by Taylor Reed

A Brief Background: Last week, a trio of economists won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. I found their work unsatisfying. That’s the background from which this light, little piece grew. On one hand, this is a personal reminder that makes light of my hoarding and mistake-making tendencies. On the other hand, it’s a broader reminder that we aren’t purely beholden to trusting in growth trends that resist satisfaction. <Full background at the bottom.>

I stumble across the floor. I know what I’m looking for. It doesn’t matter. Most of our equipment for processing hazelnuts is divided between the downstairs basement and the detached garage. Finding equipment in both locations entails swimming through stuff — to take a step in the right direction, something must be lifted and set on top of something else. Take footsteps gingerly, and heed angles with care, as the old shimmy presents risks to limbs. This stuff. All of this stuff. It’s a bit of a stress, especially now, as a seasonal race presents itself — the race to get all things under cover and hopefully sorted a bit before snowfall. These snows will cement things in place for at least a handful of months. That cold, still, and soon-arriving moment will be a very different time than the thick of the harvest rush a couple of weeks ago was. Still, I’m rushing now, and was rushing then. If I gathered a bit less, things would likely be easier.

Have you ever tugged on a hazelnut holding fast to a hazel shrub or tree? It’s a bit like a hop — a sticky, resinous, emerald bulb. You can check for nut maturity on the American hazels (Corylus americana) in our yard by slipping open the overlapping ends of the husk, dividing the leafy green, and peering inside to see if the nut is loose. If it’s still joined to the husk, even if you prod it with your thumb, it’s not quite ready. If it shifts easily, if you can shake it like a little maraca, it’s good to go. In that case, the pressure’s on. You’re racing chipmunks, squirrels, blue jays, and more.

Out of caution, I check on the resinous bundles frequently, but more than once, I’ve missed a day. More than once, by the next morning, the tree so recently ornamented with hazelnut clusters has been stripped. I browse the bare branches, while the bushy rascals chitter away.

Chipmunk, don’t you have enough? Isn’t it time to be content? For whatever reason, they don’t listen to me.

Different hazelnut varieties ripen at different rates, and there will be more chances as we have a few different types at our place. Eventually, I do manage to procure a respectable harvest. That’s what brings me to the basement and garage. I’m looking for the drying screen, or the dehusking setup, or the oil press, or the nut cracking tool. There are a lot of little steps, a lot of little tools, but they all get used.

When I have time away from work and home and caretaking, when those elusive stars align, I enjoy heading out to see what I can gather. Maybe this means hazelnuts or autumn olives, maybe mulberries or firewood, but often it means leaving our place for the thrill of thrift stores, garage sales, and auctions. I’m good at collecting stuff.

Taylor, don’t you have enough? Isn’t it time to be content? For whatever reason, I don’t even listen to me.

Read Cheating Entropy, an article from Mortise & Tenon magazine (issue #19) about Chris Havey’s work, and you’ll find that Chris is an antiquarian — and more specifically, an “architectural salvage expert”. He dismantles, collects, and catalogues historically significant bits and bobs, from hearth masonry to structural lumber, all sourced from abandoned, dilapidated, and otherwise disappearing structures on the East Coast. As you might imagine, as someone who’s been at it for a while, he’s developed quite the collection, all housed in an impressive array of trailers, shelters, and warehouses. He’s aware of his own “hoarding tendencies.” He makes the case in the write-up that at some point, you have to stop worrying about perfection. It’s too easy to fall into the hole of infinite collecting and tinkering with historical accuracy as an excuse. You have to start working with what you have if you want to preserve anything as a whole, rather than bits and pieces. He puts a fine point on the principle by sharing a quip about a friend of his. This friend dismantled and stored an entire home in his grandmother’s backyard. He cared so deeply that the touches and techniques of reusing the materials were period-appropriate that the work never happened. The whole thing rotted into the ground.

The chipmunks are embedding their own work in the soil. They know winter is coming. They know when it’s time to gather, and they understand why they’re stuffing caches and burrows with food. It all gets used. There’s no hoarding for the sake of hoarding. Even the hazelnuts they store away and seemingly abandon fulfill a purpose, as evidenced by the new hazel shrubs popping up within our garden and other random spots.

A simple coffee batch-brewer lives in our basement most of the time. A metal tower with a boiler. Set it up right, pour water through the top, and fantastic bulk coffee flows into a carafe. I picked it up used years ago, and despite its lack of frills and new purchase sheen, it does an awfully respectable job of brewing for others.

Not long after I had bought it, I schlepped it to our local farmers’ market. I had dialed it in at home, but undid that doing by strapping it to a small trailer and driving it into town. A crowd of folks I knew came by the farm market stand, excited to offer support in exchange for a great cup of coffee. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. For starters, I hadn’t brought a level with me. The machine was off-kilter. My grind size, honed in at home, wasn’t forgiving with the new brew angle, which meant that those friends all received subpar cups of silty coffee. I continued brewing coffee at that market for a few seasons. I brought a level each week. Most of those from that original group weren’t interested in getting another cup. I’m still a little embarrassed by the episode. For a minute, I thought the answer to the issues was to buy a new brewer. What I really needed was to pay attention to the actual problems, work through them, and improve things with what was at hand.

Reflecting on that particular batch-brewing example — I still make mistakes. I don’t brew coffee for groups all of the time. On the occasions that I do, I’m often bringing the setup to a new space and working with foggy recollections of what worked best last time (temperature settings on the brewer, pre-ground or grinding on location, grind-size, the total dissolved solids and mineral makeup of the water I’ll be bringing or supplied with, brew ratios, etc.) Every time I find something to be critical of after the fact, something overlooked, forgotten, unplanned for, or simply messed up. Almost always though, what I’m able to offer is better than had I not shown up to work with what I have.

I don’t need a new machine. What I need is to keep honing in. I’m dialing in by resisting the impulse to gather perpetually. This leads me to an endeavor that, in the end, is more meaningful and more necessary than merely collecting things. I’ll continue to stand by the title of Wendell Berry’s poem, “What We Need Is Here.” To ignore that reminder, to keep gathering, straining, and struggling with the clutter of bringing in more and more from elsewhere — gosh, that’d be nuts.

The Full Background: Last week, a trio of economists won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Their work describes and mathematically models the mechanisms through which “advanced countries” create and sustain conditions for rapid economic growth. This growth is unleashed by technological progress and the usurping of outdated methods and technologies by new ones (a process known as creative destruction). That explanatory work is fine, helpful even, but it does read prescriptively — that technology-driven growth, progress, and consumption are greatly beneficial, greatly needed, and greatly threatened by those who question those assumptions. (p. 13–14) I appreciate the brief mention in their conclusions of questions of how this economic growth is squared with finite natural resources and their admission that negative externalities pose “serious strains on our planet.” (p.38) I also find their immediate answer — that tech will solve that as it solves all things, but, naturally, not so fast that there won’t be widespread suffering — unsatisfying.

I’m on a LISTSERV with a few hundred academics and folks concerned with trends in growth and consumption and their adverse effects on the broader ecological systems we all rely upon. When this particular Nobel-prize winning work was discussed, resignation and frustration reigned. One person mentioned that the Club of Rome’s report, The Limits to Growth, was published more than half a century ago. Prevailing notions in economic circles tend to gloss over anything that came of the Limits to Growth report (as seen again in last week’s Nobel Prize-winning work.) In other words, the book’s impact has been negligible. The message has not sold well.

That’s the background from which this light, little piece grew. On one hand, it’s a personal reminder that makes light of my hoarding and mistake-making tendencies. On the other hand, it’s a broader reminder that we aren’t purely beholden to trusting in growth trends that resist satisfaction.

It’s Time to Stop Gathering. was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Intimate Exchange of Urgency and Hope Between An Ecologist Dad and His Daughter

by William Powers

Re-tribing and Transition are bumpy. Melissa and I have sometimes found it hard to escape our Western conditioning into efficiency and individualism. Local Samaipata friends have often come to our aid. An example of this, which I adapt from my book about Samaipata, Dispatches from the Sweet Life, is something that happened during Carnival seven years ago, when we were gifted ten new tree saplings.

Carnival in rural Bolivia in many ways celebrates inter-connection. It involves festival — a key element of community — with a nod to the natural, a celebration of the harvest. In Samaipata, parade floats with comparsa queens and ambulant brass bands stroll down Calle Bolívar in a multigenerational extravaganza, as children, parents, and grandparents dance together in matching smocks and hats. Some of the floats are themed around the harvest or Pachamama (the indigenous Bolivian word for Mother Earth). As the February corn matures on hundreds of small plots around the town, so too do carnival groups flourish with their maize-themed ensembles. Six years back, a friend, Pedro, passed me a bottle of the corn-based, home-brewed alcohol called chicha, which I swigged and handed back into his dancing group as they passed by. His float was decked out in blossoming carnival-tree branches, and on a pedestal, the queen wore a crown of the buttery yellow flowers. Later Pedro, in the festive spirit, gave us the gift of ten treelets in little black bags — five palms and five carnivals.

The following morning, a warm one with the sound of brass bands playing below in town, I macheted through an area near our creek and dug holes. For weeks I’d been studying our go-to handbook, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. The book’s pages were frayed, and I’d double-underlined this sentence: “Every element must have multiple functions, and every major function must be served by multiple elements.” The sentence felt liberating. Nature will work for us! Do you remember my excitement to get out on the land and plant trees? That’s what I felt the day I, while laboring, envisioned the single “element” of the gifted tree saplings as one day serving three functions: a windbreak, a pleasant view, and a source of palm nuts. I’d been sweating for two hours to attain the Manual’s element-to-function ideal when a friend, a thirty-something Bolivian horse-tamer with little formal education, named Kusi, stopped by.

She watched me. I waved but kept grunting away in combat with the underbrush. When I glanced up again, I noticed a slight smirk creeping up one side of my friend’s mouth.

I put down the machete, picked up a shovel, and began digging another palm tree hole. Looking up, I saw Kusi’s smirk had swelled, and I felt a little annoyed. Finally, I blurted out:

“What is it, Kusi?”

Unhurried, she ambled down the slope toward me. Saying nothing, she began to pick up felled baby trees. A tiny tipa tree. A soto sapling. I was appalled to see I’d hacked native trees from where they were naturally growing in order to put in the foreign ones Pedro gave us. Kusi still hadn’t said anything. She continued to assemble a little mass grave of the horticultural newborns I’d slaughtered.

I felt silly. Steeped in permaculture theory, I’d been clearing out the undergrowth without bothering to look at what was in it. Kusi picked up the machete and gracefully edited away grasses, spiky quiñe, and scrub tula trees, leaving behind two tender carnival trees, one of them winking with a single yellow flower.

“Don’t sweat,” Kusi said to me. “Uncover.” For the next hour that Carnival morning, Kusi and I uncovered what was already there: a future forest of diverse native trees, many, like the tipas, with medicinal functions. We brought to light more carnivals with the most gorgeous flowers and scents. We uncovered spaces without any naturally occurring saplings, too, and that’s where we placed Pedro’s palms.

About the Author: William Powers is an author, activist, and leading expert in deep ecology. He is a Senior Fellow at World Policy Institute, and he founded the Living Well Collaborative, supporting a new paradigm for healing the planet and nourishing community and economy at the local level. Powers has published five nonfiction books within the sustainability space, including Dispatches from the Sweet Life (New World Library, 2018) and Twelve by Twelve (New World Library, 2010), and his essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, and “Fresh Air.”

Ripple was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Taylor Reed

Thursday, January 26th, 2017. I was in Washington State while Brad made his offer to a room full of people in Traverse City. He was the first of several that evening to share stories for the regular event, akin to a TED Talk, called Fulfillament. He spoke of his roots and recounted lessons and guiding principles that have stuck with him before inviting listeners to consider a powerful trade-off. Despite my absence, this talk, this potent distillation, has served a bit as a north star for my understanding of both Brad and Crosshatch, and why their work is uniquely needed. Listen to it if you want to hear more of Brad’s story and the trade-off mentioned above.

For this write-up, I want to draw attention to a brief bit about three-quarters through (starting at 14m 13s if you’re listening along). Between accounts of time spent in New Zealand and his recollection of meeting Amanda, Brad remarked on what he referred to as “the third great blessing of my life… the people.” He continued,

“When I met Bob and Sally, I realized that community was made up of all ages, and the Bioneers planning committee was twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty. What a gift that is for anyone to realize how comprehensive your community can be.”

Tuesday, September 29th, 2022. I’ve heard that rural spaces can be trying places if you’re trying to find “your people.” I get it; I’ve felt that. When it comes to connecting with others in rural places, it helps to not hold too rigidly to any expectations of what a friend or friendship might look like. Ernie, a good friend of mine, is more than twice my age.

On this particular Tuesday back in September of 2022, I thought I was helping Ernie out as he helped an elder in the community who needed assistance maintaining the forest around his home. Ernie had already downed and bucked the trees that called for it when I arrived, so we worked mainly on splitting and moving firewood. Sometimes in silence, sometimes making conversation, we gutted it out. One of the gifts of spending time with Ernie is that he’s already walked most of the paths I find myself on or am interested in, both literal and figurative. He offers thoughts and experience, and sometimes just listens.

We finished our work and left half of the haul in place. That pile was for Ernie to pick up later and drop off for his daughter. The rest we mainly maneuvered into the back of his truck, and some into our car. As the vehicles crept along the winding paths out of the greenery, we trailed each other. Then came roads. He missed his turn. He missed his turn a few times. He pulled into our driveway behind me. I hadn’t realized that half of that load was coming to our house — no small contribution in our second year of heating primarily with wood. I thought my role that day was mainly to help — the learning, conversation, the activity, that was all extra. That load of wood, too? I was on the receiving end of more than I had put in, much more than anything expected.

Friday, March 22nd, 2024. I sat in a room with others I admire, all neighbors of the Hatchquarters property. Their input was crucial to understanding the hopes and cautions relevant to embarking on constructing an ecological farmstead and artist residency on the acreage. We sat in a circle. While small in number, the living room was filled to the brim. If you took account of much of the work and hobbies our family is engaged in, you’d encounter a room full of mentors. My wife works at our library, and the former library director sat there. I work for Crosshatch — core instigators of Crosshatch sat across from me. Growing food? Raising small ruminants? Experts in the room. Folks who know how to put up wood? The best. Living artfully and creatively? Well represented. Civic and community engagement? To a tee. Building, tinkering, and living within their means? I shouldn’t have to say it.

The meeting facilitator guided conversation, threading Crosshatch’s aspirations along to the aspirations of these neighbors. She asked questions aimed at the core role and feasibility of Crosshatch’s project. At some point, while reflecting on whether something like Hatchquarters might draw young families to the area by serving their needs and dreams for this place, I realized I alone sat there as a bit of a case study. The facilitator turned toward me and voiced the question: “Why choose Bellaire?” I answered with what came to mind first — brief mentions of the natural beauty and cost of living, but then I lingered a bit on what had sealed it: the people. We’re surrounded here by people who have put in the time, who have known the seasonality of this place, who’ve learned the lessons, and who are living in ways that we’d like to emulate. We’re drawn and held in this area because of the mentoring and examples of folks around us.

The facilitator countered, ”But that’s something you can find in all communities.” Yes, potentially, but as I sat in that living room, I knew on a deeper level that there was still something irreplaceable about those who surrounded us here.

Wednesday, September 10th, 2025. Take a look at that date. We’re in the future now. Ernie, my spry eighty-year-old friend, is out of town for a few days, off to Canada. Less Tim Horton-Canada, and more hunter/gatherer, subsistence village-Canada. He’s making his way to Peawanuck, an isolated Cree community of less than three hundred people on the northern end of Ontario and the western shore of Hudson Bay. It’s a six-hundred-something-mile jaunt north via cargo and mail planes. When Ernie pointed the spot out to me on a map, something stuck out immediately: shaded light blue, I saw a mass of land simply labeled Polar Bear.

I now know that’s a reference to Polar Bear Provincial Park, immediately east of the village they’re heading to. This whole region is the sort of place where visitors are few. Those who visit tend to hunt woodland caribou. If you keep heading north, you’ll find polar bears that tend to hunt narwhals.

I tend to think that Ernie’s seen just about everything. Ask him a peculiar question about a peculiar interest of yours, and you’ll pick up on why. Truth is, he hasn’t, and he knows it. And on this particular Wednesday, he’s off to learn more by observing everyday life in that small Cree community. What does that region of Taiga look like? How about livelihood in the remote village? What does modernity’s shaping (read: Starlink and the education it brings for the village’s children) in the town mean? They’ll have an indigenous guide the entire time, which I understand is a requirement for visitors due to the proximity of wildlife we don’t tend to encounter down south, meaning here in northern Michigan. He’s paying attention. He’s still seeking out stories. And I’m learning from him. I’m learning from him, and trying to do the same.

Four Dates (A Short Case for Long Memory) was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Taylor Reed

Something showed up in our mailbox not too long ago — a curious envelope featuring a hand-stamped letterhead: “The Luddite Club.”

Inside this welcomed surprise was Vol. 1 — №2 of “The Luddite Dispatch.” I devoured the brief write-up in the glossy, artful bifold and leaned back in my chair, satisfied, realizing the tale it told was worth sharing, perfect for reproducing in Crosshatch’s Whole Field. Soon after, my relaxation was derailed by a question: would I have to seek permission the way the letter had arrived, snail-mail and all, Bellaire-to-Brooklyn, waiting all darn day?

Reality is, we’ve got deadlines to meet. Penning something appropriate, finding an envelope, waiting for delivery to New York City, hoping for their reading, consideration, and positive response, and then waiting for that to make its way back to Bellaire struck me as inconvenient.

You might wonder why in the world I’d even begin to entertain such a process. Readers, “Luddite” is part of their name because it means something. While often used dismissively, the term comes from the name Ned Ludd — the fictional ringleader of the nonfiction folks who rebelled two hundred years ago amid England’s shift from small-scale weaving operations towards a more automated, mechanized textile industry. They tried to protect what they saw as emblematic of human agency, dignity, and autonomy. How? Smashing and burning the machines they believed threatened their vocations and handwork. Nowadays, the term “Luddite” refers to anyone who challenges the abuses of technology.

I checked out their website. Yes, the Luddite Club has a website. It’s pretty barebones, but it does have an email address, which is what I used to contact them.

I waited for a response. And waited.

And never heard back from them.

The Luddite Club is a non-profit that grew from the actions of a handful of urban high-schoolers determined to buck screen-driven trends. If addiction to smartphones played a significant role in hollowing out social interactions, depleting the ability to focus, and eroding mental health en masse, these teenagers formulated a simple and direct response. We’ll chuck ’em. We’ll chuck our smartphones and spend more time together. Despite that stance, I thought any publicity would be welcomed, even if mediated by digital communications and screens.

I sat at my computer. I eventually found a copy of the Luddite Club writing archived online. The text appeared in full on the website (the TedKArchive), but what stuck out was the addendum included with the piece:

Notes: Archiving these dispatches on this website was not the decision of the authors. I don’t even have access to the full first issue.

I disagree with the authors that the texts should remain offline. I like the idea of the dispatch being delivered locally by post, but I think, for example, if someone from South Africa wants to research the emergence of tech-critical ideas they should be able to do so without the club needing to spend $5 of donations in order to send the dispatch all the way from the US.

Someone had taken an approach similar to mine — trying to take the print edition and amplify it by means of electronic ether. This person had gotten one step further than I did and received a response, albeit a negative one. And then they shared it anyway.

I paused and glanced down. Sitting in my lap was my phone, nearing inoperability as its cracked screen formed a widening web. I needed a different one. Maybe my next step was due to inspiration from the young folks who put together the Luddite mailing, and maybe due to the example of my wife, Jessi, who’s been using a flip-phone for about a year. Either way, I decided against getting a new phone. I purchased a used, durable old brick: a Kyocera flip phone.

It has been nice. A tether of sorts, a low-grade psychic compulsion and its associated hum, has been severed — one of those things you pick up on only when made aware of its absence.

Also, though, it’s been inconvenient.

Replying to texts takes a lot more poking, concentration, and time.

Streaming music is no longer a thing if I’m on the road or in the garage. (The piles of cassettes and CDs I used to look right past at yard sales are a main draw now.)

When driving to new locations, I have to look up the address before leaving the house. (Which our second-hand GPS can run with if needed. Again — thank you, garage sales.)

And yesterday, I muddled my way through ordering at a restaurant, taken aback by an establishment that’s done away with physical menus completely, in favor of having patrons load it up on their smartphones. (Let’s see… a pizza shop probably offers a large pepperoni pizza? That oughta do it for our family of four, right?)

In the long run, I don’t know that the inconvenience is such a bad thing. Regardless of how it feels in the moment, it leads to rebuilding some atrophied muscles. That same inconvenience that rebuilds gives the Luddite Club a platform worth talking about — they aren’t just theorizing, they’re modelling something, convenient or not. That integrity might have something to do with the Brooklyn group’s twenty-five new chapters setting up shop across the United States now.

What I initially wanted to share with you, the story folded within The Luddite Dispatch, Vol. 1 — №2, is a short travelogue from two young women who visited a small, smartphone-free city just south of Paris. Well, smartphone-free isn’t quite fair. First, the town of Seine-Port had banned smartphones from being used in public. Second, the legislation was overturned, so the town’s mayor, the initial spearheader of the anti-tech efforts, pushed villagers to adhere to the law’s spirit voluntarily.

In a move emblematic of what Ivan Illich once termed “paradoxical counter-productivity,” the opposite of what was intended happened.

“…the cell phone ban had not liberated Seine-Port. It had in fact started a mini-war and launched a fight over power and overreach… Phones in Seine-Port were not seen by residents as signs of addiction. Using one in public was now a brave act of civil disobedience.”

Rather than taking in a settled, grounded, quaint, tech-averse Parisian locale, the authors found themselves observing something different:

Long-standing change develops from within culture, think Brooklyn high-schoolers and English peasant weavers. If imposed from above, expect the unexpected.

I wish I had gotten an email from The Luddite Club offering permission to reproduce their write-up digitally. That would have saved me a lot of time. But they didn’t, which might be due to any number of reasons. I like to think it has something to do with how they’ve chosen to stick to the spirit of their work.

I’d also love for the drawbacks of using a flip-phone to disappear. But I’m going to make the most of the swift kick to the rear the inconveniences offer. They force me to slow down. They force me to intentionally consider where I’m going. They force me to communicate more over the phone and in face-to-face interactions. And they force me to find better ways to decompress than scrolling while our kids sit and take notice.

I’m trying to actively choose, for myself, ideal forms of being forced. That is, those that serve to rebuild or protect something needed.

On Inconvenience and Phones was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Taylor Reed

Out of respect for you, reader, I’ll be up-front. I didn’t learn anything at Horse Progress Days because I didn’t attend Horse Progress Days. Let me lay out a case for why the event still deserves your consideration.

Months ago, someone offered a hot tip. A gathering was brewing — rural Central Michigan, early July, and a special one — “Horse Progress Days”. The name didn’t mean anything to me, but the recommender’s description sounded peculiar, so I scanned the internet for the lowdown.

The annual gathering is held at a different Midwestern site each year. Last year was its thirtieth anniversary, and last week, it was held in Clare, Michigan, pulling in an estimated 13,000–15,000 attendees. In 2024, it was in Gordonville, Pennsylvania. 2023 — Shipshewana, Indiana. Those names might not mean anything to you, but there is a theme: those spots are Amish strongholds, which makes sense. Horse Progress Days is a massive gathering and trade show geared towards innovations in horse-powered farming and small-scale livelihood, largely outside the realm of fossil fuels.

This means draft horses. It means handwork and pedal-powered contraptions. It means taking cues from international guests who share their own wisdom.

I imagine it now: morning mist dissipates, the ground underfoot shakes, a shire-horse stamps. I pick up on granules of oilstone grit scraping over steel — last-minute touches before a scything demonstration. And soon after, I feel my face reddening as the delicate nuances of so-called “simple” machines whiz right over my non-engineering head.

Humbled as I might have been, I did have every intention of making it, $15 entry fee and all. Clare is twenty-something minutes from where my parents live, and I didn’t know when or if it’d be hosted in Michigan again. In the end, though, it just wasn’t meant to be. On the 4th and the 5th of July, I was right here in Northwest Michigan.

If you look into the particulars of Horse Progress Days, you’ll see heavy, heavy Amish representation, but that Anabaptist image might be stretched a bit. You’ll read about small-scale Amish metal-fabricators, out-of-the-way operations specializing in achieving parameters long abandoned by larger industrial ag-manufacturers. You might also see photos of showcases from similarly nimble shops visiting from across the Atlantic — Scandinavian micro-businesses that never fell under the sway of large-scale equipment despite longstanding commitment to innovation and experimentation. Or maybe you’ll catch a snippet of an offering shared by a visitor from some sub-Saharan enclave, wherein the Green revolution never totally wrested control from traditional foodways.

You see, the whole gathering rests on pushback to a trend. Somewhere along the timeline of industrialization, farming equipment didn’t appear to require as much attunement to the landscape. The tractor and other forms of agricultural machinery grew larger and more powerful, transcending limits thanks to the incredible energy bound within fossil fuels.

Nimbleness and efficiency were no longer primary metrics of quality. Why prioritize those constraints when diesel offers more oomph than one might ever need?

And engineering for accessible maintenance? That’s less of a concern when profits and equipment sales are the end goal rather than equipping communities with tools they can repair and fine-tune themselves.

Here’s the rub, and it’s a long one, so bear with me. When fossil fuel availability becomes a concern, or the effects of widespread combustion start to skew natural patterns that all things rely upon, or inequality and concentration of wealth and power drive localized livelihoods further and further out of reach, the slicked-ease that fossil fuel-dominated agriculture represented begins to seize. That’s when more people hunger for alternatives.

Those alternatives are not fully fleshed-out systems from the past or wholly unproven future technologies. There are spaces where those two, looking back in time and looking forward, meet. Again, I wasn’t there at the event. If I was there, I’m sure I would have learned, and one of my areas of learning would likely be where and how exactly my idyllic imagining of the event smacks against reality. Still, the premise of Horse Progress Days strikes me as one of those alternative spaces.

It seems like a pocket that fundamentally depends on what’s been reliable in the past, meaning good design, craftsmanship, appropriate scale, and closed-loop systems. But it isn’t limited to stagnant traditionalism. It’s also about bearing witness to new visions of what might be possible — innovation, adoption, and inspiration.

Despite the attendance numbers, the event represents an undercurrent. I only knew of it because of word of mouth. So much of the passage of these third-way orientations relies upon being with people, face-to-face. I want to encounter those committed to settings steeped in tradition who also push for new applications. And I want to encounter those immersed in swirling worlds of new visions who find grounding in what’s been steadfast over time immemorial. Maybe I’ll catch you at a gathering like Horse Progress Days in the future. Maybe we already spoke at one in the past. Either way, I’ll keep an eye out, looking both ways.

Note: Many thanks to Tom Hurst for aiming to bring me into the HPD-fold. Tom has attended many times as a representative of Tillers International, an organization here in Michigan that carries a lot of clout in draft-horse and sustainable agriculture circles.

I Didn’t Learn Anything at Horse Progress Days was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In April I attended Georgetown University’s semi-annual Music Sustainability Forum. This assembly of academics, non-profit executives, arts administrators, IP lawyers, archivists, curators, and artists was brought to Trump’s D.C. to discuss this year’s theme: the points of intersection between music ecosystems and scholarly institutions. We were officially charged with exploring systems and mechanisms by which the latter can support the former, although the tables of precarity were turning all around us. The directors of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings were scheduled to join the forum but were instead battening down their organizations’ hatches in advance of imminent DOGE cuts. A week later, Trump would make his first swipe at Harvard’s federal funding and nonprofit status.

These weren’t only the prevailing winds buffeting the assembly. The spectre of AI was a near-constant preoccupation, as was the use (read: abuse) of music as a loss-leader for user-data capture/extraction purposes by the likes of Spotify and Apple. I was feeling utterly dejected till we broke for lunch and I sought out Dr. Natalie Hopkinson, American University professor and chief curator of D.C.’s Go-Go Museum.

I don’t know if go-go music — the propulsive funk/R&B subgenre native to the Greater D.C. area — means anything to Whole Field readers. Perhaps those of a certain age (my age; middle-age) will remember the biggest hit to come out of the scene: Experience Unlimited’s “Da Butt,” featured in Spike Lee’s School Daze, and ubiquitous on 1988 pop radio and MTV. If you haven’t heard of it, that owes in no small part to go-go’s intense localism — developed and maintained with pride and dedication by its practitioners and fans — which has enabled it to thrive as a self-sustaining music ecosystem, of which the Museum is a physical manifestation. Its holdings are composed of donations or loans by stakeholders in the community; its collections’ metadata and the contextualizing materials used in its exhibits are provided by the community. Funding, of course, necessarily relies on some sources further afield. But, as we discussed the perils of too much reliance — by individual artists; community-based archives and cultural centers; expressive communities writ large — on academic or governmental institutions for support and sustenance, Natalie shared her organization’s animating credo: “the networks are us.”

Of everything I heard in the course of that twelve-hour forum, this phrase was the most memorable, and galvanizing. It was exquisitely applicable to every complexity or complication or crisis that the group addressed, and, in effect, challenged every participant to think of power and capability at odds to the chosen theme; in horizontal rather than vertical terms. As a musician working in something that resembles a professional capacity, I was particularly stirred by its latent imperative to adjust my commitments and efforts according to the needs and scale of my own human network, rather than entrusting their care to precarious institutional systems — to say nothing of those systems forced upon us by the inhuman, in fact anti-human, “social networks.”

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the teeth of a terrifically vibrant, fertile, at times feral local punk/post-punk/art-rock/hardcore/etc. music scene. This was the early ’90s, pre-internet, and although Louisville was a destination for plenty of touring acts from around the country, the strength of and support for our community was, even then, breathtaking: 800–1000 kids (as we invariably called them, regardless of their age) would turn out for one of the bigger homegrown bands’ weekend-night shows. There was no discernable desire or effort to be anything but what we were — what our place made us and what we made of our place — and we were fiercely proud of both. We might not have owned or operated the venues, but all of the networks that sustained the scene belonged to us: organizational, promotional, creative. We received no diktat from corporate media or labels. No one claimed any institutional affiliation, and we received neither establishment support for or pressure against any of our activities.

I hesitate mightily to indulge in a public display of nostalgia here, but Dr. Hopkinson’s dictum could have been the motto on a flag that flew above every show put on by our scrappy Louisville music community. It also could — should — fly over an expeditionary column of music-makers marching out of the rotten hellscape of exploitative intermediating platforms and into a possible future of decentralized, demonopolized, community-generated and community-supported ecosystems of creative interaction and engagement. I think of Catalytic Sound — founded by Chicago jazz stalwart Ken Vandermark, it’s a cooperative, artist-run music distribution service providing reliable, equitable income streams to its contributing experimental and free-jazz contributors through membership fees from users. Or the federated model offered by Funkwhale, which consists of various community-driven “pods” (thus the unfortunate name) sharing music across a user-controlled, ad-free open network. Or — and I refuse to consider this idle romanticism — the large-scale reclamation of musical practice and activity altogether free of Big Tech-capture or institutional guidelines and constraints: open-mic nights and community song-circles; front-porch and living room jams; dance-offs and rap battles; funeral parades and mourning choirs and protest singing. We have a fathomless well of unowned and unownable songs to draw upon, and thousands of years of unmediated, human-led experience singing together. We are the key to sustainable ecosystems, musical or otherwise. The networks are us.

Guest Contribution: The Networks Are Us—Sustainable Music Ecosystems was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

adapted from a keynote address at the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council’s Environmentalist of the Year Awards, on May 16, 2025

Bob Russell was a friend and mentor who passed away in 2013. Bob was known for his contagious curiosity across a broad range of topics, as well as his unwavering activism and his acerbic wit. His favorite interjection, after he or someone else held forth on the current litany of despairs and tribulations, was “We’re doomed!”

Bob at least figured out how to say it without cursing, which I rarely do. Wendell Berry has a more eloquent take yet:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be…

(from Peace of Wild Things)

The dark edges of the world are growing; old evils we thought buried are reviving themselves in front of our eyes, and this moment’s dreadful combination of instability and absurdity adds to the horror. What to do?

Lean on a good piece of grandmotherly wisdom, to start: count your blessings. Allow me to indulge in three.

First — somehow, outside of any willful intent of my own, I came to understand that cynicism wouldn’t root in me. Seeing that cynicism didn’t serve me, and certainly didn’t serve my community, came from first understanding that I was weird, and that I loved being creative, and that I wanted to make worlds come alive. It was a choice between destruction and creation.

Second — Amanda Jones Kik, my partner in life and work, who looked down these narrow foggy life paths with me and said “why not?” often forging through the thorny briars while I paused.

Third — radical badasses of all kinds, who showed that a wide set of skills and personalities was needed to build the future we wanted. So many of them inspired me, gave me hope, helped me see my own limitations and errors of thought and action, and continued to invite me to work alongside. If you are reading this and we’ve met, there’s a good chance you are one of those fine people.

These blessings are not just an antidote to despair, they also make for a really good segue. So let’s get into it — let’s talk about how the work of repairing the world can take root in joy, curiosity, and courage. And how we can honor the work of building trust that’s essential to it, and how to savor the occasional big victory and the small moments of connection and meaning that arise from the process.

Some of the aforementioned radical badasses came to me via five years of canvassing for Clean Water Action and some similar organizations. While I have no current desire to knock on doors, I’m grateful for those years. Beyond the very fine radicals that I met, I also learned a lot from the 40–60 people I encountered each evening — by my count something like 30,000 or more in the course of doing that work. The number of doors slammed in my face by angry homeowners numbers in the dozens, maybe, a number far outpaced by the number of deeply meaningful conversations I had with people whose eyes shined when they heard about the campaigns we were working on. In between those poles, the vast majority of people, well, they cared. They were often busy, almost always distracted, sometimes uninformed or misinformed, but for the most part the average person I talked to, no matter the place, income level of the neighborhood, or campaign, they cared. Many donated — far more than you’d think. All-in-all, this was work that energized me, when you’d expect the opposite.

I’m also grateful because most days, before we hopped into vans and suburbans, we’d bring in someone to talk about just about anything related to political issues. It was through those presentations, as well as the books and magazines and websites they’d recommend, that I learned about the American Indian Movement, Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee. About Mumia Abu Jamal, the MOVE bombing, the assassination of Fred Hampton, COINTELPRO, and the Chicago 8. This is where I first learned about the organic food movement, CAFOs, and GMOs, and about corporate greenwashing and lobbying tactics. So much more: histories of labor and other movements, migrant worker rights, prison abolition, the ERA, car-centered development and sprawl, the military industrial complex, environmental racism, cancer clusters, Silent Spring, and of course a whole host of water issues from mining to lead to arsenic and oil spills.

Most importantly, I began to see these issues weaving together, the result of complex systems that prioritized money and power over caution and care. This is where the cynic in me could have taken over, but at the same time it was so obvious that all of these systems were built by people, and that we could build new ones too. What might have become cynicism became curiosity, and creativity, and a desire to see what else we could do.

A quick note — in the NMEAC keynote I spent a little time talking about the history of environmental work. I’m seeing now that it distracts from the narrative arc I was making, so I’m removing it, but will include it at the end for the sake of consistency.

I didn’t know it then, but this movement I was leaning into has some names. Carl Boggs coined the term “prefigurative politics” and David Graeber, among others, used the phrase “building the new in the shell of the old.” Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown, among others, showed the importance of building these movements at the speed of trust, with a focus on how groups work together. As adrienne says in Emerging Strategies, “Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.” That rhymes with these words from artist and activist Caroline Woolard: “What group can build something that they have not yet imagined, drawn, debated, revised, and still desired?”

My friend and beloved elder Kay Bond said “our generation said NO and your generation is saying YES.” What I hear in that is that those elders carved out a space in the old for us, now, to begin building the new. This is such a powerful and hopeful combination of strategies.

I had said that my work as a canvasser energized me, but that’s only half true. As I advanced within the organization and then became a Canvass Director, I started to see some of the ways that the larger institution, particularly within the national organization, had some problems. I’m not interested in penning a take-down, both because I don’t know how much of my experience was evidence of a large-scale cultural problem within the organization, and because I’ve since seen that this kind of toxic leadership is indeed a large-scale cultural problem infecting a huge swath of the non-profit and activist sector. CWA was just my first encounter with it.

You can probably guess the kind of thing I’m talking about, and in fact I’ve written about it before. Sexual harrasment and abuse of staff, using urgency to disregard basic decency, being generally terrible to get along with, including implicit racist or sexist behavior (even/especially looking down on the community you ostensibly served), but colleagues let it slide because you were good at what you did — often these leaders were even considered heroes to the movement.

Part of prefigurative politics is that it demands a comprehensive, relational approach. You can’t just get good at winning at the expense of trust and compassion and decency. No more siloing the work. No more hustle culture. No more ignoring your own health, your stress, your family, your ability to rest — or that of your co-workers, partners or constituents. Done well, this work is about humility, not heroics. That’s harder — but so much more useful.

I’ve been in this work for almost 30 years, learning something new all the time — and my eyes are still shining. This is hopeful, joyful, generative work that helps us work through the hidden problems to build the systems that serve us. I can’t get enough of it.

At its best, this work is a wild mix of big-picture philosophical thinking and concrete, on-the-ground action — the work is hugely improved by the conversation between theory and practice. Here are six lofty ideas along with some real-life examples. Take what’s useful to you.

ENTANGLEMENT

David Foster Wallace famously said “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Permaculture originator Bill Mollison similarly said “Everything gardens.” Both of these ideas speak to the way we are entangled in the systems of the world. Our ecological and cultural contexts shape who we are, and we in turn shape them back.

Disbelieving this puts us at risk of narrowing our focus too much, and creating unforeseen outcomes that cause more harm. The classic example is old-school ecological intervention, which introduced cane toads to Australia, cats and rabbits to Macquarie Island (decimating the bird population), and killed so many sparrows in China that insect plagues became common. Kudzu. Autumn Olive.

As Aldo Leopold says, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” Similarly, when one tugs at a single thing in the economy/politics/culture, they find it attached to everything else. You can’t disentangle yourself from the problems of Capitalism without disentangling yourself from Capitalism, and you can’t do that without finding some other system to replace it — barter circles, freeganism, or investing your time to bring about other macro-scale economic systems.

Jo Freeman provides a better example of what happens when a group of well-meaning people try to remove one system without investing in another. Jo wrote The Tyranny of Structurelessness, delivered as a talk for a Womens’ Rights conference in 1970.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness — and that is not the nature of a human group.

The whole essay is worth your time. A key point made by Freeman is that proclaiming that your process has no structure is actually saying that the structure is invisible. Some kind of structure will naturally form. Usually that structure is based on who talks the most, who has the most status and influence, or who is the most argumentative — all structures that are unlikely to create good outcomes. Instead, Freeman argues, let’s invent and evolve structures that are best suited to our needs, and then use them when it makes sense and use something else if not — but never “nothing.” She offers a number of great principles for creating such groups, including “rotation of tasks among individuals” and “diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.”

Building the new in the shell of the old means you have to build something; you can’t merely abolish something. We can’t just get rid of industrial agriculture without building farm systems that regenerate soil, provide wildlife habitat and create meaningful, healthy jobs for workers. Tug on that and you find that how food is sold (and for what price) plays a big role in whether farms can afford to transition in that way. Tug on that and you find it pulling on how food safety regulations are written (often favoring large corporate farms), how food packaging and distribution systems work, and of course dietary preferences and cultural standards for the way Americans eat.

There are many compelling arguments for local food systems; one you are not likely to hear is very important: the small scale gives us the chance to chase these connections to their endpoints and find all the ways the system needs to change to make a truly regenerative food system a possibility, without unintended negative outcomes. Of course, we could (theoretically) get rid of industrial agriculture by passing a few powerful laws, but without the alternatives ready to take root, the unintended outcomes would pile up quickly, and would likely include mass starvation and/or economic collapse. I’m making a point here, and so ignoring that many wise farmers and food systems workers have, in fact, been building such an alternative for many decades now.

Finally, this then raises the question of scale: do we then try to scale up? I often argue that a more successful strategy is to scale out, replicating and adapting the small scale model in another place, and then building new connections between the two. By “successful” I certainly don’t mean “making more money” or “generating more status for its participants.” I mean that it’s likely to actually serve the original goals (regenerating soil, sequestering or cycling carbon, wildlife habitat, good work, etc.).

ROOTING INTO PLACE

One of my favorite humans, Yvonne Stephens, used to work at Crosshatch. As we were talking through various programs she noted, “It’s like we’re learning about a place and building a place all at the same time.” Spot on, I thought then, and still do.

When talking about entanglement above, there’s an important reason that ecological examples come so readily to mind — we are always entangled in the web of life. That’s true at all scales, from the way a winter ice storm can impact some farms’ ability to start seeds in the early spring, to the eventual end of the sun and its substantial impact on earth as being habitable to life. Of course it makes sense to be more concerned with the ice storm than the lifespan of the sun. Similarly, we are entangled with global environmental conditions, including climate change and the massive shifts in weather patterns caused by it and other global phenomena.

The local scale, though, is where we have the most acute sensitivity and the most power to effect change. When it comes to being responsible to our water, for example, we can certainly focus on global water issues, but hopefully not at the expense of first stopping point-source pollution, oil pipelines, agricultural and mining runoff and water infrastructure issues in our home places.

These kinds of arguments are rightfully attributed to indigenous communities around the world, who have built resilient local cultures in large part by shaping and then being shaped by the landscape they reside in — the patterns of rainfall and drought, the changing weather, migration patterns of animals, cycles of plant life, and thousands of other small details of how food, clean water, shelter, medicine, poetry, music and other gifts arise from local entanglement.

The closest European versions of these ideas come from both Permaculture (Bill Mollison and David Holmgren are Australian but from European roots) and from Bioregionalism — coined by Allen Van Newkirk and evolved and popularized by Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft at Planet Drum in the Bay Area of California. Gary Snyder also played a big role in popularizing the concept.

The importance of communities and individuals embedding themselves into place and locality is key, as is the concept of ‘reinhabitation’ and has been emphasized by early bioregionalists Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann. Unlike many strains of environmentalism — Berg and Dasmann placed the greening of cities and technology at the centre of a reinhabitation strategy, recognizing that most people will continue to live in them. The idea is not how to disconnect and separate wilded natural areas, but instead, how to wild our cities, so that we become a part of our environment, not removed from it. (from Bioregional Movements: A Story from Many Voices)

Based in northwest lower Michigan, Crosshatch’s work, like that of so many others, is informed by our responsibility to protect water, as well as a desire to see healthy, flourishing forests, wetlands, fields and farms.

REMEMBERING

After Pete Seeger died, local musicians and activists held a memorial for him in Traverse City. I sat at a table with Sally Van Vleck (partner to Bob “We’re Doomed” Russell in life, work and action). Sally started telling me a story about Big Rock when I stopped her to say “what’s Big Rock?” Oh man, you do not want to see Sally look at you the way she looked at me at that moment.

Big Rock — aka Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant — was commissioned in March of 1963 in Charlevoix County. It quickly became a focal point for local activists’ actions to resist nuclear power and nuclear war. For Sally and her scores of compatriots, Big Rock was the rallying cry that helped to organize the Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council and other peace, justice and environmental groups around our region.

But I didn’t know that, not having grown up in northern Michigan and not having participated in those actions. And it’s not like Traverse City was going to throw a 25-year anniversary party to commemorate activists chaining themselves to the fences around the plant. Actions like that barely made the newspaper.

The next day I was talking to another incredible human, Gerard Grabowski, and the topic turned to his kids and their generation. Specifically, he was saying how many young people he knew who were socially engaged and who cared about building community and tackling all sorts of problems, but that they didn’t always feel connected to the larger movement or their history.

From there, the Long Memory Project was born. Rather than archiving the stories of our elders, the idea of the LMP is to pass those stories down to the next generation. We gather young artists with elders who have worked together in community, and the elders spend a long day telling stories about that work. The young artists then take those stories and use them as fuel for art — songs, poems, paintings and other pieces that reflect on what they’ve heard.

Speaking of unintended outcomes, we’ve found a lot with this project, all of them positive. Elders reconnecting; artists finding new avenues to explore; elders reporting that they often feel invisible and how lovely it is to be seen and celebrated.

Most importantly, though, is that moment where the stories live again, connecting both the elders and the youngsters to the work that was done in this place, by the people who preceded them, chock full of lessons and rules of thumb for how the work might be done. It was a quote to exactly that effect that inspired the title of this project; from Utah Phillips:

If I wanted a true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. They led those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate and ultimately more useful than the best damn history book I ever read. And as I’ve said before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America.

Finally, the lessons these stories contain are bound at least in part to a context, and so become not just instructions for action but instructions for living well in this place. Memory that’s bound to place is so much more useful and potent than even the most widespread global meme.

BEING A GUEST

Crosshatch has never really had a home base, which is something we originally saw as a problem to be remedied as soon as time and money would allow. In the meantime, we supposed, we could work in other people’s spaces, as a guest.

After 20 years, we are finally getting ready to have our own space. But we will never stop working further afield — in fact, the chance to be a guest in this work has been an incredible blessing. First, it meets people where they are at, literally. It also shapes the way our staff approach the partnership — after having one partner literally say “why do we need you? We can do this ourselves” we learned to never take our role for granted. As with etiquette for guests in someone’s home, there’s an etiquette that has helped us build credibility and integrity as a partner. It’s different from a corporate partnership — it requires more trust, better communication, and a clearer sense of each other’s boundaries and strengths. And it reminds us that, even after we develop a full Crosshatch campus, we are always guests in this space.

This might seem like a minor note in this larger chorus of ideas, but it’s the rooting hormone of this project — a way to begin getting our heads around the ways we need to act as we build out this work. It is, perhaps, a remedy to selfishness, profit-first thinking, white saviorism and a host of other poisons that so often find their way into the movement.

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

That phrase “memories of the future” comes from Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Movement. In a talk he gave closing down the Totnes Pound (a local currency project very similar to our own Bay Bucks), he said:

The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber once wrote “it is one thing to say ‘Another World is Possible’. It’s another thing to experience it, however momentarily”. That’s why the Totnes Pound was so powerful for me. It helped so many people to create memories of the future, lived moments of what a different, more hopeful, more delicious, more resilient future might actually be like. [emphasis mine]

This idea is at the core of prefigurative work. If you are building the new inside the old, people need moments to see what the new will bring, and how it will make them feel. These moments also allow us to discuss and re-work our plans; a way of “stepping back from the wall” to experience our plans inside the context of our place and our community.

Here’s David Graeber again, talking about prefigurative politics:

​​When protesters in Seattle chanted “this is what democracy looks like,” they meant to be taken literally. In the best tradition of direct action, they not only confronted a certain form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tracks: they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind of social relations on which it is based were unnecessary. This is why all the condescending remarks about the movement being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organization was the movement’s ideology.

I was one of those dumb kids in Seattle. What I remember, beyond the unnecessary violence of the police and the euphoria of being part of a transformative movement, was that people showed up in so many different ways. Food Not Bombs had hummus and soup and bread to feed everyone. There were people with medical training ready to lend a hand. I worked “safety” making sure that families who wanted to avoid the most heated points of contention had exit strategies to get to safe spaces. There was live music, dancers and other performers, those who were willing to risk arrest by enacting civil disobedience, and of course thousands of participants willing to occupy space and amplify the messages of the movement. For every moment of “No to the WTO” there were ten moments of “Yes to a new way of being.”

The Crosshatch Skill Swaps have always been good at creating these memories of the future — the hand-work, the learning from each other, the good food and music and the time for conversation, dance and dreaming together, all give those days a liminal, open-ended feeling. We are not only seeing snippets of the future, we are practicing it, and walking toward it all at the same time. Or, in the words of Arundhati Roy “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

FEEDING THE HUNGRY

What are you hungry for?

Our first event inadvertently asked that question. It was called Relocalizing and was an extended conversation about what vibrant local communities would look like. It featured Megan Quinn of Community Solutions as a keynote, along with lots of ideas about how our community might improve our ability to provide food, energy, transportation, medicine, elder care, art, joy, fermented beverages, etc. from our local land-base without causing undue harm. The message from the participants at that event came through clearly: more community connection, and more engagement with the living world, especially through hand-work. Those calls are what led to the first Skill Swap the following year.

Over 20 years, that message hasn’t really changed, but I have noticed some additions. People often crave a sense of the sacred and other shared experiences that were once largely the domain of churches. Our work tends to attract people who have complex relationships with the church and organized religion, including many who have left religion after suffering myriad forms of abuse. Still, there’s a hunger for community without judgment, for shared work, and for meaning. We’ve lost so much of our capacity to build trust. We’ve lost many of the skills needed to make decisions together, and to suss out toxic leadership. My friend Lisa Franseen calls these “remedial skills” that we need to relearn, and I know we can make it pretty fun to do that work.

Right now, in the face of the absurdity of the Trump administration and its trickster-like focus on keeping everyone off-kilter, we also crave meaning, hope, and a place to be vulnerable. We desperately want a sense that we have a future to work toward, and that that future makes room for all of us, not just the privileged few. We want to feel useful, and part of something that’s both bigger than us and still beautiful — awe-inspiring, even.

I’ve found in my own life that when I’m feeling anxious or depressed (which is on the regular), I start to desire more status — I want to be seen as important and useful and worthy, even, perhaps, one of the special ones, whatever that actually means. But when I’m connected to friends and colleagues and good work, and when I’m feeling centered and calm and joyful, I realize what I really want is merely to belong — to be seen and loved for exactly who I am. I don’t know how many of you share those sentiments, but I know that striving for belonging is far healthier than striving for status, for both me and my community.

All of this talk about hunger reminds me: this is one reason among many why art is so important. James Baldwin said “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

At the surface level, we need people who sing well and know the old work songs, infusing the weeding with a call and response rhythm. We need the band or DJ to lead the dance. More importantly, we need the daily renewal of curiosity and observation that the artist brings. We need screen-printing and harmony singing and dance and theater that help us refactor the old stories into new stories — art that shapes our communities’ imaginations, asks hard questions in beautiful ways, renews the perspectives of the disenfranchised, and comforts us when we feel defeated.

A great artist, of which there are many within a 20-mile radius of where I sit typing this, has the power to ignite joy, and awe, and to connect us to each other and to the sublime. To do prefigurative work without artists at the table is like trying to build a fire out of bricks.

THE THIRD PATH

The third path is a working title that needs a better name. What it stands for is pretty simple. Imagine you’ve just learned about a major social/cultural/political/economic problem. Maybe you watched a documentary or had a long talk with a friend who is involved in the work. You’re well informed and you’re itching to start solving the problem. What do you do?

One path is political — vote. Petition. Build coalitions. Protest. Run for office.

Another is financial — boycott. Buy from better sources. Use the power of your dollar to push the market toward something better for the world.

The third is communal — build something new. No matter how clumsy, or how messy, or underfunded or plain wrong, let’s consider the ways that our work, alongside the work of our neighbors, can be part of the solution to these problems.

There are some truly desirable, well drawn ideas out there — ways to restore the raucous chorus of wild places, to feed our communities from decolonized watersheds, and to move away from economies that exploit and dehumanize, toward cultures of reciprocity and care.

This work is incredibly difficult, with a long record of failures large and small. We are tasked with building an emergent movement, directed from the bottom up, that

1. puts in place low energy, low consumption, local alternatives to the global industrial economy, while
2. helping people create a new story (or 10,000 new stories) about how to live in the world, while
3. restoring our small places: the living world, in particular, but also our relationships, our trust in each other, the wounds and trauma of white supremacy and colonialism, our inequitable democratic process and power structures, and our broken local economies, and
4. having such a hell of a great time doing it that our neighbors can’t help but peek over the fence to ask what’s going on.

I think it’s number four that most often gets left behind. As some wise person said, regarding joy in the environmental movement: “this is too important to take seriously.” I’ve held that as a mantra, not to be endlessly ridiculous or flippant about the destruction of the world, but to know that movements like these grind people to dust, turn young people into cynics through indentured labor, all in the name of the cause. The joyless activist is an archetype we need to banish. We can do better. By remaining joyful in the face of our dread and the insurmountable nature of this work, we replenish ourselves for another day.

I want to find the eyes that are shining. How many people are finding true joy in this work? Can you throw an event where people go home laughing, inspired, hugging one another, versus one where people feel the dread and shame in their bellies, wandering off alone into the dark?

This work, with its focus on gathering, on shared work, and on the persistent idea of practice, contains many opportunities for fun, for joy, for the building of trust, and for the kind of hope that comes in the defiance of planting a tree or chucking a handful of seed bombs into a degraded empty lot. Will doing either of those things defeat the dragon of the industrial economy? No, but they are cheap and fun and keep the spirit alive to show up another day.

This is my take on what Grace Lee Boggs calls “Growing our own souls.” To consistently create all four of those above outcomes is impossible, but at no time can one be sacrificed to the other three. My own work in this regard fails regularly at all four, or achieves only a small measure of one or two. But I say to you: there is no other work in this moment. Let’s do it together, as clumsily as it may be done, and let’s get really good at it.

More from Grace Lee Boggs:

With the end of empire, we are coming to an end of the epoch of Rights. We have entered the epoch of Responsibilities which requires new, more socially-minded human beings and new, more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy.

Grace is one of my heroes. The fundamental point is that these projects can (and in my opinion, should) happen alongside the other two courses of action. Not just running for office, but experimenting with consensus at the small group scale. Not just boycotting a clothing company, but beginning the process of small-shop, local-chain fiber.

The third path is powerful as a way to begin seeding community change, but as a powerful additive to those two other paths. This “yes, and” or “both/and” strategy recognizes two traps of traditional problem solving: either we believe our fate is in the hands of politicians, and so we organize using political pressure, or we organize as consumers and put our fate in the power of our dollars, either through boycott or ethical consumption.

What makes this path and the projects it creates so promising? Eight reasons, at least. This strategy:

1. builds competence and expertise, calibrating the intelligence in our hands, bodies, and places, well beyond what any merely informational exercise could accomplish. By engaging in a local solution you also engage in the complexities of the original problem. This adds knowledge beyond talking points, which gives you credibility as a fellow player among those already at work in the field, and builds empathy.
2. builds a community of like-minded people, learning together. Now you are a voting bloc or affinity group, often cutting against the grain of partisan politics, which is hugely powerful.
3. builds trust, weaves interdependence, and helps people practice good governance and leadership. Gives you work to do alongside your neighbors as you practice care for both your local place and people, undoing generations of disconnect.
4. is in itself, a critique of the existing order. The fact that a competitive program is on the scene, requiring many hours of work from many people to implement, is a more nuanced and powerful indictment of the institution you are trying to change than any letter or protest sign.
5. serves as a prototype that can test and improve theoretical ideas in a small, fast, cheap way before deciding to revise them, evolve them, or scrap them as ineffective. Jennifer Garvey Berger, systems thinker and author of Simple Habits for Complex Times, calls this a “safe to fail” experiment, which is designed as much as a tool for learning about a complex system as it is about creating new projects which work. Successes can scale out into complex networks rather than up into business as usual. Either way, it allows us opportunities to actively practice the re-making of the world.
6. might actually solve, at the local level, the problem. Even if it doesn’t work completely, It builds actual systems of resilience that help our communities weather many strange and difficult changes to come. To the extent it does work, it reduces dependence on the systems we abhor.
7. no matter the size or scale, remains accountable to living, breathing, accountable members of your community, and so is responsive to local needs. Likewise, the feedback loops for its impact on the living world — on your local habitat — are short and often far more visible and legible than with anything that depends on far off resources.
8. It creates hope, and opportunities for joy.

The single most effective tool we can build is a tight-knit community, bound by trust, clear-eyed, courageous and humble. Such a thing cannot be planned for and will never be implemented by experts and with money. Such a thing is woven from what is at hand, slowly and with care, by the people in a place.

Finally, back to Wendell Berry and the rest of that fine poem, here.

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY AFTERWORD

Environmental work, over its history, got harder. It started as “save the river” or “save the owl” and it became very easy to point to. Easy for people to see a pipe or a clearcut or a bulldozer. Not to say that the campaigns were easy, just that the messaging was clear. Ironically, if you are working to protect water quality you kind of want the tap water to look bad.

Later, acid rain, climate change, groundwater non-point source and many other issues — we weren’t able to use our eyes. Problems got harder to visualize, often more subtle with terrible effects over years, decades, or longer. This made the work of community education harder, and opened the door to casting doubt first on scientific processes, then on scientific institutions, and now on science altogether.

Of course, environmental victories are often short-lived, and based often on who was in office. Many campaigns we had to win everytime (against terrible odds), and they only had to win once. No clearer view of that than right now. Stephanie Mills shared the example of Executive Order 14270 “Zero-Based Regulatory Budgeting to Unleash American Energy.” Read more about it here, or just know that about every federal policy I’ve ever worked on and many many more are on the chopping block. The silver lining, perhaps, is that things are really clear again, or will be soon.

Building the New: NMEAC Keynote Address was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Reading the landscape is not just about identifying landscape patterns; more importantly, it is an interactive narrative that involves humans and nature.”

–Tom Wessels, Reading the Forested Landscape

PART 1

Free lunch! Yes, it does exist. It is all around us falling like manna from heaven, or walnuts on your roof. Blanketing the earth in every direction like dandelions on your untreated lawn. And good thing because food is life. Eating is one of the most intimate things we do every day. Taking the flesh of another (whether animal or plant) into our own flesh; transferring the energy of another’s life into our own life. Obviously humans are not unique in this. All creatures eat and are eaten. Tracking these pathways of energy flow between species is a way to understand one of the important patterns occurring in the landscape. The scientific discipline of food-web ecology studies this specifically. Foragers study this as well, but they are particularly interested in where energy is located that can be consumed at a given time. Successful foragers develop a mental map and a mental calendar of where and when food is to be found. But this database must include much more than just what we want to eat because details about other plants and animals offer clues to our food: being able to identify a dead elm, for example, could lead you to a morel.

Tracking is usually associated with following animals, but plants can be tracked too. The calories available to us move around. At times they are concentrated in underground storage units — tubers, rhizomes, bulbs, etc. These parts are best to gather in the dormant season when they are not sending energy above ground. At other times the energy moves to the reproductive parts — seeds, nuts, berries, etc. These are often gathered in late summer and fall. In the spring the energy is often in the growing part of the plant known as the meristem — this includes shoots, stems, young leaves, etc. Not every plant considered edible is edible in all its parts at all times. To catch your meal you need to understand the life history of the plants. You need to find the right part in the right season. For example pokeweed shoots are edible in spring, but become toxic later in the season. Mayapples have an edible fruit, but their roots (or rhizomes) are toxic, whereas the fruits of leeks are not edible, but the roots (or bulbs) are. The edible taproots of biennials are only choice during their first year. Cattails have several edible parts, with at least one you can eat during each season of the year. American hazelnuts have one short season, and if you don’t get to them quickly, other animals will first.

Foragers pay attention the feeding habits of other creatures, in effect studying food-web ecology. This has many implications for habitat restoration. One example is seen in the findings of entomologist Douglas Tallamy. Though not a forager, his observations of animal feeding habits have shown how invasive plants weaken entire food webs by not feeding native insects. Seeing the landscape through the lens of food is only one of many perspectives to observe from, but it can teach us a lot.

PART 2

“For many years we have been hearing of the need for greater environmental awareness. Nothing else can build such awareness as surely and powerfully as practicing the ancient ecological art of humankind– foraging. It is not observation of, but rather participation in the phenomena of Nature that brings us to our greatest understanding of our place in the mosaic of life.” Sam Thayer, The Forager’s Harvest

For the last decade I have been doing ecological restoration work for the Iron Creek Land Community in the Irish Hills of South East Michigan, River Raisin Watershed. In tandem, I have been spending much of my free time learning the local wild edible plants. The possibilities of connecting human subsistence activities with native habitat restoration are alluring.

When I first started living and working on the land here, I found the restoration approach to human relationship with the earth inspiring because it was very hands-on. Participation in nature is inherent in this work. Foraging is another path to participation. I like that restoration efforts, at their best, are not anthropocentric. Much of the work done is to benefit species that may have no direct or obvious benefit to us. We are trying to repair a damaged system for all who live here, not just humans. However there is a tension created when working to heal the land at home while part of a global food system that degrades land abroad. Isn’t it possible to get food from our own land without destroying it? Indigenous cultures and modern foragers alike suggest that not only is it possible, we can actually gather food in a way that helps restore the health of the land. Not to mention that wild food is fun to gather, and often better tasting and more nutritious than cultivated food.

In the 1960s, Euell Gibbons argued that it was a mistake to equate conservation with non-use, as he taught people to “stalk the wild asparagus.” In the 1980s, ethnobotanist Kat Anderson interviewed Native elders in California and asked them why so many plants were threatened and endangered. The elders often responded that it was because these plants were no longer being gathered. At the same time, Nancy J. Turner was hearing the same thing from elders in British Columbia.

Folks in the restoration community may be starting to take notice. At the Stewardship Network’s recent annual conference on ecological restoration, wild rice was taken seriously as a major topic. One of the recent keynote speakers, Mark Shepard, wrote Restoration Agriculture, a book about sustainable food production systems modeled on oak savannah. In the beginning of the book he writes: “… I will explain how humankind can achieve all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems. This can be done by creating agricultural ecosystems that imitate natural systems…” I get the idea, but I would argue that we can achieve the benefits of natural systems by restoring and understanding those natural systems directly, moving away from the agricultural approach. Just as people everywhere have done for the majority of human history. We don’t need an agricultural imitation. Everything we need for food, clothing, and shelter can be found in the wild and exists in abundance. We just need to learn how to confidently find it, responsibly use it, and thankfully give back to form symbiotic relationships with the other creatures we share the land with.

PART 3

“My desire is the restoration of people on the land.” –Finisia Medrano, from the essay Returning to the Red Road found in the book Growing Up in Occupied America

Another recent keynote speaker at the Stewardship Network’s annual conference was Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer has an essay in one of the Society for Ecological Restoration guidebooks that deals with an indigenous vision of restoration, which she describes as one of “reciprocal relationships with the land”. At the top of her list of what this means in practice is the “restoration of subsistence-use activities”. She is speaking specifically of Native Americans, but I propose that this is a vision for all people. This is essential to the health of the lands we all live on. All of us are descendants of gatherer-hunters and human beings are still structured physically and mentally, in our very DNA, for success at life in the wild outside of civilization. Our senses evolved in a non-technological world, and it is there that they are still best suited. Unfortunately and relatedly, much of our landscape literacy has been lost. Gathering and hunting was not a random haphazard affair. It was informed by the encyclopedic knowledge of many generations of landscape readers and eaters. Populations of useful plants were cared for by many skillful tactics, which all together amounted to what Kat Anderson calls the art of “tending the wild”. The fact that our culture has forgotten how to tend the wild opens an exciting frontier for those of us who want to rediscover these old ways for a new age. And people rediscovering foraging are finding it to be a deeply satisfying experience.

Restoration projects often focus on the important work of removing invasive species that compromise the health of the land. They then try to bring back species and natural processes that heal and sustain. Native plants and sometimes animals return. Water flow and fire regimes return. But one element we restorationists seem to overlook is that humans were a central part in many of the pre-European landscapes we use as models. Humans, in fact, were probably a keystone species in some of these ecosystems. Humans are of central importance to oak savannas. It is now well understood that humans long maintained healthy ecosystems through the use of fire. I would argue, though, that fire was but one tool in the greater gathering and hunting regime that helped make the land what it was. The return of our primal humanity to the landscape represents the cutting edge of progress in restoration ecology, and points forward to the sane and sustainable world of the future.

“And how much more there is to be learned by inquisitive souls who are fascinated by plants…”

Edward G. Voss, Michigan Flora, Part 1: Gymnosperms and Monocots

About the Author:

Jeremy Siegrist grew up in Jackson, Michigan, left home to travel the world with a nomadic community of musicians, then moved back to the Irish Hills where he has been doing ecological land restoration over the last decade for Iron Creek Land Community. He continues to devote extensive time to observing the natural world, foraging for wild food, participating in local bird and butterfly surveys, reading, and traveling.

In early 2019 he helped start Open Grown School to facilitate outdoor nature education for all ages. He also plays music with his experimental folk orchestra theillalogicalspoon, and has written for and co-edited several d.i.y. publications, including, most recently Leaf Litter: Notes on Restoring and Reinhabiting the Great Lakes Bioregion.

Guest Contribution: Reading the Landscape Through the Eyes of a Forager was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It might have been a decade ago, but I still remember being glad I wore a sweater. The small and dimly lit room was a bit chilly, despite the subtle warmth of the beeswax taper candles and hanging haze of incense. I couldn’t say I was comfortable, one, after having stood still for so long, and two, because I sat cross-legged on the floor, packed in amongst the ranks of folks I, in some ways, did not belong.

The small room was someone’s living quarters, tucked away in the corner of a large building that sat on the campus of a Methodist university. Those who were meeting there weren’t Methodists. An Eastern Orthodox priest from a nearby town would visit this space periodically, welcomed to offer quiet services with meditative liturgy, chants and prayer—“the smells and bells”—and work through questions for students at the school who, for one reason or another, were interested, actively in the process of becoming Orthodox, or who had already been chrismated, i.e., those who truly belonged. It was a subtle undercurrent, a hidden stream often undetected there on campus. Amongst the prevailing Evangelicism, the assumption was that everyone tended to operate more or less from the same trappings and cultural upbringing; you didn’t really have to probe much. Those drawn to the Orthodox circles were generally swimming in deeper questions of the present and future.

Most everything at the evening service was symbolic and foreign. Similar to when I attended my first used equipment auction, I’d never been so aware of the subtle movements of my own arms and fingers. If I lapsed in my care, usually subconscious gestures might physically indicate commitment to something far beyond what I could handle committing to. Much of what was read, spoken, and referenced was in Greek. Sometimes Russian too.

I was there for a few reasons. I wasn’t Orthodox, and while I could easily claim the Methodist label, that didn’t sit well with me either. I had Orthodox friends there that evening, and I knew many of those there to be thoughtful and honest people. I myself was trying to be thoughtful and honest.

During the more dialogue-oriented portion of the evening, the back-and-forth for learning more, I spoke up and asked a question. That question might come up in another essay. Right now, I have someone else’s inquiry to the Priest in mind, a loaded question for an Orthodox father on Protestant grounds:

“Who counts as Christian? Who’s qualified to be called a follower of Christ?”

The Priest answered concisely. “You know, that’s a question I don’t pay any attention to. I’m having a hard enough time trying to understand and work out how I can be a follower of Christ each day.”

Making judgment calls on that front wasn’t his business. His task, what called for his focus and work, was his own daily and active becoming. Setting boundaries on the who, how, and where that process was being worked out elsewhere wasn’t for him. His role was only to be sensitive and accountable to what that process looked like in his own life, which of course rippled outward. The more he did it, the less things were about him.

I heard echoes of that sentiment earlier this month as I listened in on a discussion entitled Acceptance and Agency at the End of Modernity. Someone leveled a quandary at those speaking: What’s worth doing in the face of myriad forms of instability and crumbling, disruption and confusion? Is the answer found in political projects? Grassroots work? Deeply engaging cultural forces or attempting to step back from them?

Their response?

It wasn’t their role to prescribe to others what an appropriate response looked like. They could offer examples to draw from, but there’s no single answer. The breadth of what’s taking place and the scale of what’s called for is so vast that appropriate, lived-out answers might even appear to be at odds at first glance. For some, throwing their weight behind supporting government institutions and systems and working to keep them operating might make the most sense. For others, the work of dismantling might be called for. Some might be drawn to what’s visibly lauded. Others are better off not being noticed, doing needed, yet quiet work that’s hidden, perhaps even by necessity. It could be stepping into a role they’re uncomfortable in. It could be stepping back from such roles and doing the dishes or getting better sleep.

What matters is paying attention, letting your heart be shaped, and responding accordingly with respect to the unique combination of resources, skills, circumstances, and experience you alone carry. Although that’s work you alone can do, it isn’t always a solitary effort. Maybe it’s informed by gathering with a group of people committed to traditions that have been found reliable for generations. The strength you think you carry, or lack thereof, might be totally upended by an encounter with forces of the more-than-human world. For me, I’m writing right now, although sometimes I question how much that counts. Still, I’m thankful for the writing, organizing, and compiling that others have done: it clarifies how I might be of use in more direct ways. For you, maybe this is an invitation to do more, and maybe an invitation to do less. If it makes sense to help, well, what that help looks like is for you to discern.

Who’s In? Who’s Out? And What Counts? was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A flurry caught my eye last year. It wasn’t like the flurries of snow we’ve been seeing these days. I noticed that we were inundated by new signups for our emails. It wasn’t immediately apparent — they arrived over a month or two. When I caught wind of the happening, it felt like encouragement, as if things were landing rightly. We were writing the sorts of writings and offering the sorts of offerings that people hungered for.

How satisfying. For a bit, at least.

As I glanced down through the list of signups, something else stuck out:

We were big in Zimbabwe. No kidding. Not one, not ten — nearly all of the signups were from Zimbabwe.

Now, readership from other countries isn’t new to us. Sweden has been our stellar example. We’ve worked to cater to that Northern clime. We’ve featured writings from Sweden’s Gunnar Rundgren, an authority on food systems and organic production (WF Vol. 3, №5), and Dougald Hine, the visionary behind A School Called Home in Östervåla (WF Vol. 4, №3). And don’t forget the feature on Grazed and Confused, a lovely contemporary-agrarian film from Sweden’s Leo Labady (WF Vol. 3, №11.)

But this was different. It didn’t make sense because we hadn’t actively cultivated anything closely related to Zimbabwe. At least, it didn’t make sense until I spied something more:

*8abg7#ffn2rr9ly

In a field intended for meaningful input, I found something meaningless: a set of characters as random as can be. The pattern continued across all of the signups.

Address? Random letter-number jumble. City? A nonsensical string of data. Zip code? Another wild bunch of nothing.

You, the reader, might have seen this coming from a mile away. The contacts were fake. I thought we were gaining traction, and in a very new locale for us, too. And it was all nothi —

Wait. Hm, hold on.

My eyes weren’t deceiving me, and the contacts were not fake. I was seeing genuine, real-time activity from those very addresses. Sure, some were behaving in ways I’d expect from people with no discernable connection to what we do — namely, aiming to support long-term resilient culture, livelihood, and life primarily in rural Northwest Michigan. Those were unsubscribing and flagging our emails as spam. But not all of them did that. I tracked along as some began to open our emails regularly. Some took it a step further, clicking through to different links, following what fit their interests.

Before batch deleting all of the additions, I did some sleuthing and looked up some of the email addresses. Sure enough, these were real people — not from Zimbabwe, but real. The question remained: why were these folks getting our emails?

Well, I gathered a handful of facts and mapped out that these errant email recipients could likely be explained by what’s known as a “spam-bomb.” There are a few reasons for “spam-bombing.”

1. A “spam-bomb” can be set up to damage an entity’s online presence and credibility. Somebody have a vendetta against Crosshatch? In that case, enlist web crawlers to pull random email addresses from across the internet or find a way to purchase bulk email data on the dark web. Add all of those contacts to our signup form. If the target, ahem, if I don’t catch on, we’re suddenly sending mail to all of these addresses who likely flag the unexpected emails as spam. Once we’ve hit a certain number of flagged emails, our communications are black-listed and servers filter them out, effectively negating delivery of email campaigns.
2. Another explanation behind “spam-bombing” seems more likely in our case. The technique can be used to hide evidence of fraudulent online purchases. In this instance, the folks being emailed are the targets, rather than us, the ones doing the emailing. In short, again, batches of email data and contact information are obtained. This time, credit card info and/or online payment details too. Bots are used to sign individuals up for a flood of emails, inundating their inboxes, while fraudulent purchases are made. Because of the onslaught of emails, victims likely never see the online notifications for the “purchases” hit their inbox. It’s a jerk move.

There you have it. Our seeming flash of popularity was likely a remnant of a weird artificial system that humans created to use technology for harm, an odd practice still shaping the world in lasting and negative ways. It was gratifying to see our growth in numbers, but it’s less so knowing it wasn’t quite the real thing.

Despite the ups and downs I’ve shared, the intention of these emails, what they’re capable of, and what they’re for is steady. I track with Adam Wilson’s exploration of their limitations and value (excerpted from The Reclamation of Agency):

“For whatever intimacy these written stories achieve, this is not neighboring. We do not share breath across the digital abyss. I don’t see your patterns of coming and going when I bike by on my daily trips up and down the road. I won’t be knocking on your front door with a box of Farm beef (that’s on the spring list for the neighbors on the road) or an invitation to carpool to the Friday supper at the Church of the Nazarene. I won’t be asking you to mow the Farmhouse lawn this summer or join us for one of our Sunday work days called Farm Frolics. I won’t learn that your husband just lost his job or that your son’s at the hospital after a mental breakdown. I won’t be kept up at night wondering how I might make myself available to you in your moment of distress, or whether the dollars in my bank account might be of greater service in your hands right now. But I will continue to write stories that encourage you to pursue such emotional and material entanglements.”

I particularly love that last line:

“But I will continue to write stories that encourage you to pursue such emotional and material entanglements.”

My work here at Crosshatch is helpful to the extent that it incites and encourages embodiment and participation. The whole email contact saga above was shared in hopes that it might be entertaining, but it wasn’t intended solely to entertain. It was intended to get you here, encountering fodder for grounded work, creative action, and in-the-flesh relationships.

Those things don’t sneak into your inbox and make themselves present in your life without you knowing. They take work and time. That’s work that we’re in together, and that’s work these missives aim to support. It’s less about flashy numbers. It’s more about enlivening (and being enlivened by) our rural communities in what are often less quantifiable ways. I hope these written words take on a life of their own, particular to your circumstances, wherever you are. Here, in Zimbabwe, anywhere.

Note: Yes, we know about reCAPTCHA and 2FA and such, and we’re currently working on improvements to our systems, sign-ups, and website. :)

In Your Inbox For Good Reason, was originally published in Selections from The Whole Field on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.