26. Antonia Malchik on poverty, shame, and identity wars in the American West

Ken Ilgunas (0:05)

This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunas.

My guest today is Antonia Malchik, a writer based in Montana and the author of A Walking Life, reclaiming our health and our freedom one step at a time. Antonia writes the sub-stack Trespassing, which explores ownership, power, and the privatization of the commons. Her work examines how walking connects us to the land and one another and what we lose when places once shared become fenced off and privately. I've known Antonia for 10 years via email. We talked a lot about private property, trespassing, the commons. It's rare to find someone who's kind of into the exact same thing you're into. So as we were working on our respective books, we were passing a lot of notes back and forth. So this is my first time getting to chat with her. And I was inspired to get in touch based on her substack essay Sordid Little Stories, which is a very open and vulnerable piece about growing up poor in Montana and just kind of having this financial precariousness, this shame kind of follow you through your adult life.

We talked about kind of the political culture in Montana, which can be a very kind and generous place, but like any heavily rural state can suffer from all sorts of political delusions. And then we get into her essay Sordid Little Stories, shame, poverty, all that fun stuff. This is a long one. It's about an hour and 45 minutes. The first 45 minutes is free to any free subscriber, paid subscribers get full access. Well, I think one thing I noticed when working with people like us, and I think they call themselves progressive property theorists, academics who are interested in writing about the commons and what's happening legislatively, what's happening legally, and they're usually in favor of things like the right to roam. I don't know if you've noticed this when you've talked to people of our ilk, but they are extraordinarily nice, extraordinarily generous, and extraordinarily sharing, which leads me to believe there's a base personality out of which some of their political values grow. I don't know if there's a question attached to this, other than does that resonate for you at all?

Antonia Malchik (2:47)

It does, hugely. I think of every person I've ever gotten in touch to interview formally or just ask questions, like David Bollier, who's a real, very influential scholar on the Commons, spent a lot of time with me and introduced me to some other people.

I hadn't thought about the question in exactly those terms before, but now that you phrased it that way, like is there a core personality trait? I'm kind of wondering, because I run into a lot of things where I think, you know, I've written about this for so long now and really believe in the Commons and kind of the evils of private land ownership in particular and certain things about private property in general. And it does force me in a way to constantly question my own values. Like, if I'm, you know, something to do with substack, for example, I'm like, okay, wait, is this in line with the values that I profess to believe in and the kind of world I want to see? And now I'm wondering if a lot of other people do that too. Like, I think about Douglas Rushkoff, right? He wrote Team Human and he does all these, this podcast about like, Team Human, I guess. You know, it covers a lot of territory, but I feel like he really works on that, or Cory Doctorow. And obviously those people don't work specifically in the fields of the commons and right to roam and those kinds of issues, but it's very, it's very related.

That's a really interesting question. I think there must be a core personality. Like if you're going to be an economist, like a professional economist who researchers and works at a think tank or university or something and you go for say, Georgism rather than following Milton Friedman or Malthus or Ricardo or one of the other classic sort of free market, quote unquote, economists, like that's a very specific choice. That is a choice that says, I believe in what Henry George wanted to see with regards to land ownership and land taxation and what actually creates a fair and just society. So there's got to be something in that.

Ken Ilgunas (5:11)

Yeah. And it makes me think, just like you and I, for example, like we grew up in very different places, probably very different backgrounds. I mean, you come from Montana, I come from suburban Western New York. So we're separated by a vast geographical distance, but yet you and I, we end up kind of thinking about things in a very similar way. And the amount of people who are, say, writing about these things, I mean, under a hundred, you know?