Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

It shouldn't come as news to anyone that America is in trouble these days, but I've read few explanations of just how varied and deep the trouble lies than Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco's book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.  The two men, one a print journalist and the other a comics journalist, traveled the country and found four regions where inequality is having a devastating affect on locals.

The book begins in Pine Ridge South Dakota, a reservation with almost complete unemployment.  By beginning the book here, the authors are reminding us that disenfranchisement, disregard for human rights, and blind obedience to capitalism are some of the central tenets of the American experience, and they always have been.  And the consequences of that are clear to any who would care to look.

From there, Hedges and Sacco take us to Camden New Jersey, a post-urban wasteland drowning in drugs and poverty, to Welch West Virginia, where the environment is being destroyed in the quest for coal, and to Immokalee Florida, where people, mostly migrants from Mexico and places to the south, are being exploited in the interest of keeping the price of growing food low (even as financial speculators keep the cost of buying food in markets unnecessarily high).  Over and over again, Hedges and Sacco show us examples of devastation and disregard.

The thing is, they also show us dignity and hope.  Again and again we meet people who have stood up to big business, local and state government, and sometimes their neighbours, in often vain attempts to protect their homes, their environment, and their way of life.

The final chapter of the book didn't sit as well with me as did the rest of the book.  In it, Hedges writes about the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, and in it, he saw the beginning of the end of Western Capitalism.  It seems to me that his hopes for this movement were unrealistic, and with the book having been out more than a year, events seem to have not supported his viewpoint.

Ignoring that last chapter, this book is an excellent portrait of a country that is entering its decline at the hands of the elite few.  Joe Sacco's portraits and illustrations add weight and veracity to the text, and his comics, which usually take the form of biography, are fantastic.  Both Hedges and Sacco incorporate oral history into their writing, letting the people in these little-known and much-ignored places speak for themselves, giving their stories greater weight.

I enjoyed this book, and would love to share in Hedge's optimism that the solution to many of these problems lie in the collective voices of regular citizens.

World Changers

The holiday issue of the New Yorker this year is not on a 'Winter Fiction' theme, but is instead concerned with individuals or organizations who are involved in making the world a different, and better, place. It is one of the better issues in recent memory, with a plethora of good articles.

The Ice Retreat
by Fen Montaigne
This article is ostensibly about the Adélie penguins of Antarctica, who are finding their usual habitat no longer hospitable to them, as temperatures at the bottom of the globe rise. The real core of this article lies in Montaigne's profile of Bill Fraser, an 'ecologist and penguin expert', who has been spending years studying these unique birds.

It is clear that this population is in grave danger, as the numbers of nesting pairs have dropped precipitously, and quite recently.

Hearth Surgery
by Burkhard Bilger
One and a half million people die each year from cooking, and cook-stove related injuries in the developing world. At the same time, people forced to use inefficient open-hearth wood fires are responsible for almost matching the carbon emissions of people in richer countries.

Bilger chronicles the efforts of an eccentric group of people, many of whom are connected to the Aprovecho Research Center, to construct more ideal stoves. The article chronicles many of their attempts and failures, and paints a portrait of a group of semi-obsessed hobbyists who may manage to create a great deal of positive change in the world.

The Monkey and the Fish
by Philip Gourevitch
This is a fascinating article about Greg Carr, an American who hundreds of millions of dollars in the tech industry before retiring to work in philanthropy - namely in managing the Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. He spends tons of his own money in attempting to improve this region - repopulating animal species, planting seedlings, and negotiating with local leaders to improve the park, the lives of the people living around it, and the ecology of a large swath of land.

Carr is an interesting character, and Gourevitch describes both his optimism, and the monumental nature of his task. This was an excellent, well-balanced, read.

Greening the Ghetto

by Elizabeth Kolbert

This is an excellent article about Van Jones, the driving force behind the organization Green For All, which is working to provide the underprivileged with training for jobs in the Green economy. His idea is a great one. Government spending on infrastructure projects is going to have to increase to get the economy working again. Instead of just building bridges and roads, he suggests that the money be spent on retro-fitting the existing infrastructure to make better use of environmentally friendly technology and efficiency standards. To add to the economic cure, he wants some of these jobs to go to people in poor communities, thereby killing many birds with a few stones.

Kolbert profiles Jones as a very interesting individual with a long history in the American social justice community, who has more recently taken up the environment as his cause. As with all of Kolbert's pieces on the environment, the quality of the reporting is excellent.