How bad does it have to get

Following is a revised essay originally published in 2021. People leave home for all kinds of reasons. This essay is not a judgment; the relevance of this question— “What would it take for a person to leave?”—never fails to fascinate and sadden me. Friends sometimes ask me how long I’ll stick it out in Montana. It’s natural, I suppose, to wonder why, if the politics of a place is oppressive or repressive, one doesn’t just move. And yet, when you feel that you belong to a place—not that it belongs to you, but that you belong to it—picking up and leaving isn’t a light notion. As a born-and-raised Montanan who’s the daughter of on the one hand a born-and-raised-Montanan, and on the other of an emigre and exile who was not allowed to see his family or return to his home country for nearly twenty years, the questions of home and belonging are almost always with me. When I read or watch news stories of refugees, whether from Syria or Honduras or elsewhere, all I can think of is how bad it has to get to force a person to pick up sticks and leave home. My own Russian-Jewish grandparents were refugees in the Ural Mountains during the Siege of Leningrad. It wasn’t a choice they made willingly, and it’s one many people didn’t survive. How bad would it have to get for me, for you, to turn your back on your home and know you might never be able to return? How many people actually choose to leave their homelands? What imagined countries do they carry in their hearts? —- These subjects, of home and belonging, are trickling around the world, finding outlets in places I didn’t expect to see them. I keep coming across conversations of community and the drawbacks of fierce individualism, and the damage that absolutist private property rights cause. I bump into these concepts in random places, and just in the last few weeks an essay of mine about private property versus the health of the commons (https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-time-to-upend-the-idea-that-land-is-private-property) , published five years ago on Aeon, went from around 6,000 Facebook shares (where it had stuck since it came out) to nearly 70,000. It’s clearly hitting some kind of nerve, though where exactly, I don’t know. One of the recent readers of that essay shared a music video that they’d helped to make (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82jFyeV5AHM) to advocate for preservation of a waterway in India, teaching me the concept of “poromboke.” In their comment on the essay, they explained: “The Poromboke is a medieval tamil agrarian revenue term that denotes lands reserved for shared communal uses. Such lands cannot be traded or built upon, and yield no revenue to the crown or the government. The term and its legal essence have survived well into present times. But the quality and health of the Poromboke commons began its decline when the property making agenda of the British colonial masters collided with the notion of the commons. Perhaps because it was strictly not property that could be traded, it began to be seen as worthless. Today, the word poromboke has degraded culturally to refer to worthless persons or places.” One of the lyrics of the music video they shared sticks with me: “After Ennore got its power plant, acres of ash, but river scant.” The whole ensemble reminds me of a short video I shared a few months back, about sand mining in Cambodia (https://aeon.co/videos/sand-grab-how-singapores-growth-is-taking-the-land-out-from-under-cambodians-feet) for Singapore’s expansion that ruins island fisheries. Sometimes we don’t even need to flee home. Sometimes, maybe most often, someone steals it from underfoot. —- I listened to an interview with Stephen Jenkinson recently where he talked about being a citizen of the soil. It came up partly in a discussion on individual rights—the eternal pull between “freedom from” and “freedom to”—and dovetailed strangely on my watching of Adam Curtis’s documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Head. There is something freeing about knowing that you can’t have everything exactly as you wish, that you owe something to the communities around you. I know Montana has a lot of narrow-minded people and especially narrow-minded politicians. So does everywhere else. But it remains just about the most beautiful place I have ever been. It’s my home. And I don’t see why I should let the Christian nationalists and uber-wealthy and resource-extractors have all of this life-richness to themselves. Besides which, most people can’t afford to just leave, and the rivers and trees and wildlife certainly can’t pick up and relocate somewhere else. I can’t imagine living far from the rivers that have so often saved me. If I think of myself as a citizen of the watersheds I rely on, the dynamics of this place and its struggles look very different. It’s worth fighting for, even if I lose. The roots will remain. Some stuff to read or listen to: * This two-hour episode of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & B...