Weekly Picks – May 26, 2024

Credits (clockwise from top left): David Guttenfelder; Jesse Winter / The Narwhal; Current Affairs; Rizek Abdeljawad/ Xinhua via Getty Images; Cristina Gottardi; Hokyoung Kim; Shannon Stapleton / Reuters; monticelllo/ Getty.

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Not Your Childhood Library

“Andrea Hansen-Miller, a licensed clinical social worker, keeps drop-in hours at her office in downtown Minneapolis. To signal that she’s ready to begin, she sets two chairs outside her door, to create a makeshift waiting room, and turns on the lights. A wicker basket holds free hats, shoes, scarves, and gloves, and cabinets and a wardrobe rack are stocked with donated coats. Regulars often go straight to Hansen-Miller’s stash of granola bars and Tide Pods. “It gets them in here,” she says. “Then I can ask, ‘Where are you staying at night?’” Hansen-Miller, a native Minnesotan in her late thirties, played college volleyball, and is recognizable by her willowy height. She has an upper-ear piercing and wears aqua nail polish and fun socks. Once she learns a client’s name, she doesn’t forget it, even if she hasn’t seen the person in a while. The other day, she pressed a packet of Mott’s fruit snacks into the palm of a known diabetic. If someone asks for a transit pass, Hansen-Miller, thinking ahead to morning, may hand him two.

On a recent Friday, Hansen-Miller helped a new immigrant from Afghanistan with some paperwork, then greeted her next visitor, Robert Blood, a skinny, soft-spoken former cook with eyeglasses and a goatee. He had on a puffy jacket and wore a baseball cap over his shoulder-length hair. Blood had been mostly unhoused for about seven years when, last summer, Hansen-Miller helped him land a studio apartment on the tenth floor of a public-housing building downtown, for sixty-one dollars a month. He moved in on his fifty-eighth birthday. “Best present I could have gotten,” he said.

When a homeless person finally gets a place of his own, both sudden solitude and the presence of neighbors can be unsettling. Noise bothered Blood. At the moment, though, Hansen-Miller learned, he was more concerned about a power outage in his building: “I don’t know if everybody’s got their heat all the way up, or what.” It was late March. Forecasters were predicting six inches of snow that night and another foot starting Sunday. Blood worried that his food would be ruined if the electricity didn’t come back on soon. Hansen-Miller said, “The fridge! I didn’t even think about that.”

Blood’s precarious housing situation started with the deaths of his sister and his mother, a depressing period that was exacerbated by heavy drinking. He couldn’t afford to live by himself and gave up on roommates after sharing a two-bedroom rental with a personal-care aide and the aide’s client, who had a habit of relieving herself throughout the apartment. Blood had never spent a night on the street. Sometimes, he stayed at a shelter; more often, someone let him crash. Now he tried to repay that favor, but his lease forbade long-term visitors, and a recent house guest had tested his patience. “Is she still there?” Hansen-Miller asked.

“No,” Blood said. “And I wouldn’t want her back. She stole a bunch of my cups.” It irritated him that the guest would go grocery shopping for herself but never for the house. “It’s just little stuff,” he said. Hansen-Miller praised Blood for asking the woman to leave, saying, “It’s hard to set boundaries with apartments.”

Hansen-Miller’s next visitor was arriving. Blood stood and said goodbye. As he walked out, he passed cheerful displays of novels and children’s literature, and, in the lobby, a large bronze statue of Minerva, the goddess of justice and wisdom, shown cradling an open book. Hansen-Miller works in a public library.

. . .

The American Library Association rates the Hennepin County Library system one of the most robust in the country. In an annual study conducted by John Miller, the late president of Central Connecticut State University, Minneapolis consistently ranked among the nation’s most literate cities. Miller once said, “This isn’t about whether or not people can read, it’s about whether they do read.” Minnesota also votes big and blue. In five of the past seven Presidential races, the state has led the U.S. in voter turnout. An astonishing eighty per cent of eligible voters participated in the 2020 election.

A few of Minnesota’s smaller cities have witnessed the hatefulness that has befallen public libraries in other states, but Central has hosted drag-queen events and puts on an annual queer prom without incident. Joshua Yetman, the library system’s communications manager, told me, “Book bans aren’t even a question.” The people of Minneapolis, the Hennepin County seat, support their libraries so ardently that, in 2000, they voted to earmark a hundred and forty million dollars to build Central and improve the branches; voters tend to elect county leaders who are demonstrably committed to the library’s longevity. This year, Hennepin allocated seventy-six million dollars for its libraries—more than some counties’ entire operating budgets. “We don’t have to beg for money,” Yetman said.”

2. “Deny, denounce, delay”: The battle over the risk of ultra-processed foods

“When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.

Monteiro had noticed that although Brazilian households were spending less on sugar and oil, obesity rates were going up. The paradox could be explained by increased consumption of food that had undergone high levels of processing, such as the addition of preservatives and flavorings or the removal or addition of nutrients.

But health authorities and food companies resisted the link, Monteiro tells the FT. “[These are] people who spent their whole life thinking that the only link between diet and health is the nutrient content of foods…Food is more than nutrients.”

. . .

Studies of UPFs show that these processes create food—from snack bars to breakfast cereals to ready meals—that encourages overeating but may leave the eater undernourished. A recipe might, for example, contain a level of carbohydrate and fat that triggers the brain’s reward system, meaning you have to consume more to sustain the pleasure of eating it.

In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomized study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein—and gained weight.

The rising concern about the health impact of UPFs has recast the debate around food and public health, giving rise to books, policy campaigns, and academic papers. It also presents the most concrete challenge yet to the business model of the food industry, for whom UPFs are extremely profitable.

The industry has responded with a ferocious campaign against regulation. In part it has used the same lobbying playbook as its fight against labeling and taxation of “junk food” high in calories: big spending to influence policymakers.

. . .

In an echo of tactics employed by cigarette companies, the food industry has also attempted to stave off regulation by casting doubt on the research of scientists like Monteiro.

“The strategy I see the food industry using is deny, denounce, and delay,” says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a consultant for companies on the multisensory experience of food and drink.

So far the strategy has proved successful. Just a handful of countries, including Belgium, Israel, and Brazil, currently refer to UPFs in their dietary guidelines. But as the weight of evidence about UPFs grows, public health experts say the only question now is how, if at all, it is translated into regulation.”

3. It hurts, but it’s holy

“When I remember the British Empire, two scenes – two stage sets, really – come to mind. One is a courtroom in Uganda, when it was still a British protectorate. Joseph Kiwanuka, a battered but irrepressible editor, was being tried yet again for ‘criminal libel’ – the favourite charge used by the colonial authorities to deal with seditious newspapers. As the hearing concluded, the judge walked across to the prosecuting counsel (they were both white men). ‘How much would you like me to give him? Six months? Big fine?’ The prosecutor shook his head. ‘No, Jim, he couldn’t pay. We’d be OK with a couple of months and confiscating his printing press like we did last time.’ The judge did what he was told. Joe Kiwanuka was led away. The two white lawyers went off for lunch at the club.

The other vision is a tangle of black ironwork, an ancient lift shaft loud with clanks and groans in Denison House, near Victoria station. Here, in the final years of the empire, was a rookery of remarkable men and women whose life mission was to denounce the empire’s crimes, to give British journalists and politicians news they wouldn’t get from the Colonial Office, and to help the struggle of Britain’s colonial possessions towards independence. The lift hoisted visitors to the shabby offices of great causes. Among them was the Africa Bureau, led with arctic integrity by the Rev. Michael Scott, with Mary Benson – just as dedicated but warm and welcoming – by his side. Close by was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, run by Tommy Fox Pitt. A dignified, slightly military gentleman, Tommy had been a district officer on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) until he fell out with his colonial masters. His first offence was to encourage miners’ trade unions. Then, in the early 1950s, he rebelled against Britain’s appalling plan for a Central African Federation (this in effect created a second and vaster apartheid South Africa, placing the enormous black majorities of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland under the domination of the white-settler minority in Southern Rhodesia). Back in London, Tommy used the Aborigines’ Protection Society, founded in 1837, to help destroy the federation. It finally expired in 1963.

The relevance of those two memories is that they underline a point Sathnam Sanghera keeps making in Empireworld. At the outset, he warns against the ‘balance-sheet’ approach: was the empire on balance a good thing or a bad one? That way, he writes, one gets ‘dragged … into an enervating culture war’ that obliterates all nuance. Instead, he is interested in imperial contradictions and paradoxes. As those memories of the Uganda courtroom and Denison House help to illustrate, the British Empire imposed repressive governance but also bred the warriors (brown, black and white) who would overthrow it. By forcing million-strong population movements, the empire spread diseases, but also developed the medical technology to treat them. Game reserves and national parks were established to protect nature, but were founded to ensure that there would be enough animals to shoot for ‘sport’, and drastically degraded the lives of local people, by restricting traditional hunting and fresh settlement. The Brits introduced newspapers and books, but also censorship; they ‘dehumanised millions of Indian labourers … through indenture and laid the foundations of international labour laws’; they ‘spread democracy to large parts of the world’, but ‘sowed discord in ways that still destabilise many … regions of the planet’. And – here comes Denison House – ‘the British Empire was an incubator and propagator of white supremacy, as well as a forum in which humanitarians founded campaigns that liberated people from crude ethnic classification.’

. . .

Sanghera’s books confirm that there is a perception problem here. This is the glassy wall – some would say one-way mirror – that separates the colonised from the colonisers, the defeated and occupied from the victorious occupier. In France after 1940, even the most disaffected and pro-French Germans – and there were quite a few – had no real access to what the Paris crowds were thinking or feeling. In the same way, Brits have been surprised and annoyed to find that Indian and Irish people, though born long after these events, cannot easily move on from the 1919 Amritsar Massacre or from Bloody Sunday in Derry. But Sanghera’s background allows him to climb through this perceptual looking-glass and understand why the balance-sheet approach – ‘isolated blunders … tragic exceptions’ – doesn’t cut it. He has been slagged off for not being grateful enough to Britain for the enormous network of Indian railways (think of all those boastful ‘great railway journey’ TV programmes), and asserts that they were designed with British convenience and profit in mind, not Indian need, and that their transformation into an effective national system came after independence.

Nonetheless, it’s not only the British who cook up convenient delusions about the imperial past. For Narendra Modi, decolonisation means not only changes to street and city names, to official pageantry and the use of English, but repudiation of India’s Moghul-Muslim centuries as an earlier form of alien colonial suppression. In Barbados, Sanghera toured some of the old sugar plantations and found the guides reluctant to bring up the slavery economy that had made them so profitable. Visitors didn’t want to hear about it, or grieve over iron shackles. ‘So you whitewash it and you turn it into something more palatable,’ one (black) guide said. But he went on to describe the painful racism that endures in Barbadian society.

. . .

It hurts, but it’s holy: a duty and a destiny. This sanctity propaganda is one reason Sanghera finds the British so sulky when invited to discuss the empire.”

4. The Voyager Probes Were a Triumph of Collective Endeavor

“Voyager 1 last explored a planet in 1980. Its cameras have been kaput since 1990. The only data it has returned since then—particle counts, cosmic ray readings, magnetic field measurements—aren’t the sort that turn the public on. The spacecraft’s great feat these days is to fall through nothing toward nowhere at 14 times the speed of a rifle bullet. In a few more years its power source will die, and that will be that.

Yet millions of us still care a lot about this ungainly, obsolete machine. The twin Voyagers’ mission manager, Suzanne Dodd, calls them “humanity’s spacecraft,” and with good reason; if there was ever a people’s space shot, they’re it. Like our national parks and public libraries, they are a triumph of nonprofit collective endeavor. Their mission is not to claim, extract, or exploit resources or to humiliate rival superpowers, but to deliver a public good.

And unlike human space “explorers,” who can only set foot on ground that has already been surveyed at high resolution, the Voyager probes truly have revealed unknown worlds. Jupiter’s moon Io, pimpled with volcanoes spewing hundred-mile-high umbrellas of sulfur. Europa, hoarding more liquid water than Earth under a smooth shell like a cracked egg. Saturn, capped by a hexagonal storm bigger than Earth but neat as a honeycomb cell, and its finely-grooved ring system, wide enough to bridge the gap from Earth to the Moon but only about 30 feet thick. Saturn’s mega-moon Titan, with rains, rivers, and seas of ultracold natural gas under a dim ocher sky. All told, Voyager revealed 20 planets and major moons in detail for the first time. Until then we had no idea what a mad zoo of landscapes is rolling around over our heads—cryogenic dust geysers, red lava running under a sky spanned by Jupiter’s paisley glory, a whole world covered with snow. All pure, all wild.

These spacecraft—antique engines of wonder, still ticking 47 years after launch—are a glimpse of blue sky above the prison yard of high-tech capitalism. They suggest a relationship to technology different from today’s treadmill of ruthless manufacture, rapid obsolescence, barbarous disposal, and dubious net benefit. (For all their technological toys, surveys suggest Americans are no happier today than in 1946). Today, the average phone packs more computing power than a thousand Voyagers, but is assembled in a dystopian hive-factory by an army of disposable workers. It’s carbon-intensive to produce, the cloud resources behind its apps spew more CO2 every time we tap up a cool service, and it serves only 2.5 years before exploring the inside of a landfill. Over 5 billion phones, with all their gold, tantalum, tungsten, cobalt, and lithium, much of it destructively or illegally extracted, are thrown away each year.

A probe like Voyager 1 has a delightfully different product life cycle.”

5. Beyond Athens and Jerusalem

“When John McCain selected former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in 2008, it was the gift that kept on giving to the United States’ media and entertainment establishment.

For the mostly liberal chattering classes, her folksy mama bear affect, ignorance about basic geopolitical facts (the existence of two Koreas among them), and possible illiteracy were far more interesting than John McCain’s platform. Fifteen years later, Palin’s candidacy is far less amusing than it was to noughtie-era Daily Show writers, recognized instead as a pivotal moment in the emergence of movements that today constitute the New Right. From the Tea Partiers and Obama birthers to Trump stans, white nationalists, and anti-vaxxers, Sarah Palin walked so they could run (into the Capitol).

Outside observers peering into the abyss that is the New Right often envision it as a coherent force. The real divide, we hear, is between the conservative establishment – “respectable” Republicans of the George W. Bush type – and upstarts like J.D. Vance and lunatics like Marjorie Taylor Greene. If you’re able to forget the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, CIA black sites and the routinization of domestic surveillance, one might indeed prefer the oil-painting ex-president to Greene’s fleet of Jewish space lasers. But this divide is not the only fault line that runs through contemporary right-wing politics. Indeed, we find that the coalition of New Right Forces – a motley crew of techno-libertarians, America Firsters, post-liberals, economic nationalists, monarcho-fascists, vitalists, social conservatives, conspiracy theorists, incels, racists, and anti-Semites – is hardly proceeding in lockstep formation. In the words of one of its leading funders, Peter Thiel, the New Right is “a very ragtag Rebel Alliance. It’s like we have diversity on our side.”

Perhaps the most significant fissure within the Rebel Alliance has to do with capitalism, its social effects, and the purview of the state vis-à-vis the ‘free market.’ This raises a puzzling fact. How is it that Peter Thiel has thrown his weight behind both national conservatism, whose adherents argue that capitalism is undermining family formation and thus the traditional moral order, and the sort of amoral techno-monarchism increasingly popular in Silicon Valley? It was with this question in mind that I took a deep dive into the economic visions (hallucinations?) coming out of different quarters of the New Right, with an eye toward making sense of their contradictory messaging about the family, the nation, private enterprise, and governance. Looking beyond superficial similarities – chiefly cozy feelings toward actual or aspiring authoritarians and a burning hatred for all things woke – is both illustrative and frightening, because it helps reveal a political strategy that is significantly darker than usually realized. Understanding it requires looking more closely at Peter Thiel’s own political trajectory and his two pet projects: the national conservatism movement helmed by the Israeli-American political theorist, Yoram Hazony; and the neoreactionary monarchist one associated with tech bro-cum-blogger, Curtis Yarvin. Far from suggesting some sort of conservative synthesis, the growth of these two movements in recent years illustrates that the old battle between Jerusalem and Athens rages on.”

6. The Criminalization of Poverty Is Creating a More Violent World

“On April 22, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that focuses on whether unhoused—the term that has generally replaced “homeless”—people with no indoor shelter options can even pull a blanket around themselves outdoors without being subject to criminal punishment.

Before making its way to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court held that municipalities can’t punish involuntarily homeless people for merely living in the place where they are. This is exactly what the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, did when it outlawed resting or sleeping anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive in cold weather, even when no beds in shelters were available. The law makes it impossible for unhoused residents to stay in Grants Pass, effectively forcing them to either move to another city or face endless rounds of punishment. In Grants Pass, the punishment starts with a $295 fine that, if unpaid, goes up to $500, and can escalate from there to criminal trespass charges, penalties of up to 30 days in jail, and a $1,250 fine.

The issue before the court is whether such a law violates the Eighth Amendment’s restrictions against cruel and unusual punishment. The city is asking the court to decide that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t impose any substantive limit on what can be criminalized, so long as the punishment itself isn’t considered cruel and unusual. If so, municipalities across the nation would be free to make involuntary homelessness unlawful.

. . .

The Supreme Court’s decision could dramatically criminalize poverty and homelessness nationwide, especially if cities near Grants Pass, in the state of Oregon, and across the country, put in place similar restrictions.

Sadly, such a scenario is anything but far-fetched, given not just this Supreme Court but all too much of this country. Since the early 2000s, our nation has regularly turned to policing and “law and order” responses to social crises. Often wielded against poor and low-income communities in the form of fines, fees, and risks of jail time, such threats are regularly backed up by police in full body armor, using tactical gear and, in this century so far, hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment transferred directly from the Pentagon to thousands of police departments nationwide.

All of this has made the possibility of using violence and brute force more likely in relation to many situations, including the world of the unhoused. Most recently, of course, militarized police have swarmed campuses to help quell largely peaceful student protests over the war on Gaza. Consider it anything but ironic that when Northeastern University students were arrested for their Gaza encampment, they were taken to the same facilities where unhoused people were being processed during homeless encampment sweeps.”

7. A portrait of pollution around Canada’s busiest port

“Every day streams of toxic waste pour into Burrard Inlet, home to Canada’s largest port. These waters, at the northern extent of Vancouver, have nourished Tsleil-Waututh Nation (səlilwətaɬ) for millennia. Today, they are so polluted that public officials say shellfish are no longer safe to eat and people are regularly barred from swimming at local beaches.

There’s the cocktail of contaminants rain washes in from city streets. The sewage that pours in during big storms. And the mix of heavy metals and toxic chemicals the B.C. government allows corporations to dump into the water every single day: oil and grease, lead, copper and myriad chemicals melding with cloudy wastewater that can threaten marine life.

That’s just the pollution we know about. Video obtained by The Narwhal, which shows coal spilling off the side of a ship as it’s being loaded at Neptune Terminals late last year, raises questions about the frequency of spills and leaks along Burrard Inlet — and how often they go unreported.

Once home to lush estuaries and beaches plentiful with healthy food, the inlet is now a hub for global trade, facilitating the export of coal, petroleum products, potash and mountains of grain through the Port of Vancouver. It’s undergone a dramatic transformation that has unfolded through colonization. And, although the contamination from industry and surrounding cities is largely hidden beneath the water’s surface, it has had severe consequences.

. . .

But Tsleil-Waututh Nation is intent on rewriting the rules that allowed this waterway to wither.

“It’s always sustained our people, the inlet, and that was just obliterated,” Gabriel George, a member of Tsleil-Waututh Nation and director of the nation’s treaty, land and natural resources department, tells The Narwhal.

“If you could have a time capsule from the 1750s to now, you’d think you’re on another planet or something, in a toxic wasteland,” he says. “This was an old-growth, ancient cedar rainforest.”

Over the past several years, Tsleil-Waututh Nation has led efforts to better understand the extent of the contamination, pulling together the most comprehensive picture yet of water quality in the inlet. At the same time, the nation worked closely with the B.C. government to establish new, more stringent water quality objectives that, if met, could set the stage for Tsleil-Waututh people to safely harvest seafood from the inlet once again.

It’s a groundbreaking policy co-developed by a First Nation and provincial government. The challenge now is enforcing it on the ground.”

8. Gaza’s Stolen Healers

“It’s been two months since Osaid Alser has heard from his cousin, Khaled Al Serr, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis.

Before late March, they had been in regular contact — or as regular as the shredded communication infrastructure would allow. Al Serr had created a telemedicine WhatsApp group where he and Osaid, a surgical resident in the U.S., recruited doctors from stateside, the U.K., and Europe to give advice to their overstretched colleagues in Gaza.

. . .

Al Serr was a natural vessel for the collective medical knowledge of the group chat. “He always wanted to help out, always liked to use his hands, to kind of fix a problem and have an immediate impact,” according to Osaid.

In February, the Israeli military invaded Nasser Hospital. The attack left the hospital hollowed out, just one of the destroyed health care centers in a medical system savaged by an overwhelming caseload and a relentless military assault by Israel.

Still, Al Serr maintained some optimism. His last post on Instagram was uploaded in mid-March, a short video showing the exterior of the hospital from the day before, captioned with a triumphant message:

Finally!! After more than a month of cutting electricity in Naser hospital, our staff was able to fix the generator and get the electricity again to Nasser Hospital. For the last two weeks, we are trying to clean and prepare the hospital’s departments to reopen the hospital again.

Six days later, on March 24, Israeli forces stormed the hospital again. Osaid had asked a few days earlier if Al Serr was alright. No response ever came. It was their last exchange.

His relatives believe that Khaled Al Serr, along with what was left of the hospital’s dwindling staff, was taken prisoner by Israel.

As early as November, reports emerged of doctors being detained and going missing in north Gaza. According to the World Health Organization, at least 214 medical staff from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military. In early May, the detention and alleged torture of medical staff from Gaza made headlines when Israeli authorities announced the death of Adnan Al-Bursh, a well-known surgeon and the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. After being taken into custody in December, officials said Al-Bursh died in April while in Ofer Prison, an Israeli detention facility in the occupied West Bank.

“Dr. Adnan’s case raises serious concerns that he died following torture at the hands of Israeli authorities. His death demands an independent international investigation,” Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, said in a statement last week. “The killing and detention of healthcare workers is not a legitimate method of warfare. They have a legitimate and essential role to care for sick and wounded persons during times of conflict.”

Al-Bursh is one of at least 493 Palestinian medical workers who have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the Ministry of Health. The Israel Defense Forces has systematically targeted hospitals from the north to the south of the strip, claiming that Hamas operates in the facilities. Medical staff in Gaza’s hospitals have repeatedly denied this claim. This week, Israeli forces have launched new attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital in the north, with reports on Wednesday and Thursday of medical staff being detained from Al Awda.

. . .

Those Palestinians lucky enough to be released from imprisonment offer harrowing glimpses of what happens inside Israeli detention centers.”

9. Nova Scotia’s Billion-Dollar Lobster Wars

“Not so long ago, good lobster could be found closer to the city. Historically, there were strong harvests as far south as New Jersey. But, in the past thirty years, global warming has pushed lobster populations to cooler seas. As the industries in Long Island and Massachusetts collapsed, the waters around Nova Scotia became the most productive lobster breeding grounds on Earth. For Canadian fishermen, the boom has been lucrative: since the mid-nineties, the harvest has more than doubled, to ninety-eight thousand metric tons a year, and global demand has surged. Canada now catches about one and a half billion dollars’ worth of lobster a year, roughly triple America’s output.

Private-equity firms and seafood conglomerates have swallowed many of North America’s fisheries. But, in Nova Scotia, most lobstermen are independent. The vast majority of the harvest is taken within fifteen miles of the coast, in inshore waters, where large corporations are forbidden to fish. (The closest they can get is the offshore zone, which begins almost sixty miles from the shore.) The heart of the inshore fishery is a zone called Lobster Fishing Area 34, which comprises Saint Mary’s Bay and much of the greater Bay of Fundy. For decades, these waters have been dominated by British Canadians and a tightly knit enclave of Acadians, the descendants of French émigrés who settled in the area in the seventeenth century. In the popular imagination, these inshore lobstermen—who fish from their own boats, pass down licenses to their children, and populate quaint villages in an area that has become known as the French Shore—symbolize an important holdout against the Goliaths of big business. But many inshore fishermen have also resisted a recent entrant to the power struggle: the Mi’kmaq, the most populous group of Indigenous people in Atlantic Canada.”

10. Can Sports Survive Climate Change?

“It’s been six years since the IPCC released its 2018 report warning that mean global temperatures would rise past 1.5 Celsius unless drastic action was taken by 2030. While climate change is already impacting all aspects of our lives, there is one area where relatively rapid and meaningful steps could be taken, but have yet to materialize: sports. Rising temperatures, seas, and emissions all call into question the sustainability of current sports practices. Can athletes continue to compete outdoors under current game conditions in scorching climates? What happens to athletes from island nations threatened by rising sea levels? How can mega-events like the Olympics and the carbon footprints left behind by associated construction and tourism continue to be justified? Professor Madeleine Orr joins Edge of Sports to discuss these questions and other topics addressed in her book, Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports.”