I’ve been imagining what it’s like to walk in one direction. Or, better yet, to run. You hear about serious ultra marathoners who cover hundreds of miles without rest — I’m not one of them — but the point is, I’m imagining significant overground movement. It's not along a path or a street. Just, in a direction.
Isn’t that strange?
I imagine passing through picketed yards, moving diagonally across city street grids and over highways. I'd have to weave around buildings of all types — although the further I run, the more space there is between them. I pass strip malls, first, then agricultural areas, where I would trample fields growing various crops. I might cross into and out of a state park. I’d run through pre-development areas — tripping over orange string, pickets and tape that outline market-ready lots — and adjacent K-8 schools. Certainly more suburbs. The wildlife and climate and terrain would change, very gradually.
Eventually I would find myself at a high point. Winded, I’d turn around to look back in the direction I came from. I wouldn’t be able to see my house, but I’d see the land roll out, continuous and carpet-like in front of me.
Continuous, but neatly divided and sub-divided into pieces, each of them owned by someone. One of them, far in the distance, owned by me.
The imagined scene ends with a swarm of police charging up the slope, falling over themselves to seize me; to splay me out and hold me firmly against the law, ready to be pinned down with many, many charges of trespassing.
This is an odd thought experiment, but it’s one I keep returning to. The friction between its two surfaces is compelling. To move freely and quickly in a direction, without a road, is to fully experience land; it is to engage with land on its own terms — majestic, inhuman, ecosystemic. To move that way is also to encounter the variety of artificial divisions and legal classifications and physical structures that bring land into our human scale and scope and ambitions.
I am writing Notes on Common Ground to explore that abrasion. Not because I want to return to some idyllic nature-state, and not because I have some kind of agenda for those artificial divisions and structures. I’m writing these notes because the friction is just interesting, isn't it?
Interesting, but not trivial. Today's global crises are all, in some way, related to land (try it: climate change, income inequality, access to healthcare, political asylum…). That's something I believe on an intellectual and a visceral level. So I need new ways of thinking about land. On its own terms. I'm using this digital space to explore and document — and perhaps create — ideas.
My plan is for these Notes to be fairly omnivorous, wandering from comments on things I read, to business models I encounter, to mini-creative projects I do. The important thing is that they will be published weekly, on this Substack page.
The format is new to me, and uncomfortable. I think it's the right one, for three reasons.
My underlying motivation is to peel back the assumptions that I don't even realize are coating my eyes, by looking at many different things and considering them carefully. Other people might find that useful, too. Maybe not; if you're seeing things clearly, and from a specific perspective, please comment or reach out on Twitter.
The second is to hold myself accountable. I want to keep up a regular cadence, and to articulate what I find in a clear way. If this isn't fun to read, it's useless. And if I sound naive and make observations that seem obvious... well, there are worse things in the world than public embarrassment.
And the third is to build on the long, rich history of alternative land movements; to learn from them and work in alliance with them. That doesn’t happen alone, obviously, and it doesn’t happen in overly-scholarly, or overly-commercial spaces. A healed relationship with land won't be a single, sharp, incisive model that someone has paid for in a consulting contract. It can only be a groundswell, and that means it will be big, messy, and conflicted, and it will emerge in fits and starts. I hope these notes add some momentum to that tumble.
I haven't plotted out a path to a destination. I am writing in the sprit of joyful exploration. Some of these notes will share things I've already discovered and haven't done a good job of documenting and collecting — but there is much, much more.
That’s the point: I’m far from understanding what land really means, today, and I want to explore what it can mean. So for the most part, these Notes on Common Ground will describe my forays into entirely new territory.
Thank you for coming along.
Several people inspired me to start writing this.
Thanks, in particular, to @pfletcherhill who is on his own exploration of the solarpunk aesthetic. It’s beautiful/inspiring/extremely well written.
Thanks also to @laraortizluis who is cooking and writing in public with exuberant joy and personality and passion.
Thanks to @biancawylie for wisdom and clarity and critical optimism.
Thanks to Shafer, whose iterative writing is the most creative and exploratory work I’ve ever encountered.