March 31, 2026
We've hit one of those weird temporal things - I'm writing this on a Sunday about a talk I will give on Monday (assuming all goes to plan) and you will get this email on Tuesday (again, if all goes to plan). So either the day after tomorrow I will give, or yesterday I gave, a talk at Montana State University. The talk was (I'm going to default to the past tense) part of a series the university is hosting on public spaces. In places like Bozeman, public spaces usually means places like Glacier National Park. I asked the audience, including students there to get extra-credit, it’s a thing, what would happen if we thought about our politics the way we think about nature.
Glacier National Park are real places, and there are fierce debates over their use. They are also idealized places captured in paintings by artists like James Moran and Albert Bierstadt. The idealized versions of Nature help inform public policy and our conceptions of our country. The American West is both a place, and an idea about a place.
As most of you know, I spent a lot of time in the day-to-day of politics. You also know I believe deeply in the promise of what our politics can be. For me, politics is both the reality of a press scrum in the rotunda of the Capitol after a State of the Union address, and the ideal of the Burmidi's Apotheosis of Washington painted on the underside of the Capitol dome.
We talk about political space a lot. Advocates create political space into which they hope politicians will move. We want safe spaces and spaces for honest debate. But what if we thought of space not as something politics is in, but rather as politics itself? What if our politics were like our National Parks or local hiking trails?
I will ask you the same question I asked the attendees last night - if you thought about politics the way you think about nature, how would you behave?