Photo: pro-Trump wannabe 'poll watchers' banged on the glass outside the room where absentee ballots were being counted at TCF Center on November 4, 2020, in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)

Aug 11, 2022 - A sweeping US House oversight committee report has warned that lies and misinformation around the 2020 American presidential election present an “ongoing threat to representative democracy” and pose a grave physical danger to election officials.

The 21-page report called for emergency funding to address increased security costs related to 2022 contests and warned that there was a much-heightened risk that conspiracy theorists could gain power over elections in the future.

The report also detailed chilling threats against election administrators across the country. One Texas official received menacing messages targeting him and “threatening his children, saying, ‘I think we should end your bloodline.’” The messages against him came following “personal attacks on national media outlets.”

Another threat included a social media call to “hang him when convicted for fraud and let his lifeless body hang in public until maggots drip out of his mouth.”

The committee started investigating the impact of lies surrounding election administration in early 2021. After former Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he falsely insisted that the election was stolen from him.

While there is no evidence that the 2020 election had irregularities, let alone widespread fraud, many Trump supporters still believe in the “big lie.” This falsehood energized a mob of Trump supporters to attack the US Capitol during the January 6, 2020 insurrection.

The House committee said that conspiracy theorists, “led by former President Donald Trump and his supporters,” have fueled threats against election officials. Several in Florida publicized an election supervisor’s phone number and encouraged listeners to call and say “that they are watching him, that he is a piece of crap, and that these are their elections.”

The committee’s analysis described lies about elections as operating as a positive feedback mechanism. The report said: “The spread of false information about elections harms nearly every element of election administration.”

“For the past two years, election misinformation in the United States has often followed a feedback loop that produces more false information, heightens threats and pressures on election administrators, and increases the possibility of election subversion,” the report said.

“Conspiracy theorist candidates across the country have gained notoriety and run for office with the explicit goal of overturning election results,” it added.

The report said that the spread of misinformation has exerted enormous pressure on election officials, who are swarmed with “coordinated campaigns of records requests and bad faith inquiries” to interfere with their work.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in some states seized on the chaos to greenlight laws that make illegal minor mistakes by election officials, which “allow partisan actors to intervene in ballot counting and certification”.

These statutes, along with the confusion and distrust that has grown since 2020, “have paved multiple pathways for the future subversion of legitimate election results,” the report said. ...Read More

JULY 20, 2022 - The war in Ukraine could alter the Pentagon’s future weapons buying plans, as military leaders look to better protect large, expensive equipment, the head of America’s second-largest defense company said.

“What we're learning from the war in Ukraine is big, slow things are big, slow targets, whether it's warships or tanks,” Raytheon Technologies CEO Greg Hayes said in an interview Tuesday. “An asymmetric weapon can take out a multibillion-dollar system.”

In Ukraine, both Ukrainian and Russian forces have used relatively cheap, modified commercial drones to drop explosives on military formations. Homemade weapons rigged with explosives were used by ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria.

“I think this is going to cause us to rethink… some of the spending priorities in the next decade,” Hayes said.  

He doesn’t expect these types of changes this year. Congress is reviewing the Pentagon’s fiscal 2023 budget request, and inside the Pentagon, officials are building a spending request for fiscal 2024. That annual budget request is typically sent to lawmakers in February; however, the Biden administration submitted its first two budgets late.

“I don't think you're gonna see that this year,” Hayes said. “But it's certainly in the thinking of the folks at DOD in terms of, OK, if they can kill one of my ships pretty easily with a missile, what do I do to protect that ship? Or what other technologies do I need? Or vehicles do I need that are less susceptible to these asymmetric attacks?”

Ukrainian forces have used shoulder-fired Stinger and Javelin missiles to destroy Russian tanks, armored vehicles, and combat aircraft. Raytheon makes Stingers, and makes the Javelin jointly with Lockheed Martin. 

In recent years, the Pentagon has been reshaping its long-term spending to counter China’s weapon advances, following two decades of spending billions of dollars on weapons for battling insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s developing new long-range bombers, hypersonic weapons, and satellite constellations. Defense officials have called Russia an “acute concern” that is accounted for in the military’s strategic planning.

After being elected in 2020, experts and analysts predicted the Biden administration would cut or flatten the defense budget after years of spending increases during the Trump administration. But both of Biden’s budget proposals have included increases in defense spending. Congress added tens of billions of dollars more to the 2022 request and is poised to do the same again this year in its review of the 2023 request.

“When President Biden was elected two years ago, I think we were all prepared for the inevitable cuts in defense spending,” Hayes said. “The fact is, we've seen anything but, because of all of the geopolitical events.” ...Read More

Aug 18, 2022 - Eddie Canales can’t forget the moment he saw the decomposed body of a young man in his 20s hanging from an oak tree on a south Texas ranch last September.

The intense heat and humidity in this arid scrubland had quickly rotted his flesh to expose much of the skeleton, which had been at the scene for at least a week.

Clearly visible in a graphic image the sheriff’s office provided to the Guardian was the skull, lolling to one side. And both his feet are missing, probably eaten by wild animals.

The man was from Mexico, according to ID documents found. Police explored the possibility it was a lynching, but concluded it was suicide.

“Most of the bodies I encounter are already skeletonized,” said Canales, who runs the South Texas Human Rights Center, a non-profit based in Brooks county, Texas, working to put an end to the avoidable, harsh deaths, and reunite families with the remains of loved ones.

“But this was particularly harrowing. That image will stay with me forever,” he added.

Brooks county covers almost 1,000 square miles of sparse, brush-covered, sandy ranch lands not far from the eastern end of the US-Mexico border and is at the heart of a deadly migration crisis that is seeing desperate people die in record numbers.

So high is the grim toll that the surrounding region, spanning several Texas counties near the Rio Grande, has been called the other Death Valley.

Data bears out that terrible nickname: the Missing Migrants Project, an initiative by the Swiss-based International Organization for Migration (IOM) that tracks migrant deaths and disappearances globally, recorded 715 deaths of people trying to cross the US border from Mexico in 2021 – more than double the figure in 2015, making it the deadliest land crossing in the world.

Of the four US states along the border, Texas has the longest stretch and the highest number of migrant deaths, according to a report by the University of Texas’s Strauss Center. Brooks county, where authorities recovered 119 bodies last year, has had more deaths than any other Texas county over the last three decades.

“We’re struggling to deal with all the bodies,” said Don White, county deputy sheriff. Last year the county was provided with a mobile morgue by the state in response to the grisly human reaping. “I recently had to pick up three fresh ones in a day,” he said.

Outside experts believe that federal immigration policies have exacerbated the tragedy, forcing migrants into ever-more perilous crossings, and leading refugee journeys – fleeing violence, persecution and climate disaster – to an anguished dead end.

Eva Moya, an associate professor at the University of Texas studying the precarity faced by migrants, says the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico” – a policy introduced in 2019 under the Trump administration – has resulted in more than 70,000 people being sent back into Mexico to wait for their US court cases, often for extended periods in makeshift camps, where they are often denied basic health care and face violence, rape, murder and kidnappings by organized crime groups.

“The risk continues to increase,” says Moya. “Asylum seekers in Mexico are fearing for their lives and smugglers are taking advantage of that. They will do anything to make profit from these people. It’s human trafficking at its max.”

At the same time, Title 42, ostensibly a pandemic-related health measure introduced in 2020, closing border ports of entry and allowing Border Patrol to summarily expel migrants without asylum hearings, has exacerbated the deaths in Brooks county and beyond, said Alma Maquitico, director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

“Title 42 has led to a rise in deaths,” she said. “People aren’t crossing at cities any more, but in more faraway, dangerous areas. They are dying in the desert.”

Immigrants walk towards the Rio Grande to cross into Del Rio, Texas, from Ciudad Acuna, Mexico.

Immigrants walk towards the Rio Grande to cross into Del Rio, Texas, from Ciudad Acuna, Mexico. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Canales also pointed to the rural, arid expanse.

“This is the real Death Valley,” he said, contrasting it with its scorching desert namesake in California.

“The immigration system has failed. The government wants to blame the cartel but not the policy that is creating this problem. The solution is to offer an ordered asylum pathway. You could fix this tomorrow,” he added. ...Read More

Sometimes I wish there were as many leftist reading groups on The Art of War as there are on Marx’s Capital. It’s not that I don’t think leftists should understand socialist economics. Plenty of people I respect teach classes on Marx’s Capital. But it’s one thing to know what you want; it’s another to know how to get it. One fair critique of the revived American left is that while we have developed a compelling platform and inspired many to embrace the creed of democratic socialism, we are insufficiently savvy about the pursuit and use of power. 

Thinking strategically changes the kinds of questions one asks in deciding what to do. Take a recent minor controversy on the online left: Chris Smalls, the president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

Smalls’ appearance on Fox News was criticized by Andrew Lawerence of Media Matters, who wrote that: 

I am sure Chris Smalls is aware that Tucker Carlson and Fox News are the enemy—Smalls is a revolutionary labor organizer. The value of appearing on Fox is instrumental: there are Amazon warehouse workers who watch Fox News and listen to Tucker Carlson. If Smalls can go on Fox News and get across a pro-union message while avoiding falling into the trap of denouncing AOC, he will aid the project of organizing other warehouses. For Smalls, the question of whether to go on Fox News is: “What does it do for the ALU?” It is not “Is Tucker Carlson a good or bad person who deserves credibility?” In other words, Smalls’ choices are outcome-driven rather than an expression of moral preferences. 

I recently interviewed a member of the ALU’s organizing committee, Justine Medina, and she talked about how one of the union’s most effective organizers, an Italian American known as “Uncle Pat,” is a Trump-supporting Republican. Justine said that this one man has managed to flip hundreds of workers from “no” votes to “yes” votes on the union. She commented that Uncle Pat and Chris Smalls want to go on the Sean Hannity show together, to show an image of interracial working-class solidarity that messes with people’s expectations. 

Leftists shouldn’t just read about social problems and their proposed solutions. We also need to be students of history, and not just the history of the left. It’s as important to understand the lives and tactics of robber barons as it is to understand the struggles of those who resisted them. We should study both revolutions and counter-revolutions, military campaigns and propaganda victories. We must be a little more Machiavellian—even if it means reading Henry Kissinger’s memoirs. “What do we want?” and “When do we want it?” are questions that we have never struggled with the answers to. “How do we get it?” is a much tricker question, but the first step to finding the answer is to make sure we’re actually asking it. ...Read More

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By Gao Yunxiang

Several times in recent years, Chinese broadcasters have aired shows that feature Paul Robeson (1898-1976), one of the most popular African American singers and actors of his era and a well-known civil rights activist.

China National Radio and various channels of the widely influential China Central TV showcased Robeson on programs in 2009, 2012 and 2021, narrating China’s resistance to foreign military aggressions. This is a remarkable amount of coverage in Chinese media for an American who died decades ago. Though not widely known in the United States, the relationship between Robeson and China continues to resonate in China today. It’s part of the history that connects Black internationalism with the experiences of Chinese and Chinese American people. Robeson was one of the most important figures in an alliance between Maoist China and politically radical African Americans.

The Chinese love for Robeson derives most of all from his role in globalizing the future national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. In November 1940, in New York City, Robeson received a phone call from the Chinese writer and philosopher Lin Yutang. Lin asked Robeson to meet a recent arrival from China: Liu Liangmo, a prolific journalist, talented musician and Christian activist. Within half an hour, Robeson was in Lin’s apartment for the meeting. In his numerous articles published in Chinese-language periodicals, Liu recalled Robeson ‘beaming over me with his friendly smile and his giant hands firmly holding mine’. The two became fast friends.

Robeson enquired about the mass singing movement that Liu had initiated in China. Liu told him about the new genre of Chinese fighting and folk songs he had helped to invent for war mobilization, singing some examples. Robeson’s favorite was the signature piece ‘Chee Lai!’ or ‘March of the Volunteers’ because, as he explained, its lyric ‘Arise, Ye who refuse to be bond slaves!’ expressed the determination of the world’s oppressed in their struggle for liberation. Listening intently to Liu’s rendition of the song, Robeson wrote down some notes, and left with a copy of the lyrics. On a starry night weeks later, Liu attended an outdoor Robeson concert at Lewisohn Stadium on the campus of the City College of New York. Robeson sang many Black spirituals and songs of national battles against fascism; then he announced: ‘I am going to sing a Chinese fighting song tonight in honor of the Chinese people, and that song is “Chee Lai!”’ Robeson, Liu recalled, sang in perfect Chinese.

These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!

Tune of the Week: Elton John & Dua Lipa Cold Heart  ... 3:20 minutes

The fashions, fabrics and eye-crossingly patterned wallpapers of the 1970s abound in “Angry Annie,” a French period piece practically painted in avocado green and Le Creuset orange, with hand-crocheted accessories for good measure.

Would that the rest of Blandine Lenoir’s rousing abortion drama felt quite so dated. Instead, in a year where the overturning of Roe v. Wade signifies a major step back in the collective fight for women’s reproductive rights, this story of women banding together to assert their bodily autonomy in an age of sexual revolution feels all too timely: not merely a compelling reminder of how things were, but a warning of how they could yet be.

Bright and predominantly hopeful in tone, and powered by a typically lovable performance from recent César winner Laure Calamy (“Call My Agent”) as a meek wife and mother emboldened by an underground women’s movement, this is a less visceral, more crowd-pleasing account of French abortion-rights history than Audrey Diwan’s celebrated “Happening” — which was set a decade earlier than Lenoir’s film, before much community around the cause had taken clear shape. But it’s no soft lob either, impressing with its inclusive, observant view of how abortion law affects women (and men) across a wide range of ages, social positions and domestic situations, and advocating for continued collaboration in defending and enacting it.

Tonally and narratively, “Angry Annie” is closer in spirit to this year’s Sundance-premiered “Call Jane,” its fictionalized angle on France’s real-life Movement for Liberty of Abortion and Contraception (MLAC) unfolding not dissimilarly to writer-director Phyllis Nagy’s take on America’s comparable Jane Collective. Such broadly recognizable parallel points will help Lenoir’s lovingly crafted, heartily acted film attract global distributor interest following its premiere in Locarno’s Piazza Grande showcase. (Some might want to reconsider the slightly comic-sounding English-language title, which doesn’t quite convey the film’s communal focus and outlook.) French outfit Diaphana Films will release the film domestically in late November.

Introductory title cards detail the 1973 establishment of MLAC, a movement aiming to assist women with safe illegal abortions and access to birth control, with local chapters across the country staffed by predominantly female volunteers and assisted by liberal-minded doctors, many of them male. Mild-mannered mother-of-two Annie (Calamy) isn’t much for activism, even ducking out of workers’ rights meetings at the small-town mattress factory where she holds down an uninspiring job: “I’m not into all that political stuff,” she says, and her loving but unimaginative husband Philippe (Yannick Choirat) likes it that way.

When she falls pregnant with an unwanted third child, however, she’s forced to think of her body as a political space. Shyly attending a covert MLAC meeting and going through with a successful, mostly painless Karman’s-method abortion, she’s surprised by the camaraderie and conviction of the women in the group, while her mind is opened to feminist theories of bodily discovery and the female orgasm. Soon enough, she’s volunteering with them, talking other women through the patriarchally instilled feelings and shame and guilt she once held herself, and sensing a new life’s calling altogether — to the growing consternation of Philippe, who may support a woman’s right to choose, but is less keen when that upends a long-held household hierarchy.

The goal, of course, is to get abortion rights secured in law — yet “Angry Annie” turns most interesting and emotionally nuanced when that very victory comes at some cost to the validation and belonging that women like Annie have found in groups like MLAC. “They won’t have the solidarity we had,” she mutters, arguing that a clinically delivered legal abortion will be marked by respect but not “tenderness,” while others fear that legalizing abortion won’t help many women in need if the procedure isn’t covered by national healthcare. Even the most right-on male doctors, meanwhile, dismiss the feminist creed of MLAC in their pursuit of more sweeping political gestures. (“You don’t understand,” one dares to mansplain to a woman questioning their bullish approach to activism.) Lenoir and Axelle Ropert’s screenplay may bend towards progress and uplift, but it isn’t without its barbs: There’s a pleasing consideration here of the conditions and complexities of change.

The warmth and good humor of Calamy’s performance protects “Angry Annie” from feeling like a dramatized debate at such junctures. Even at its most didactic, the film feels populated with credible, complicated characters rather than convenient case studies. One particularly moving scene sees a woman, reasoning that she hasn’t the means or the energy for a seventh child, wrestling aloud with her own moral qualms as she undergoes the procedure: “I have no right, but I’m too tired,” she weeps. For others, like the nervous teen calmed by Annie’s guidance, it’s a chance to begin adult life on her own terms; elsewhere, a young woman backs out after realizing her husband wants the termination more than she does. There’s no one-size-fits-all story in this open-hearted, empathetic film: Choice is the common factor that rights disparate lives in different ways. That seems obvious enough, though with lawmakers and activists restaging this battle half a century later, it appears to bear repeating. ...Read More

The day the landrus arrives, the people do nothing. They have had days like this before, when unknown animals have appeared on the outskirts of the city. Some are species that have somehow returned from extinction; some are mutations that have found their way to the city from nuclear waste dumps. But all of them, in the words of the city’s people, are “kin.” Many years ago the people agreed by “collective decision” not to kill any kin whose intent seemed harmless, so while the landrus is flattening the people’s crops as it drags its walrus-like body from the creek to the fields, destroying crops and damning the people to a hungry winter, it is clear that the animal means no harm. So they watch it, they sketch it, and they have meetings about it, but they don’t run it out of town, they don’t detain it, and they don’t hunt it.

Soon it becomes clear that all the flattening of the fields is for the purpose of nesting. The lone landrus is readying a breeding ground. A hundred pregnant landruses are coming, but to reach the breeding ground, they will need the people’s help to cross a stretch of impassable, jagged asphalt. Debate intensifies and camps begin to form: help the landruses across, leave them to their fate, or drive them out. But it’s no matter, because while the adults are meeting, their children have taken action. They have built a snow bridge to help the landruses, even if this means the people may ultimately be displaced from the city.

This is the arc of Phoebe Wagner’s short story “Children of Asphalt,” which appeared in the 2021 anthology Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures. As a work of solarpunk fiction, the story takes place in a world where cooperation and mutual aid have replaced the ruthless self-interest of capitalism, and where the decisive binary, and hierarchy, between humans and the nonhuman world has dissolved. Wagner’s story is an especially ingenious example of solarpunk in the way it plays with readers’ expectations: Were this a work of realism, the landrus would be dead, or dissected, or bred, or kept in a zoo, or otherwise monetized. (When I taught this story in my Climate Fiction class, one student was certain that an entrepreneur would make landrus-skin hats.) But the people do none of this, and when the adults come close, the children keep them in check. With each expectation that the story brings up in the reader, only then to thwart, Wagner clarifies the difference between a solarpunk future and our capitalistic present.

In her new collection of essays Death by Landscape, the novelist and essayist Elvia Wilk dedicates an essay to the politics of solarpunk fiction. While solarpunk is “built on a clear-eyed understanding of the dystopian present,” particularly the uneven distribution of climate dystopia according to class, nationality, and race, it is nonetheless “curiously optimistic” about our planetary future. It offers a picture of an ecologically enmeshed and abundant future where radical egalitarianism extends within and beyond the human species. As any of the various solarpunk manifestos floating around online will tell you, the only thing solarpunk fiction cannot be is dystopian. These manifestos also make the case that while solarpunk is currently being visualized in fictions like Wagner’s short story, its makers are invested in practical and immediate solutions to the climate crisis. The stories may be speculative, but the worlds they build are being presented as plausible. To Wilk, the purpose and promise of solarpunk is to “close the plausibility gap” between our dystopian present and a non-dystopian future—between landrus-skin hats and children being willing to give over the city—by “expanding the aesthetic imaginary.”

Solarpunk fiction is among a constellation of literary works that attract Wilk’s attention for their expanded imaginaries about life during and after the climate crisis. Wilk’s starting point is that the climate crisis has laid bare certain ecological facts: the interdependence of all species, the porousness of bodies, the false separation between humanity and the rest of the nonhuman world, and the false exaltation of human modes of knowing. Wilk’s interest is in works of literature and art that take these ecological facts as their narrative conceits. Her book catalogs an important, growing body of literature that would not traditionally appear under the banner of “nature writing” or “environmental literature” but that is fundamentally ecological in what it allows for in its fictional universes: the blurring, rotting, merging, and grafting that characterize life from an ecological perspective.

There are, then, stories of women who are transformed into plants (Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape”), and stories of plants that have consciousness (Jonathan Sarno’s film The Plants Are Watching), stories of people decaying into compost (Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot), and stories of people giving themselves over to black holes (Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table). These types of stories are “weird” in the way Mark Fisher, one of Wilk’s main interlocutors, defines the term: as that which “lies beyond standard perception, cognition, and experience.” But they are neither weird nor false from an ecological viewpoint. They are speculative fictions that are in some ways—at least in this “ecological fact” kind of way—realer than realism.

Wilk declines to discuss her literary archive in terms of genre, but it is nonetheless the case that each essay focuses on (let’s call it) a cache of texts that share basic narrative conceits reflective of an ecological principle. Rough groupings emerge. The first essay in the collection, for example, is devoted to what she calls the “ecosystems novel.” The name is a riff on the so-called systems novel, wherein a hero figure finds himself tangled up in larger sociopolitical, economic, or technological systems. The systems novels of Pynchon, DeLillo, and the like may undo what Amitov Ghosh calls the “individual moral adventure story” by enmeshing their protagonists in larger systems, but according to Wilk they still uphold the distinction between the human realm and the ecological realm. And rather than challenging the binary between figure and ground—the binary that Wilk finds especially untenable in the era of climate crisis—systems novels ultimately reinforce this (ecologically false) distinction. “In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it,” Wilk writes.

The ecosystems novel, on the contrary, would not “focus on the story of a person against the backdrop of the world,” Wilks explains. Rather, it would take as its conceit that “the human is not a self-contained element but completely inseparable from all other organisms, both on micro and macro levels,” and it would endeavor to tell a story reflective of this truth. In addition to the woman-turned-plant stories that open the essay, Wilk lists Richard Powers’s 2018 The Overstory, Helen Philips’s 2019 The Need, and Tricia Sullivan’s 2016 Occupy Me as examples of narratives that portray “ecological dependencies” and “insist that figure and ground are not distinct from each other.” Wilk’s own novel, Oval, published in 2019, makes a similar attempt to blur these boundaries, with its ecovillage set atop a human-made mountainside that has a mind and body of its own. Wilk’s discussion of the limitations of the systems novel suggests that the ecosystems novel, in its foregrounding of all creatures’ original enmeshment, may better capture “what it means to be a person in an age of drastic ecosystemic decline—of planetary extinction.”

Wilk also examines narratives sometimes labeled as the New Weird, an area of science fiction in which the otherworldly impulses of writers like Lovecraft are updated in such a way that the weird occurrence is treated not as “freaky or frightening” but simply as evidence that our everyday experience of consciousness is constricted and flattened out—until, quite suddenly, it isn’t. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation serves as an example. Yet Wilk’s essay makes the striking observation that perhaps the New Weird isn’t so new after all: Wilk splices her discussion of Annihilation together with readings of works of Christian mysticism from the medieval period in which their women authors access the higher reaches of human consciousness and divine love through acts of extreme self-negation. It is through this pairing of the contemporary and the medieval that Wilk is not only able to characterize ways of knowing that fall outside of the bounds of our shallow and constrained view of rationality but also to begin to sketch out a longer history of these alternative epistemologies.

In my estimation, Wilk does not do enough with this insight that the “new” awareness of ecological facts, such as interdependence, porousness, lack of bodily integrity and control, and the limits of human consciousness, represents less a discovery of these principles and more a mainstreaming of them. Certainly, there have always been people whose lived experiences and literary works have not allowed these ecological facts to fade from view, and it seems that privilege must be in play where these principles are allowed largely to be forgotten.

The appearance of medieval mystics in an essay about the New Weird raises the idea of a much longer history of the ecological insights that Wilk tracks across contemporary fiction, and it raises the prospect of an altogether different kind of cultural history—one of writers and artists who were working with the ecological viewpoint long before the climate crisis made it much harder for some people to deny.

Yet Wilk’s account does make it feel as though we are seeing a groundswell of contemporary literature that is working from an ecological metaphysics. Wilk writes that these works challenge traditional Western literary forms, particularly in their effort to do away with the singular human figure set against a static and meaningless backdrop. In a way, these narrative strategies seem perfectly aligned with the ecological and metaphysical revelations of the Anthropocene. But there’s also a way in which they seem misaligned with the historical revelations of it—namely, that a subset of humans has driven the planet to the brink of catastrophe because for centuries it has been able to deny or avoid ecological facts.

In some climate circles, there’s been a move away from talking about “humanity” as responsible for the climate crisis, and a move toward talking about capitalism, or even specific corporations and individuals, as culprits. The critic Kate Aronoff, for example, prompts us to name names: “We” didn’t cause climate disruption; ExxonMobil did. In these types of, albeit nonfictional, narratives, the push is precisely to rescue the “figure-ground” narrative form from the historically false way of telling the story as if vast numbers of undifferentiated humans played equal roles in the drama.

The narratives Wilk discusses capture and manifest something about ecology that is lost in the “individual moral adventure” story, but we should not lose sight of the fact that enough wealth and power can produce lives capable of at least partially eliding some of the constraints of an interconnected world. If one way of describing the climate crisis is as the place where ecological fact and historical fact come into conflict and rub each other to the bone, then it seems that, if there is any use value left in the “figure-ground” narrative structure, it is to zero in on exactly how some individuals have moved through history not as heroes of the culture but as climate villains.

There are several essays in Death by Landscape in which the figure of Wilk is brought into focus. “Extinction Burst,” for example, describes Wilk’s experience with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a treatment for PTSD that regards traumatic stress as a physiological phenomenon and uses eye movement to move traumatic memories from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. “Ask Before You Bite” follows Wilk as she participates in a night of live action role-play (LARP) and uncovers the deeper purpose of progressive LARP-ing communities to create a world in which the rules of engagement, particularly around consent, are explicitly named and proactively installed, the effect of which is, for Wilk, to maximize freedom while minimizing harm. There are lessons in these essays about creating new types of narratives for the era of climate crisis that loosely link them to the others in the collection; but what lasts are these little brutal gems of images, the Wilk whose involuntary trauma-response to stress is to fall suddenly asleep, the Wilk who receives a consensual slap by a stranger at a Nordic LARP-ing quest. In these essays, it is the lucidly observed idiosyncrasies of everyday life, so profoundly strange, that expand our sense of the beautiful and the possible, no landrus required.

Lynne FeeleyLynne Feeley's work has appeared in the L.A. Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Princeton. ...Read More