Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Last week, I went to visit Gabriel in Dublin, where they’ve lived for almost three years. We went on a bog walk, looked at really old stuff, biked along bodies of water, and ate potatoes in many forms. In honor of the rare occasion of our being in the same place, we offer you this reflection on that time.
I. What we know about being in places
Both of us can be on the ground but see the city from above, as a map or like a bird. Space is always three dimensional, sometimes four. Remember when we were here doing that thing? What about the stream that used to run this way?
We both learn place on foot and by bike, tracing corridors along rivers or over bridges, where streets stay the same but change their names, where safe passages dead end in lanes of traffic.
We learn places by flow: of water, of people, of food and of waste. We are different in many ways, but each of us is defined by how we learn places, and we learn places in the same way.
Knowing place is knowing home; we’ve made a point of visiting all the places we’ve each called home, over our six years of friendship. We’re up to four states and two countries, as of this week.
II. What we know about land economies
Going to a new place, it’s easy to try to press the fabric of what you know onto the body of what you do not. Irish friendliness feels like midwestern friendliness. Irish dairy faces similar struggles as Vermont dairy.
But the land tells no lies, and encourages us towards the nuance of similarity, the non-causation correlation, of how things got to be how they are. Vermont’s dairy industry is struggling because there’s minimal demand for cow milk. Ireland’s dairy and meat industry is directly in conflict with any vision of a climate resilient nation. Reliance on fertilizer and monocrop rye grass to churn out meat and milk means sacrificing other land use—for food crops, for forest, for deep roots that sequester carbon and nitrogen and prevent erosion.
In Vermont, small veggie farmers abound, producing beautiful crops that feed people year-round. But they too struggle, under the pressure of yielding profit in addition to food. In both places, commodification of product and disregard for value beyond capital create problems land workers can dream of addressing, but often have no power to fix.
III. What we know about local energy
Until just a few years ago, Ireland used peat for fuel. Bogs around the country were drained by cutting channels that allow water to exit, instead remaining in the mossy sponge. Then, men and machines were brought in to harvest the peat that lay underneath - a dense, pre-coal mass that burns alright enough, available in abundance right there at home.
To this day, Vermont uses trees for heat at biomass facilities across the state. Some of the feedstock is waste wood, like old christmas trees and broken pallets. Much of it is freshly cut timber, abundant in the green mountain state’s forests. These trees are trucked around and burned.
Amid the urgency of a transition away from fossil fuels, extracted and processed and transported around the world, local fuel appeals. But it comes at the cost of bogs and forests - tremendous natural carbon sinks that keep greenhouse gases locked up, instead of in the atmosphere. Bogs and forests take decades, millenia, longer, to become mature, and reach their full potential for sequestration. Destroying them as they approach and reach this stage amounts to a climate crime.
In both cases, ‘natural’ gas is offered as an alternative while we build renewables, which also rely on imported, mined metals that too often destroy indigenous ecosystems.
IV. What we know about friends
You cast a wide social net when you first move to a place. Often the people you meet are very different from you; often they don’t stay close friends for long, but the ones that do are special.
Then, there are people you can instantly recognize as your people, on a dance floor, in a zoom room, people you don’t even have to try to see eye to eye with.
Some friends you only come into contact with once every several months or even less. There doesn’t need to be guilt in allowing for these gaps because the time you spend together is often dynamic and mutually fruitful.
Some friends form part of your every day, and there’s joy in keeping up to date with every detail of your lives: their work drama, the news stories they’re following, the hookups, the new recipes. Whether by text, voice note, or weekly coffee dates, you remind each other that none of us exist in our own heads.
There’s a particular thrill of introducing friends, watching two people you know well having a conversation that you would never have with either of them. Each recognizing you a little better through knowing another person who made you who you are.
V. What we know about making
It feels good to share something you’ve made with someone who cares about you. It also feels good to share that thing with strangers, to watch them light up in recognition of an idea that used to only exist in your head. But when that person knows your mind as well as you do, that recognition begets conversation and momentum to keep on making and sharing and making.
In anticipation for our time together, we talked about what we could make, how we could take time to record a podcast and write collaboratively and do so much work together. And then we were together and making things never came up. Without saying it, we both recognized that it was more important to just be. If our collaborative creations are a way to stay together when we’re physically apart, then the best kind of collaboration we can do while together is just actively engaging in that closeness.
VI. What we know about home
Home is a place where you have unfinished business. Degrees or jobs or organizing or relationships or plants that need watering, home is the place you come back to because there’s something that needs doing.
You’re not home in a place if you aren’t participating in that place’s politics. Maybe you can’t vote where you live but you can still protest, organize, and agitate. Maybe you’re brand new to a place, but there is still a way to bring an outside perspective to a place without stepping on the toes of people who grew up there.
Sometimes you don’t realize that a place has become your home until someone pays you a visit. Only then do you recognize the details of the map in your head and tell the stories you’ve gathered - some your own, and some inherited from that place. When someone comes to visit, you get to welcome them in the way you were welcomed: telling them how lucky they are that the weather is nice, taking them to the pub down the road, wishing them a safe journey the way the locals do.
Since Lena left on Monday people have been asking me if they liked Ireland, and I’m never sure how to respond. We spent as much time talking about the flaws of this place, this government, this society, as we did about its joys and promises. If either of us LIKE Ireland it isn’t in the ~shining emerald isle~ way expected of visiting Americans. My working answer is that Lena probably liked this place because it is the place I’ve decided to stay for a while and call my home, because it is a place that contains pieces of me, and now pieces of our relationship.