but they do hope to reorient the practice of history to a good deal of information it has heretofore ignored, and revive the question of freedom (in place of the question of inequality) as a central concern for those with utopian or socialist impulses. (I happen to be reading this with a bunch of social ecologists involved a wide array of cooperative projects across the continent, via a weekly reading group that meets over Zoom. If joining such a group appeals to anyone, the invite is open; send me a message and I’ll share the info.)
Graeber’s take on freedom gets a strong shoutout from queer critic and poet Maggie Nelson in her latest work, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, where she writes, “I have taken as my guide the words of anthropologist David Graeber, who wrote in Possibilities: ‘Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” What can that possibly mean in an era of runaway climate change, an era caused, one might argue, by the dedication of some to certain habits of what they experience as freedom (automobile use as just one example)? This is part of what Nelson considers in her fourth essay or ‘song,’ which I finished reading only a few short hours ago. There’s no quick-and-easy answer to summarize here, but important questions to take along with us, of how we tell stories and think about time and relate to indeterminacy.
And here’s another question to throw in the mix: might some landscapes be more conducive to freedom? That’s one I’ve been holding since perusing James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States last summer, which I hope to revisit alongside a long-overdue first reading of his well-known Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott suggests that landscapes such as wetlands allowed various populations to avoid the drudging labor of grain-based agriculture, and that the destruction of such ecologies has allowed for the forced sedentism of and greater state control over previously unsettled groups. Which may suggest some of my motivation behind this next topic:
DAMS, WATER RIGHTS, AND THE RIGHTS OF RIVERS
In December I finished a classic piece on land policy in the western United States and the attempts of John Wesley Powell to connect that to water policy and centralized planning on water use, Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Many of Powell’s proposals before and during his tenure as the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey did not see realization during his life2, but the decades to follow would see the establishment of the Bureau of Reclamation and, many would argue, an era of excessive dam construction. There’s another classic capturing the history of that bureau, as well as that of the Army Corps of Engineers, which I’ve meant to read for years and will be picking up shortly, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. Part of the story there, certainly, is the displacement of Indigenous people as the result of dam building and reservoir-creation, as occurred at Hetch Hetchy. This is a global phenomenon, and ongoing; one need only consider the millions mandated to relocate so that the Three Gorges Dam might be built on the Yangtze River.
Displacement via dams has often been followed by a denial of usage rights along the newly dammed river. The refusal to allow access to subsistence fishing at traditional fishing sites—forcing displaced river-based groups to find new sources of food or integrate into the cash economy—remains an active issue in Salmon Nation, as well documented in Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River, by journalist Roberta Ulrich. Dams on the Columbia and Snake River both have disrupted not only human lifeways but that of their most iconic species, salmon. This is clearly a much-discussed issue in the region, but I’ve been enjoying fisheries scientist Jim Lichatowich’s detailed history of Pacific salmon and his forceful arguments for breaching dams as a needed strategy to ensure their survival in Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis.
Can dam removal save salmon? Might it also restore entire landscapes and allow for resilient and traditional lifeways that we will need in future years? What happens when we can rely on a river for food, rather than relying on a river as a highway for the transport of food grown elsewhere? What can the history of building dams to help ostensibly rationalize water distribution tell us about likely issues and challenges we must consider in the years of drought sure to keep coming? What might happen if we think of rivers as beings in their own right, and with rights, as some are pushing for? These are the kinds of questions I’m curious about—not to mention that one can take all the questions about collective governance of land and just as easily ask them of water.
BORDERS AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY
I’ll be back down by the U.S.-Mexico border in February, which seems like a fruitful time to revisit Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, which I read for the first time in 2021, just before my trip to the Rio Grande. As a companion piece I’m considering re-reading Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity—I have a much-underlined copy from my graduate school time some years ago. Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule has lingered on my to-read list since last January, and I’m wondering if this is the year I’ll finally make it through Mimi Sheller’s Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. (I know from her talks that the book is full of useful analyses, but the prose style unfortunately leaves a little to be desired.)
A common theme in all these feminist-oriented discussions of the border is that the creation and enforcement of social identities can act, in their own way, as the creation of a border, and that the use of force and power on both a social border and a physically-constructed borderline can have real consequences. Can we dissolve some of the rigidity of our social ‘borders’, and what does that do for national borders?
Such a framing suggests that such dissolution of identity is desirable, but that certainly isn’t a given. As the editors of Voices from Bears Ears: Seeking Common Ground on Sacred Land aim to illustrate, a strong sense of personal and communal identity often aids a sense of land stewardship. But what happens when two different social groups with identity-based attachment to land are at odds with one other over that land? Can the fact that both have a place-based identity serve as a basis for cooperation rather than antagonism?
As it happens, I’ll be heading from Bisbee, AZ, near the border, up to Bears Ears in late March, allowing for a place-based reflection on these questions.
REPARATIONS
I haven’t stumbled upon much compelling reading about reparations as yet—this might be another area in which the web is keeping a bit ahead of the world of print publishing—but did just learn that Olúfhemi O. Táíwò (a philosopher whose work I first came to know, as it happens, through Twitter) is publishing a book on the subject, Reconsidering Reparations, due out now only a few weeks. Táíwò aims to tie together the current climate crisis and an argument for reparations and colonialism both, which certainly seems pertinent to our interests here.
So that’s one version of how this year might proceed. Yet learning and writing being the journeys that they are, diversions and distractions both good and bad and sudden changes of plans are all wont to happen. But as any traveler knows, it’s the unexpected events that make for the best stories, so I hope none of you will be too disappointed if I veer off course. In fact, I’d love to have some reader-inspired side-trips: send your ideas (and your reading suggestions) to unsettling@substack.com.
Until next time,
Meg
This is the second book on the efforts of Cooperation Jackson; the first is Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Self-determination and Economic Democracy in Jackson, Mississippi.
Though many did; Powell, it turns out, is largely responsible for ensuring that topographic maps of the expanding U.S. empire were made. All those topo maps you can buy at REI, or download on your phone, to use when you go hiking? Generally they’re based on work by the USGS, initiated by Powell.