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I had a pet inchworm for one full weekend when I was in elementary school. We were camping. I kept my inchworm in cardboard box like an amphitheater which I filled with a collection of green things I thought an inchworm might like, and I called him Inchie (my naming scheme in elementary school was very clever), and everything about this was excellent right up until I lost him, at which point I was distraught. It's possible, because the box was quite large, that I had just misplaced my inchworm within the confines of his makeshift home, but I remember searching beneath the leaves and sticks. It's equally possible, because the box was completely open on top, that Inchie made a break for it.

Either way, my only consolation was in making my parents help me search for a replacement inchworm.

Walking in Tromsø's woods yesterday the inchworms were so thick they looked like pine needles on the ground, and I felt guilty for stepping on them even though it was also unavoidable. One sat on my foot and rode with me across inchworm nations until I left him in a clutch of blueberries on a ledge above Langvannet, one of the small lakes on the north end of the island. When I stopped to take a photo, another inchworm fell on my head. When I got home, I found yet another on my arm, and dropped it into the plants outside the window. I am not sure I have the desire to care for a pet inchworm anymore, even just for a weekend. Better let them be, I think. The inchworms are plenty equipped to care for themselves, I think. Maybe they will inherit the earth, or at least those woods, though yesterday those woods were mine.

If is easy to take temporary ownership of the woods here. I can walk from where I live up the hill and get on the Lysløype, the ski path that is floodlit all winter, and from there I can find any number of thin footpaths and singletrack higher and deeper into the woods, where the network of unmarked trails expands like a spider's web. And if I want to get off Tromsøya I can catch nearly any bus and ride it to the end of its route on Kvaløya or the mainland and walk into the mountains, easy as you please. I am able to do this because of Norway's common access traditions, which give me and anyone else the right "to move freely over all wildlands except farm fields and gardens." This is called the Allemannsretten. Vera, the professor I work with here, has also told me that paths in Norway are protected: if a trail exists, has existed, no one may block it. She has told me, also, that some farmers have started to place hay bales along the roads where it is popular to park to stop people from traipsing across their land, but it's so unusual and counter to the culture that it attracts media attention. Still, when we were talking about it, Vera said she thought if there were more people or less land in Norway might be pressed to forsake this right and move towards more strident protection, which would of course be manifested as more rights for private ownership, more rights for landowners and less for everyone else. 

I owned an inchworm for one weekend because I kept it in a box. I wanted to do two things with my inchworm: take care of him, and keep him in the box. I'm not sure if the two were connected in my head. But when we talk about restricting people's rights to nature it is almost always with one eye towards protecting the wilderness, caring for it, preventing other people from trampling inchworms and leaving behind nothing but waste. But when we fence things in and keep people out, we run the risk of them never allowing people to come to know the things that are being protected, never coming to care for it, because a public good has been made privatized. We are shutting people out of land for the land's own good, but that also means we aren't allowing people to see for themselves that the land is good.

I'm not sure I would stop to watch inchworms swing in the air and inch across the top of my shoe if I had not had and lost my pet when I was younger. And of course no one's terribly concerned about inchworms, because they are small, plentiful things that seem set on surviving. But they're still part of the broader system. And an inchworm might be scaled up to Jörmungandr proportions, or perhaps that World Snake might be scaled down.

When I was younger I used to think, when I saw an inchworm suspended in the air, that witches or ghosts were somehow involved. I was a superstitious child. But the truth is no less fantastic: inchworms drop to the ground when it's time to pupate. Those inchworms that littered the ground are on their way to becoming geometer moths. The peppered moth, which is on of the many species of geometer moth, is a textbook example of natural selection: after the Industrial Revolution, the dark morph of the moth was favored because darker moths could better hide on soot-blackened trees.

So there was a third possibility for my lost inchworm, though I didn't know it at the time: perhaps he was in the box still, on the way to becoming a new thing.

Inchworms--and geometer moths--are resilient. I don't advocate laissez-faire environmentalism, the idea that we should simply treat things as we please and it'll all shake out fine. But at the same time I think there needs to be some sort of balance, yoking together environmental protection and environmental use and trusting that maybe our World Snake is an inchworm, and will be able to withstand our feet on the paths that run across its back as it pupates into a moth, black or white or peppered.