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Dear friend—

This is another mishmash of updates and thoughts and recs! I have an essay in the works, but it’s been in there for a while, and I don’t know when it will finally make its escape. It’s about consumerism and degrowth and abundance and it’s proving unwieldy—plus life is _lifing and non-work writing is taking a backseat—but I’m excited to share it with you.

Speaking of, my time in Idaho is drawing to a close. Maybe the biggest thing I’ll miss? This “dry heat” business. A 90°F day here feels totally different from anything higher than, like, 78°F in Pennsylvania. Where Pennsylvania heat feels like being smothered by a wet blanket, Idaho heat feels like a warm, dry hug. I will really miss not walking through soup for four months of the year. Alas, from whence I came, so I shall return.

a few minor notes:

This past weekend, we hosted Alex’s friend E and went hiking and kayaking in the canyon nearby. Tiny little falls tumbled and trickled down the canyon face and into the river, glittering like broken glass on the dark rock. Dragonflies zipped through the air, of all sorts of colors, including an astounding electric blue. Like, I didn’t know Mother Nature could do that one.

We saw a mama duck lead her little gaggle of ducklings in and out of the tall grasses along the river’s edge, and at one point Alex pointed out a trio of ducks slumbering on a log. My friend, I confess I haven’t seen a mallard in-person in years. Their little heads are so intensely, deeply green and so stunningly iridescent. Photos only vaguely gesture at what they actually look like. And these ducks were fearless—I was surprised at how close they let us get to them.

Three hours upstream, we came upon a shelf of relatively flat rock, with massive pillars looming to our left and the bulk of the river passing on the other side of them. Some smaller smaller rivulets had pushed their way through fissures and dips in the rock plain.

We waded shin-deep through the water, which was pleasantly cool after sitting directly in the afternoon sun, and I said aloud that all I needed was a little fish to come and swim by my legs. No fish in the river, unfortunately, but E did find a little pool of water in the rock face we were walking on and called me over.

It was a bit murky and lined with green plants and algae and looked quite warm. There were small fish swimming in it, perhaps the size of my hand, with pale bodies and red stripes slashing down their sides. The pool was completely cut off from any moving water.

I suspect we were looking at the remnants of winter snow melt that had raised the river far higher so that it reached this part of the rock; a miraculous divot where, somehow, minuscule seeds of life had grabbed hold and created a whole tiny ecosystem, long after the river’s current receded.

✦

Don’t let this fool you. To be honest, I’ve only been around the canyon maybe 10 times during my year here, even though this natural wonder is a 10-minute car-ride away. My time here in Idaho has taught me a lot about myself and, to be honest, my shortcomings—largely my dependence on my environment to shape me into the person I want to be, as opposed to any intrinsic motivation.

Moving into suburbs has put me into a position, for the first time in a while, in which I have to do things I deeply dislike to do other things I know are good for me but perhaps don’t bring the most immediate joy. For instance, getting out of the house and meeting new people was stunningly easy in a walkable, bus-able city like Pittsburgh, at least compared to my hometown or the town I lived in this year.

The Big Sticking Point: car dependency. This town is very small—without traffic, it would probably take about a 15-minute-drive to span the whole thing from north to south—and yet the streets are not built for bipedal movement. Missing sidewalks, zero shade, a ridiculous amount of traffic lanes for a town this small, long stretches of blocks without crosswalks. Also, Idaho does not have state emissions testing for cars, lmao, and boy, can you taste it in the air.

With my skills and disposition, I feel like a Road Hazard behind the wheel, and driving feels like a Dance with Death anytime I go to someplace outside of a given 5-mile radius I’ve committed to memory. But the more that embedded-ness in the world feels increasingly urgent to me (for personal, philosophical, and political reasons), the more this all just sounds like excuses, excuses.

Looking ahead, a big part of my Life Goals™ will be balancing: 1) getting myself back to environments that I know help me be more #embedded, and 2) pushing myself to just do the thing I dislike, knowing the ultimate rewards (connection, generosity, self-fulfillment, etc.) are worth it.

a few things to chew on:

I’m kind of out here writing bangers for watch of food and water—which are always informed by and based in the experience, labor, and expertise of my coworkers, especially researchers and organizers, so huge shout out to them.

Here are two that have stuck with me, in case you’d like to learn more about these topics, plus some further commentary FROM ME, NOT FROM THE ORG, I DO NOT SPEAK ON BEHALF OF THE ORG IN THIS LETTER OR EVER, ALL VIEWS MY VERY OWN:

“How Iowans Defeated Big Ag’s Cancer Gag Act”

My time at this org has really emphasized to me how corporations will spare no expense to keep on poisoning us if it will defend their bottom line. From plastic and oil and gas, to PFAS forever chemicals, it’s a pattern that repeats over and over as corporations lobby, hide, and market their way out of accountability.

In Iowa, pesticide use has skyrocketed alongside cancer rates in recent decades. Fields there are drenched in glyphosate, a weedkiller linked to a cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So much agriculture in Iowa and around the world is dependent on glyphosate—especially after Monsanto, the original maker of glyphosate-based Roundup, started selling seeds for genetically modified Roundup-resistant crops to pair with its weedkiller. This has allowed farmers to use more and more of the stuff over the years, as Monsanto insisted its product was safe.

Now, Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018) is pushing a flurry of bills at the state and national level that would prevent more lawsuits claiming health harms of their products.

For this article, I spoke with several Iowans who joined the successful fight to stop one such bill in their state, dubbed the Cancer Gag Act. They were incredibly generous with their time and their stories—all these folks had suffered with cancer, knew others who had, or even had much of their families wiped out by it.

It was hard for me to fathom this kind of grief. My loved ones have been extremely fortunate in the health department, and the older I get and the more I learn, the more I realize that is entirely by twist of fate—and I mean cosmically, on the individual level, not politically. Because it’s absolutely not “fate” that brings devastating illnesses to some populations over others.

Take, for instance, Elon Musk’s new xAI data center in Memphis, TN. He’s been running 35 until-very-recently un-permitted gas turbines to power it. The turbines are dumping noxious air pollution into predominantly Black neighborhoods that have already borne the brunt and costs of the city’s heavy industry. Residents of Boxtown, the neighborhood nearest to the data center, have cancer rates four times the national average.

Powerful corporations make decisions everyday about who is dispensable and who isn’t in the name of profit. Who deserves a good life and who they’re okay with killing. And the answer to the latter is hardly ever “well-to-do white folks.”

It’s not that dissolving huge corporations would make racism and classism disappear, but rather that our current economic system, dominated by such corporations, makes it all so much worse. So that’s where a lot of my brain space and framing for ~gestures at everything~ has been lately.

Read about the Cancer Gag Act

“How Trump’s Crypto Dealings Threaten Democracy — And the Planet”

Several of you have heard/seen me share this quote before, but I can’t help but bring it back. In a 2021 interview, sci-fi author Ted Chiang told Ezra Klein:

I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

And boy do I feel that, including with crypto. As a confessed luddite, there’s also a lot about this technology I don’t understand and feel I can’t speak to. Some of the cases for crypto do seem reasonable and fair to me, and there are people working on making it kinder to the planet.

But of course the crypto world is entirely dominated by straight-up scammers who are building vast amounts of wealth through hyper-corrupt uses. With them behind the wheel, I doubt crypto will ever live up to its creators’ ideals. Instead, it’s already doing immense harm to our government, environment, and economy. In this article, I trace the webs of corruption between Trump and crypto firms and new U.S. crypto policy, and touch on crypto’s environmental impact.

(I don’t claim this thought, but it’s congealed from so many different sources, I can only say it’s wholly unoriginal:) I’ve been thinking a lot about how we (as a society) talk about technology and the inevitability baked into the discourse. The Next Big Thing—whether that’s smart phones or AI or crypto or virtual reality—is treated as an unstoppable tsunami rolling toward us. As though our only option is to prepare for sinking/swimming.

But that mindset cedes sooo much power to tech overlords like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al. We can regulate this stuff and refuse it outright. We can opt out of exploitative technology and turn to alternatives. And we can think about how to use tech ethically and responsibly, and contribute to a culture where that’s the norm.

Read about Trump, crypto, and climate

Next time—from Pennsylvania. Until then, take care <3
—mia xx