The New York Review of Books - October 06, 2022

44 Pages·2022·10.9 MB·English

Linda Greenhouse: Verlyn Klinkenborg: Leslie Chang: David Reynolds:
Resegregating The Beach Boys New Journalism Abe Lincoln,
Our Schools in the Studio in China Spiritualist
Volume LXIX, Number 15 October 6, 2022
Mark Danner: Trump’s Slow-Motion Coup
Hermione Lee: Joseph Roth’s Serial Exiles
Bill McKibben: 100 Million Climate Refugees
Michael Gorra: Who’s Afraid of Close Reading?
Erin Maglaque: Francesco Bianchini’s Godly Science
Jerome Groopman: Diabetes, Money, and Politics
SUB_UK_US_nyrb100622.indd 1 9/8/22 4:13 PM
CHIC A GO
Reflections on Life, Place, and Everything
States of Plague Seneca
Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic Fifty Letters of a Roman Stoic
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“In this mélange of history, literary analysis, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary
and memoir, the authors explore the inter- by Margaret Graver and A. A. Long
section between a celebrated novel, current
This selection of fi ft y letters off ers insight
realities, scholarship, language, and the tricks
into Seneca’s life and thought in language that
that time and circumstance play on all of
speaks to the modern reader.
them.”—Kirkus
PAPER $16.00
CLOTH $20.00
The Complete Works Geometry of Grief
Handbook, Discourses, and Refl ections on Mathematics, Loss,
Fragments and Life
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Edited and Translated by Robin Waterfi eld “Attentiveness to beauty is the instrument of
transcendence—that essential facet of Frame’s
The complete surviving works of Epictetus,
geometry of grief and readjustment.”
the most infl uential Stoic philosopher from
—Maria Popova, The Marginalian
antiquity.
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PAPER $18.00
Victories Never Last The Porch
Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Meditations on the Edge of Nature
Plague (cid:22)(cid:23)(cid:19)(cid:16)(cid:5)(cid:4)(cid:11)(cid:7)(cid:24)(cid:19)(cid:4)(cid:5)(cid:11)(cid:6)
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“The Porch is a poignant and multi-sensory
“In our time of plague, Zaretsky has returned feast in the grand tradition of wilderness
to the plagues of the past, helping us to writing by the likes of Henry David Thoreau
grasp what Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, and John Muir—told from an architectural
Montaigne, Camus, and others came to under- perspective.”—Architect Magazine
stand about the terrifying way disease can
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upend our certainties and our hopes.”
—Michael Ignatieff , author of On Consolation
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The Pocket Epicurean On Not Knowing
"(cid:14)(cid:23)(cid:12)(cid:7)!(cid:11)(cid:5)(cid:5)(cid:19)(cid:16)(cid:20) How to Love and Other Essays
(cid:2)(cid:3)(cid:4)(cid:5)(cid:6)(cid:7)(cid:8)(cid:9)(cid:10)(cid:11)(cid:12)
“A helpful guide to facing the manifold
anxieties of modern life.”—The Idler “Right now, our political and aesthetic discourse
CLOTH $12.50 seems less a genuine conversation than a com-
petition of mutually exclusive certainties. How
The Pocket Stoic
wonderful it is to read Ogden, a writer who says
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never be fi nished’ and means it.”—The Atlantic
“An excellent starting point for anyone interested in
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experimenting with this approach to life.”—Five Books
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The UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS www.press.uchicago.edu
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Contents
October 6, 2022
MORE
PERFECT
6 ......................................... Bill McKibben Where Will We Live?
Nowhere Left to Go: How Climate Change Is Driving Species to
the Ends of the Earth by Benjamin von Brackel, translated from UNION
the German by Ayça Türkoğlu
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise
of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia
8 ......................................... Vona Groarke Poem
11 ....................................... Hermione Lee Poet of the Dispossessed
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim
14 ............................. Linda Greenhouse A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent
Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools
by Stephen Breyer, with an introduction by Thiru Vignarajah
16 ...................................... Michael Gorra Corrections of Taste
Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read
by Terry Eagleton
18 ............................. Jerome Groopman Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It
Insulin—the Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck
to Wall Street Gold by Kersten T. Hall
Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman
PENIEL E. JOSEPH
21 ....................................... James Walton Doomed to Lucidity
The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller
THE THIRD
23 ................................... Leslie T. Chang L ittle Town on the Prairie
China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World RECONSTRUCTION
by Liang Hong, translated from the Chinese by Emily Goedde
27 .......................................... Ange Mlinko Timeless Correspondences America’s Struggle for Racial
HERmione by H.D., with an afterword by Francesca Wade
Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. by Donna Krolik Hollenberg Justice in the Twenty-First Century
29 ............................. David S. Reynolds Throngs of Unseen People
In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits
“Peniel E. Joseph is one of the
by Terry Alford
most brilliant and gifted
31 ........................... Verlyn Klinkenborg Endless Summer
Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road a documentary film directed historians in the nation today.”
by Brent Wilson
—MICHAEL ERIC DYSON,
34 .................................... Erin Maglaque Rome Was His Laboratory
author of the New York Times
The Incomparable Monsignor: Francesco Bianchini’s World of Science,
History, and Court Intrigue by J.L. Heilbron bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop
36 ................................... David Shulman Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms
The Kural: Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural translated from the Tamil
“Peniel E. Joseph writes
by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma
in the tradition of Du Bois and
39 ....................................... Mark Danner The Slow-Motion Coup
Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency by Michael Wolff of Baldwin as he seeks to
The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People
delineate how tragedy might give
Who Stopped It by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague
How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic way to true justice. Personal
by Sallust, translated from the Latin and with an introduction and political, human and historical,
by Josiah Osgood
Joseph’s book is urgent,
One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General
by William P. Barr important, and illuminating.”
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s
Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump —JON MEACHAM
“Brilliantly written and elegantly
argued, this book is a gift
to all Americans. It offers an
honest and compelling account
of how change happens, and
it forces us all to consider how
we might work together to
win the fight for racial justice.”
—KEISHA N. BLAIN,
nybooks.com Sarah Schulman: The Failed Monkeypox Response
coeditor of the #1 New York Times
Joe Bucciero: Representing Reality in Weimar Art
Jenny Uglow: Edward Lear’s Uncertain Seascapes bestseller Four Hundred Souls
Nathaniel Rich: The Dark Ironies of Italo Svevo’s Fiction basicbooks.com
Blair McClendon: James Benning Sees America
Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews
at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at
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GAGOSIAN
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Contributors
SHAKESPEARE
Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Editor
Changing China. Her new book, about the working women of Egypt, will be Emily Greenhouse Shakespeare and Cervantes:
published next year. Deputy Editor A Comparison of Th eir Plays
Michael Shae
Mark Danner is the author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War and Clive Bellis/José González 228 pgs
Executive Editor
The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He holds the Class of 1961
Jana Prikryl
Distinguished Chair at the University of California at Berkeley and is the Lacan’s Interpretation of Shakespeare
Senior Editors
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. D. Brooks, ed. 576 pgs
Eve Bowen, Julie Just, Andrew Katzenstein,
Hasan Altaf
Michael Gorra is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and
Th e Globe Th eatre Project
the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Contributing Editors
Prudence Crowther, Gabriel Winslow-Yost Rob Conkie 296 pgs
Faulkner’s Civil War, among other books. He teaches at Smith.
Art Editor
Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law School and contributes regularly to Leanne Shapton Why It Is Impossible to Write a
The New York Times’s opinion pages. An updated edition of her book Justice Managing Editor Biography of William Shakespeare
on the Brink: A Requiem for the Supreme Court will be published in October. Lauren Kane Yona Dureau 260 pgs
Vona Groarke ’s thirteenth book of poems, Hereafter, will be published this fall. Online Editors
Lucy Jakub, Max Nelson Tragedy of Richard II: A Newly
Jerome Groopman is the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical Associate Editor Authenticated Shakespeare Play
School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Daniel Drake
Michael Egan 664 pgs
Center, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the coauthor, with Pamela
Assistant Editors
Hartzband, of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You. Nawal Arjini, Willa Glickman
An Examination of Verdi’s Otello
Verlyn Klinkenborg ’s books include Making Hay, The Rural Life, and Copyeditors and Its Faithfulness to Shakespeare
Sam Needleman, Will Palmer
Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. Jane Hawes 156 pgs
Editorial Interns
Hermione Lee ’s latest book, a biography of Tom Stoppard, was published Arianne Gonzalez, Noel Stevens
Th e Staging of Shakespeare’s
last year.
Editor-at-Large
Romeo and Juliet as a Ballet
Daniel Mendelsohn
Erin Maglaque is a Lecturer in History at the University of Sheffield and the Camille Howard 156 pgs
author of Venice’s Intimate Empire.
Bill McKibben is a founder of ThirdAct.org and the Schumann Distinguished Publisher Renaissance Magic and Hermeticism
Rea S. Hederman
Scholar at Middlebury. His latest book, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station in the Shakespeare Sonnets
Associate Publisher, Business Operations
Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Th omas Jones 188 pgs
Michael King
Wonders What the Hell Happened, was published in May.
Associate Publisher, Marketing and Planning
Five Films on Hamlet
Ange Mlinko is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University Janice Fellegara
Holger Klein/Dimiter Daphinoff 524 pgs
of Florida. Her new poetry collection, Venice, was published in April. Advertising Director
Lara Frohlich Andersen
David S. Reynolds , a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, Shakespeare and Public Executions
Rights
is the author or editor of sixteen books, including, most recently, Abe: Charles Mitchell 172 pgs
Patrick Hederman
Abraham Lincoln in His Times.
Type Production
Macbeth, Murder, and the Witches:
David Shulman is the author of Tamil: A Biography, among other books. Will Simpson
Evil Spirits and Odd Coincidences
He is a Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was Production
awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016. Kazue Jensen Th omas Morris 444 pgs
Web Production Coordinator
James Walton is a writer and broadcaster. He is the editor of The Faber Book
Maryanne Chaney Was Shakespeare a Jew? Marrano
of Smoking and the author of the literary quiz books Who Killed Iago? and
Advertising Manager Infl uences in His Life and Writing
The Penguin Book Quiz: From the Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ulysses.
Sharmaine Ong Ghislain Muller 376 pgs
Advertising Assistant
Lucie Swenson Shakespeare’s Holy Fools
Fulfillment Director Sandra Pyle 284 pgs
Janis Harden
Circulation Manager Defi ning the Shakespeare Canon:
Andrea Moore 37 Plays in 37 Chapters
Publicity Ronald A. Rebholz 308 pgs
Nicholas During
Design Director Th e Infl uence of Stoic Philosophy
Nancy Ng
on William Shakespeare
Special Projects
Ben Schneider 260 pgs
Angela Hederman
Office Manager
Shakespeare in Children’s Books
Diane R. Seltzer
Sally Sugarman 272 pgs
Comptroller
Max Margenau
Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare
Assistant Accountant
Rodney Symington 328 pgs
Vanity Luciano
Receptionist
T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare
Teddy Wright
Charles Warren 140 pgs
Founding Editors Gender Archetypes in A Midsummer
Barbara Epstein (1928–2006)
Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) Night’s Dream and M. Butterfl y
Mira Wiegmann 312 pgs
Cover art
Katherine Bradford: Blue Lap Sitter, 2021
(Katherine Bradford/Campoli Presti, Paris)
To order:
Series art
Jason Logan: Liquorice Carbon Tests, 2022 mellenpress.com
or
Visit your bookstore
October 6, 2022 5
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Where Will We Live?
Bill McKibben
Nowhere Left to Go: heat this is changing the way water
How Climate Change Is Driving moves across the region. The roots
Species to the Ends of the Earth of Amazonian trees suck up large
by Benjamin von Brackel, quantities of rainfall off the Atlan-
translated from the German tic, and then transpire that moisture
by Ayça Türkoğlu. through their leaves; like an airborne
The Experiment, 278 pp., $26.95 river this moisture becomes rain on
the next bands of forest farther west.
Nomad Century: But both climate- caused drought and
How Climate Migration human-c aused disruptions are break-
Will Reshape Our World ing down this machine. Four years ago
by Gaia Vince. the legendary tropical conservationist
Flatiron, 260 pp., $28.99 Tom Lovejoy (who died last winter) and
his Brazilian colleague Carlos Nobre
Border and Rule: calculated that “as little as around 20
Global Migration, Capitalism, percent deforestation would be enough
and the Rise of Racist Nationalism to throw the entire system out of bal-
by Harsha Walia. ance,” transforming rainforest into
Haymarket, 306 pp., savanna.
$45.00; $19.95 (paper) We’re at that threshold already. Von
Brackel reports that
The climate crisis can be under-
stood as an experiment in pace. By the Pantanal in southwestern Bra-
burning the remains of hundreds of zil is one of the largest wetlands
millions of years of flora and fauna in the world. It was here where
in the course of a few decades, we’re the worst drought for centuries
forcing the planet through changes raged in 2020...and an enormous
that usually take eons; deep time is fire burned for weeks, destroying
suddenly running like one of those a quarter of the whole ecosystem
films of a flower opening in seconds. of forests, islands, and grassland.
In a geological instant we’ve raised
the annual global average temperature The rainy season across this wetland
one degree Celsius, and the second is now 40 percent shorter, quite likely,
degree will come faster still; on our he says, as a result of those Amazon
current course we’re headed toward “rivers in the air” beginning to stall.
a third degree. Astonishing shifts in We have some ability to respond to
precipitation, forest fires, sea level, these dramatic shifts. Many countries,
and many other systems are happening including the US, are backing a “30 by
month by month and season by season. 30” plan that calls for setting aside
The pace is truly savage. almost a third of their land by the end
But that experiment in time is play- of the decade— in the US this would
ing out even more dramatically across mean formally protecting an additional
physical space. The rapid rise in tem- area larger than the state of Texas. But
perature is causing plant and animal Meghan Hildebrand: Seasonal Drift, 2022 this job gets steadily more challenging
species, and people, to move toward even as it gets more necessary. Where
the poles and higher, cooler ground. the permafrost beneath. Musk oxen, watch this obituary being written in once you could “preserve” a species by
This exodus has not only begun, it’s caribou, and Arctic foxes are being in- real time; Hughes often reports on fencing off its habitat, now you also
begun to overwhelm biological and exorably pushed north, where they will his overflights of the vast stretches have to protect its escape route: grizzly
political stability. We need to think run into the ocean. “The closer they of whitened coral that now line the bears don’t live in Yellowstone because
deeply about it, and act with resolve, if get to the North Pole, the more the Queensland coast.) It’s possible that they appreciate being part of the Wy-
we’re to have any hope of not rending inhabitable territory shrinks. Earth is some corals may emerge in what were oming tourist economy, they live there
both our ecological and civilizational an ellipsoid, after all,” he writes. once temperate waters farther north because it’s the right temperature. If
fabric in permanent ways. Three new As on land, so at sea. Von Brackel as they become more tropical, but don’t that temperature moves hundreds
books help us appreciate the magni- writes movingly of indigenous com- hold your breath— “the formation of a of miles north, then they must go
tude of the challenge; you can’t under- munities now largely bypassed by the coral reef the size of the Great Barrier too— across highways and populated
stand the next decades of life on earth whales on which they’ve depended for Reef could take, roughly, half a million areas. (Some of those highways were
if you don’t take in their joint message. food and cultural continuity because years.” destroyed in record flooding in the re-
As Benjamin von Brackel notes in the small organisms on which the gion this June; tourist communities
Nowhere Left to Go, the ecologist Ca- whales feed are moving as the tem- reported receipts down 75 percent or
A
mille Parmesan was among the first to peratures warm. Meanwhile, off Ice- Equally fundamental changes are more following the storms.) BI
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suggest that we were seeing climate land, huge schools of mackerel were underway in the earth’s most cru- Von Brackel interviews scientists U
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change in action. In 1996 she published appearing, having migrated north; cial ecosystems. Biologists working who are working on “assisted migra- O
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an influential study of Edith’s checker- when fishermen from the European in the Amazon have demonstrated tion” for many species, but this is hard H
S
spot butterflies showing that the spe- mainland followed, violent conflicts that trees and bird and insect spe- work, and not just for species like griz- TI
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cies was disappearing at the southern with their Icelandic counterparts were cies are moving into the mountains zlies that some people might rightly B
end of its range, in Mexico, but not in narrowly averted. to escape rising heat; eventually they fear. It’s hard because the change RIA,
Canada: overall, the butterfly’s “center Along the Eastern Seaboard, sugar will run out of mountain to climb, but never stops; Noah had to cope with TO
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of distribution” had shifted more than maples are moving north (and the the deeper problem is that for many just forty days of rain, but (to quote VI
sixty miles north and three hundred March days of nighttime freeze and of the world’s greatest forests there Camille Parmesan) “the problem with Y,
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feet higher in elevation. Other biolo- morning thaw that drive the sap are aren’t any mountains, just vast flat- climate change is that there is no end LE
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gists began looking at the ranges of moving into February or disappearing lands that are growing steadily hotter. in sight.... If we knew when the cli- A
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the species they studied, and in the altogether); theoretically, though, they In the mountains, von Brackel writes, mate would stabilize, we could prepare A
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past twenty years a robust science has have some room to move, so Vermont’s the temperature drops three degrees for that.” RO
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emerged. loss should be Quebec’s gain. Many Celsius with every 1,640 feet of ele- At this point it’s clear that the de- A
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Von Brackel, a German journalist, other ecosystems are simply dying vation, but in the lowlands a bird or struction will be enormous, but as von D/
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ably chronicles the research at every in place—v on Brackel describes the a tree would need to travel 310 miles Brackel concludes, A
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latitude and on every continent. He sad plight of Terry Hughes, the Aus- north to get similar relief. B
E
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describes, for instance, the invasion tralian coral scientist whose career It’s complicated in the Amazon, and the less we allow the earth to L
of the Arctic by deer, rabbits, and has become an extended deathwatch in other forest basins like the Congo, warm, the more areas we return N HI
beavers— whose dams create ponds as the Great Barrier Reef, the earth’s because humans are simultaneously to nature, and the more reserves A
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that are now visible via satellite; that largest living structure, repeatedly logging and burning big swaths of the and corridors we create, the more EG
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water traps heat, speeding the melt of bleaches. (Followers on Twitter can jungle, and together with the rising species we will be able to save, and ©
6 The New York Review
McKibben_06_10.indd 6 9/8/22 4:55 PM
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October 6, 2022 7
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we will at least be able to pass on say, Germany or Turkey or Vietnam. At this writing, parts of the Horn of the impact of the 1619 Project— it
fragments of life on this planet But they are a small fraction of what of Africa are enduring their fourth forces the reader to grapple with the
to our children and their children. we can expect as temperatures rise: consecutive dry “rainy season,” and relentless and ongoing use and abuse
the International Organization for Mi- children are starving; in Central Amer- of power by rich countries and their
gration has predicted that we could ica, a narrow land between two fast- political and economic leaders. Walia is
Except, of course, that we and our see 1.5 billion people forced from their warming oceans, drought has made not a trained journalist, so the book is
children and their children may homes by 2050, and in 2020 an analysis farming incredibly hard. And when rain light on storytelling (and a little heavy
be preoccupied with another problem, by an international team of academ- does come, it’s often now in the form on jargon), but it is devastating in its
which is where we’re going to live our- ics in the Proceedings of the National of violent storms— in 2020, at the tail deployment of data and evidence.
selves. Human beings, according to end of the most active hurricane sea- We often hear talk of an “invasion”
Jens- Christian Svenning, a Danish ac- son in Atlantic history, Eta and Iota of immigrants creating a “border cri-
ademic whom von Brackel quotes at (we were well into the Greek alphabet) sis,” Walia observes, but “mass migra-
some length, have concentrated them- crashed into Nicaragua, Honduras, and tion is the outcome of the actual crises
selves for at least the past six thou- Guatemala, doing almost unbelievable of capitalism, conquest, and climate
sand years in a “surprisingly narrow amounts of damage—b y some esti- change.” She documents centuries of
belt” of the planet, centered around mates equivalent to almost 40 percent coercion that have taken place along
an average temperature of thirteen of the GDP in Honduras. When people the US- Mexican border: the US an-
degrees Celsius, or about fifty- five de- cannot farm and cannot eat, they will nexed northern Mexico, worked to
grees Fahrenheit, and with relatively move, or at least try to. thwart the Mexican Revolution, and
low humidity: much of North Amer- Let us state succinctly the most ob- with the North American Free Trade
ica, Western and Southern Europe, vious point: none of these crises are Agreement began “prying open do-
the Middle East, eastern China, Japan. caused by the people suffering from mestic industries in Mexico to a global
This is the “temperate to Mediter- them. The average Somalian, at the regime of production.” This was neo-
ranean zone,” and it’s appealing be- epicenter of that withering drought, liberalism at its apex, theoretically
cause “small-s cale farmers can work produces barely one two- hundredth as “opening” the economies of the US and
outdoors without suffering from exces- much carbon as the average American; Mexico to largely unhindered cross-
sive heat or cold,” because crops and the average Honduran a fifteenth as border trade, but the results were as
livestock yield more here, and perhaps Academy of Sciences said that by 2070 much; the average Vietnamese a sev- predictable as they were brutal: more
because “moderate temperatures are as many as three billion people could enth (and much of that comes from than a million Mexican farmers were
also conducive to elevated moods and be living in areas stressed by high heat. manufacturing stuff for export to us). forced into bankruptcy within a de-
good mental health.” The US, with 4 percent of the world cade, while corn exports from the
That zone is migrating north too, population today, has produced a quar- US to Mexico increased 323 percent.
which is not perhaps an insurmount- Do such numbers seem startlingly ter of all the greenhouse gas emis- This flood of cheap corn particularly
able problem; one can imagine the large? Gaia Vince, in her book sions in the atmosphere; the carbon damaged indigenous communities that
residents of Napa relocating to Ore- Nomad Century, points out that fires we pumped into the air during our were both economically and culturally
gon and then on to British Columbia. even in affluent places like California industrialization and (especially) our dependent on a crop first domesticated
The UK’s record heat this summer and Australia have begun to produce suburbanization will linger there for a on their lands.
was brutal for people without air- internal migrations. But wealth is a century or more. No country, not even “Millions of Indigenous people,
conditioning, but brutal is relative: the buffer. In poorer parts of the world far more populous ones like China, will farmers, peasants, and [villagers]
bigger problem is that much of the a warming planet is already a daily come close to catching us. Somalian from rural areas were dispossessed
world that is already hotter than aver- grind; she reports that rice farmers famine, Honduran hurricanes, Viet- and then proletarianized into low- wage
age will become lethally hot. Less than in Vietnam are planting at night with namese inundation— these are crises factory and farm work,” Walia writes.
one percent of the planet’s surface headlamps to avoid dangerous heat, caused by us, and given that many in Employment in the maquiladora fac-
has an average temperature higher and the British medical journal The industry and government have known tories along the border “exploded by
than twenty- nine degrees Celsius, or Lancet estimates that in 2018 “more the consequences of burning fossil 86 percent within the first five years
eighty- four degrees Fahrenheit; at the than 150 billion work hours were lost fuels for decades, you could fairly say of NAFTA,” in cities that soon became
moment that’s mostly in the Sahara due to extreme temperature and hu- the climate crisis is a kind of crime deadly for women; 90 percent of these
region. But computer modeling shows midity.” (Of course, for many farmers Americans have been committing. factories were US-o wned, and they “set
that within fifty years those kinds of their livelihood will be a thing of the And not the first crime. The global the de facto wage floor for manufac-
temperatures could be common in past— parts of southern Vietnam, for scope and historical perspective of turing across the continent,” costing
most of the tropics, an area projected instance, are expected to be below sea Border and Rule, by the Canadian 700,000 factory jobs in America. It’s
to be home to 3.5 billion people. Living level by 2050.) activist Harsha Walia, reminds me easy to see how this simultaneously
there will become borderline impos-
sible— it will be too hot to work out-
doors. Read the first chapter of Kim
Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry
for the Future,* about a crazy Indian
heat wave; or read the newspaper ac-
counts of the actual heat waves that
badly degraded life in India this past
spring and in China this summer, or Passage
about the almost unimaginable deluge
that at the end of August put a third I’d never been further than Ballina, and only in the back of a cart.
of Pakistan underwater and turned The train shuffled field after tree after field, as Dada did with cards
the Indus River essentially into an and me as a spindle at the heart of it, the last still thing in the world.
inland ocean. People are going to be It was as well, maybe, departure was giddy so I thought the whirl
on the move. meant more than the leaving. For a while. Queenstown was a hell
In fact, they already are. The UN’s of shouting and shoving and crying in the lurk of those huge hulls.
High Commissioner for Refugees re- Beggars, drunks; porters who’d offer to carry bags, then disappear.
ported in late May that the world, for A madwoman pulling at me, asking was I not Bríd from Inis Oírr.
the first time in recorded history, had
100 million forcibly displaced people. That packed cabin was the most at home I’d felt since Glenavoo:
Of those who were set on the move warm bodies close around me, women snoring as Mama used to,
in the previous year, “conflict and vi- a baby crying and someone being sick and someone whispering.
olence” accounted for 14.4 million, and But only one privy for every hundred bunks on the City of Berlin
“weather- related events” accounted and no deck below in third class: for six nights, the same foul air.
for more: 23.7 million— though the Getting on, I knew nothing of Berlin. Getting off, I didn’t care.
distinction between these is often
hard to draw. The war in Syria, for in- —Vona Groarke
stance, which produced large numbers
of refugees, followed the most pro-
found drought ever recorded in what
we once called the Fertile Crescent.
These numbers are enormous—100
million is more than the population of,
*See my “It’s Not Science Fiction,” The New
York Review, December 17, 2020.
8 The New York Review
McKibben_06_10.indd 8 9/8/22 4:55 PM
Vernon Fisher
Chapter, 1999
Acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 inches, 106.7 x 106.7 cm
[email protected]
October 6, 2022 9
McKibben_06_10.indd 9 9/8/22 4:55 PM
drives migration pressure in Mexico But what justice demands and ecological localism, where immi- There are examples even in the
and brews resentment north of the what politics can produce are often grants are compared to foreign heart of GOP America. Earlier this
border. A border turns out to be a very very different; we’re far from tear- invasive species, and...puts for- year, for instance, The Washington
useful device for controlling people ing down borders. As Walia notes, in ward screeds such as “Borders are Post reported from Greene County,
on both sides. (You can, for instance, one country after another right- wing the environment’s greatest ally; it Iowa, a classic mid- American farming
get undocumented people to do low- politicians have skillfully used fear is through them that we will save region that has watched its popula-
paid jobs others won’t take, and then of people crossing those boundaries the planet.” tion steadily fall and its stores and
use their status to keep them from to strengthen the most retrograde churches disappear. Voting for Trump,
complaining; according to one study governments. It’s worth remember- and for longtime congressman Steve
she cites, 52 percent of companies in ing that Donald Trump began his Given the realities Walia so force- King (who once referred to Mexican
the US threaten to call immigration unlikely presidential campaign with fully describes, it is worth asking immigrants as having “calves the size
authorities on workers during union remarks about Mexican rapists. His if there are ways beyond sheer justice of cantaloupes” from carrying heavy
drives.) shameless rhetoric about people from to make the case for more porous bor- bags of marijuana across the desert),
“shithole countries” descending on predictably did nothing to arrest the
the US to take American jobs cap- decline, so now the county has em-
Walia makes a similarly detailed tured support from downtrodden barked on a project called Nueva Vida
case in country after country, voters, and now Greg Abbott is em- en Greene County to attract Latino
demonstrating the dynamics behind ploying the Texas National Guard to settlers. The county has set up cul-
Australia’s hideous island prisons patrol the border as part of his bid tural awareness classes and soccer
for migrants and Europe’s extensive for reelection as governor of Texas, teams, and provided housing and jobs.
system of deals to keep African immi- finding support among not just As one woman explained, “We need
grants away from the continent. She white but also Latino voters in the some diversity here. We’re all too old
demolishes one piece of conventional Rio Grande Valley. Walia notes that and White.”
wisdom after another: for instance, even Cesar Chavez once “led a cam- Walia hates such projects—s he says
she asks, in an exploited and rapidly paign against ‘wetbacks’ and reported that programs like the German one,
heating world, what is the differ- undocumented workers to federal which Angela Merkel sold under the
ence between a worthy refugee and authorities.” slogan Wir schaffen das (We’ll man-
a scheming “economic migrant”? By The same dynamics can be seen age), “center humanitarian benevo-
the end of this remarkable account, across the world. Right- wing parties lence and Europeans materialize as
it’s hard to disagree when she writes: in Europe have used inflammatory saviors, while refugees are burdened
rhetoric around incidents of sexual ha- with the expectation of performing
I align with a leftist politics of rassment to try to turn women against gratitude”; that “liberal welcome cul-
no borders, since the borders of immigration, and an emerging “ecofas- ture” erases “European complicity in
today are completely bound up in cism” needs to be taken seriously. As creating displacement through colonial
the violences of dispossession, Walia points out, the far- right gunman conquest, land theft, slavery, capitalist
accumulation, exploitation, and who murdered twenty- three people at extraction, labor exploitation, and war
their imbrications with race, caste, an El Paso Walmart in 2019 posted an ders, and here Vince’s book may be profiteering.”
gender, sexuality, and ability.... online manifesto declaring, “If we can helpful. In some ways she is wildly Immigration should be better un-
Borders are not simply lines mark- get rid of enough people, then our way unrealistic— I think there is little derstood as reparations, Walia says—
ing territory; they are the product of life can become more sustainable.” prospect that we will be building and, given the power of her historical
of, and produce, social relations In France, Marine Le Pen’s National vast modern cities on the Siberian account of oppression, I think she’s
from which we must emancipate Rally party campaigns on what Walia tundra or the Canadian permafrost right on the merits. But I strain to
ourselves. calls to house arriving immigrants— see politics shifting in that direction,
but she shares Walia’s skepticism which leaves one in a quandary about
about the usefulness of borders. (In what to do. For instance, I serve on
fact, she provides a fascinating his- an advisory council at the Lutheran
tory of human mobility, which was Immigration and Refugee Service,
largely uninterrupted by immigration perhaps the country’s leading voice
controls until the invention of the for refugee resettlement, and I am in
CALL FOR FELLOWS
modern nation- state.) awe of the remarkable work done by its
And she points out that the rich staff as they struggle to win entry slots
The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at The New School for Social
countries of the world are actually for people from around the world and
Research invites applications for our 2023 Summer Seminars (June 11-17,
beginning to feel another pinch, not then to resettle them effectively. But it
2023). Founded and directed by Ann Laura Stoler, and now in its ninth year,
nearly as brutal as the climate cri- is so painfully small in scale— it feels
the ICSI offers advanced graduate students and faculty from around the
world the opportunity to spend a week at The New School's campus in ses affecting the Global South but too much like the years when I was
Greenwich Village, working closely with some of the most distinguished real enough: because of falling birth setting up a homeless shelter in the
thinkers shaping the course of contemporary social inquiry. Fellows partici- rates, these societies are aging quickly. basement of my church. Taking care
pate in one of three seminars where rigorous intellectual inquiry is joined (Arresting data point: in Japan, adult of ten men a night was important to
with attention to pressing political concerns to cultivate styles of thinking
diapers now outsell baby diapers.) them, but like other ad hoc charitable
that address the desperate and unequal conditions in which we live today.
Meanwhile, “many of the countries endeavors it also may have relieved
affected by climate stress and other some of the pressure for necessary
2023
pressures, such as repressive regimes, systemic change.
FACULTY & SEMINARS have large numbers of unemployed I fear very much that this tension
youth living in poverty, which triggers between liberal and radical solutions to
KENDALL THOMAS conflict. Creating secure migratory migration will simply be overwhelmed
The Resistance to Critical Race Theory pathways to depopulating” countries in the years ahead. If the climate mod-
Co-Editor of Critical Race Theory: would “help these people...get on elers are even close to correct, one or
The Key Writings That Formed with productive lives,” and also help three billion human beings attempt-
the Movement, The New Press 1996
the nations where they arrive keep the ing to move away from rising heat and
MCKENZIE WARK ratio of young to old in some kind of drought, and from flooding cities, will
Transsexual Exceptions: balance. When Germany, for instance, make their own geopolitical reality.
Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality accepted a million Syrian refugees, Limiting the planet’s warming—
Author of Philosophy for Spiders: this “generous response to the hu- building solar panels and wind tur-
On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, manitarian crisis” was also an “astute bines as fast as we can— will limit
Duke 2021
economic decision”: somewhat the scale of the upheaval,
but it will not at this point prevent
EYAL WEIZMAN The country needed to fill labour it. Our ability to cope with a planet in
Forensis
shortages, partly resulting from motion in some even modestly humane
Author of Forensic Architecture:
the depletion of its Turkish mi- fashion will determine the character of
Violence at the Threshold
of Detectability, Princeton 2017 grant population, many of whom the century ahead; thinking through
had returned to their homeland the possibilities right now, while the
during its economic boom. Sweden numbers are still relatively small, and
also took the opportunity to revive then taking the biggest political steps
its depopulated villages, includ- we can manage to open our societies
.
APPLICATIONS DUE ing reopening schools and football to people who need to move, is our
DECEMBER 15, 2022 teams. The biggest fear Sweden best chance at both justice and peace.
faces is those immigrants leaving The world must bend or else it will
criticalsocialinquiry.org
and returning to Syria. break.
10 The New York Review
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