Weekly Picks – February 11, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top right): Nick Sirotich, Thomas Nast, Pixculture/ Creative Commons, Mark Harris, Sue Cunningham Photographic/Alamy, Maggie Shannon.
The informal economy, crime, and journalism surrounding rural Amazonia. Parasitic effects of fungi an analogue to the corporate thought process. Phantasmagorical escapes into farming retreats in Singapore. The historical and ongoing political and military philosophies behind Israel’s great displacement project, as relayed by the Editor in Chief of Haaretz. A first-hand account and analysis of the dollar store model in the United States. And photographs from a late abortion clinic in a country unwilling to offer basic healthcare to women.
This week’s collection:
- The Forest Eaters
- The Fungus Among Us
- On Farms
- Israel’s Self-Destruction: Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect
- Dollar Stores Show Capitalism at its Worst
- A Safe Haven for Late Abortions
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
“About three quarters of the Amazonian population live in towns and cities. Altamira—a city in the state of Pará, nearly twice as large as Texas—is not beautiful, it is not picturesque, it is not pleasant. Though the waters of the Xingu River used to run clear, it is now not anyone’s idea of an idyllic rainforest outpost. Once a Jesuit mission, it is now a 100,000-strong city of hulking Land Rovers with tinted windows threatening to mow down those poor or reckless enough to walk in the street. It has the dubious distinction of being among Brazil’s most violent cities, worse than Rio de Janeiro, with its famous street crime, where I was scolded within an inch of my life by an elderly stranger for leaving apartment keys and cash folded into a towel on the beach while I went for a solo swim.
Altamira is territory of the grileiros—whom Brum’s translator, Diane Whitty, glosses as “land grabbers”—and their henchmen. Worth the price of admission is Brum’s detailed explanation of their particular technique of seizing and destroying the Amazon: the grileiros hire private militias to drive out Indigenous peoples, along with anyone else who lives on public preserves in the forest; chop down hardwood trees (illegally—but who is to tell in such a remote area?); and then set the rest on fire. Once that patch of the Amazon is burned, grileiros bring in cattle or plant soybeans to solidify their claim, as well as to turn a profit beyond the value of the stolen land. At the local level, corrupt officials bow to or directly work with the grileiros. The noncorrupt rightly fear them. At the national level, Brazilians have neither the resources nor the will to do much to stop them. Grileiros are, Brum writes with a flourish, “key to understanding the destruction of the rainforest, yesterday, today, always.”
. . .
For many years Brum resisted writing directly about Indigenous groups, including the Yanomami who occupy the area nearest to Altamira. She felt she didn’t know enough, worried that she didn’t speak the language. After moving to Altamira, she got over her reticence. Some of the most intriguing quotations in her book are from the Yanomami shaman and diplomat Davi Kopenawa, who refers to outsiders to the forest as “commodities people” or “forest eaters.” He describes our books as “paper skin” where words are imprisoned.”
“The people who make corporate decisions to poison the earth do so because their brains have been hijacked by the virus. Partly this is accomplished with simple bribery. Corporate CEOs are awarded vast salaries and ridiculous compensation packages in order to blind them to their human responsibilities. But that alone is not sufficient. The brain fungus also works at a more subtle level. It convinces the corporate decision maker that he is part of a larger system, and that it is the system that is responsible for ethics. In this view, he (it is almost inevitably a he) doesn’t have to know anything about the ethics and morality of his decisions. He can offload that responsibility. His job is to increase shareholder value. It is the job of the political system, the law, or the market to impose restraints. The mechanism is a little fuzzy, but what’s important is that there is a division of labor. “You just concentrate on producing revenue,” the fungus whispers to the CEO. “Other parts of the system will worry about protecting the biosphere.””
3. On Farms
“While each farm represents a loss, perhaps what is most appealing about Evelyn’s is that it symbolizes the most extreme form of a kind of seduction for the Singaporean city slicker — effortless, chaotic natural abundance. For the urbanite cynical about concrete and manicured greenery, what Evelyn’s farm offered was a return to a blessed form of pre-urban ruin, a kind of Eden. One only needs to read the multiple journalistic lamentations that have been penned in the wake of the farm closures to see this hunger: “For most of us who only know of living in urban Singapore, of landscaped surroundings crisscrossed by asphalt and cookie-cutter shopping malls, it’s hard to imagine what it could have been like to run bare feet across exposed earth, to jump into muddy pools left by passing storms, or to tumble in grass teeming with insect life; to wake not to the dreary drone of traffic but to the cacophony of birds and bugs beginning their day in wild abandonment. This was the reality of Chai and her siblings — a childhood led not by the relentless march of progress but by the instinctive rhythm of nature.”
. . .
What we hear of, again and again, is a romanticized notion about what farming in Singapore is and was — waking to the sound of birds, soil and sole in perfect communion. Back-breaking labor is absent from this picture, traded in for a perfect salve to contemporary malaise. For most Singaporeans, a visit to the farm presents an escapist fantasy. Local travel websites advertise farms as “idyllic countryside haunts,” with articles on novel weekend activities, asking:
TIRED OF CITY LIFE?
Here are 11 family-friendly farms in Singapore for a one-day getaway. You don’t have to leave Singapore to feed goats and experience how it is like to grow crops.
For a country that has lost touch with any mainstream practice of farming, what does it mean for us to want to farm again?”
4. Israel’s Self-Destruction: Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect
“One bright day in April 1956, Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), drove south to Nahal Oz, a recently established kibbutz near the border of the Gaza Strip. Dayan came to attend the funeral of 21-year-old Roi Rotberg, who had been murdered the previous morning by Palestinians while he was patrolling the fields on horseback. The killers dragged Rotberg’s body to the other side of the border, where it was found mutilated, its eyes poked out. The result was nationwide shock and agony.
If Dayan had been speaking in modern-day Israel, he would have used his eulogy largely to blast the horrible cruelty of Rotberg’s killers. But as framed in the 1950s, his speech was remarkably sympathetic toward the perpetrators. “Let us not cast blame on the murderers,’’ Dayan said. “For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate.” Dayan was alluding to the nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” when the majority of Palestinian Arabs were driven into exile by Israel’s victory in the 1948 war of independence. Many were forcibly relocated to Gaza, including residents of communities that eventually became Jewish towns and villages along the border.
Dayan was hardly a supporter of the Palestinian cause. In 1950, after the hostilities had ended, he organized the displacement of the remaining Palestinian community in the border town of Al-Majdal, now the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Still, Dayan realized what many Jewish Israelis refuse to accept: Palestinians would never forget the nakba or stop dreaming of returning to their homes. “Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around us,’’ Dayan declared in his eulogy. “This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.’’
. . .
October 7 was the worst calamity in Israel’s history. It is a national and personal turning point for anyone living in the country or associated with it. Having failed to stop the Hamas attack, the IDF has responded with overwhelming force, killing thousands of Palestinians and razing entire Gazan neighborhoods. But even as pilots drop bombs and commandos flush out Hamas’s tunnels, the Israeli government has not reckoned with the enmity that produced the attack—or what policies might prevent another.”
5. Dollar Stores Show Capitalism at its Worst
“Dollar stores essentially expect you to work several jobs at once. Usually, there are only two workers running the entire store, and sometimes you’re stuck there by yourself. So you have to run around the building, dealing with problems as they come up. Just when the line of customers is longest, you’ll hear the crash! of a shattering pickle jar ten aisles away. You’re a cashier and a janitor, and a security guard, and a stocker of shelves, and an unloader of trucks—and you’re the complaints department when any of that goes wrong. At a Walmart or a Target, in contrast, there’s a full staff, and everyone has clearly-defined roles. At Dollar General, you do everything, all for one low, low price.
. . .
Dollar stores are extremely profitable for the companies that run them. In 2022, Dollar Tree (which, as of 2015, also owns the Family Dollar chain) reported a gross profit of $7.7 billion, while Dollar General made $10.8 billion. The sheer size of the dollar retail chains is staggering. There are more than 35,000 dollar stores across the United States, and more than 19,000 of them are Dollar Generals. (For comparison, that other sleazy retail giant that mistreats its workers, Walmart, has around 5,200 retail stores in the U.S., including Sam’s stores.) The number is rapidly growing, too. By some estimates, Dollar General opens three new stores every day, many of them in low-income rural areas where people have few other options for shopping or work. In 2023, the company even went international, opening its first location in Mexico. In the break room, we used to joke that if Elon Musk ever does land on Mars, he’ll find a Dollar General waiting to greet him.
. . .
Since 2014, at least 49 people have died in Dollar General stores, and 172 have been injured. The company is on OSHA’s list of “severe violators,” having racked up $21 million in fines for workplace safety issues since 2017. Meanwhile, OSHA has found more than 300 violations at Dollar Tree-owned stores, and officials say the company has demonstrated a “repeated and continued disregard for human safety,” often blocking fire exits and stacking boxes in haphazard piles that could topple and crush someone.
. . .
Knowing all this makes it especially disgusting that dollar stores try to portray themselves as a force for good in society. In this respect, they’re nothing if not brazen liars.”
6. A Safe Haven for Late Abortions
“For nearly a year, the photographer Maggie Shannon visited the clinic regularly with her Canon R5 camera. The clinic’s staff allowed Shannon in because they wanted to help lift some of the secrecy that surrounds later abortions. “Even within our own community” of reproductive-medicine practitioners, Nuzzo said, “later abortion is still kind of stigmatized.” (Exact numbers are hard to come by, but only about a dozen clinics in the country provide abortions after twenty-four weeks; Partners in Abortion Care offers them up to thirty-four weeks.) In the end, Nuzzo and Horvath were astonished by how often patients agreed to be photographed, albeit with their faces concealed. Many of them wanted others to understand how the obstacles placed in the way of abortion care had pushed their procedures later and later.
. . .
Some people pursue late abortions with wanted pregnancies, having just found out their fetuses have grave anomalies. Such was the case for Kate Cox, a Texas woman whose fetus was discovered to have a lethal genetic condition, and whose plan to have an abortion in state was recently thwarted by the Texas Supreme Court. Some patients have just been given their own diagnoses—of cancer, for instance. “They want to receive chemotherapy, and they’re, like, ‘I can’t do this. I want to save my own life,’ ” Horvath explained. Other women, she added, have had to assimilate devastating new facts—“like the fact that the person who got you pregnant turns out to be an abuser who beats the shit out of you.” There are also patients who are either too young to have a regular menstrual cycle or old enough to be approaching menopause, and did not realize until very late that they are pregnant.
One woman Shannon photographed, a thirty-six-year-old whom I’ll call Amanda, was seven months along when she came to the clinic. Several years earlier, Amanda had been given a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome, and doctors had told her that the condition made it very unlikely that she could conceive without in-vitro fertilization. Because of the aftereffects of recent weight-loss surgery—nausea when she felt too full—she didn’t even consider that she might be pregnant until almost thirty weeks. When a home test came back positive, Amanda was floored. She told me that she’d never wanted kids. She’d been sexually abused as a child, struggled with depression, and was living from paycheck to paycheck; the man with whom she’d gotten pregnant had no interest in a baby. “I was very much not in control of my own life,” she said.”