Nomadic Life on Public Land: Ecological Futures Beyond Settlement

Vehicle-dwelling nomads on western public lands offer a case study of ecological belonging without settlement. In contrast to ecological futures grounded in permanence, property, or linear progress, nomadic life is structured around mobility, impermanence, nonlinearity, and the constraints of state territorialization. This paper draws on participatory ethnography—including oral history interviews and my own experience living nomadically since 2022—alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology and scholarship in religion and ecology. It follows dispersed campers who cultivate temporary forms of dwelling as campsites appear and disappear and community gathers and disperses. Rather than diminishing dwelling, nomadic life intensifies ecological attunement as the quotidian becomes oriented around weather, terrain, water, wildlife, and seasonal movement across the landscapes of the western cordillera.