“What I am against—and without a minute’s hesitation or apology—is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves. If we state the problem that way, then we can see that the way to correct our error, and so deliver ourselves from our own destructiveness, is to quit using our technological capability as the reference point and standard of our economic life. We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.” — Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

WHEREAS—far as I can see—the purpose (the end, the telos) AI serves is human obsolescence,

with the following essay,

and with the linocut prints below, which I carved with my own two hands, and not in an instant either, but slowly over at least 3 hours,

both of which are expressions of my embodied human intention, attention, mind, and prescence;

I do declare that I am a writer (& printmaker, musician, and citizen) against AI. With this print and through this essay, I am taking the WRITERS AGAINST AI pledge, which is as follows:

• I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

• I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

• I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

The rest of this essay explains why I am choosing to refuse AI. I am stating this opposition here, and I am adding it into the about section of Small Panacea, because I believe in AI transparency. I want to know when I am interacting with AI out in the world, and I suspect there are many more who do too. I am hoping here, now, to build the faith that this publication will never use AI. This I swear from the deep marrows of my bones.

Our writing and our printmaking, Small Panacea & The Precarious Press, are, and always will be,

IN WHICH, FEELING TRAPPED WITHIN SUBWAY CARS TURNED AI PROPAGANDA TUBES, I CONCEIVE OF A PRINT TO DEFEND OUR PUBLIC SPHERE FROM THE INVASION THE BILLIONAIRE-TECHNO-ROBBER-BARONS HAVE LAUNCHED UPON THE SITES OF OUR COLLECTIVE CIVIC DISCOURSE

Anyone who’s spent time in New York City this year—and New York is not alone in this to be sure—has seen the rise of the AI-ad-plastered subway car. These ads ask us to imagine an easier world—a “more frictionless” world, to use the language of at least one example I saw this summer. These ads seek to generate longing for a world in which we all wear our obsequious friends glowing around our necks; one in which everyone is outsourcing their pitch deck curation to Claude so he can streamline their workflows; one in which you can skip that boring phase of music making where you get physically together with some friends and vibrate your bodies all at once. In this world they are selling, every iota of human thought is given over to a machine. A machine which does our thinking, our writing, our music making, our planning, and our chatting, for us. Notice, in each of the aforementioned examples, a real live human being is somehow precluded, whether that be a friend, a powerpoint maker, or a full choir of singers. In short, these AI hucksters are selling human obsolescence.

The New Yorkers who ride in a hole in the ground are one of the most diverse, and largest, captive audiences in America.1 This is why the techno-robber-barons are spending a fortune advertising AI in the subway. They need a vast audience because their firms rely on the profits of large numbers, and they need a captive audience because they can sense that any audience free to flee from them would do so in a jiffy. Could it be that the ad blitz these inequality engines are pursuing is a response to the whiffs of rebellion brewing in the citizenry, which they can barely smell through the algorithmic miasma they wither within? Can the AI companies sense that they have much convincing to do, much consent to manufacture, in order to justify their abhorrent inordinate infrastructural investments?

I, and Americans more broadly, have long been bothered by ads. I’ve witnessed my elders mute commercials my whole life. Some of those same elders took me to see How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying when I was young, and laughed raucously when the “book voice” bellows from above bemoaning vice-presidents of advertising. Perhaps it is within Edward Abbey’s novel of industrial sabotage, The Monkey Wrench Gang, though, that I have seen this animosity towards publicity manifest most dramatically; the book begins with an Albuquerque surgeon, Doc Sarvis, burning billboards off Route 66 in New Mexico.

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Though billboards aflame kept me up tearing through pages in the middle of the night, it was John Berger’s non-fictional critique of advertising that best resonated with how these subway-car takeovers made me feel. I’ve only seen clips of Berger’s 1972 BBC television special, Ways of Seeing, but have read the book he released based on it later that year. There, amidst tiny black and white reproductions of all the images Berger discussed on the air, he writes:

“In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives. No other kind of image confronts us so frequently.

In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of visual messages. One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn [my note: here lies a masterful page break in Berger’s text] a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen whilst waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.

Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately benefits the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers—and thus the national economy. It is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer.

The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible signs of ‘The Free World’. For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice.

but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer—even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.” 2

So what future are these latter day techno-Don Drapers proposing with their advertising? How will their products benefit the public? How are they suggesting we transform ourselves into objects of envy? They want us to start confiding in our necklaces instead of our real human friends. They want us to sit in front of a laptop prompting a model to spit out synthetic “music” instead of making sound in a room filled with friends we’ve been singing with since childhood.

This is why the present state of advertising feels heavier to me than ever. They want us to spend our working days training their AI models how to do our jobs. Morgan-Stanley has estimated that there will be a billion “humanoid robots” by 2050. Bill Gates, when asked, “Will we still need humans?” answered, “Not for most things.”3 They are offering us the barren comfort of a too-thin cold-inviting blanket stuffed into a duvet cover woven from strands of straight sadness. Where before they were selling us sneakers, now they are selling us a future in which we either don’t exist, or exist solely in front of a computer screen where we have quick access to our own personal contingent of LLM bots who tell us how to see the world. Now, they are trying to manipulate us, en masse, to believe that we should envy people who do not interact with other people.

Given those stakes, I felt an urge to make a print to push back on the ubiquity of such a technology’s prescence in the public sphere. If what you are peddling threatens to destroy the labor force, pollute our lands and waters, de-value the work of artists and musicians and writers everywhere, all while profiting off of the training it gleaned from humanity’s collective creative commons—be that creativity fictional, non-fictional, academic, scientific, musical, visual, architectural, printed, digital, choreographic, dramatic, and the list goes on—then you should not be allowed to use billions of dollars to dominate the public sphere without the public being provided a commensurate platform to counter the current flood of AI propaganda! I feel the urge of a citizen, to force debate in the captive spaces the billionaire-techno-feudal-overlords mistakenly think they can buy, and then preach within unanswered.

Their insanely expensive advertising campaigns cannot buy the quietude of the citizenry!

With printed matter do I seek to forestall (for I, perhaps naively, think it is not yet too late to avert) the complete takeover of the public sphere by these slimy corporate rent seekers.

So, without further ado, the print I made—with my own two human hands!—which I have been affixing (impermanently, and non-destructively) atop AI-ads I come across in the subway:

This print, as with all prints, has a lineage. This is a quality of printmaking that AI cannot reproduce. In every print is a history of a person’s thought, a thoughtscape germane to an individual, the printer. Prints are to the human mind what pottery sherds revealed by the brush of an archaeologist are to a bustling ancient metropolis long ago buried under sand. This print’s lineage is the same as the arc of our opposition to the broad and often mystifying category of ~Artificial Intelligence.

It’s quite difficult to pinpoint the moment we developed our opposition.4

I’ve just returned from a walk to the top of the hill without a definitive answer. How human of me.

Perhaps it was when we learned of the environmental devastation Elon Musk’s makeshift xAI power generating station, made up of “thirty-five mobile methane-gas-powered generators”, is wreaking on a mostly black community in South Memphis?5

Or perhaps it was when synthetic music ceased to be a concept from Brave New World alone?6

Maybe it was when we learned from the Dada Drummer’s Almanack about how Spotify (but, of course) arranges its music extraction apparatus so that as AI created “songs” receive more and more listens, the share of the total money available on the platform going to real living working musicians goes down in almost direct proportion to how much AI created “music” there is on Spotify as a whole.7

Or was it the reports of AIs coaxing children into suicide? or was it Grok gawking at child abuse pornography?8

Could it have been the aforementioned vexing subway propaganda after all ?

Or maybe it was when we discovered the freakish amount of additional fossil fuel and coal burning that AI data centers are prompting all over America.9

It must have been personally hearing from friends who are currently being forced to use AI at work!

Then again, it might have been witnessing, this summer, on street after street filled with forthright yard signs, the opposition being mounted all across this country10 to data centers wasting scarce fresh water, and driving up electricity bills, as we drove from Knoxville, to Rochester in Upstate New York, to Fargo, and on across Montana as we made for Glacier National Park, on our way to meet the show in Calgary.11

I could have developed my opposition to AI over any one of these incidents. I could have staked my dissent on the coincidence of all these factors, but that would miss the crux of the matter. For when I hear of a new incident I could add to my list, I am often reminded of what Wendell Berry writes (just after this essay’s opening epigraph) in his essay Life is a Miracle—“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”12

I want to live as a creature. This is the true font of my opposition. I cannot, and will not support or use AI because I believe the telos of AI, its ultimate purpose, is to bring about human obsolescence. I love humanity, I care for humans, and I love being human. This technology seeks, in what it does and in how it does it, maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but progressively and eventually, to eradicate this love and care I hold so dear.

It is for this reason that I believe we must oppose AI, and the companies birthing it, in the political arena as well. Should not our democracy seek to bring about human flourishing? These AI companies, these billionaire machinists, seeking human obsolescence, inherently oppose human flourishing. How can an obsolete humanity flourish? Thus, our politics is not for them to influence. With their massive injections of cash into lobbying and advertising, they are blatantly trampling on what remains of our democracy.13 We are now witnessing the build out of megalithic infrastructure, often in fragile watersheds, begun without the consent of the people who live nearby, in order to raise vast knowledge systems which aspire to the domination of everything—nature, society, information, freedom, markets, land, power (electrical and political), supply chains, the trajectory of human life itself—all without the people having voted on whether such systems should exist at all. Tell me, dimmelo, what, if not these things, is the matter of democracy?

So,

Where are our plebiscites? And I mean the plural! Should we not be voting upon the rollout of AI, continually, ad infinitum? It’s not too late to begin!

Before any more AI ads are placed in subways, or in the public sphere at all,

The people should vote,

Before AI is given any more adulatory free press coverage through agitprop op-eds & “news” spotlights,14

The people should vote,

Before any more AI models are ever released for public, or private, consumption—before the government and corporations further build AI into their woodworks (and kill chains),

The people should vote,

Before any more workers are forced to use AI at work,

The people should vote,

Before any more data centers are built, or any are put into orbit,

The people should vote!

On the compensation structure of those building AI systems, if the people ever do vote for some form of AI,

The people should vote!

On what to do with the profits of these AI systems, which have been trained on humanity’s collective output,

The people should vote!

Every single one of these plebiscites should be free from any sort of financial influence by the AI companies. There should be no lobbying for technologies which threaten human obsolescence.

But there is lobbying, and it is currently invading our civic discourse. So what is a citizen who believes in democracy, and in human creativity, to do? Though I am not too a Benjamin, as Ben Franklin, and Ben Lundy did before me, I’ll print!

AI is an Invasive Species

But what to print? How did I come to land on “AI is an INVASIVE SPECIES” as the phrase to put out into the world?

It was in my growing opposition to the technology that I found the phrase. Any refusal brings with it a search for alternatives. Starting with the basic springboard from which we all access the internet, the search engine, or in my case, Google Search. If I was going to distance myself from the encroaching sway of Gemini, and the AI overview now embedded in Google’s search function, I needed a different engine. And how rich a rabbit hole awaited me!

Out beyond Google, lie treasures like Marginalia—a search engine which does not return images, and often leads you to some academic blog from the late nineties! Marginalia was brought to me by, Elan Ullandorf, breaker of algorithms, bringer of search engines. Mr. Ullandorf, works on investigations for The Marshall Project, and writes, here, about “the more human side of the internet,” which includes questioning what algorithms are and how they shape our understanding of reality. It was Mr. Ullandorf, in the same article that I was reading for advice on how to de-Google my life, who led me to the phrase I decided to print, when he cited an article by Sean McDonald, also called AI is an Invasive Species.

In that essay McDonald argues that “Like a lot of invasive species, ‘AI’ was developed organically, in a range of contexts, for tasks that seemed to require high-volumes of computation. And, like a lot of invasive species, through a combination of carelessness, lack of safeguards, and capital interests, ‘AI’ has escaped those contexts and overtaken entire ecosystems—to their degradation, if not eventual destruction.”

When armies invade they force a governance structure upon a populace. The way in which computational AI is being embedded into the woodwork of our society, as McDonald shows, is very much like a real military invasion of the countryside. Through this imbrication of AI decision-making and our institutions, a structure of governance is being forced on pretty much every poor person in this country. Nearly all 92 million people living at least 200% below the federal poverty line have to interact with AI, often without their knowledge: Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, SNAP benefits, Social Security Disability Benefits, Private Health Insurance, Unemployment Benefits, Landlords using AI background check systems, surveillance at low-income jobs and in schools, government translation services, police departments assessing domestic violence risk, and child welfare services (to name just a few); all have already incorporated AI into their decision-making apparatuses. None of the poor people affected by this “invasion” had any say in whether or not AI would play a part in their lives.

Just as an invading army inevitably makes mistakes which result in innocent civilians dying, AI is already making mistakes which are leading to civilian casualties: In 2024 alone, all because of AI making mistakes, 4,000 disabled people in Arkansas had their in-home care cut “despite them having medical conditions that have not gotten better”, 40,000 people in Michigan were wrongly accused of Unemployment Insurance fraud, and 4,000,000 people in Texas were erroneously put in a queue to lose their Medicaid Health Insurance.15 These are just a handful of the many thousands of mistakes that AI makes which are currently being downplayed in much the same manner as “collateral damage” has been since time immemorial.

I now suspect, as it will soon become clear, that using the language of invasion to describe anything is usually destructive, but when I first read McDonald’s essay in late 2024, I thought the metaphor apt. It seemed already back then that there was no going back to the days, imperfect as they were, when you could get a person on the phone to help with a mistake that had been made with your insurance billing, a person who might have some sympathy for your position as someone with medical debt just trying to make ends meet. Two years later, this past June, McDonald’s essay popped back into my mind. I had just driven from New York to Minneapolis, and I was on Giselle’s and Auden’s porch, regaling them and Reid with tales of the AI ads in the subway feeling like an onslaught, like an invasion of my thoughtspace, when it occurred to me that this instinctual phrasing, which had tumbled out of me in the throes of storytelling, dovetailed beguilingly with the invasive embedding I had learned of from McDonald.

When Giselle gave me a fun scrap of real Lino, the kind that curls on its hemp mat if you don’t glue it down to wood, and Reid started carving into an eraser, I, as if entranced, began to trace in ink on the lino’s surface the edges of the letters of the phrase, “AI is an INVASIVE SPECIES.” With the epicenter of the AI-advertisement bombardment still a stench in my palate’s memory, I was overcome with the sense that INVASIVE was the perfect word for this ad coup. Perhaps printing it, and placing it atop (impermanently and non-destructively) some AI subway propaganda, could help the as-of-yet still neutral passerby name some buried discomfort with this technology, and this advertising. In reaction to this invasion, in the defense of all those who wish for their children to be able to live as creatures, appellation was to be my warhead, printed matter my fuselage.

Now and then, I looked up at the ginkgo halfway down Giselle and Auden’s block as I carved, and the sun set, and soon, after an album or two, who knows?, I blew off the last strands of gouged away linoleum, rolled some black ink out on a cardboard palate, inked my finished carving, and rubbed my spoon on the back of the paper I had laid upon lino; I ripped leaf from linoleum to reveal—

DUBITO ERGO SUM

Almost as soon as I finished that first carving, my doubts began. First, I doubted the visual form of how I had carved the phrase. And then I doubted the phrase itself. There’s a moment in the lineage of every print when everything gets literally flipped around. Ink does the flipping. Ink lets you see what you’ve done properly for the first time. Ink also opens a floodgate—all the people out there who have not trained themselves to read mirrored letters can now interact with the print too. Sometimes they nod vigourously. Sometimes they say “huh?” And sometimes they curse you and your backward ideology. If you’re lucky someone will try to nudge you towards something more generous than you initially carved. Thus, it’s usually after Ink flips your carving that the doubting of what you have carved begins. So here, on the flipside, is the part of this print’s lineage in which I doubt.

As I was looking at this first draft the next day on Giselle’s dining room table, where I had left it to dry the night before, I was overcome with the feeling, almost like hunger, that this draft was lacking a visual element, through which, I could bridge my print to the visual and literary heritage I want to protect, and which AI seeks to eat.

So I set out in my thoughts to revise. I had recently been on a swamp boat in the Everglades with Chee looking for invasive Burmese Pythons, so they were the real invasive species on the tip of my thought’s tongue. And aren’t they the perfect icon for the sentiment? For snakes (at least in the tradition that these AIs have mostly trained on) are tempters, and so many now are tempted by the barren promises of AI. For somehow—or rather, due to them manufacturing consent for their technologies—not having to think has become desirable, is now tempting.

So I carved again, and when the slivers of Lino settled I had the snake print you saw above. For a brief moment I was happy with what I had created. I proudly affixed it to AI ads in the subway. Some I showed it to were not catching the connection between the snake image and invasive species so I began pairing it with my earlier mangrove print in a six inch by twelve inch broadside (this is the above 6”x12”edition which began this chapter).

Then back into the subway. I saw someone read it and smile as I was leaving a train car. This happened a few times. There were some frowns too. Then I gave one to a man I met at a Palantir protest who was wearing an Extinction Rebellion shirt and bending one of his flip flops between his hands as he balanced on one foot. He told me, with a knowing wink, that it was we humans who were the worst of the invasive species. That sprang, like his flip flop snapping back into place, my first doubts upon the phrase itself.

A month later I gave one of the mangrove versions of the print to my friend Kristi, just after she had lit a candle in the studio we sat within near Tompkins Square Park. This was the weekend of the Summer of Ludd, so festivities abounded beyond where we sat. She said, percolating with her old affection for me, “o Jack/Jacques, there are no invasive species, don’t you think?” I protested—what about the Galapagos Goats, or Kudzu, or Scotch Broom! She pressed me gently a bit further, “nature doesn’t recognize human made boundaries.” Like a seed fallen across an international border from its mother tree, Kristi sowed further doubts which now crept up to my bedside and knelt. A week later in Chicago, in a bookstore named for skunk cabbage, I spied a book called Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong, by Clare Follmann. It had some lovely etchings of my dear Galapagos Goats on the cover. I bought it.

Follmann—in naming the “Cartesian dichotomy”16 which arises when we use metaphors like invasive species, in this case the implicit cleaving of humanity as separate from nature—helped me understand what Kristi had been trying to tell me.

To militarize our metaphors is not a neutral act. It is to believe in this Cartesian cleaving. It is in the end “to give up on life,” as Wendell Berry would say. Wendell would probably remind me, if I were to show him my print, that “it is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.”17 For in invoking the metaphor of “invasive species” am I not advocating for some dismemberment? Wendell’s “dismemberment” is the Cartesian dichotomy Follmann names. And in invoking it am I not participating in that same cleaving of man away from nature—the placing of humanity upon a pedestal above the reach of the weeds, of the world itself—that is the prime pillar of capitalist thought? Here’s the passage in Follmann’s book, in which she also quotes Wendell (look at all we thinking ones orbiting him like pennies dropped into a science museum lobby’s gravity well), and points out that species don’t invade, rather we bring them across previously impenetrable natural barriers. As I read Follmann, Kristi’s words began to seem lit up from within—as if suddenly imbued with bioluminescence.

“Ultimately, the militaristic metaphor is one of conformism. It reminds us of a deep (perhaps in some cases instinctual) fear of the other, of that which is unknown or different. We are afraid of what we don’t know because we fear it might harm us, and the metaphorical militarization of invasive species feeds on this fear. Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft declared, ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’

Militaristic language may serve to colloquialize concepts like invasive species and rally popular support against them. Yet this aggressive, combative approach enforces the false notion that human beings are somehow separate from or against certain manifestations of nature. As environmentalist writer Wendell Berry says in his essay Getting Along with Nature, ‘even as conservationists, we see the human and the natural economics as necessarily opposite or opposed; we subscribe to the very opposition that threatens to destroy them both.’ While our capitalist society enforces patterns or behaviors that distance us from the natural world, we are and have always been a part of nature.

Biologist Brendon Larson explores problems with these military associations in his article The War of the Roses: Demilitarizing Invasion Biology, explaining how our current rhetoric relies on the power of metaphor to generate a unanimous consensus on the meaning and significance of invasive species. This can be misleading to the public, as it marks these species as malicious entities. Larson also notes how this more violent way of thinking diverges from the prevailing philosophy in other domains of environmentalism or ecology that strive for a more harmonious coexistence between humankind and nature as part of broader conservation values. In fact, the sense of urgency invoked for invasive species management procedures through militarized metaphor can undermine conservation efforts. Larson sees this as a multifaceted problem, and I paraphrase:

1. The metaphor of war requires one to imagine two opposing sides and to harbor an us-versus-them mentality. This is contradictory, given that invasive species are largely an endemic problem because of anthropogenic factors like human globalization. The us in this war facilitated the spread of them. We cannot be separated; we are the ones creating the invaders. The use of a war metaphor pits us as opposing sides, but our relationship with invasive species is complex and inherently entangled.

2. The metaphor of war suggests that there will be a winner, which is misleading. There will never be a return to pure natives in an ecosystem, particularly as climate crisis and other anthropogenic factors continue enabling dispersal.

3. Such loaded military language may contribute to public resistance to or distrust of those using this language. Science is supposed to be objective, and loaded language bears bias. A Pacific Northwest-based study conducted on the role of ecologists in ecological management suggested that the public prefers ecologists to inform and educate rather than argue for a particular mode of action.

4. Invasive species removal in certain areas of conservation or restoration will primarily benefit upper-middle-class citizens and may therefore be perceived as an elitist ecological pursuit. This class divide further distances the public from ecologists and conservationists and perpetuates public mistrust.

“Invasive species management with a militaristic logic will fundamentally prioritize control and oppression rather than conservation. The dichotomy between humans and nature can, in a way, free us from accountability or connection to nature’s struggles. With substantial debate around these topics kept at a linguistic and discursive remove and accessible only to experts, the public is rendered uninformed and unable to insist how the natural world, our collective home, might be taken care of.

“Elsewhere, Larson argues that the current invasive species paradigm perpetuates an obsolete way of thinking about ecosystems as stable systems rather than as changing entities eternally subject to ecologically necessary disturbances. Larson pushes emphatically against the Cartesian dichotomy between humankind and nature, challenging us to recognize our role in the creation of scientific paradigms.”18

As Kristi, with her doubt, and Clare, with her book, helped me see, using the word invasive brings with it much baggage. Just as we are the ones—via human globalization—facilitating the spread of “invasive species” (the Burmese Pythons didn’t use their United Airlines credit cards to get a deal on an extended vacation in the Everglades after all), the “invasion” at the southern border about which our politicians monger is also a case in which as Follmann puts it “the us in this war facilitated the spread of them. We cannot be separated; we are the ones creating the invaders.” In this case, the we is American capitalism, with its global reach, causing extreme heat, rising sea levels, more intense fire seasons, landslides, floods, more violent hurricanes and monsoons, often where they live in the Global South. Already roughly 20 million people are displaced every year by weather related events, and some estimates say up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050.19 Just as the Galapagos Goats did not choose to go to the famous islands, migrants are not invaders, they are human beings we have evicted.

I also doubt what the word “species” is doing in my print. The same President who call migrants invaders refers to human beings as aliens. So does the law of our land. This word, steeped in the same us-versus-them dichotomy, implies that they are some other species. Though the negative effects of NAFTA on Mexico and places further South (higher unemployment and less union membership20 for starters) is well-documented, current politicians use the implication that migrants are some other species to insinuate that their motive for coming here is to invade (as if US meddling in Latin and South America has not caused excessive violence which has forced many migrants to flee their homes), rather than the motive we all recognize as deeply human—trying to make a better, safer, wage to support our families and ourselves.

This rhetoric helps justify, or at least obscure, inhumane laws. You could go to jail in this country if you give water to a non-US citizen you come across dying of thirst in the desert. It is a felony to drive a starving, thirsty migrant to the hospital if you come across one on the side of a desert highway.21 Do I want to be using the same rhetoric that enables these laws?

With my hesitations about the print swirling, I began to slow my dissemination of it. We left New York again towards summer’s end, and far away from the robust subways of New York City I saw fewer places that seemed perfect for this commentary. But the phrase remained in my mind as I thought of and discussed with Kyra and friends, replacements. Then the whole Hugging Face hullabuhloo happened, and I began to think—was this the correct phrase after all? Was AI at this point not literally invading? And wasn’t to call them alien, as in other to humanity, entirely accurate? Is “AI is the only real invasive species!” the phrase I should carve?

See what has begun from all my hesitation? New books enter our orbit when we seek out perspectives on our doubt. New phrases begin to circulate in our minds and conversations when we question the phrases we initially carved. This is the stuff of being human. Our doubts guide us. How will we ever question the policies of our government which have forced thousands of migrants to their deaths in the remote desert if we do not first doubt that government’s rhetoric? Doubt is not merely good practice for a citizen. It is thought itself. As I learned from Ann Carson, we often collectively truncate Descartes famous formulation.22 The full sentiment is not just ‘I think therefore I am’, but rather dubito ergo, cogito ergo sum, ‘I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ Our doubts are our thoughts which are our humanity. It is from the miasmal haze of doubt that creativity springs.

This print was born from a lineage of doubting: whether I was using the best search engine; whether my sentiment needed an image; whether I chose the best language to voice my dissent. That doubt, in turn led to new thought and a fresh search for more books (which is a form of thought no? The journey through a library or bookstore to find the book in question) which might reorient my opinion on first invasive species and then eventually on immigration (Follmann’s book influenced my thoughts on the rhetoric of invasive species; John Washington’s book The Case for Open Borders influenced my thoughts on immigration). Using AI precludes all these opportunities for doubting. If I had generated this print with AI, I would not have doubted each part of its creation. I would never have sought out the books I did. I would never have conversed with friends and family about the multiple drafts of this print. AI precludes the human interaction necessary for the formulation of doubts. AI precludes humanity itself. I’ll have none of it.

In the end, I am putting this print out into the world because I believe it is good enough for now, and safe enough to try. If we were to apply the same methods modern states utilize to eradicate invasive species to the eradication of AI, we would not be participating in the mass execution of living creatures, but rather in a series of refusals which would actually help preserve the ecosystems on which all living creatures depend. To eradicate the invasive species of AI would mean an immediate shutting down of every data center project on earth. It would mean an immediate liquidation of all the AI companies, with their vast (and illicitly gained) wealth divvied up amongst their employees and the people writ large. It would mean the destruction of current AI models which would in turn help fight against the theft of writer’s and artist’s, and musician’s oeuvres. It would mean a massive shifting of investment away from the military uses of AI—in kill chains, and in mass surveillance systems—and towards the social services which will actually preserve human life. It would probably even mean setting up the governance board Sam Altman lied about a decade ago.

We must conserve the lineage of our doubts if we are to remain human. It is this lineage which AI seeks to destroy. In the wake of this destruction, humanity will no longer remember doubts past, long developed. If we do not remember our collective doubt’s origin, we will repeat that which led us to doubt before. Our government is already using AI to conduct mass surveillance campaigns that would make twentieth century despots drool. Surely our memories of two world wars, the civil rights movement, and the forever wars on terror of my lifetime, ought to give us grand doubts as to the direction such surveillance tends. It is the doubts of the citizenry which keep the republic.

For now, I will continue printing this edition of “AI is an Invasive Species,” while I seek a better lexicon, because my doubt is the maker’s mark of my humanity, and because the AI companies are sure as hell not pausing whenever they have doubts of their own.

As Maslow put it, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.”1 Would that every overseer of the great American stockpile were well aware. Moreover, would that the Great American stockpile is never replenished. For if you have the stockpile, it is tempting to see in every school, a military target.

May this print be a reminder that there is money to spend on ordinary people in this country. If only we could force our government to spend less on missiles, and bombs. The bombs Pete Hegsdeath set upon Iran in the first four days of this war in Iran alone cost at least $20 billion.2

People like JD Vance, love to spew sentiments akin to “We live in a world of scarcity.”3 Whenever you share a dream these people scowl upon you and object—No, No, No, Fractal Man! Where will you get the money? Scarcity is a lie. Money seems to appear out of nowhere when the bombs start. Suddenly debt financing is a feasible viable option—so long as the dream is bombing.

There is money to house absolutely everybody. Our government just spent it on ammo. There is money to provide all care for all people. Our government just already spent it on missiles. There is money for high speed rail. It just went up in smoke on the Persian Gulf. There is money for universal pre-K. There is money for K-12, and higher education, and research. But the administration is asking that we divert it towards replacing the projectiles they just used up.

Collateral damage is an obscuring euphemism. It is wielded—much as scarcity is to justify austerity—to excuse atrocity. Pete Hegsdeath, and his grumpy godfather in the Oval Office, ought not be allowed to wash themselves of the blood of all the children they have murdered in Minab with euphemistic towelettes. They have claimed they are blameless because they messed up—the school in Minab used to be a military target, they say. Such are the expected mistakes when Progress invites AI into the kill chain, they say. Claims of collateral damage cannot hide that these men are war criminals.

Today, when “the roughly-$1 billion daily price tag of the war in Iran would be enough to cover the daily costs of SNAP benefits (food stamps) for over 40 million Americans, as well as daily Medicaid costs for the 15 million Americans expected to lose their healthcare coverage from the Big Beautiful Bill,”4 I am reminded of words I have only ever read for they were spoken by a man from a different time, who would, I think, be horrified at this war, though unsurprised. Would that this administration, and all the future ones, could have Eisenhower’s 1953, Cross of Iron Speech, giving them tinnitus, keeping them up at night, as they ponder their missile launches,

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

This was not then, and is not now, a way of life at all. Later in that same speech Eisenhower said, “we are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.” We ought not operate violently so as to prevent violence towards us, a sentiment I often hear bandied about. Strides towards disarmament always move towards a safer world. Stockpiling never does, and bombing certainly, obviously, does not.5 We demand ethical leaders who will not breed hatred for Americans by killing children thousands of miles away in broad daylight while they are at school. We demand a permanent end to American bombings, in Iran, and everywhere in the world. Fractal Man is shouting as hard as he can!

I’ve been mailing people prints! Send me your address if you want one!

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Sometimes the best way to receive crushing criticism is to transmute it into a print so that it might gain color, and depth, and thereby become useful.

The verbal becomes visual, the sonic becomes ink. And in the process, the soul of the critique is laid out upon the table, and cloaked in color, which is like salt. Salted soul ceases to cause indigestion.

The US Senate is one vote away (HJ Res. 140) from ending a 20-year ban on mining in and around the Boundary Waters Wilderness. I, and so many people I know and love, would find the destruction of this beloved wilderness devastating. So, briefly, I'll talk about the mine, and the ruin it will cause, and then to close, I will refocus on what we stand to lose if we lose the Boundary Waters. I didn't think my voice alone was up to such a grand refocusing, so I am including some reflections on the Boundary Waters by friends of mine that I have collected in recent days.1

If you are reading this and know and love the Boundary Waters, please join the reflection pool—leave a comment about your history with them and why you want them protected!

The impending vote in the Senate is the culmination of a backdoor loophole effort to overturn a years long environmental review process that involved peer-reviewed research and massive community outreach. This vote would go against the will of the people. The most recent poll I could find (by Impact Research, from August 2025) found that "68% of voters statewide and 70% of voters in battleground districts say that legislation permanently protecting the Boundary Waters from sulfide-ore copper mining should be a very important priority." This finding is consistent with polls done by Trump's own favored polling firm Fabrizio-Ward.

If the ban is overturned, the Antofagasta Conglomerate, a chilean company, owned by a chilean billionaire, will use its disguise subsidiary Twin Metals Minnesota to begin sulfide ore mining just outside of the Boundary Waters, directly upstream of them.2 The map below shows the path pollution from the proposed mine will take as it travels north into the Boundary Waters watershed.

Sulfide ore mining is particularly damaging. To get at trace amount of copper and nickel, vast amounts of sulfuric acid will be released into the Boundary Waters. Sulfuric acid is battery acid. Exposure to it can cause extreme burns; it is the substance used to eat rust away in industrial steel production. It can cause blindness if the eyes come into contact with it, whether through the air or via splash. It can induce tissue and organ death if ingested, say while drinking water that once was the cleanest water on earth.

Twin Metals claims that "ore processing will remove most of the sulfide minerals. Therefore, tailings will not produce acid rock drainage (ARD)." They also claim that "the project design we have today minimizes potential impacts in the areas of water, wetlands, noise, dust, light and visual pollution." The first claim is a blatant lie. This type of mining has never "not produced acid rock drainage." This type of mine has, historically, polluted surrounding waters 100% of the time it has been tried. Closed sulfide ore mines are still polluting this country right now as I write. Today, 50,000 gallons of contaminated sulfuric-acid-laden waste water will spill out of long closed sulfide ore mines. Will Antofagasta stick around for 85 years after they abandon this site to ensure that their actions don't harm future inhabitants of Northern Minnesota? For the 250,000 years during which, some estimates say, the site will still be dangerous? I cannot call the second claim a lie. They are shifty like that, this foreign mining company. It's phrased so as to be technically possible. But the phrasing is also telling. Antofagasta only cares about "visual pollution." So they will hide their mine underground and pretend that if we can't see the harm it is doing, then that harm doesn't exist.

Republicans who are voting in favor of the mine repeat their age old platitude that this is about jobs. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) said as much on the floor of Congress—“these are good mining jobs,” he said. But by Twin Metals' own estimation, only around 750 direct jobs will be created by this mine. And perhaps 1,000 more will be created indirectly. But they do not mention that mining jobs are inherently temporary. On their website, they acknowledge their mine will close when it is no longer profitable to destroy the Boundary Waters, but they say nothing of what will happen to the miners who will be laid off. It's worth remembering that this has happened before in Minnesota. In the 1980s 10,000 miners lost their jobs when the iron mines closed. Most of those miners found new livelihoods in the recreation industry which now gives upwards of 17,000 people jobs in the Boundary Waters and Superior National Forest alone. That's 17,000 jobs that rely on these waters being pristine, that will be threatened by the existence of mining here. As always, it's not really about creating jobs for normal Minnesotans. It's about paving the way for corporations to get rich off of our public lands. Plundering that which we hold in common for the benefit of all, and for the health of the planet, so that a chilean billionaire can add a few billion to his bullion pile.

What do we Stand to Lose?

What is it that would be destroyed by the sulfuric acid that will leach out of this mine? A place of solace; a place of rest; a place of clear waters—some of the cleanest left on earth; countless fauna would not survive the acid—moose and loons, fish innumerable, Canada lynx, gray wolves, black bears, and the critically-threatened long-eared bat. The Boundary Waters hold 20% of our National Forest’s fresh water. A quarter of a million people canoe through them every summer. Tens of thousands of rural livelihoods are sustained by work supporting the recreation that goes on within these waters. And on the other side of the boundary? The Canadians have already permanently banned mining in their half of these waters—Quetico Provincial Park. They understand how important and pristine this place is, and how valuable and increasingly rare such places are. This mine would destroy Quetico across the boundary as well. The US Senate will not just be undoing the will of the people of Minnesota, but of Canadians too.

So to close, here is a small sampling of those people who do not want this mine, who love the boundary waters, and all that they represent. I am very grateful for their responses and I hope somehow they might move the far-away senators who will make this decision, as they have moved me.

My friend Annie Schlaefer wrote: “I grew up going to the boundary waters with my family. It is the first place I felt deep connection to the earth. The first place someone told me that I could dip my waterbottle in the middle of the lake and drink the water. I could trust the upstream decisions hadn’t poisoned what flows to me. It is where I learned about leave no trace and what it means to take with me only what I need. This place helped me and so many others shape our understanding of our relationship to the land- not as something to use up- but something to belong to and be accountable to.

To me the BWCA is a symbol of truly protected and cared for land and water. Proof that restraint is possible and not everything has to be optimized for extraction or profit. If we give into capitalism in a place so loved and cared for like the BWCA, it really feels like there could be no end to the ravaging of capitalism.”

My friend Kristi Fackel wrote: “We sent August [Kristi’s son] to a camp where they take (increasingly) long trips into the Boundary Waters, and he left home the first time a sullen, long-haired (hair as curtain-shield that he could disappear behind) kid and returned a different human. His hair was behind his ears, his smile was genuine and he was filled with a confidence that came from having met his edges.”

My friend Claire Roth relayed some thoughts to me over the phone; here is my rough retelling of what she said based on the notes I took while we chatted: The first time I went camping was in the Boundary Waters when I was twelve. I grew up in Los Angeles so this was my first time really going into the woods. The trip was five days long and there were seven girls and two counselors on it. We carried ourselves physically but we also carried each other’s souls, our energies, we empowered each other. It was the first time that I realized I could do things I set out to do, and that I could have community while doing those things. It was the first time I heard a loon. It was the first time I felt grounded in a community that was empowering, and that was life changing. [Claire has since worked as a counselor on trips like the ones she went on, passing on the empowerment she felt back then to kids now.]

My friend Tristan Evans-Fargione wrote: “I grew up going to the Boundary Waters nearly every summer with my friend Noah, his little brothers, and our dads. Even at a young age those trips made me realize how special they were. Up there in the Boundary Waters all of my anxiety melted away, and I felt so connected to nature and other people. We would lie on beds of moss, pick wild blueberries on little islands, and wander the “tree highways” walking on top of wind-felled trees to see how far we could get without touching the ground. As an adult I have gone back many times with friends, and I know I will keep going back. [The Boundary Waters are] one of the most special places in the world, and there are not many places like it left. It needs to be protected at all costs.”

My friend Louis Blackmore took me at my word that responses could be one sentence: “Steeped in unspeakable stillness.”

My fiancé (!) Kyra Smith wrote: “I didn’t know a place such as the boundary waters existed until I was an adult. Canoeing in the boundary waters was the first time I experienced extended silence. That silence opened up worlds and wells of gratitude for this beautiful earth within me. It is a sanctuary away from all evils where one can dream of a better world.”

And my friend Johan Cavert wrote: “I grew up going to the Boundary Waters with my extended family every year. It was a tradition that shaped my understanding of wilderness, of beauty, of the hardiness and fragility of nature, and of the sublime feelings of community and satisfaction one can reach after a long day’s paddle and a sing around the campfire at night.”

HJ Res. 140 remains before the Senate today. With just one vote, the senate could overturn the ban, and allow mining to proceed in Minnesota, against—it must be stressed again—the will of the people. The people have already spoken; that was what led to the ban in the first place. Haven’t we had enough of billionaires profiting to the detriment of absolutely everyone else? So call your senators! Call Rep. Pete Stauber [(202) 225-6211)] and give him a piece of your mind. You can find your senator’s phone number here. Here’s what I’ve been putting on the back on my “Moose Not Mines” print:

And one last thing! If you live in Minnesota and would like to protest the Antofagasta Mine in person you can! This Saturday April 4th, at 11am, my aforementioned friend Claire is organizing a singing protest action at the Minnehaha Falls Bandshell in Minneapolis. If you go, you’ll get a paper copy of this print, along with much fun singing, community, and you could even wear a cardboard canoe around your waist as you dance!

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We spent the first seven weeks of this new year in Florida in the presence, everywhere, of the tangled roots of the mangrove. All over the state, on the Atlantic coast, in the Everglades, on the Gulf coast, mangroves purify the waters. Countless birds and fish thrive in and around their roots. Manatees congregate in mangrove forests—they eat mangrove leaves, and algae off their roots, they rely on the fresh drinking water that mangroves desalinate.

Mangroves desalinate the coastal waters of Iran too. The mangrove forests on the coasts of the Persian Gulf provide nurseries for fish and shrimp, and habitat for limitless inland creatures that rely on the fresh water the mangroves produce, in a desert where fresh water is hard to find.

The coasts of our countries are kin. Our people are not enemies. If you strip away the animosities of our misguided leaders, we recognize each other. If we could visit, we would recognize the lands we each call home. The mangroves I stood beside in Naples, Florida closely resemble the mangroves that, until my country bombed them this week, purified the waters off the island of Qeshm near the Strait of Hormuz.

Stop the bombing, and the mangroves will begin the healing.

There’s no denying anymore that we live in a fascist, plutocratic, kleptocracy. Any guardrails this country has had are fast decaying, if not gone already. But we cannot, and ought not despair! The cultivation of utopian hope is ambitious, but more importantly it is constitutive! Which is to say—it is through demanding that which we hope for that we will achieve it. Any other path is self-defeating. Besides, to claim that this neoliberal order we find ourselves living under is—as Francis Fukuyama (and Margaret Thatcher) and many others have done—the only reasonable way the world can be, is positively Victorian. Those ossified British blood sacks thought it unseemly to even imagine anyone imagining a different political order—you might offend the Queen, gasp!

So as this new year starts and we are told that the most we can hope for is that we might get some meager subsidies to help us pay for our extremely (artificially) expensive (for-profit) health care using Health Savings Accounts filled with our own money that was already deducted from our pay checks, I declare that the most dangerous thing we can currently accept is not that we might be wanting too much, but that we are not now demanding enough!

So say it with me this year, and may this be but one of many demands we might “put together to create some kind of more feasible social imaginary,”1 MEDICARE FOR ALL, RIGHT NOW!

As always, if you’d like me to send you a physical rip of this print, or of any other, do be in touch! It would make my day to mail you something!

Happy New Year! Here’s to demanding more for all of us in 2026!

There are a lot more readers of this newsletter than when I started a year ago, some of whom I know very well, some we’ve met on our travels, and some with whom I haven’t yet had the pleasure of conversing. I am hoping that this installment of Small Panacea will serve as welcome and introduction to this project for those of you who are more recently joining me, and as an invitation to everyone reading to reach out (in an email, in the comments, in a letter if you are daring!) regarding the ideas I discuss in these pages.

Thank you, as always, for reading! I would love to mail you a print from our mobile shop, The Precarious Press, if you let me know where to send it!

We were in Portland, Oregon from August 5th through August 10th of 2025.

an arm into the park

Ursula K. Le Guin has felt like an old friend since I was a kid and the archipelagos of Earthsea swam into my imaginary. Fond residue of childhood, her stories still reel my delight’s rotors. Lately, my unshakeable love of snow, and my longing for skiing and winter, have dovetailed with my reading, three winters past now, of the comfort of a lit hearth midst the ice on Gethen (aka Winter) in The Left Hand of Darkness. So could I hardly wait to arrive in Portland, Oregon, for I was eager to visit the house on Thurman Street where Le Guin wrote for 58 years. But on our drive from city center up to Ursula’s neighborhood, before we had spied her house, a deep green gulch—Balch Gulch, the map tells me later—commandeered my attention. From bridge of concrete slab suspended above I peered into the bosky ravine. At the margin of my sight a trail glinted, wobbling along beside the stream that cut the gulch. With curiosity galvanized, my commandeered attention compelled me to probe the trail.

So down the steps at the end of Ursula’s block we trotted. The trail wends southwest along the gulch’s groove, cupping Ursula’s neighborhood as it unrolls. On the map it looks like the elephantine limb of a colossal forest giant pointing at the Willamette River declaring his intent to wade. From down in the gulch, on the trail, looking up at Thurman Street, the neighborhood feels distant, as if the slab bridge suspended above you were a plank connecting two utterly alien ships moored off the shore of some outlandish continent. I had waited many months to see Ursula’s house. I could wait a little longer. So we resolved to follow where the giant’s arm was leading, and to return to Thurman Street later, on the way back to the car.

The giant’s arm connects to the giant’s frame. His body is Forest Park, one of Portland’s gems, a huge urban forest reserve, home to over 5,000 acres of mostly second growth trees, and what feels like at least a hundred times as many banana slugs. Once you pass from the gulchy arm, into Forest Park proper, your options feel limitless. You could continue up the Wildwood Trail to Pittock Mansion on the ridge in one direction, or you could trek the other way towards 88 more miles of paths stretching on northwest towards Sauvie Island on the Washington State border. The sunlight of the gulch turned to cool on my calves as the shadow of the canopy crosshatched us like a rising curtain. Slugs and canopy rim the Willamette River for eight miles. The Tualatin Mountains are the giant’s spine.

It occurred to me as the trail led us to an old abandoned stone craft park restroom smothered in human hued graffiti that Ursula would never have needed to drive up to Forest Park, as we had. She had her very own giant’s arm attached to her block, waiting to pluck her up and place her down again in the forest. Balch Gulch, like a spoke into the wheel of her neighborhood, though Ursula is no longer around to walk the trail, remains a tendril of forest reaching out to the residents of her neighborhood, whispering to them, offering them unfettered access to the spiritual fruits of the quiet forest. Le Guin’s writing, I thought, reaches out to readers in a similar way, offering people far afield a metaphorical arm into the park—how many thousands has she helped imagine what it might be like to taste of those spiritual fruits? It was only a few years ago, in the pages of The Dispossessed, that I first encountered an anarchist utopia, so saturated is our culture with dystopias that it took two decades for me to stumble upon one.

Surely, the real arm into Forest Park just beyond her front door helped her as she wrote. I imagined Ursula leaving her front door, with an idea turning over in her mind, walking calmly towards the gulch. There are no cars revving and honking to distract her on her route. She is not worried for her children’s safety in the street. There are, in fact, no streets to cross between her house and the gulch, just a staircase to descend while thinking, beginning to write. She could walk from her front door right on into the park, undisturbed. No wonder she stayed for nigh sixty years. Must have been a writer’s wonderland.

the letter that spawned a park

High on the giant’s spine, I found on a park board (ha!) perhaps the original metaphorical arm into the park to come out of Portland: a letter from the Olmsted firm, attempting to convince the Park Board to set aside the land for a park system in Portland. After pausing at the stone restroom skeleton, I had given Kyra a hug and, drawn as I am to uphill stretches, ran up the Wildwood Trail. Twelve switchbacks later by my woozy, out of breath count, I emerged into the parking lot of the Pittock Mansion, a chateau built atop Portland’s West Hills in 1914 by Henry Pittock, the publisher of the daily newspaper, The Oregonian. The sign displaying an excerpt from the Olmsted letter was at the edge of the mansion’s parking lot. From it I learned that Forest Park was first proposed by John Charles Olmsted, Frederick’s nephew and adopted son, back in 1903 in a report he submitted to the Park Board of Portland with a flourish of striking language—

“future generations will . . . bless the men who were wise enough to get such woods preserved. Future generations . . . will be likely to appreciate the wild beauty and the grandeur of the tall fir trees in this forest park, or reservation, as it would perhaps better be called, its deep shady ravines and bold view-commanding spurs, far more than do the majority of the citizens of today, many of whom are familiar with similar original woods. But such primeval woods will become as rare about Portland as they now are about Boston. If these woods are preserved, they will surely come to be regarded as marvelously beautiful . . . No use to which this tract of land could be put would begin to be as sensible or as profitable to the city as that of making it a public park or reservation.”1

As I began to run back down the Wildwood Trail, towards Kyra below in the “deep shady ravine,” I thought about the rhetorical tricks the younger Olmsted was using to argue for this park. There’s an appeal to posterity and a higher power in the same phrase— “future generations . . . will bless the men” who made this park. How could any self-respecting park board member not want to hop on the posterity-will-love-me train? And then an appeal to rarity—‘look what happened to the old growth forests of the east coast! they’re gone! don’t you want your city to have a rare wonder that nowhere else has?’

Perhaps most striking to modern ears though, for it harmonizes with our national obsession—economic growth—is the last sentence I excerpted—“No use to which this tract of land could be put would begin to be as sensible or as profitable to the city.” Why this word, profitable? On the surface, huge numbers of protected trees hardly seems profitable—especially not near a booming lumber industry. Nearly down the hill, I began to wish I knew off the top of my head to whom exactly Olmsted was making this appeal. Perhaps knowing something about Olmsted’s audience would shed some light on his argument.

Later that evening, with my portal to the web open on my lap, I set out to uncover who was on the Portland Park Board in 1903. Turns out the Park Board attached Olmsted’s report to their own report for the Mayor, and they helpfully signed their names: L. L. Hawkins, T. L. Eliot, J. D. Meyer, and Ion Lewis. Lester Leander Hawkins was a civil engineer turned banker with many business interests. According to The Oregonian, the daily that Henry Pittock made his fortune publishing, he “was the first president of the Ainsworth National Bank, helped organize the Portland Hydraulic Elevator Co. and was instrumental in formation of the United States Electric Light & Power Co., which morphed into the Portland Railway, Light & Power Co.” Ion Lewis was architect to the tycoons. He ran a bustling firm that built Portland’s City Hall and the Multnomah County Courthouse, as well as many private mansions for Portland’s industrialists. Lewis designed prominent Portland lumberman Winslow Ayer’s sprawling property; the house of Portland capitalist and land developer Walter Burrell who, according to the National Register of Historic Places, “played a pivotal role in Portland’s economic development,”; and the house of another big lumber man, Philip Buehner; these among many other residences, many of which are museums open for touring today. Try as I might, I was unable to find anything other than the 1903 Park Board report on J. D. Meyer—seems he might be lost to history.

But there exists a veritable gold mine of information on the last, rather different, member of the park board—Thomas Lamb Eliot. The night before I began looking into the Park Board, Kyra and I were reading T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton aloud, so the next day when I saw T. L. Eliot’s name on the report, I was shocked at the coincidence—I had indeed found sapphires in the mud amongst the garlic; Thomas Lamb Eliot is T.S. Eliot’s uncle.

And indeed he lived up to the patrician Eliot name. His biographer, Earl Wilbur wrote that he was “by natural instinct, aristocratic,” much like his east coast brethren—his cousin Charles was the President of Harvard at the same time that he was receiving Olmsted’s letter. He followed in the footsteps of his father, T.S. Eliot’s grandfather, who founded Washington University in St. Louis, by founding Reed College, an institution he later said he hoped would be “a provider of the highest forces of civilization.”

T. L. Eliot was not quite the same type of man as the other members of the board—he was a prominent West Coast minister, an environmentalist, an animal rights activist, and a longtime civic leader in Portland who set up an orphanage, campaigned for women to have the right to vote, and was a tireless advocate for the Portland Public Library and Art Museum, steering both institutions to their founding.

Nevertheless, working with, and in the idiom of the capitalists was entirely in Eliot’s wheelhouse. I wondered in fact, after reading some of Eliot’s letters to Simeon Reed, the notoriously ruthless cattle, steel, and railroad baron, convincing him to direct funds in his will to the “founding [of] a Reed Institute of lectures and art and music and museum,” if Eliot had not learned a thing or two from Olmsted about how to appeal to the capitalist class. In one of his letters to Simeon, Eliot joked that a new institution of learning would “need a mine to run it.”

So what exactly was Olmsted doing? Why did Olmsted think the language of profit might appeal to businessmen and to an, albeit very wealthy, minister-reformer alike? Earlier in the report, J.C. Olmsted—in keeping with the tenets of the City Beautiful Movement (of which all of the Olmsteds were practitioners), namely that the virtue of the masses might be saved and bettered by grand and classically inspired infrastructural improvements to public space (not unlike our own dear leader’s recent proclamation about the preferred style of architecture for government buildings moving forward . . . )—wrote that municipal parks are “exceedingly important” in developing “the healthfulness, morality, intelligence, and business prosperity” of the people of a city. I think the answer is here, in this language which is rather similar to Eliot’s later summation of Reed College’s purpose to provide civilization.

Superficially, a park is not something which can be made profitable at all. Olmsted was not suggesting that admission be charged for entry. Rather, he was implying that the health of the citizenry is crucial to the success of capital. Here is the philosophical overlap between the business leaders and the minister on the park board. Both could get behind an appeal to “healthfulness” because both sought it for the people, albeit for different reasons. The capitalists to ensure the availability of a labor force to exploit, the minister because of religious conviction, and probably a dose of paternalism, as was germane to the progressive reform movements of the era.

Moreover, a park could be conceived of as profitable in what it might help the industrialists avoid. A park just might convince the working masses that life was sweet enough that they need not organize, that they need not strike, that they need not leverage their collective power to take on capital. That business leaders, and “Progressive” reformers like Eliot, might be looking for some way to pacify the people, to make the seas calm enough for business, is a good bet given that this was an era in which labor disruptions were common; strikes, boycotts, and organizing were ubiquitous, and workers were winning concessions. As Howard Zinn puts it in A People’s History of the United States, “true, this was the “Progressive Period,” the start of the Age of Reform; but it was reluctant reform, aimed at quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes.”2 The 1902 Anthracite Coal Strike, in which President Theodore Roosevelt intervened on behalf of the bosses to keep the union unrecognized, had been nationally publicized recently, and the memory of the great Pullman Strikes of 1894 was still in the national imaginary. Capitalists everywhere were interested in shutting down these types of movements before they got whipped up into national firestorms. The idea that a park might actually be good for workers, while also satisfying the capitalist’s wish to lower their susceptibility to work stoppages, made Olmsted’s use of the word profitable the perfect way to thread the needle between business and labor concerns.

Though I want him to have known what he was doing, and to have been doing it for a real love of the people, Olmsted was closer to the aristocratic mold of T.L. Eliot—he, and his City Beautiful Movement were undeniably paternalistic. Conspicuously, any input from actual people living in Portland at the time is missing from his proposal for the Portland park system. Olmsted was quite clear in his leanings. Also found in his letter:

“the president of the [Park] Board should be a man who has been successful in that line incidentally to the establishment or extension of some large commercial undertaking . . . It is of the utmost importance that the rest of the Board be men of refined taste and competent to safely decide the innumerable questions that concern the appearance of the parks . . . As a rule, men of cultivated taste are most apt to be found among those who have always been rich or well-to-do . . .”3

Though this is disappointing, in the end I’m not sure it matters why Olmsted chose to frame the need for a huge urban forest as that which would be most “profitable for the city” or for “business prosperity.” Rather, because, to use the historian Rutger Bregman’s words, “the right thing often happens for the wrong reasons,” Olmsted touched on the right language to make the right thing happen regardless of the reason.

What Olmsted was doing here is an example of what Rutger Bregman calls moral reframing. Olmsted was “finding different arguments that resonate with different audiences for the same point that [he was] trying to make.” He wasn’t only making the obvious environmental argument that saving the old huge trees of Portland from the lumber industry was a moral good which future generations would appreciate; rather, he argued, ‘saving these trees is actually the more profitable path for the lumber industry than cutting them down.’ Given the longtime hegemony of profit as sacrosanct modern motive, the “right language” to argue for the creation of Forest Park was born from a reframe, a transmutation of arguing for parks in the tongue of conservation alone, into the language of industrialism, of modern capitalism.

moral reframing

Reframing in this manner has been successful in other moments too. Olmsted’s letter reminded me of another brilliant example I first found in Rutger Bregman’s recent book, Moral Ambition. In the 1780s the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, after collecting interviews with at least 20,000 sailors, spoke out against, not the conditions for slaves on slaving ships making the Middle Passage, but the conditions for the white sailors on the ships. Obviously this is the “wrong reason” to abolish the slave trade, but it too, worked. “When British politicians learned of the death toll among British sailors,” Bregman notes, “many were deeply shocked and came out against the slave trade.”4 Turns out Clarkson pitched his arm into park, the statistic he had uncovered—up to 20% of white sailors were dying on slaving voyages—to William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, and Pitt was moved to change his position on the slave trade because of his sympathy for “our boys.” Clarkson’s efforts were a huge part of the British slave trade finally ending in 1807.

Another example: a colleague and friend of Clarkson’s, the charismatic and inventive abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, reframed that which the public could imagine as possible for a black man. Equiano, who appears played by the actor David Oyelowo in the new Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution, was born in the 1740s and at the age of eleven was kidnapped from his home in Benin, subjected to the Middle Passage, and eventually ended up enslaved on a plantation in colonial Virginia. He fought for the British in some perilous sea battles as a powder monkey on a frigate in the Seven Year’s War; ended up with a Quaker master who let him buy his freedom; wrote a bestselling autobiography—The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: or, Gustavus Vassa, the African; became a polar explorer; and only later in his life took up the mantle of abolition. His life’s story and the immensely popular language he employed to express it did much to push Britain towards abolishing the trade.

Equiano reframed with his very existence, and with how he expressed himself. With his memoir he caused innumerable white people to alter what they thought possible for a black man; with his speaking tours he turned a well-composed narrative into the testimony of a real, living, laughing, passionate, flesh and bones, man. He transformed the fight for abolition by breathing immediacy into the horrors of slavery for people who had never come into direct contact with it. And he transformed himself too. Bregman points out that Equiano was, for much of his life, “not opposed to the institution of slavery. At one point, while saving money to buy his freedom, he even briefly took a job that involved purchasing slaves in Africa.” It seems that Equiano’s interaction with some English Quaker women, like Elizabeth Heyrick, whom I discuss in my previous Letter from Philadelphia, possibly pushed him to embrace abolition later in life. The anthropologist David Graeber suspects that the answer to the question people have asked for centuries—why did it take him so long?—lies in Equiano’s integrity:

“One thing that comes through strikingly in the book [The Interesting Narrative] is that this was not only a man of endless resourcefulness and determination, but above all, a man of honor. Yet this created a terrible dilemma. To be made a slave is to be stripped of any possible honor. Naturally, Equiano wished to regain what had been taken from him. His problem was that honor is, by definition, something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it, then, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place.

It strikes me that this experience—of only being able to restore one’s lost honor, to regain the ability to act with integrity by acting in accord with the terms of a system that one knows, through deeply traumatic personal experience, to be utterly unjust—is itself one of the most profoundly violent aspects of slavery. It is another example, perhaps of the need to argue in the master’s language, but here taken to insidious extremes.5

But I don’t really like this framing of their efforts at persuasion that I’ve been setting up. I don’t want to think of agitating for change as simply reframing something in less offensive language, or as arguing in the master’s language for that matter. I think Olmsted, and Clarkson, and Equiano were up to something more complicated, something rather more akin to offering people that which Ursula K. Le Guin had in her neighborhood—an arm into the park. Clarkson was leading people to abolition by appealing to the emotions everyday people had for figures they could relate to—namely white English sailors. Maybe people knew a boy who had grown up down the street who was forced to go to sea on a slaving ship and then died; it’s much easier to feel something for him than for a person you’ve never met.

Olaudah Equiano was leading people to abolition by working to close that gap. Most people in England at the time had probably never even seen a black person. For his arm into the park, Equiano offered his humanity, showing the English public on many speaking tours that they could feel for him and people like him. Some evidence has emerged more recently that Equiano was actually born in the Americas and was never subjected to the Middle Passage. It doesn’t seem like we’ll ever know for sure how exactly his life actually proceeded, but if indeed he offered the world a fictional memoir, then he was even more so offering the people an arm into the park in the metaphorical vein of Le Guin. Through pure storytelling then—he gave the people a best-seller—Equiano painted for the masses a window, one it turned out that they were craving, that looked out on a better world, one with exciting black polar adventurers in it that they could even aspire to be. Clarkson did this too; his window looked out on happy English children playing in their hometowns, not dying far away at sea. It is the role of an arm into the park to help others envision how we get from here to there, from what we have to what we want. In the end, the ways in which we must morally reframe in order to enact real change often point us towards what needs to change. The reframe points us towards the park.

the park

You’ve probably been asking—“what exactly is the park in this metaphor? Sure, it’s nice to want to provide access to the park, but what about the park itself? What’s waiting there for people to do? To experience? Why do we want to go into the park at all?”

To put it simply, the park is freedom. Not dictated by the old and wealthy, but by planet and people. I am not talking about freedom which trickles down. And not the freedom the rich have accumulated—to do whatever they wish, to own as much as they want, to get there as fast as the latest mega-polluting jet will take them. The freedom I dream of—for myself; for my family and friends; for the 42 million SNAP recipients who have been on a terrifying rollercoaster for the last seven weeks; for my yet-to-be grandchildren; but also for humanity beyond our borders, in Gaza, in Sudan, and in Yemen, in the Southeast Asian countries that manufacture much of what we consume—is a freedom from worry, that one sickness or toothache will bankrupt you; that data centers will monopolize all the fresh clean water and all the power, demanding yet more absurd fossil fuel consumption; that a gun will take your child or their teacher before their time. I see a “park” with no gates, one that doesn’t close at midnight, where no one needs to work three jobs to put food on the table, where no one need fear American airstrikes, where it is unheard of to spend a third of waking hours stuck in traffic. It was Ursula K. Le Guin who first helped me to imagine what this type of world, what the “park,” might look like.

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the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin as “arms into the park”

In imagining what freedom could look like if we changed the conditions of our lives, but kept the compassion, Ursula herself was a master of writing these ‘arms into the park.’ So many of her stories consider the social and human implications of customs different to our own. When we see characters feeling real emotions that we do recognize because of stimuli from social situations that we don’t recognize, we are able to ‘try on’ different visions of what the park is in this long extended metaphor. Ursula’s writing helped me see that something was wrong with how the world functions, and she helped me to start imagining the substance of another world, to envision how I might participate in the race, as Zinn puts it in the Afterward of A People’s History, of “demanding a new future,” and showed me through her example that in participating we might “help determine the outcome.”

On Planet O, one of my favorite planets to daydream of inside Le Guin’s “Hainish Cycle” (a term she repeatedly distanced herself from, and yet sometimes also used . . .), Ursula reimagines the institution of marriage, thereby planting a seed about where our culture places arbitrary limits on the conception of freedom. On O, marriage, called sedoretu, is between four people from two different moieties, two evening people, and two morning people. It sounds incredibly complicated, but as Le Guin has one of her narrators explain, “to us, of course, it seems simple, and so natural that it’s foolish to describe it, like trying to describe how we walk, how we breathe.” Like marriage in our society, there are happy sedoretus and sad, imperfect ones. As with our society, some people take the institution very seriously, while others seek to change it—one of the stories set on O describes two women who seek to set up a sedoretu with three women and one man, and face much of the same discrimination that you would expect on Planet Earth. All these people live in a free society, and in showing us the complexities, joys, and sadnesses of these people, living with the only institution their culture has ever known, Le Guin is showing us another vision of what freedom could look like. Free people don’t have to have the same assumptions about culture that we do. And in showing us the depths of different assumptions, Le Guin helps us see both where our own succeed, and where they fall short.

Ultimately, I cannot and ought not, define freedom for everyone. Nor could Ursula, nor can a class made up of a paltry rich few for that matter. But she could, and I still can, work to convince people that we ought to collectively reconsider some of the things we have received as canonical with respect to American freedom. Like Ursula, Olaudah Equiano and Thomas Clarkson helped people envision another way freedom could look—a black polar explorer now on a public speaking tour; and a world where Jimmy down the block doesn’t get kidnapped and forced to work on a slaving ship until premature death. Forest Park, in turn, is reaching a huge number of people through showing them a glimpse of freedom operating in the urban fabric. And Ursula offered us a vision—four people all married together deeply believing that such a relationship is what freedom looks like—which challenges us to ask, ‘if we cannot believe that such a thing could be freedom here, are we really free?’ Perhaps, after all, that is what an arm into the park is—the ever welcome call to question: am I really free? So to close, I’ll give you an idea of what I mean.

disneyland is ‘an arm into the park’

In a previous essay I argued that the centering of cars in society makes us all less free. We can, and ought, to use the popularity of Disneyland to morally reframe the dominance of cars in American life, and to help a broader coalition understand how we might go from the strip-mall-SUV-life, to safely walkable, electric-train-forward, cities.

While in Costa Mesa this past September, before the year one cast flew away but after the new cast arrived, on the golden Monday when the theatre went dark between weeks in Orange County, we all went to Disneyland. It struck me while walking around in this pedestrian oasis, replete (or so I’ve heard) with springy pavement to make it easier to walk, no cars itching to mow you down, and a horse drawn carriage with plenty of passenger space offering to take you across town, that this country would be a better place if we converted our small sidewalk, parking-lotted, urban fabric into something closer to Disneyland’s Main Street.

Perhaps this question might serve as an arm into the park: what if Disneyland were a real American city? For starters, a lot of people would be very happy; Disneyland is immensely popular. Even on a Monday after the start of the school year, the place was swarming with people—many were children doused in glitter. According to the Themed Entertainment Association’s yearly attendance report, Disneyland has hosted over 15 million visitors per year since 2009 (excepting the pandemic years) and it hit 15 million visitors in the mid-90s too. That’s way more than visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 (6.3 million), and way way more than visited Yellowstone National Park that year (3.2 million). If we extrapolate from this data that means that, on the low end, 45,000 people are visiting Disneyland every day. This is as if everyone in the town I grew up in, Arlington, Massachusetts, had visited Disneyland every single day of the year, for the last sixteen years.

Disneyland is also very dense. And the cities of the future will have to be denser than what we have today if we have any hope of reducing our footprints. Hayden Clarkin estimates, in a delightful article on this here Substack, which inspired this line of thinking, that Disney’s Main Street, if we extended it to be a square-mile city neighborhood, would have roughly 14,000 people living in it. He’s working with the Main Street of Disney World, but all the Disney-realms work with similar designs. If anything, Disney World is just even busier than Disneyland. This means that Disneyland-made-real would be far denser than Arlington was when I was growing up, and by extension denser than most suburbs in America are now, by about 5,000 people per square mile. Main Street at Disney is as dense as the ring cities around Los Angeles like Hermosa Beach, California where my dad lives. It’s also as dense as many neighborhoods in Chicago, and in Miami.

But it doesn’t look like LA, or Miami, or any suburb in America for that matter. It’s far more happily walkable. This is, as Clarkin points out, precisely what makes it desirable as a vacation destination. Modern American relaxation at this point involves getting away from the mayhem of cars which dominate our lives. This is why people go to Greece and Italy. It’s why medieval towns all over Europe hold such allure for Americans. People want to go to quaint little towns in sunny climes, to sit by the side of a piazza eating gelato. When they are on vacation people want to walk around in places designed before cars existed. This is not the only reason Disneyland is appealing to so many people, but it is certainly a big reason, and I would argue it is a large part of why so many adults love Disneyland with a passion.

Of course Disneyland has its flaws. For one, it’s far too expensive to be accessible, and for another, it’s compensatory consumerism incarnate, but its popularity is telling. We ought to start asking people what it is about Disneyland’s design they find so appealing. And then we should ask—why not incorporate those things into our cities?

No matter how many companies like Uber and Waymo and Lyft and the god-awful TeslaTunnelEsophaguses try to convince us otherwise, people do actually like walking; Disneyland proves this—it’s just that because of the design of our cities, we often don’t feel safe to do so. Instead of horses only showing up on our city streets when cops ride them sending off glares of intimidation, maybe freedom could look like people catching the horse drawn trolley in the city center. Instead of an endless stream of cars wasting people away on far too long morning commutes (especially for poorer people who can only afford to live increasingly far away from work), freedom could look like everyone living within a fifteen minute’s walk of all their necessities, a reef of pedestrians and bicycles weaving, chatting, singing, dancing on our main streets, outside of the metal boxes that isolate us from each other, and heighten our meanest impulses.

Except that, here in America currently, freedom can’t look like Disneyland. As Clarkin points out, most of the things that make Main Street in Disneyland the way that it is are illegal under most zoning codes in the US. You don’t really have a choice about setting aside ridiculous amounts of space to park cars on the premises of every building in most US cities, and euclidean zoning means that you can’t have an apartment right above a business, as Walt Disney’s own personal apartment inside Disneyland was.

I am not suggesting that Disneyland offers a precise policy plan for our cities, far from it. I am suggesting that Disneyland offers an aspect of freedom that is missing from the American urban fabric outside its walls, an aspect a huge number of people are familiar with already and feel fondly towards, but which they don’t currently recognize as something for which to strive. I don’t want Walt Disney’s Curtis-Yarvin-ey vision of a CEO King, of corporations ruling the world, to come to pass, but I do think that Clarkin and the 18 million people who visited Disneyland last year may be on to something—some of Walt’s ideas about a car-less future are worth examining, and could help bring a broader coalition of people on board with envisioning “the park” as a world less centered on cars.

The actual arm into the park in Ursula’s neighborhood, Balch Gulch, was donated to the city of Portland by the banker, merchant, and capitalist Donald Macleay in 1897. The gulch was, from the beginning, both the literal and the metaphorical arm into the park I have been pontificating on about. It provided the first public access to the already public land that would become Forest Park, and so helped to spread awareness about the benefits of having access to urban forest. When people could finally get into it, they, obviously, loved it. The gulch itself helped mobilize the people of Portland to push for a parks system, to recognize what they had, to save the lands that would become Forest Park from the lumbermen. How do we get from here to there, from what we have now to a future without worry? Clearly a committee of rich men with total discretion to invent, as Olmsted imagined, isn’t going to cut it. No, it’s on the gulch trail, in the many acts of bringing people right up to the entrance, that we, together, will create the park.

And so, like a many-headed octopus rising above the water, I hope to add to the debate, to offer as many arms into the park here in the pages of Small Panacea as I can, informed by our travels during our second year of touring, by the people, places, and histories that we meet along the way, to try to help others imagine what could be. In a culture obsessed with what one ought to be against, arms into the park are limbs you can take hold of, like a branch poking out of a rushing river; they are something to stand for.

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There’s still time to protest The Ambler Road, an environmental catastrophe, and a direct assault on the will of the people of Alaska!

The Ambler Road is a proposed 211 mile industrial road, closed to the public, which would cut through the southwestern foothills of the Brooks Range connecting the Ambler Mining District, a copper and zinc deposit on the edge of the Arctic, to global trade via an existing oil pipeline access road, the Dalton Highway.

The proposed route for the road cuts off a huge chunk of Gates of the Arctic National Park, would cross and pollute 3,000 streams, and eleven rivers, four of which, the Alatna, the Koyukuk, the Atchiiniq, and the Kobuk, are currently protected National Wild and Scenic rivers. Trump is proposing eliminating their protections.

The Brooks Range is one of the world’s largest remaining roadless regions. The lack of roads in the region is why the Western Arctic Caribou Herd, long dwindling, is currently making small population gains. The lack of roads crossing rivers allows indigenous tribes and peoples to fish and hunt as they have for centuries. Non-native hunters too, currently rely on the plentiful fish and caribou for upwards of 70% of their diet. It’s exceedingly difficult to get to the Kobuk Valley—and that is exactly what makes the way of life here possible.

On Monday, Trump granted approval for a road that 74 Tribes and First Nations peoples who actually live there vehemently oppose, all in the name of putting “America First.” All the President’s lackeys are praising the wisdom of his sharpie scribbling. They claim that through releasing the resource potential of Alaska, this road will benefit the local communities and the nation. Sen. Murkowski insists “the President’s re-approval will unlock a world-class mining district, deliver quality-of-life benefits for communities in the region, and help grow Alaska’s economy. It will also improve our national security by strengthening our mineral security and enabling us to produce more of our most important resources here at home.” Sen. Sullivan cheers as well, “I’m glad to see another critically important project for our state’s economy and working families being put back on track.” The Governor of Alaska, Mike Dunleavy would have you believe the road is a panacea for a dragging rural economy—“this decision will unleash development opportunities, create new jobs for Alaskans and secure access to strategic minerals.”

But it’s the President’s doormat, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who told the tallest tale of all—“China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of all the top 20 critical minerals,” Burgum bleated. “And in this mine area up here, we got copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, gallium, germanium—rich in all of the minerals that we need to win the AI arms race against China.”1

All these spaniels seem to be parroting the position of Ambler Metals (the parent company of which is Trilogy Metals), the Canadian corporation (with part Australian ownership) which stands to profit from the Ambler Road. You can almost hear the glee in Ambler spokesperson Kaleb Froehlich’s voice when you read his spurious statement: “For rural Alaskans, this road represents opportunity, [well]-paying jobs, essential revenues for remote communities and a chance to build a more resilient local economy. It’s a pathway to both national strength and regional prosperity.”

The Trump Administration is making two claims about the Ambler Road: one, it will help the US win an AI arms race against China; two, that it will bring economic prosperity to the people living in the region through which the Ambler Road will travel. Both claims are lies.

This road does not put America first. It certainly won’t help us beat China in the AI game. Even if you believe the narrative that we need our own independent American supply of critical (tech sector) minerals to make sure we are not beholden to China, (you shouldn’t—the US Geological Survey has repeatedly found that copper is not a critical mineral because of its abundance in the lower 48 in far less remote and pristine places) the minerals from the Ambler Mine are not going to find their way into American markets at all. Trilogy Metals itself assumes “that delivery of all concentrates would be to a smelter in the Asia Pacific region.” This from a 2023 feasibility study run by Trilogy Metals—a foreign Canadian Company, let me mention again—which outlines their plan to send all of the mine’s output somewhere in Southeast Asia to be refined for sale on the Chinese market, the significance of which “cannot be understated.”2 This mine is a Canadian profiteering enterprise set up to benefit China.

And, to sweeten the pot with a dash of conflicting interests, Trump announced as he approved the road, that the Federal Government will be taking a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals, which, while potentially sounding like a boon to American business, actually creates a corporate spy’s delight—a strange incentive for Trump to help the Chinese win the AI race. If demand for Chinese AI datacenter increases, which it will if China is seen as winning the race, then Trilogy Metals will see an increase in demand for copper from the mines, which will in turn boost its share value, thus increasing the value of Trump’s stake in the company. What businessman could resist?

Except the government’s stake in Trilogy is not a conflicting interest so much as out-and-out cronyism when you discover that John Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager who made a killing betting on people’s immiseration during the 2008 crash, and who is a friend, donor, and ally of Trump’s, owns an 8.7% stake in Trilogy Metals. Paulson raised over $50 million for Trump’s campaign at a fundraiser at Paulson’s Palm Beach mansion in April of 2024. With the announcing of the DoD as a new business partner for Paulson, Trump just paid him back in full, plus interest—Paulson’s $30 million dollar stake in Trilogy rose 245% between closing bell on Monday and opening on Tuesday morning; Paulson’s shares are now “worth” over $100 million. What businessman could resist?

So is the Trump administration’s second justification—the economic prosperity for the region argument—also problematic. Far from bringing prosperity to down on their luck rural communities, the Ambler Road will heighten rural dependency on outside (read, extremely expensive) supplies by destroying the last remnants of a millennium of subsistence hunting and fishing. The plight of the Athabaskan, Koyukon, Kobuk, Selawik, and Nunamiut peoples in the face of this road reminds me of the Swedish linguist, writer, and documentarian Helena Norberg-Hodge’s description of the arrival of global trade to the Himalayan region of Ladakh which I first encountered through a Wendell Berry essay,

In the traditional culture villagers provided for their basic needs without money. They had developed skills that enabled them to grow barley at 12,000 feet and to manage yaks and other animals at even higher elevations. People knew how to build homes with their own hands from the materials of the immediate surroundings. The only thing they actually needed from outside the region was salt, for which they traded. They used money in only a limited way, mainly for luxuries.

Now, suddenly, as part of the international money economy, Ladakhis find themselves ever more dependent—even for vital needs—on a system that is controlled by faraway forces. They are vulnerable to decisions made by people who do not even know that Ladakh exists . . . For two thousand years in Ladakh, a kilo of barley has been a kilo of barley, but now you cannot be sure of its value.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s declaration that connecting the Ambler Mine to the global mining trade will “deliver quality-of-life benefits for communities in the region” is especially heinous given the destruction that the road is going to cause. The road will bisect the migratory route of the region’s Caribou herd, potentially leading the herd to extinction, and will cross eleven major rivers, permanently scarring the (rare) sheefish and chum salmon populations (and more!) of the Kobuk Valley, on which, says April Monroe, an advocate with the Tanana Chiefs Conference who helped defeat the Ambler Road the first time around, “nearly all people regionally depend, at least in part, [for] subsistence hunting and gathering.”

Murkowski is cynically amplifying Ambler’s misleading position “that caribou herds have thrived near similar road developments on Alaska’s North Slope and in Northwest Alaska without any impact on migration.” Ambler’s position is dubiously true, and research undertaken by Jim Dau, among others, shows that Ambler can only claim this at all because Caribou have staged a mild comeback by changing their migration routes to avoid roads altogether. Lest we forget, when the Dalton Highway—the existing oilfield access road which runs perpendicular to the proposed Ambler route—first opened in 1974, connecting the Prudhoe Bay oilfields to Fairbanks and by extension to the rest of the world, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd first began to decline. This decline continued for more than 40 years. It’s only in the past few years that the herd has started to rebound near the highway, but it is still much smaller than it was before the Dalton Highway opened, and shrinking overall. If the Ambler Road is built, the caribou may not survive another disturbance to their migration, and the ability of indigenous peoples in the Kobuk to provide for themselves, as they have for centuries, much as the Ladakhis did, will fade, and they will “find themselves ever more dependent—even for vital needs—on a system that is controlled by faraway forces.”

The injustice of all this is heightened by the swooping nature of Trump’s sharpie flourish. He is faraway forces incarnate. All this copper leaving Alaska is much like the forced export to England of tobacco, indigo, sugar, iron, timber, and rice from the American colonies in the lead up to the American Revolution which pushed Jefferson to write that governments ought to “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The founding fathers of this country asked, ‘how can a ruler so far away understand the needs of a place he has never known in person?’ If his power is to be just, they concluded, he must seek the permission of those he governs. Jefferson famously went on, “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The people of the Kobuk Valley are telling Trump loud and clear that this road will deny them ‘safety and happiness,’ that his ruling from on high, 3,500 miles away, is not just. It would be in the spirit of the founding documents of this nation, that is to say it would be patriotic and deeply American, to “alter or to abolish” Trump’s misguided approval of this project.

The governed are saying, loudly and clearly, they do not want the Ambler Road. At least 74 Tribes and Nations have spoken their dissent. At least one native group changed their mind about the project because of all the lying going on. Rural non-native Alaskan hunters and anglers have said they do not want the road for they fear it will make their hunting and fishing impossible. Some big game hunters have likened building the Ambler Road to death by a thousand cuts for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd. The President is claiming an obscure passage of a law from 1980 allows him to supersede the will of the local people.3 He argues, paternalistic to the end, that it’s in the best interests of these people who will end up living beside a road they are not allowed to use.

The damage done to the communities along the road will be inordinate. Probable, but not definite, short term mining and road building work for at most 2,800 local Alaskans, (this is a generous estimate) cannot replace the subsistence hunting and fishing which has sustained all of the communities in the region for many, many generations. Those 2,800 people may have work for a time, but the work they will be offered is not permanent and will in fact destroy the permanent way of life that had prospered in rural Alaska before the advent of the industrial economy. This is all not to mention, and Trump is always careful not to, that a massive copper and zinc mine will inevitably leech heavy metals into the surrounding area. “Fugitive dust,” kicked up by ore trucks has been found to contaminate mosses all along the road that leads to Red Dog Mine, a similar mining project further north and west. And forever chemicals (PFAS) have recently been found—how long have they been lurking?—in whitefish and grayling populations in some lakes along the Dalton Highway. Pamela Miller, the executive director of a Anchorage-based environmental health research group, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, told a National Geographic reporter back in 2020, that heavy metals can accumulate in lichens which caribou then eat, causing dangerous metals to appear in humans who have hunted the contaminated caribou.

Those contaminated caribou were roaming near the Red Dog Mine when she spoke with that reporter five years ago. That mine was opened in 1989 under the provisions of the same 1980 law Trump is using now. The EPA said in 2016 that Red Dog was the most polluting mine in America. It will have some competition for the title if the Ambler Mine begins operations. The whitefish and the salmon, the caribou of the lower Brooks Range, and the lichens and the mosses will become contaminated too and then, unable to practice the hunting and fishing that has sustained them for centuries, the people of the region will become dependent on a closed loop—incredibly expensive food shipped in and bought with wages made at the mines which are the source of the dependence on imported food.

This is the same globalization that Norberg-Hodge observed in the Himalayas in 1991. Once the caribou are poisoned, and the fish are cut off from their breeding grounds, once you can no longer be sure about a kilo of barley,

Increasingly, people are locked into an economic system that pumps resources out of the periphery into the center—from the nonindistrialized to the industrialized parts of the world, from the countryside to the city, from the poor to the rich. Often these resources end up back where they came from as commercial products . . . at prices that the poor can no longer afford. 4

So spread the word, speak up for the non-industrial poor, start saying “Stop the Ambler Road!” Speak up because the Kobuk, the Koyukuk, the Atchiiniq, the Alatna are all still wild rivers, the rare real rivers, like the Colorado used to be, “the real Colorado, before damnation, when” as Edward Abbey remembered in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, “the river flowed unchained and unchanneled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw. That was a river.”5 Speak up because the people who rely on these lands, who steward these lands, who are not consenting to this governance, are saying they do not want this road, and it’s high time we listened to the people who actually live in the places we seek to exploit.

quisquis erit vitae scribam color.
whatever the color of life will be, I will write.
                                     -Horace, Satires, Book II

Back in June when we were in Denver my friend Joe suggested that I might like the HBO show “How To with John Wilson.” Something about the way in which John thinks reminded Joe of me. In Costa Mesa, in Orange County, California, heartland of car worship, what with some lingering pains making running difficult, and feeling hesitant to bike much from worry that I’d be hit by one of the clueless SUVs bopping around, I settled in to take Joe up on his suggestion.

It is striking to me that a show like John Wilson’s, which revels in linking both ordinary and zany snapshots filmed on the street in New York City with tangentially related lines from whichever essay John is narrating, could never be made in Costa Mesa. In Costa Mesa you couldn’t film a series of sidewalk circus acts as you read a passage about entertaining guests at a dinner party, nor could you illustrate the idea of a mortgage being a burden by filming a staggering man dragging all his belongings down the street in a huge green trunk because there are no people out on the streets here.

Nor for that matter could a book like Ulysses take place in Costa Mesa because the characters wouldn’t be able to hear each other talk for all the cars whizzing by. That wouldn’t matter anyways because they’d all be ensconced in their metal boxes most likely heading to the only place this city has reserved strictly for pedestrians, the South Coast Plaza, California’s largest shopping mall.

The streets are all six lane boulevards here, and I, perennial proponent of common sense jaywalking—the streets are public land after all—cannot cross without pushing a cross walk button because the streams of cars on all these boulevards whirr by entirely unbroken. I timed how long I waited to cross on multiple occasions—three rotations of light changes for the cars while I was waiting for nigh seven minutes. Sometimes you have to wait to cross twice because they haven’t even bothered to put crosswalks on all sides of the square.

And so when we move on to Sacramento at the end of two weeks in cartropolis, I am relieved. The expansive network of bike trails along the Sacramento and American Rivers is easy to access from our hotel by the theatre. The morning after we arrive Kyra and I are gliding through riparian cottonwood forest watching sea lions (!) arch their slick backs, diving and playing in the river. In the fall California heat, biking along on a wooded trail fully separated from the city’s cars, I feel free.

It’s a freedom I was missing back in Orange County. I think the many collected minutes of feeling stuck waiting for the streaming cars to part contributed to feeling stuck in my writing. It’s this bicycling freedom, away from the worry brought by cars, which brings a realization. The claim I want to make is actually more fundamental than I thought. I don’t oppose cars simply because of environmental reasons as I had long thought, rather I think that

The centering of cars makes us less free.

The issue is that fundamental. Once a symbol of Kerouacian American freedom, cars are now closer to the fetters they once tore apart. The way our cities are designed—for cars primarily—makes people, people not in cars that is, an afterthought. (It also makes people inside cars an afterthought—adding more lanes helps sell more cars but it most certainly does not ease traffic) This is true to different degrees all over America, indeed all over the world.

It took visiting Orange County—possibly the most oppressively car-centered county in America—immediately before visiting Sacramento, with its relatively immense bike trail system for me to at last articulate just how central cars are to the undermining of freedom in this country.

More specifically, it is the memory of a snowy egret and a white-faced ibis standing in the stagnant water of a concrete flood control channel around the corner from the Segerstrom Theatre in Costa Mesa which has helped me finally articulate the claim above. These birds, standing in a concrete ditch, offer a sneaky (and I think fun!) ingress to examining how cars and roads are undermining freedom.

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Synanthropes

Snowy Egrets and White-faced Ibises are synanthropes. That they thrive on concrete, wading in waste water, lends them membership to the synanthropic club. Unlike misanthropes, these creatures flock (pun intended) to humanity. And because of our proximity to them, members of the club are familiar to us all.

Rats, and pigeons, raccoons and coyotes, seagulls and vultures are all synanthropes. “Syn” comes from the Greek meaning with, but has come down to us as united or considered together, as in words like synchronous (together + time) and synagogue (together + bring); and “anthropos” from the Greek for a human being. Indeed, synanthropes are those creatures (and plants!), which must be considered together with us humans. Ben Goldfarb, who wrote a terrific book about road ecology—how roads interact with their environs—suggests that synanthropes, “clever and adaptable creatures who harvest the resources that humanity furnishes,” inhabit a space downstream of humans, recycling our wastes. Brooke Jarvis, writing in The New Yorker in 2021 about another synanthrope with which we are all intimately familiar—deer, places synanthropes into a liminal space, “the tiny minority of wild animals” that do not live in the wild and yet are “not livestock or pets.”1

They are the creatures of my everyday, the color of life. I can observe them silently, content, knowing that my presence won’t spell their doom; no, they thrive near me; it is in fact their defining trait.

When I was living in New York a few years ago, I would get out of my Trader Joe’s shift at midnight and run home along Riverside Drive. I would always greet the raccoons who frequented the trash can on 103rd and Riverside. A midnight celebration of our shared habit, me and the raccoons, with a drooping London Plane tree as my witness, of passing this way most nights and stopping here to acknowledge our lives’ intersection. Over many months I got to know these particular raccoons, the way their eye masks pinched their eyes, the strange spot one of them had on his tail. My heart quickened when they had a friend I did not recognize over for dinner. Maybe this is why I like synanthropes so much: their propinquity to us allows us to know them over time and thus as individuals rather than as members of a class. We are able anthropomorphize them, to fool ourselves into thinking we might know their personalities, their friends, their habits, as if they had these too.

I’ve always paused for these creatures for I’ve always felt an affinity with them. They roam parallel to me. They suggest that the wild is not some place out there that I could never enter. We amble through the same streets, and luxuriate in the same street lamp lights. I marvel at their continued presence amongst our asphalt and our toxic runoff. I marvel that our built environment can serve as a meeting ground, a piazza if you will, for the gathering of species, of intelligences. Because of synanthropes, I can imagine flood control channels as old town squares, and trashcans as huge dining tables set for guests. How lovely!

So when I stopped my bike to peer down into the piazza, er, flood control channel I mean, on Mr. Snowy Egret and Mr. White-faced Ibis, I thought of the Racoons of Riverside Drive and their huge dining table set for guests, er, I mean, trashcan. In celebration of our shared pathway, I sit on the sidewalk drawing egret and ibis, angling to carve their visages in linoleum.

Later in the week, standing beyond my bike which I’d let fall to the ground within sight of Huntington Beach, I was drawing a bird again when a man approached me to chat, curious about what I was capturing. I had stopped my bike in a hurry when I glimpsed a great white egret wading in the Santa Ana River, looking like a spear fisher about to pounce. I inched closer to the river bank until I could see all of the big bird, from his toes dunked in the river, to the yellow beak fixed atop a long and tense neck, until I was close enough to distinguish his pupil from his eye.

As I got out my notebook to draw, he flashed his beak into the water, too quick for me to see it pierce the surface, and when the spray of startled water settled he stood again before me with a worm, wriggling, dangling in the every-moment-more-orange sun. The citrus disk lost much of its remaining height as I drew the hunting egret.

I was going over the lines of my drawing that I actually wanted to keep, when the aforementioned man whom I’d seen down on Huntington Beach, where the Santa Ana meets the ocean, chatting with everyone he could find came up to me and peered at my notebook. He wore an offensively green safety vest, like someone not quite convincing wanting to pass as a highway worker, and continued to look up at me, as I continued inking. He badly wanted me to look up. I could feel his pleading.

When I finished tracing the lines I felt were not mistakes, I did finally look up. He smiled (at last!) and said, “You’re drawing?” The question was drawn out with a deep pitch valley in the middle made me feel like he thought me drawing now, here, was a miracle, like the lifting of a pestilence.

“Oh yes,” I say, and look again on the egret plodding forward to the ocean over the rocks. The man says that he doesn’t see as many egrets around as he used to. I nod sadly and say what a reality. We nod along together bumping our chins over the wobbly ground of a future with fewer birds in it.

A week later, with two more trip to this patch of beach under my belt, I returned once again with my friend Kenny. Having fallen in love with the Santa Ana Bikeway, its wide sloping views of a river slowly re-wilding, and the release it provided from cartropolis (everywhere has redeeming qualities), I wanted to share it with a pal. So I raised the seat of Kyra’s bike for Kenny and we set out. I’d seen pelicans, and gulls, plovers, and terns, and of course egrets and ibises, but not until this final bike ride did I see the big bird I had heard frequented this place.

And then just as Kenny and I approached the endless water we saw him standing there at the mouth of the river. Tall, silent, and fully motionless, a huge great blue heron stood ankle deep in the Santa Ana. All the other birds were dwarfed by him. As we watched him, stately and still, I thought of the man who was interested in my drawing. I wondered how many big birds he used to see here, how he must have felt when witnessing an echelon, a full rookery, take flight. In all my trips to the beach these past two weeks in Costa Mesa, I saw only three solitary great white egrets. And just this one great blue heron.

Which brings me back to synanthropes. I love these creatures, I do. But I don’t want them to be the only creatures. “But,” you say, “synanthropes won’t be the only creatures! The other ones will just flee the city for the wild places.” “You’re right,” says I. This will remain true for a while. The great blue heron and the great white egret are not endangered now. But traffic, and pavement are eroding their habitat, while toxic road runoff, among other things, puts their health at risk too.2 Soon, maybe not in my lifetime, but then again, maybe, all the creatures left will have to be synanthropes. The other ones, the wolves, and the bison, the bald eagles, and the loons, will be to our grandchildren and their kin as unicorns and saber-tooths are to us, fauna we tell stories about, and that’s all. It’s already happening all over—the egrets, the great blue herons are fleeing our cities. The man I met at the beach remembers a time when there were more of them, just as I remember a time when it snowed in Boston. Increasingly, most people on earth live in cities, which means that, daily, the chances of seeing a great blue heron—of drawing his magnificent contours, of feeling reverence for his capacious wingspan—diminishes.

Which in turn brings me back to freedom. As cars push everything other than the synanthropes away from cities, and as roads push everything other than synanthropes further into the wild spaces we have left (20% of the US landmass is currently affected by the reach of roads) the color of life is dimmed.3 The soundscapes of our cities will stem from fewer sources. The smells will become purely mechanical. Hunting—which many rural dwellers I know see as a fundamental right, almost synonymous with freedom—will become a word for what rats and raccoons do in our dumpsters.

Surely this is not a vision of the freedom we hold so dear! A grayscale world, not with fauna numberless, but with a cast of creatures diverse enough to fill only the ten spots on our finger abacus? No! We already have the maximum amount of freedom that roads are going to provide us. At this point freedom will continue to grow by pursuing alternate modes of transit that have greater capacities while shrinking their footprints.

No New Roads, starting with The Ambler Road

It is at this point that I can hear my (currently imaginary) critics revving their engines, shouting over the din, “Well, what are you going to do about it? You want to just get rid of all cars, all roads?? No one will ever vote for that!”

I do not wish to be so extreme at all. Rather, I wish to say simply that we should not build any more new roads. We have so much pavement already, 4 million miles of it, not counting sidewalks and added lanes even. Let’s maintain the roads we have, and let’s commit to not building any more.

This slogan, “No New Roads!” can be exercised immediately. Earlier this month, Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to lift Biden-Era protections on 13 million acres of wilderness on which over 30 Alaska Native communities depend for, among many things, subsistence fishing. One of the greatest caribou herds left on earth is (at least until the Senate votes on the measure) protected under the Biden policy. On one edge of the protected lands lies a copper deposit. On the other, the Dalton Highway.

With protections on their way to gone, mining interests are poised to resurrect the Ambler Road: 211 miles of pavement through wilderness, Gates of the Arctic National Park, and many native and rural communities. All to connect the Ambler Mining District to the Dalton Highway.

According to Nicole Schmitt, the head of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, if this road is built “3,000 streams and 11 rivers, and the migratory routes of three caribou herds, including the Western Arctic Caribou herd,” will be devastated. The road, really an industrial thoroughfare, will lead to 168 trips of both empty and copper laden trucks each day rumbling through some of the most pristine land this country has left. The road will not however run through any of the native or rural communities along its path. These communities will receive noise, air, and water pollution, but none of the economic benefits roads can bring to places to which they are connected. Even if these Native and rural communities were to build their own access roads to the main Ambler Road, they wouldn’t be allowed on the freeway—it’s going to be a private road, for corporate mining purposes only.

Notably, there are a lot of MAGA people in Alaska, many of them hunters and anglers, who do not want this road built either. While the Republican senator from Alaska Dan Sullivan has said that the road and the mines are necessary in the interest of national security—argues Sullivan: copper from the Ambler District will help us reduce our reliance on Chinese imports—the Hunters and Anglers for the Brooks Range Coalition points out that the corporate beneficiaries of the proposed road are planning to ship all of the ore from these mines to Asia anyways. Ambler Metals, the company that stands to gain most from the road is not even American owned; they are jointly owned by a Canadian corporation and an Australian corporation. This, the Hunters and Anglers coalition argues, contradicts Trump’s America First agenda.

Not only will the copper extracted via the Ambler Road not be put to use in America, the road will actively harm the Americans near it. It’s not just Alaska Native communities that rely on the Brooks Range for subsistence fishing and hunting, more than 60 non-native rural communities rely on the Western Arctic Caribou Herd for food. The herd’s population is already down 41% since 2017. Will these people, indigenous and nonnative, be freer because of this road? Or will it forever erase their way of life?

I insist, freedom is not the freedom of industrialists to “ruin one place or culture for the sake of another;” freedom is not getting from a to b in a metal box as quickly as possible. Freedom does involve a world colored by the bountiful diversity of life with which we are graced to share the planet. I am, of course, indebted to Wendell Berry, both for the quote above, and in linking freedom with a diversity of life. In his essay “Conservation and Local Economy,” Berry writes that for a community to be healthy, for it to be “free of tyranny,”

“we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place, plus the place itself: its soil, its water, its air, and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it. If the place is well preserved, if its entire membership, natural and human, is present in it, and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy.”4

Humanity’s reach on the globe has changed 75% of the world’s land and two-thirds of the world’s water mass. Over a million creatures are extinct already. At what point, when you have stripped the paintings off the wall of the home, removed the rugs from the floors, boarded up all the windows, painted the walls gray, and poured concrete over all the flowers out in the yard, do you stop referring to the space as a home and start referring to it as a cell? At what point is our freedom to exist on whichever rat infested patch of pavement we can afford not really freedom anymore?

Kenny gave me a copy of the comic book Watchmen after we biked down to Huntington Beach and saw the great blue heron wading in the Santa Ana. In the book’s final act, the main characters fly to Antarctica where their superbly-wealthy-former-superhero foe has built himself a snow globe paradise protected from the blizzard winds of the icy continent by a huge glass dome. Inside the dome, greenery abounds. Exotic birds land on the wealthy-aging-ex-superhero’s shoulder. There are big cats out there under the dome too.

If we want to live in an America where freedom, a colorful life, a life with more than just egrets and raccoons in it, is for people like you and me, not just for the techno-feudal overlords who can build domes with their untaxed billions, then we had better stop building roads while there are still any migration routes left at all.

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This is the first in a series of “No New Roads!” pieces. More are in the works, stay tuned! Thank you, as always, for reading.

For more information about The Ambler Road and for suggestions on how you could help see The Tanana Chiefs Conference “No Ambler Road” petition.

While churning thoughts on my writing and mulling how I wish to proceed, my making has turned visual. This certainly has something to do with the possibility for communal gathering while making visual art. I have spent many hours in the last month hunched over the long dining room table that my cousin Jess and her husband and their daughters have so generously made available to us, printing and painting away while my cousins make food, chat, dance around the kitchen nearby, read, and print and paint along with me! The seclusion necessary for research and writing would have made these gatherings harder.

I am also inclined to think that color—ink, and paint soaked strings whirling through the air towards brown paper canvas—has been brought out of me by the immense welcome Kyra and I have felt here around this table and in this house this month. We are so grateful to have such a kind and generous family; all this art germinated here, midst these people, my family, in this patch of home on the road.

Around this wondrous long wooden table in Jess’s dining room, which has become our locus of art-making, linocut drafts and experiments, familial painting collaborations, drawings and plans, and cats sitting in drying paintings have all taken shape—ours, this month, is a colorful paper world.

All this printing and painting is changing how I think about my writing. There’s more writing on the way; its direction has changed.

Here’s some of the work that has come from this table, from our month with my cousins in Berkeley, California.

We’re moving on to Seattle tomorrow. I’m running the San Francisco Marathon today—in fact I’m starting my race as this Small Panacea is being published, for I scheduled it to send far too late last night when I should have been preparatory sleeping.

Outside of Vegas, in the late afternoon when the heat would start to break, I ran through Red Rock Canyon’s Calico Hills towards Turtlehead peak. This, and not the neon extravaganza visible below, was my Strip. Much more my style—red bulbous rocks smooshed together and wilting in the desert sun. I wondered often why the city centre felt the need to import Venice when these oozing red wonders graced this place, not half an hour from the bas(s)ed casino’s uuntz-uuntz—uuntz.

On the second day that I summited Turtlehead in the waning of the light, the sandstone—associative inducer—transported me. With feet treading the Calico Hills trail, red rocks tossed my mind aloft, improbably, to Upstate New York a year ago, to the summer’s day when Kyra and I roved through the sculpture park Storm King on our way up from the city to see a play—The Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses—in the Frank Gehry theatre at Bard.

In the canyon now, as I run out beyond the gambling and the lights, sandstone corms, red domes, and wee rock onions, foisted upon each other by the motions of a Paleozoic ocean1, lay my imagining brain down Upstate before a brickwork sculpture—Brunelleschi meets a Smurf’s headgear—by Martin Puryear, which Kyra and I danced in, climbed up, lay down beside, viscerally enjoyed this time last year. (Such are the wonders of associative tangents that my likening the sandstone in Red Rock Canyon to Martin’s brickwork led me to discover that Las Vegas is home to the largest bricklaying competition in the world, the Spec Mix Bricklayer 500, during which bricklaying hopefuls line up to see who can lay the highest and best 26-foot-long wall in just one hour, thus claiming the title of “World’s Best Bricklayer.”)

Through holes Martin Puryear, sometime mason, built into his organic leaning spilling brickwork dome—lumpy cornucopia—we saw sky and the hills behind. Careful placement of his bricks in the park left no other sculptures visible from our vantage. We were alone with his thinking made physical, and with each other.

We, enthralled with the vaulting worm tending towards clouds, memorized Martin Puryear’s name that day, adding him to our lives’ schema, allowing ourselves the pleasure of linking more works to his thought as we ventured forth, on our current roadtrip, and in life henceforth.

Since learning his name, and beginning to travel with the show across the country, we have added many more works of Martin’s to our mindful libraries. And, as our geographical reach expands, and our collection of instances of his work, and of other artist’s work, grows, we have noticed that Martin is a stylistic outlier amongst artists with a national presence. He is an outlier in that he does not have one (or even two for that matter) predominant style(s).

Of course no artist is purely monolithic, but many, we have noticed through 30 cities since September, develop a recognizable style which can be replicated and installed in theaters, parks, plazas, etc. the whole country over. I am starting to believe that if an artist wishes to exhibit, or receive commissions outside of one geographical region—typically the one in which they live—they must develop a style that can be linked to their name by the museum-going public. I in no way intend to say that I do not like the styles that nationally present artists develop—I find many of them fascinating and valuable. It has simply become impossible not to notice that a Louise Nevelson in Louisville, Kentucky inhabits the same world, the same mood, and the same look as a Louise Nevelson in Washington, D.C.

I am thinking also of Jaume Plensa’s perspective warping heads made of marble slices, and his meditating people made of white type which we’ve found in Cincinnati and in New Orleans, in Houston and in Buffalo;

of Robert Indiana’s amour, those steel LOVEs in every sculpture park in America;

of Richard Serra’s weathered steel mazes in Maryland and in California, in Dallas and in Chicago;

of Calder’s exposed rivets which are everywhere;

of Joel Shapiro’s dancing french fries that Kyra and I have attempted to mimic with our bodies in Des Moines, in Boston, and in seemingly every other city between;

of Tony Smith’s geometric spiders in Cleveland, in Des Moines, in Louisville, in Pittsburgh, in Buffalo;

of George Rickey’s polished steel right angles rotating with the wind in Washington D.C., in Cleveland, before the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library;

of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s graphite splattered petrified cedar formations which bring the Outback to Madison, to Cincinnati, to Greensboro, to Atlanta, and so many more;

of Simone Leigh’s elegant spoon women in Philadelphia, and in Cleveland;

of James Turrell’s windows on the sky in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Minneapolis, Houston, San Francisco—the list goes on and on.

Once again the profit motive is causing a homogenization of style. When an artist makes a sculpture, then receives critical plaudits for it which lead to commissions for more sculptures like it, they become incentivized to continue making work which fits into the same stylistic realm—and thus their work of this sort begins to proliferate around the country. Many of these artists have other work that looks and feels different, it just doesn’t end up spreading across the country.

Martin is different. I never can tell, before I find his name on a plaque stuffed into some grass growing out its hair, or before Kyra comes rushing up to me smiling and gushing “guess who this one is!!”, that he is the maker whose touch I behold. Brickwork, weaving, geometric strips of fused wood curving, granite with rough hewn slabs and smooth facades conjoined (cf. his piece in the Walker Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis which I walked past for years before linking it to Martin), wheels and chains, spheres trying to be baskets—his themes, and not his medium or his methodology, are the constituent parts of his style. I am not quite sure how he has done it. Perhaps it is that he came to prominence and fame relatively late, in his 40s, that he was able to develop many strains of thought before receiving validation for just one of them. His work, alone amongst sculptors of his stature, is everywhere though none of it looks obviously like any of his other work.

“Who made that?” his pieces always seem to pose the question themselves, and in seeking answers I embark on a search for the didactic I know must be nearby. Such was my mind’s backdrop as my body tumbled through red sandstone in the Nevada desert. The rocks I ran past on my way to Turtlehead Peak once more, seemed to call to me “who made us??” And I couldn’t help but call back to them, “Surely it wasn't Martin Puryear??”

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Writing this piece has been an act of discovery—I hope you’ll come along with me for the ride!

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The Market

I kept returning to the Italian Market on East 9th Street during our two weeks in Philadelphia hoping I’d once again encounter the goat on a leash wearing a diaper who, with his bleating, halted the cars more successfully than any crossing guard I’ve yet crossed. Though I received the caprine blessing but once, each visit to the market twisted my eye-beams and I felt like Donne in love, or like the cardinal’s cloistered votes after they are read aloud in sistine secrecy—my attention pierced and threaded by strands poking out from motley 9th street doors.

Mostly, the motley strands were reams and reams of diffuse printed matter. Philadelphia’s a paper reef in fact, teeming with DIY print. Scaffolding and the reverse of street signs host overlapping stickers—I found the address of a house show and a fellow substacker on the backs of stop signs. The Italian American Herald sits piled on stoops like the kids in my old neighborhood in Manhattan who set off fireworks in the street. Zines spill off coffee shop counters, and flyers poke out from bookstore crates. Here though, unlike in most places we’ve been, the sidewalks occasionally get crowded because people actually stop to read what these streets have to offer.

I suppose it’s spring sun stops passersby—on our first morning in Philadelphia, everywhere, a great reawakening. The sun-side of the street, t-shirt and shorts warm, seems a lilac barrel in which my nose bobs for scent. Kyra and I discover most every museum in Philly is closed on Monday and Tuesday, so we decide to head for East Passyunk Ave, the street along which our dear friend David recommended we stroll.

On our way to Passyunk, before I knew a goat was known to stroll here too, we walk though the Italian Market for the first time, where the fruits and people thrombus, extending beyond the sidewalk—reminds me of New Orleans where the cars seem bashful for disturbing pedestrian reverie. Sausages, saucily, call to us from behind glass, and the mongers all wear telling hats, personalities bottled in brims. Gorgonzola belts and peppers sing. Italian arias waft from a boombox hidden behind a counter. People greet you on the street here as if that hasn’t become novel on every other street in urban America. Sweater stomachs are meant for hand wiping. Curbs are for vegetables, sitting slow, and chatting.

We stop on the market’s first corner to watch a 90-year-old wielding a dazzling hot pink walker turn light to dancing coins, and mount the steps into Anthony’s Coffee and Chocolate House, slowly but with resolve, as if he’d done so every morning for at least twice my lifespan. If he’s the actor on the moment’s stage, we, and the printed matter all around are his audience, peering upon his struggle from the telephone poles, street sign posts, and railings. Stacks of papers slump beside Anthony’s steps—the paper reef’s his stage.

We can’t help but follow the twinkling pink inside for a coffee. The clock above the door bears her gears to us coyly as if she were not presenting her innards for all to see, and more of the papers from out front—the aforementioned Italian American Herald—are splayed with errant coffee droplets across a cafe table. Mr. Pink Walker has settled in to a conversation by the window, and after ordering we settle into our projects—Kyra’s reading Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and I begin, ostensibly, to write—recalling reaching Lake Erie while we were in Cleveland—but really, I’m listening to Mr. Pink Walker tell his much younger but still old companion a story it becomes clear his companion has heard many times before. Mr. Pink Walker keeps trailing off and staring, as if in absent minded ecstasy, up at the exposed gears of the clock. His friend waits for a moment—it almost seems that he relishes these brief lacunae, a chance to sneak in a daydream of his own—before prodding Mr. Pink Walker gently, “you were just about to say how Cohen . . .”

Together they construct the older man’s memory of New York half a lifetime ago where “Cohen made $40 million just last week”—but actually, the younger man nudges, “it was 40 years ago.”

I am roused from my eavesdropping when an elderly woman who seems to know all the people behind the counter inclines her nose towards Kyra’s book. “That must be good,” she says pointing at Martyr! “You’ve been completely engrossed.” Kyra smiles, agrees, recommends. For a moment, she chats with the woman. Then the woman and the two old men head back into the sun and wend slowly—she, North, the men South. We watch them merge with the bustle and sit with our coffee and our fresh found silence.

3.5%

The next day, as I write of Mr. Pink Walker in my black notebook, the green one’s predecessor and successor too,1 I am clutching another local publication. This one, more DIY than the Italian American Herald, harkens back to Philadelphia’s pamphlet printing prime. We’re sitting in The Last Drop, a coffee shop unafraid of Lou Reed’s raspier side, which Kay, who plays Juliet’s nurse recommended. Across the pamphlet’s top, next to a sigil ribbon wrapping a printed Liberty Bell which reads The Philadelphia Liberator, a Dozen Egg Index inscribed in the paper’s left ear documents the prevailing oological obsession. I’m a fish on the reef caught by the pamphlet’s first headline, “We the 3.5%: The Hidden Secret to a Successful Revolution.”

I finish a first draft of my thoughts about the Italian Market and, pleasantly depleted by the act of writing, pull the Liberator close, hoping I might really discover the key to making meaningful change in our country. And, the research by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan which the article details, does not disappoint.

Chenoweth and Stephan found, in studies conducted between 2006 and 2008, and again in 2012, that it is likely that nonviolence and 12 million people in the US really could bring about a different sort of government here. Globally, between 1900 and 2006 all successful revolutions have had two things in common. 53% of them were nonviolent. And of those nonviolent revolutions, 100%, or all, which engaged 3.5% of the population—engaged, that is, says Chenoweth, in an active and sustained way—were successful. All big enough nonviolent revolutions in the twentieth century worked. Why not here, now, too?

There are roughly 341.8 million people living in the United States today. Three and a half percent of that translates to roughly 12 million people sustaining active and peaceful participation in a clearly defined movement. Or in Chenoweth’s words, we’ll need both a “large and diverse participation that’s sustained,” and “campaigns [that] have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.”

What would a movement like that look like? What would its more than protest methods be? What would it demand? And how might we bring about its rise? I carried these questions with me, and spurred on by some inkling that collecting all this physical print held an answer, to better inquire within their pages, I spread my findings in an arch before me like a fan pulled from kimono’s slips, on the wooden table by the stage door of the Academy of Music. I placed my notebook in which I’ve been churning thoughts, last, centrally, as my printed arch’s capstone.

The inkling becomes clearer when all this print I’ve collected begins to facilitate encounter. As I sit pondering, as Mark Fisher puts it, what if we held a protest and everyone came? another Mark, one of the fellows who oversees the stage door, comes by in a quiet moment to ask what I’m writing. We get to chatting and, as I share some of what I’ve learned so far about the history of printing in Philadelphia, Mark shares with me that he once gave historical tours of the city. I mention a pamphlet, printed here in the 1790s, that I’d been reading and he then, with great excitement, gives me on-foot directions—suppose I seem like I’ll actually go romping!—to the potter’s field related to the text—more on that later!

This happens again the next week, only this time, I am the printer, and in my hand I hold my brayer rolled with ink. My most recent linocut, to protect the table, is placed neatly on a slab I cut out of a merch box, and I’m about to test how it shows up on cardboard. Jack, the kilt clad house manager, bounces by just when brayer and arm are suspended and stops to take in my operation. They smile, ask what I’m making, and we get to talking. Some hours later I find Jack and give them a cardboard print from this stage door batch. We nod, both pleased with how they turned out.

The next day, our acquaintance having been forged by printing, and curiosity, Jack and I discover that we know someone in common through Jack’s deep circus connections and my tenuous ones. When Jack learns that I am interested in learning and writing about places that once functioned differently, they point me to the Cherry Street Pier which was a water treatment plant, and now hosts artist’s studios and exhibitions. Kyra and I, following Jack’s cairn, make for the Pier on our last night in Philadelphia. It’s in the shadow of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and just so happens to be quite close to the potter’s field cairn Mark planted earlier. The exhibition inside is called Eggy. At once, I feel a kinship with the work for eggy is what my mom calls my fried egg tattoo. We pause to laugh in front of video of actors in a blackbox practicing seggsual healing as Marvin Gaye wanders into our ears.

Time and again, print draws in the curious. Is it the allure of paper? its mystique? which magnetizes people in proximity to ink? Printing, we are, I suppose, as close as we’ll come to practicing alchemy—turning wet pulp and fiber to ink stained permanence, and how?

Part of the magic of print resides in its physicality. We send our energy into a physical thing which is fully in the space with us. Crocheting in a public space, reading a physical text, painting on a canvas, laying dominoes in the square—all broadcast “I’m still in this space” though my attention presently is with that which I hold in my hands.

In our heads-down, phones-up modernity, a person out in public interacting with real paper, or rolling ink over a stamp, signals approachability. People have always been fascinated with alchemy. Unlike the blankness of a screen, shielded by custom from the prying eyes of strangers—most people would step back aghast if you admitted you were reading their computer screen over their shoulder, no?—physical print offers the people sharing space with us a clue as to our person, our personality. One doesn’t need to know what you are writing in a journal to have discovered that you share a mutual interest in journaling, to discern you share common ground more than just your current physical proximity.

Engrossed in physical print—Martyr!—as she sips a coffee in the Italian Market, Kyra encounters. A curious would-be bookfellow, who seems she really would take up a tome at the exhortation of a stranger fully divested from distraction, engages Kyra in conversation.

Engrossed in printing, I encounter—Mark, urban historian, and Jack, curious aerialist who feels like a friend-to-be if ever I should call Philadelphia home.

Because I had before me a printed copy of The Philadelphia Liberator which I could physically hand to Mark, we got to talking on a topic we could both relate to—I handed him a clue about me to bridge any potential gap between our thoughtspaces. Print, in its physicality, when multiplied by public space, facilitates encounter.

We need to facilitate encounter now more than ever. Through encounter will we bridge the gaps between ideologies, and we must unite the spectrum somehow if we are to become 12 million strong. Hints of print in this place’s past, whispering to me from streets flush with didactics, pique my curiosity—much like my printing piqued Jack’s—and so, always one to believe the past might guide the present, I began to look into the history of printing in Philadelphia. The past does not disappoint. The unearthing of print here is the unearthing of revolutionary moments, and movements, which have found kindling at different times. If print could help foment change a century ago, and two centuries ago, perhaps it could do it again, against all odds.

A Brief History of Radical Printing in Philadelphia

In 1747 when the advent of King George’s War with Spain and France brought threat of privateering up the Delaware River to the city, Ben Franklin “took action by writing and then printing and distributing a pamphlet entitled Plain Truth in which he proposed to bypass the recalcitrant Quaker assembly”2 which in its pacifism had consistently refused to institute a colonial militia for the defense of the city.

Franklin appealed to the working people of Philadelphia along explicitly class conscious lines. He signed his pamphlet “A TRADESMAN of Philadelphia,” and warned the “unhappily circumstanced . . . middling People, the Tradesmen, Shopkeepers, and Farmers of this Province and City!” that unlike the Rich for whom “the Means of speedy Flight are ready in their Hands” the People “cannot all fly with our Families” when the chaos of War comes.3

Plain Truth successfully incited a small rebellion. The largely Quaker assembly allowed for small militias to form in Philadelphia under the control of various “middling People” as Ben Franklin had wanted. Hatters, carpenters, upholsterers, and other laborers without wealth found themselves at the heads of companies of 100 or more men. That bears repeating—because of the ideas circulated in Franklin’s pamphlet, the pacifist Quaker assembly allowed for small militias to form. Print here hastened the organizing of the “middling People” into a polity which could not be ignored, into the beginnings of a community with a voice sounding in concert. The pamphlet was another brick in the path towards Revolution.

It wasn’t just poor and middle class white people mobilizing via the printed word though. With writing in print as far back as 1794 “the black community inoculate[d] itself against racism.” When yellow fever struck the city in 1793, white doctors unsurprisingly declared black people “innately immune” allowing city officials to draft Afro-Philadelphians into dangerously exposing roles as gravediggers and nurses while white Philadelphians deserted the city in droves to avoid the epidemic. And then when the fever lifted and the white people returned, rumors began spreading that black people had looted the homes of the dead in the absence of the whites.

So in 1794 Afro-Philadelphians Absalom Jones and Richard Allen published the pamphlet Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People during the Late Epidemic in Philadelphia—this is the aforementioned pamphlet Mark and I discussed at the table before the stage door—to refute these deadly rumors. Jones and Allen, according to scholar Joanna Brooks, constructed a “counterpublic” through their printing efforts which celebrated the heroics of black people in the city faithfully performing their forced duties as gravediggers and nurses for the larger public betterment while sustaining losses from fever to which Jones and Allen showed clearly the black community was not “innately immune.”4 Far from stealing from the homes of whites, Jones and Allen showed that the people of color who buried the dead actually ended up paying out of their own pockets to cover all the associated costs of removal and burial.

In July of the same year that he and Jones published their Narrative, in January, Richard Allen, building on the momentum gained from constructing this printed “counterpublic,” founded Bethel A.M.E. Church, one of the two oldest black churches in Philadelphia.5 Print publishing and physical space devoted to the building of community go hand in hand. When people read in print their views expanded on or validated, they begin to feel as if they are in community already with those others out there reading too—a physical space to meet is the logical extension of the community implied by being a reader of pamphlets. I imagine that Allen and Jones’ pamphlet helped some marginalized black Philadelphians feel that they were not alone holding their isolation and grieving their loved ones who had fallen from fever. The church probably felt like a natural extension of the space the pamphlet began opening.

The church, opened when the free black community of Philadelphia was most needing a place of refuge, would go on to be a spot for organizing in the larger fight for abolition. In the summer of 1847, this same church that Allen founded would host Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison midst their westward journey to Ohio. To a large assembled crowd Douglass intoned,

“I regard every Slaveholder as a manstealer—the vilest of sinners, and all his professions of humanity and religion I throw to the winds. We have it in our power to rouse the church to its duty. Let us pass such resolutions and adopt such addresses as the occasion demands and as we can adopt, and publish them and the church will be roused. We should brand as the enemies of God and man every church and minister, that supports or apologizes for Slavery, and regard them and speak of them, as we would were it piracy they were supporting.”6

By the time Douglass had finished, the crowd had been in tears and had laughed heartily, and when he sat they applauded “long and loud.” He answered their “almost extravagant expectations” with passion, intensity, his “keenest satire,” and his “sparkling wit.” That Douglass, before a large crowd, could call into question the moral legitimacy of white churches in the final push leading to the abolition of slavery was surely in some small way enabled by the truths Richard Allen and Absalom Jones printed for their community while giving it physical space over fifty years before.

One group that met in the church in the years before Douglass ascended its soapbox advocated for something more than protests in order to rid the country of the scourge of slavery. As I learned of them and their movement, I began to think that their tactics could satisfy Chenoweth’s present call for diverse strategies beyond protest.

In 1830, seventeen years before Douglass took to the pulpit of Bethel A.M.E., a group known as the Colored Free Produce Society held its first meeting in the same room Douglass would later command. The group was building on threads that had started in Philadelphia, in print, as early as 1811.

In that year the Philadelphia minister Elias Hicks published a pamphlet, Observations on the Slavery of Africans and Their Descendents, which argued that consumers in the north were feeding slavery “which would, of course, stop as soon as they withdrew their support.” Hicks, in his sermons, went on to argue passionately for free-produce, or only buying that which was produced by non-slave labor. Hicks was not the only voice in Philadelphia printing in favor of free-produce—many of the loudest coming out of Philadelphia in the 1820s and 1830s were women’s and they went further than Hicks. Not only did they argue for a widespread boycott of all goods made with slave labor, they also called for the immediate and unqualified abolition of slavery, which hard as it is to believe now, was considered very radical at the time.

In England, in 1824, a decade before William Lloyd Garrison came to his senses and renounced his previous support for gradual abolition, Elizabeth Heyrick published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, which was immediately reprinted for the first time in North America here, in Philadelphia. It gained a following, and because of continued demand, was reprinted a decade later in 1836, once again, in Philadelphia. Heyrick insisted that a total boycott was necessary because “Reason and eloquence, persuasion and argument have been powerfully exerted ... to little purpose.”’ Heyrick made plain for northern abolitionists that ““when there is no longer a market for the productions of slave labour, then, and not till then, will the slaves be emancipated.”7 The subheading of Heyrick’s pamphlet is telling—The Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of Slavery. Heyrick recognized close to two hundred years ago that strain which Chenoweth touches on in her research now—if a mass movement is to be successful, it must be nonviolent because only then will the numbers of people necessary to inflict change emerge. People can dedicate themselves to a nonviolent cause; it’s not asking too much. People want to fight injustice—it’s just that not everyone is willing to die to do so. Free-Produce provided tentative abolitionists with another path, one more broadly actionable than violence, and thus one that could spread and grow. We need another such path today.

In February of 1831, soon after they met in Richard Allen’s church, the Colored Free Produce Society built on Heyrick’s success in Philadelphia and connected the sin of the consumer with the sin of the slaveholder, proclaiming in Benjamin Lundy’s paper The Genius of Universal Emancipation—which was printed in Philadelphia for many years—that “every individual who uses the produce of slave labor encourages the slave-holder, becomes also a participator in his wickedness.”8

Soon mainstream white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison were calling for the same boycott that Elizabeth Heyrick, and Elias Hicks, and the Colored Free Produce Society were demanding. That is the sort of cross denominational appeal that a movement which could draw 12 million supporters would need. Which returns me to my questions—What would a movement like that look like now? What would its more than protest methods be? What would it demand? And how might we bring about its rise?

General Strike?

Later in the week, while standing in the crowd of the Hands Off protest that filled the field before Independence Hall, I saw a sign for a General Strike. I hadn’t seen any rumblings of one before and wondered if this might be the ‘Free-Produce’ of our time.

But then I went to the page currently set up and found both that General Strike US does not list any unions as partners, and has a list of demands so long as to frighten away the tentative. Clearly there is much work to be done—a movement like this which does not involve the unions of this country is a joke and needs to reevaluate its priorities.

On the issue of demands—there is a reason Bernie Sanders is currently drawing the largest crowds that have ever assembled for a political speaker in US history—“In Nampa, Idaho, we had twelve thousand, in the most conservative state in America,” Bernie said to Evan Osnos for a recent New Yorker article—his talking points have not changed since he was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont 35 years ago. He does not get distracted by all the cultural issues that polarize this country. As unfortunate as it may sound, the Democratic Party has forsaken working people of all ideological bents and if we are to build a new Free-Produce we must, for now, stop talking (not caring, just talking) about gun violence, and climate change, and abortion.

We must speak only of the overriding and paramount concern which faces this country now and which can unite disparate swaths of the political spectrum—the extreme concentration of wealth in this country. The tax lawyer Bob Lord, an expert if ever there was one, has said that if the present trend is allowed to continue, over the next forty years around 19 people will increase their share of the nation’s wealth from 1.8% to 18%. 19 people will own 18% of all wealth in the US. And that is just the top .00001%! The rest of the 1% will also still own more than the exorbitant amount they already own. This is what we need to be talking about—unceasingly. This is the issue that can unite the working people of this country, whether they live in Idaho or California, Arkansas or Massachusetts. When Ben Franklin took on the Quaker Assembly with Plain Truth he appealed to the working people of Philadelphia strictly along class lines. We must do the same now.

If ever a city were still brimming with the residue of a craft, Philadelphia rattles with the jangling movable type of the Leather Aproned Printer’s calling. The day before the Hands Off protest, I was bopping around the old city with my friend Austin, who had popped up to visit us from Baltimore for a few delightful days, when we happened across the printing house that the National Park Service runs out of Ben Franklin’s grandson’s former abode. It was as I watched one of my favorite park rangers I have yet met print a sample of Ben Franklin’s pre-war title pages that I reflected on what role printed matter might have in bringing about the rise of a new ‘Free-Produce’ movement.

After peering into the dug up foundations of Ben Franklin’s house for some moments, Austin & I push open the door to the National Park Service museum of printing, and slip inside. We are greeted by the smell of ink and a wooden Gutenberg printing press in motion. The press, run by my new favorite park ranger whose passion for printing lingers like a perfume in the room, cannot resurrect Ben Franklin or his grandson, but it can reconstruct their motions, and when we set the type we know they set here we are privy, for a moment to the pace of their thought, to what they read, to the great influence these gears and tympans, friskets and fonts9 worked on them.

When we ask more about what she does, the printing park ranger narrates her recent rabbit hole fall through all of Franklin’s letters to see if he spent more on the type, the ink, or the paper. And with the glee of a birder finding a lifer she declares that contrary to popular speculation that the type (sent across the pond in ships from London—he had only one Font available to him, would have had to develop a relationship with a typesetter to get more) was most expensive, it was actually the paper that was Franklin’s greatest expense. “Cotton paper,” she says after asking us to guess, from a touch, what the wet paper she was feeding into the press was made of. “You could send this through the wash. Just like our paper currency today—it’d just get clean.” With the smeared boxing glove dabber that Franklin would have used to apply ink, she blots the rows of letters, and folds the platen holding the paper down, on hinges shining, onto the type. Then she pulls the whole contraption along its rails under the press and turns the screw. As the press comes down on the platen I am half expecting wine to dribble from the edges, for grape sweat to mix with the ink she applied.

Print draws passionate and curious people towards it—I have seen this over and over again here in Philadelphia. If we are to sustain a new ‘Free-Produce’ movement, then those are the type of people such a movement will need filling out its ranks.

I know that what I am proposing—some sort of printed Renaissance—may seem like utter folly in our internet forward world, and to be sure, a commitment to printed matter will not appeal to everyone. This is part of the design however. We do not need everyone, we need a diverse and passionate core of 12 million people. And I think that print could act as a sieve to find those people.

If, as Mark Fisher has suggested, Capitalism does not need our buy-in to thrive, if in fact it hums along in the background of our lives, happy to feed and grow grotesquely on our passivity, then a successful general strike will necessarily need to ignore the borders between work and home as ruthlessly as the capitalism we wish to protest. So many websites run on Amazon servers—streaming at home will undermine a general strike because Amazon will go right on making money outside of working hours off our home entertainment; so many fast fashion companies—so many companies period—do not maintain ethical supply chains—if we continue shopping online during a general strike, the strike is undermined.

The border between what we may buy and what we must avoid is no longer as black and white as that which the Free-Produce movement drew. The commitment necessary will be intense, and it will encompass attention too. If we are to hit the ultra-wealthy in their pocketbooks we will need to ubiquitously withhold our attention as well as our labor. Here is the further part print has to play. To boycott successfully in the present day is to reinvest in the face to face, and print, with all its magical physicality will help 3.5% of us to commit absolutely to the strike.

During my uncovering of printed history, I was struck that at its core the history of printing is embedded within the history of building community. Whether it be Richard Allen and Absalom Jones creating printed space for black Philadelphians to mourn their dead, and then physically starting a church that served as a hub for abolitionist activity for the next half-century, or Franklin slowly swaying the Quaker sensibilities of his community to be more in line with his own radical politics, communities develop and evolve around the printing of the written word. Print in Philadelphia has always worked to change minds and to bring people closer to positions they once thought completely untenable. And in its glorious physicality, print brings people into public space, and causes them to linger there. Print is passed from hand to hand in public spaces, discussed in public spaces, used to paint on the back of in public spaces—the possibilities span unending.

In Philadelphia there is a mutuality forming. Public Space and print media already renew each other here—they always have. They could more. Much of the printing I’ve encountered here has been inside of spaces which require something of you to enter. For print, real ink on paper, to reclaim a space in the zeitgeist and to thus fulfill its promise to in turn help people reclaim public space, print must be brought into the public space we do have available to us. We must bring the zines spilling out of bookstores, the newsletters on coffee shop counters, the linocut hidden behind the stage door, out into the open.

The Singing Fountain

I never saw the goat in the diaper again after my second walk through the Italian Market. It wasn’t until after leaving Philadelphia that I realized a goat on a leash wasn’t really what I was looking for at all. I kept going back to the Italian Market, not to find the goat, but to sit down within the community I had witnessed there. I was seeking to return to the fountain—I learn later it’s called the Singing Fountain—we found on our first morning in Philadelphia, in a triangle where impossibly many streets converge causing cars confusion, allowing a small oasis for people to pop up. I longed to return there midst urban bustle, where no one was on a phone, but children painting, and elders conversing, and a book loved so well its cover had fallen off permeated.

Maybe thirty minutes after we finished our coffees and left Anthony’s, we come across the fountain wedged between Tasker Street, Passyunk Ave, and 11th Street. Free-form crocheted sculptures drape the metal waterworks, for Spring has not yet sprung enough to turn the fountain on.

A mother breast feeding rests her feet where the water will pool—crocheted fountain’s ledge her ottoman. She’s talking with another mother rocking a baby in a stroller. Arc around the fountain towards the two men speaking hushed, Spanish over the chessboard inlay on the triangle’s permanent stone table, and our eyes pass over two girls round 5th grade painting as they crouch in the fountain’s empty tiled basin. They’ve lined up all their blue paint bottles—they only have many different blues—under the central spire of the dried-up watering hole. Smiling, they select new blue paints and squeeze them onto their cardboard canvas, no palette, direct application.

Rove my Hearing! then my Eyes! further round the fountain. An old woman with a red felt brimmed hat pulled low over her eyes so she appears as mostly a talkative mouth storytelling, regales her bench mate wistfully, a younger by some three or four decades man, with admirably unwavering attention, as if his nose is strung through with twine and anchored to the red brim of her felt hat, with a story of her last trip as “an unmarried woman” fifty years ago to Mexico City where a bullfighter brought her onto the pitch after brunch to pat tomorrow’s bull. It was all science teaching in Philly after that—she’s lived around the corner for almost 40 years now she tells him.

He asks her name wondering if he knows her already somehow because he’s lived close by for a good while now too. “Cipollini’s my maiden name” she’s smiling already, “you know what that means? You know what I am?” He smiles too as he shakes his head. “Onions! I’m an onion!” She throws her nose skyward and laughs as warmly as it is today.

Then, as if there were no words left to speak, the woman sings him an old song about fountains, hopes he’ll learn it, for it carries the energy of the place.

I am diverted from my listening by a voice sitting next to Kyra across from where I sit writing in the fountain basin. Bent over, I’m scribbling in green ink. “Am I keeping you from drawing?” The voice asking me nods towards my little bird anatomy blank sheeted notebook adventuresome. The voice belongs to someone who seems on their way to perform with Spinal Tap. Huge hair curls all around a shy and smiling face. They’re reading a book with no cover but a ripped edge and twist a pencil through their fingers, seems a nervous twirl. They point to the fountain, then to where they sit. “This seat is the best for drawing the fountain.” Smile my way.

School’s out now it seems. Some more girls approach the triangle and one sighs as she shrugs her backpack off her shoulders. “The fountain’s busy today,” she says to no one at all, for her friends have continued on, not having noticed she stopped. She looks wildly around, heaves her bag onto her shoulders again, and runs with little steps after the pack.

A man beside me in the fountain has had his eyes closed with his face inclined towards sun, his hands pressed together between his outstretched legs this whole time.

There’s angels cast in bronze on the fountain’s central spire. Someone has wrapped them in crocheted tapestries. They’ve wrapped the little free library, and the benches, and the iron decorative posts dotting the triangle. We are all sitting in a sea of crocheted wrapping paper, colored yarn washes us in the absence of trickling water.

Already by the fountain the people gather, painting, meeting, laughing, writing, drawing, playing chess. We want to be with the people we don’t know in our cities. We want to feel the sun on our faces in the middle of our city grids. Here beside fountains not even flowing, we are happy. Here, in Philadelphia we find some hope. Here, it feels like a new vision of what is possible, for our country, for our world, could form in printed ink.

Let’s toss more print into the mix! Print draws the curious eh? More will linger, more will put down their phones, more will discuss the print they find waiting for them by the fountain, if we can embed print in our public spaces. There was so much printed matter lying around in Ben Franklin’s day that people used it as “bum fodder” when they withdrew to the loo. I want to use pamphlets in the bathroom again! I want print as the fabric of life again. We ought to be reading real print in bus stops, in parks, when it hits us in the face walking down the street blown by the winds. Embed print again in our public spaces, and we will be better able to keep them public. Embed print in public space and more of the passionate, and curious, will flow through the sieve, into the open. We’ll find the 3.5% there, by the fountain, when we are there too, on the reef, in community.

I picked up three acorns during the 50 mile race I ran in the fall of 2023 in Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve in Savage, Minnesota. The race was three 16.7 mile laps of the reserve’s trails. In the early morning dawning a nearly perfect spheroid acorn called me to wonder at its roundness as I went round the park. I picked it up and by the time I had started lap two I had retired it to my pocket and wanted another—an urge, like how I crave a glass of milk at the end of many miles. When the third lap came around I felt like it would be lonely if I did not scoop up an acorn from its contours too. I gave one of these acorns to Kyra afterwards and the other two went into the front pocket, where they joined a little poured-pewter acorn that Kyra gave me a while back.

On Saturday morning in Louisville, Kentucky, at 6:10 am, with about 50 minutes to go until I started running the Louisville Marathon, I stepped on a pistachio in our hotel room before I had the chance to wriggle the sleep crust off my lids. It was one of those pistachios that is impossible to crack because there’s no open seam along its meridian, like Mt. Washington in Pittsburgh before the discovery of coal. I could hear the nut shaking around in there like the loose filament of a used up lightbulb. I put it into the little key pocket of my short-short running shorts and ran the whole marathon with it there.

The next evening we stopped to camp for a night in the Ozark National Forest and I rolled the sealed pistachio between my thumb and forefinger as I lay awake thinking in our tent in the early dark in a clearing near the trailhead we’d head out from in the morning for a wee jaunt in the woods before continuing on to Oklahoma City.

I wondered to myself there in the dark why I like carrying nuts around with me. And I continued thinking about this question the next morning as I stood by the creek we had heard burbling along all night, staring into the water, impossibly teal, glowing from within, as if it were a pulsing box concealing a disembodied pneumatic brain, sizzling. Losing my gaze in the Ozark water eventually led me to thinking about the run in Louisville.

So anyhow, I like carrying nuts around because I find it amusing to think, begob!, that I am carrying a whole tree around without even a second thought. A whole potential tree that is. But this is enough for the imagination. I often imagine when holding a nut that I am literally tossing an entire oak tree aloft and laughing while I do it and it’s nothing to me. I’m like a panicked mom who lifts a car off her kid in a moment of released adrenaline but all the time, because all the time I am carrying at least five trees in my fanny pack. And this makes me laugh.

I’ve often carried nuts with me as I have run marathons as a precaution in case I need to think about this funny image of myself hoisting trees above my head like a ditzy circus strongman in his underpants with two ladies in big floppy dresses standing, posing, on both of his upturned palms in order to distract myself from the pain of continuing on. So far though, I’ve never really been in pain during a marathon. I’ve certainly been extremely tired, and extremely uncomfortable, but not in toothache, or broken bone, or bleeding cut level pain. Until this marathon in Louisville that is. And this time when I really needed it, I forgot that I had a prospective tree in my pocket.

Instead I retreated into my old off-Joycean maxim, every run is many runs, wherein I am always meeting myself.1 I have described this associative habit of mine in conversation as a memory palace, or more precisely as a memory path for it is running routes I populate with memories, mostly it is places in Minneapolis and New York which become tied to places and scenes elsewhere. Sometimes it becomes hard to tell which place is the original and which populates the other.

I ended up turning over one such difficult chicken or egg connection in my head for much of the middle section of the Louisville Marathon. The question which consumed miles ten through fifteen was at first ‘does the block of the Helsinki City Marathon that has always reminded you of the block of the Twin Cities Marathon near the Mel-o-Glaze bakery by Lake Nokomis actually remind you of Minneapolis or does the Minneapolis block actually remind you of the run in Helsinki?’ but soon it morphed both away from a question and towards other connected scenes which were brought to mind by the Olmsted Park in Louisville I was struggling through.

As if drawn through an urban wormhole, Iroquois Park, designed by Olmsted in the early 1890s, became the rotating event horizon of my memory path. The singularity at Iroquois’ center sent me irresistibly to the North Woods of Central Park where I have long, in writing, situated scenes of the squirrel, Father Maynard, conducting therapy sessions with ghosts afflicted by chronic temporal whiplash, which is in turn connected—I have established a correspondence to use Hannah Arendt’s definition of metaphor from her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations—with the view of Spring Lake’s reeds in Minneapolis framed by the pillars lifting I-394 above Bryn Mawr Park. This description of metaphor in Arendt led me to start thinking of my associative running practice in an epistolary sense. I was a postal carrier delivering a series of letters from one place to another. From one place to another; the places are the correspondents—they are speaking to each other through my running.

I needed this retreat into memories of places elsewhere because the Louisville Marathon was the hardest marathon I have yet run. It was my 26th marathon (Teal, that evening as I sat compressing my legs in the PT room puffer pants, noticed the three 26s wrapped up in the run—my 26th time running 26.2, on the 26th of April, before darting out of the room to hop back on stage), my slowest one yet, and by far the most painful running experience I have ever had.

I think it is all the driving entailed with touring that has done me in. I have high hopes that some more committed PT exercises, perhaps a new relationship with weights, cross training once we pick up my bike in Minneapolis in two weeks, and growing more used to driving, will over time bring pain-free longer distances back into my everyday. While walking with Kyra to the race, in the early morning dark down the middle of the blocked off street because O how good it feels to walk where the cars normally reign!, my pigeon pose pain—that is pain helped by pigeon pose—returned, announcing itself with great fanfare played by my trombone-curious glutes. My hip flexors were attorneys wary of approaching the bench of a judge hostile to their miens.

And with the same step which took me over the starting line the pain worsened. Until mile 17 the crunch in my butt made it very painful to go downhill especially—and most of the race was slightly downhill. My moments of clarity, when I could feel the exhilaration of breathing while running, the wonder for how good breathing feels, were on the three short uphills in Iroquois Park. Then at mile 17 my pigeon pose pain vanished and my hip flexors, like the dueling organs opposite each other in the rafters of Clerigos Church in Porto, began, in a polyrhythm manufactured by a dissonant fugue theme twisting back on itself when replicated with a one second delay (out of time) by the second organ, to scream with high sustained pitch for the rest of the race.

So anyhow, I’ve forgotten the pistachio in my pocket, begob!, and thus turn to reflection in the moments of the rest of the race when no urban wormhole beckons. And, because of a detour we took to see an old friend of my mom’s on our way from Cincinnati to Louisville, my thoughts turned to the period a few years ago when I was telling the story of the Odyssey with some fourth graders.

I began our discussion of Book III, the Nestor episode, by asking the kids to describe to a friend a time when they had met an old friend of their parents. I listened in on some stories that kids were telling across the room. One memorable story involved a kid’s dad’s best friend falling into a backyard bonfire the slipperiness of its narrator notwithstanding. I then asked them to add a detail to their story, if there was one to be added—had they learned anything about their parent from their parent’s friend?

Then I told a story of my own. I met my mom’s old friend Carrie for lunch when I visited Daniel in Paris during my senior year of high school. She ordered in flawless, complexly grammatical, French, in a thick Wisconsin accent that made Daniel’s parents laugh at the recollection, and then told us all the story of how she met my mom. She had been working in a ketchup factory and fell asleep in the break room. When she arose she discovered a charcoal sketch of her sleeping self on the table beside her. She searched the factory asking far and wide, do you know who made this. And finally some guys on the floor said they thought the new girl drew pictures. And so in seeking out the new girl who drew pictures, Carrie and my mom became friends. I heard my first description of my mom’s drawing over lunch in a fond thickly Wisconsined recalling.

So anyhow, the lesson spills on to the young lad’s encounter with Nestor. I told them how Telemachus travels to Pylos searching for news of his father. And from Nestor learns nothing of his father’s whereabouts but adds detail to his lacunae drenched vision of Odysseus.

“For never yet have I seen the gods so manifestly shewing love, as Pallas Athena did to him, standing manifest by his side.”2

This is how we learn about the past in more quotidian detail than strictly the events of history will tell. The smells of people and their rooms. The sound of a world of which we were not yet apart. Through the stories of those who were, we might see, in a flash, a time before.

Our diversion on the way to Louisville, a romp with my mom’s friend Laurie beginning in Covington, Kentucky, and from there connecting the dots of Mike Skop sculpture’s in the area, would make a fine addition to that lesson on Nestor.

So as the race turned South out of Iroquois Park onto Southern Parkway, my thoughts turned to Mike Skop’s house in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. Laurie brought us to the house at 70 Hawthorne Ave during the second stop on our short tour of Mike Skop sculptures in Northern Kentucky. My mom studied here with Skop at his house in the summer of 1979. Laurie studied here for many summers too. They didn’t overlap, but both learned about Skop from their shared high school art teacher, Jim Wheeler. For a moment I felt like I could see my mom sitting in her high school art class when I heard Laurie’s recounting.

There’s a Skop sculpture called The Troubadour made out of poured polyresin which shows up in hue adjacent to oxidized copper standing on the lawn of the house. Arching my neck up at it brought me, suburban wormhole, to my childhood attic where I unwrapped and looked, for the first time, on some of my mom’s sculptures from around the time she lived in Kentucky. I felt as if I had discovered an inventory of her library, what she was reading if you will, when she was my age. An antecedent to her style rose before me. Such reveries will take you far away from present pain, and in no time, looking back, it’s over. The race is run.

In the end, not so much a balm as a Madeline, my pistachio, in our tent, and in the morning, as I dropped my eyes and their attentional directives into the creek near our campsite, became rural wormhole into recollection of my run and a session of schema fabrication for our recent travels. Good gateways, I’ll keep carrying nuts around regardless.

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