Book Review: "Breve historia del Sahara Occidental" ("A Brief History of Western Sahara") by Isaías Barreñada

Breve historia del Sahara Occidental (A Brief History of Western Sahara) (2022)
Isaías Barreñada
142 pages

Peace is not just the absence of war, it is also justice.
(La paz no es solo la ausencia de guerra, es también justicia.) (66)

Over the course of the twentieth century, peoples in colonies across the globe protested in pursuit of – and often fought protracted and bloody wars for – the right of self-determination. By the turn of the twenty-first century, many of these national liberation movements had successfully achieved independence, with most of the colonies that remained settling into some form of relatively stable relationships with their distant masters, as protectorates or territories.

In a few places, however, colonial conflicts have remained unresolved. One such disputed region is a strip of land along the north-western Atlantic coast of Africa. In his book A Brief History of Western Sahara (Breve historia del Sahara Occidental), political scientist Isaías Barreñada summarizes the events that led to the current situation in Western Sahara, and explains the conflicting interests that have both contrived to frustrate its resolution and left it under-the-radar in terms of global awareness.

Based on his biography in the book, Barreñada brings significant experience to the topic. As a professor of International Relations at Complutense University of Madrid, he has been deeply engaged in the study and analysis of events in Western Sahara and the Middle East, including serving as a member of the Observatorio Universitario International del Sahara Occidental (International University Observatory of Western Sahara).

In his overview of the colonial history of the region, Barreñada notes that Spain petitioned for, and was granted, authority over it in 1885, during a diplomatic conference in Berlin held to establish the partitioning of Africa. Though not from this book, the two images below demonstrate the extent and character of the plundering of the continent at that conference, one showing the resulting partition and the other an editorial comic from the time that already then recognized the imperious posture of the European powers.

Spanish interest in the coastal region was primarily “geostrategic: to avoid that another European colonial power settle across from the [Spanish province of] the Canary Islands, which could put into question Spanish sovereignty over that archipelago.” (20) Barreñada notes that although the Spanish colonial period in the Western Sahara was hardly benign, Spain’s engagement was relatively limited, in-line with its goal of occupying the region largely as a preventative measure.

By the 1960’s, as significant numbers of European colonies became independent nations, Spain’s geostrategic reasons for staying in Western Sahara had waned; unfortunately for the Sahrawis, however, Moroccan interest in their land grew during this period. Moroccan officials began publicly claiming their country’s supposed historical connections to Western Sahara and, with increasing adamance, claiming their right to it.

In the mid-1970’s, the Spanish government declared their intent to decolonize the region and to hold a referendum on independence. But the referendum was never held; taking advantage of Spain’s distraction during its transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, Morocco launched a military invasion into Western Sahara, and Spain withdrew precipitously, signing a treaty with Morocco in which it ceded control of the territory. Barreñada repeatedly refers back to this missed moment of opportunity for the Sahrawis, when Spain retreated from the region in the face of Moroccan aggression, failing to follow through on its commitment to carry out the referendum on independence.

Over the balance of the text, Barreñada explores how, from the 1970’s on, the situation in Western Sahara became increasingly complex. The Sahrawis, from their origins as Bedouin tribes, coalesced around the desire for an independent state, while the Moroccans invested heavily to try and bribe the Sahrawis into accepting Moroccan rule. During this period, Western powers such as Spain and the European Union, as well as the United States, have demonstrated an unwillingness to risk international stability for a region of the world they cared little about. And, with the West ambivalent, the United Nations has proven impotent to engage in defending the Sahrawis’ right to self-determination.

Barreñada notes the challenges faced by the Sahrawi national liberation movement, including most critically the dispersed nature of their population, split between the Moroccan occupied territory, Algerian refugee camps, and the remaining free portion of their land. Despite their dispersed population, Sahrawi’s have managed to make common cause in the fight against the occupation. Nonetheless, they struggle to counter the power of the Moroccan state and to capture the attention of a world that has averted its gaze.

On the other side of the conflict, the Moroccan regime faces both growing, armed resistance from the Sahrawis, but also challenges at home. The government’s spending in Western Sahara has begun to trigger dissatisfaction among Moroccans who would prefer to see the money used at home, while the cumulative investment over so many years makes it ever more difficult to pull out and admit having wasted so much money and effort. Perhaps most critically, the regime faces the difficulty of walking away from a narrative built over half century among Moroccans that the Western Sahara region is and always has been a part of greater Morocco.

As a part of his analysis, Barreñada compares the situation in Western Sahara to another ongoing, and much more prominent dispute, that between the Palestinians and Israel. In that context, he notes that “the term intractable conflicts has been popularized to describe conflicts of long duration (protracted), not currently resolved, and complex, if not impossible to manage to resolution.” He points out, however, that this term “implies not just a sense of complexity, but also of fatalistic “irresolvability” that prejudges the possibility of resolution.” (33) And, in the Western Sahara in particular, he argues against giving in to the fatalistic conclusion that the situation is intractable and for the will to be found to allow the Sahrawis their right to self-determination as enshrined in the UN charter.

In A Brief History of Western Sahara, Barreñada summarizes the colonial history of the Sahrawi people, and provides a comprehensive review of the challenges of finding a peaceful resolution to their pursuit of independence. In clear and engaging prose, he lays out his view of how Spain and the international community have failed the Sahrawi people, and he concludes with a powerful warning regarding the potential implications of this failure for the global order: 

The international community’s consent and permissiveness to the politics of force of certain countries is contributing to the perpetuation of conflicts. This inaction of the international community makes it co-responsible and, worse yet, runs the risk of leading to a presumption of the failure and inefficiency of international rights. (97) 

(In that context, one can wonder how the Sahrawi’s view the West’s active engagement against aggression in Ukraine, relative to its passiveness in the face of similar aggression in Western Sahara.)

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Other notes and information:

The book has many helpful appendices, including: a chronology of events in Western Sahara; a comprehensive bibliography; a list of key acronyms; a list of documents regarding the conflict, with links to several of them; links to websites of organizations engaged in the conflict; and, portions of documents related to the conflict.

A review of the book by Luz Gómez appeared in the Babelia section of the El País newspaper under the title <i>Breve historia del Sáhara Occidental’, la recolonización de la descolonización</i> ("A Brief History of Western Sahara," the recolonization of decolonization").

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of an English translation of the book being available at this point.

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Book Review: "Tratado de la infidelidad" (Treatise on Infidelity) by Julián Herbert and León Plascencia Ñol

Tratado de la Infidelidad ("Treatise on Infidelity") (2010)
Julián Herbert and León Plascencia Ñol (1971, 1968)
119 pages

Julián Herbert and León Plascencia Ñol explore some of the more unusual corners of human relationships in their collection of short stories Tratado de la Infidelidad (Treatise on Infidelity). No simple story arcs here of boy meets girl, and after a bit of conflict they fall in love.

In the opening story, a man travels to Lisbon to renew his relationship with a married woman, trysts that carried on through the end of her first marriage and that they are now resuming during her second. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, however, and when their rekindled passion leads him to stray from the strict rules he has set for himself in such relationships, troubles soon follow.

In Gymnopedias, a thirty-year-old man in Mexico who’s never had a girlfriend is approached in a bar by a sixteen-year-old girl who had been part of a German volleyball team traveling across Mexico playing matches. She abandoned her team when the time came to return home, and has been wandering across Mexico, picking up guys who will support her.

Several of the stories in the second half of the collection feature a loosely interconnected set of characters and range from a truly bizarre exchange about cats to a story in diary format, in which a man who works as a photographer records his profoundly unbounded relationship with a dancer. She seems to have no inhibitions, and has become at once his lover and at the same time a kind of muse for his photography. It could be said that unbounded is perhaps not the most appropriate description for some of their myriad activities…

I read this book in Spanish, and admittedly struggled with a lot of the slang. As in most any language, there are, not surprisingly, a wide variety of words for various body parts that figure prominently in sexual relationships. I’m not aware of an English translation of the book, but a reasonable level of Spanish, and a willingness to dig around on the internet for the meanings of the slang used, will allow a reader to enjoy it. In return, these stories offer up a piquant look into various corners of the broad range of modern relationships.

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Other notes and information:

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Book Review: "Elder Race" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Elder Race (2021)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
201 pages

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” 

Arthur C. Clarke

As writer Adrian Tchaikovsky’s science fiction novel Elder Race opens, Lynesse, the Fourth Daughter of the Queen, has come of age, yet remains entranced by the myths of her childhood – stories of heroes, monsters and magic. And so, when refugees begin streaming into the kingdom from distant lands telling of a demon that steals minds, and her mother downplays the danger, Lynesse decides that she has a duty to find a way to defeat this advancing evil. Recalling stories of a sorcerer named Nyrgoth Elder, who had once helped her great-grandmother defeat another threat to the kingdom, she journeys with a trusted companion to his home, a massive tower high in the mountains, to plead for his aid.

Nyr, as he refers to himself, reluctantly agrees to accompany Lynesse and her friend on their quest. As the three set out however, it quickly becomes clear that before they can face down the threat beyond the horizon, they must first overcome the vast gulf in understanding that lies between them. Tchaikovsky deftly develops the relationship between the young, impassioned, and headstrong Lyn and the older, world-weary and ambivalent Nyr; by alternating chapters between the two as narrators, he allows readers into the mind of each, revealing their wildly disparate views of the world around them, the situations they face, and one another.

Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of Lynesse and Nyr, allowing them their frailties and insecurities along with their strengths and fundamental dignity, leads us to care deeply about them. And by having them only cautiously and haltingly build their relationship as they travel ever closer to the unknown danger, when Nyr suddenly comes to deeply appreciate Lyn for the first time – her mindset and motivations – and reveals “I feel my heart break, in a way that I would never be able to fix, not even if I took it out right now and tinkered with it” (149), my heart broke too, as a reader, at the power of his moment of clarity.

Along with brilliant character development, Tchaikovsky does a wonderfully convincing job of world building. And he does this without padding the story with action and events to fill in the backstory, instead distilling Elder Race into a tightly-crafted, powerful tale of the mysterious intersection between myth and reality, legend and history. And, in the end, we find that Clarke’s maxim about technology and magic has no end, no matter how much we learn. Somehow both a frightening and thrilling realization.

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Other notes and information:

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Book Review: "Age of Anger: A History of the Present" by Pankaj Mishra

Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017)
Pankaj Mishra (1969)
406 pages

Those who perceive themselves as left or pushed behind by a selfish conspiratorial minority can be susceptible to political seducers from any point on the ideological spectrum, for they are not driven by material inequality alone. (112)

With the conclusion of the Cold War in the early 1990’s, Western nations celebrated an end of history moment, believing that liberal democracy and free market economics had prevailed, and would inexorably expand across the globe. The celebration was short-lived, however, as since the turn of the century the West has come to face seemingly existential threats, including externally from a violent strain of Islamic fundamentalism, and internally from aggressive far-right nationalists pursuing political power.

These two specific threats have triggered myriad theories as to their origins – including, for example, religious fanaticism or colonial anger for the former, and cultural or social frustrations for the latter. And such an attribution of separate, particular motivations to each can seem natural; it certainly reflects a general tendency to do so for myriad similar uprisings historically. In his thought-provoking book Age of Anger, however, Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra dismisses this identification of distinct causes for these and other eruptions of mass violence.

He postulates instead a more comprehensive explanation, arguing that the motivation for these kinds of events originates out of a frustration felt by large segments of the global population who find that a successful elite has rigged the system against them. Referring to this frustration as ressentiment (a term coined by Nietzsche), Mishra describes its present-day incarnation as arising because

[People’s] evidently natural rights to life, liberty and security, already challenged by deep-rooted inequality, are [now further] threatened by political dysfunction and economic stagnation …. The result is, as [Hannah] Arendt feared, a ‘tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else’ …. An existential resentment of other people’s being, caused by an intense mix of envy and sense of humiliation and powerlessness, … [which] poisons civil society and undermines political liberty, and is presently making for a global turn to authoritarianism. (14)

 Mishra traces the origins of this ressentiment to the transformation initiated during the 18th century age of Enlightenment, which led to

the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which, emerging in Britain and France, spread itself over the old world of Asia and Africa and the new world of America and Oceania …. The changes brought about by two coalescing revolutions, the French and the industrial, marked a sharp break in historical continuity; they ushered in a new era of global consciousness. (50-51) 

Certainly, one can acknowledge that these changes provided many with new opportunities to improve their position in society and, as has been argued by Steven Pinker and others, have led to a significant reduction in global poverty over the past several centuries. Mishra argues that during this same period however, it has also become clear that the systems that replaced the earlier aristocracies have led to “grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power [which] have created humiliating new hierarchies,” (13) leading to deeply felt frustration due to the “intensely competitive human desire for convergence.” The result has been his age of anger – a nearly continuous string of populist uprisings over the past several centuries, which are best explained as motivated by ressentiment, “rather than [the traditional focus on] religious, cultural, theological and ideological difference." (50)

Having established his thesis, Mishra spends the balance of the book exploring its origins in Enlightenment philosophy, and its subsequent evolution and implications. His tracing of both the arguments among philosophers of the Enlightenment period, and later the reaction of the German Romanticists to the Enlightenment transformation, can require a careful reading to follow the plot he lays out – in part because of the nature of the topic, but also because his sentences can at times be dense and wandering; but the reader’s reward is a coherent and convincing interpretation of the history of the past few centuries that explains much about our present-day social, economic, and political challenges.

Strikingly – though perhaps not surprisingly – people’s fundamental inability to anticipate the full impact of their policy prescriptions plays a central role in the narrative. From the Enlightenment on, one group would propose a way to change society, in the hope of improving it, only to have their counterparts a generation or two later experience, and have to react to, the unintended consequences of the application of the earlier proposals in the real world – blowback on a civilizational scale, as each period’s attempts to fix or adapt to the problems they have inherited only creates new problems for the future.

Thus, for example, the shift from an aristocratic to a meritocratic society championed by the Enlightenment philosophers was intended to allow people to flourish socially and economically, outside of the rigid constraints of nobility and royalty. Mishra notes, however, that 

[their] new society, though free of irrational old hierarchies, wasn’t meant to be democratic. Liberty primarily meant freedom for social mobility for the man of talent [and] means. … Hierarchy would still mark the new society: the mass of the people would remain necessarily subordinate to the authentically enlightened at the top. (59)

Not surprisingly, the mass of the people, once they became aware of the possibility of political, social and economic liberty outside the context of the aristocracy, were unwilling to simply cede such rights, and attendant benefits, to some small group of men of talent and means. And the likelihood of this resulting in anger was, Mishra points out, already recognized during the Enlightenment period. He describes how the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau challenged the Enlightenment philosophers on the point, predicting the unrest to come:

[He] understood the moral and spiritual implications of the rise of an international commercial society, and … the deep contradictions in a predominantly materialist ethic and a society founded on individuals enviously emulating the rich and craving their privileges. … [He] pointed out that … while promising freedom and equality, [it] did much to hinder them … [and] that the individual assertion mandated by modern egalitarian society could amount in practice to domination of other individuals; he foresaw its pathologies, flaws and blind spots, which made certain negative historical outcomes likely in practice. (110) 

The problems Rousseau described have, in fact, played out over the past several centuries since the Enlightenment, resulting in a series of revolutions by masses of people reacting to the divergence between their expectations and their day-to-day experience.

The first, and perhaps most transformative of these was, according to Mishra, the French Revolution. Beyond overthrowing the monarchy, it evolved into a populist uprising that led to the development and widespread propagation beyond France of democratic ideals based on the concept that liberty and equality were rights for all, rather than only the elite few. 

The revolutionary tradition with its concepts of democracy, the pursuit of liberty, and equality moved quickly from the economically developed and politically complex ancien régimes of the Atlantic West to the simpler ancien régimes of Prussia, Austria and Russia, before taking root in Asia and Africa. The late eighteenth-century plea for constitutional monarchy from a small minority of property-owning bourgeois escalated into mass movements for republican democracy and universal suffrage, and, eventually, into demands for the abolition of private property and full collectivization. (51)

 Mishra dedicates a significant part of the text to the work of one of the earliest groups to offer a countervailing view to the rational, scientific view of the Enlightenment, the German Romantic philosophers. In reaction to people “feeling marginalized by the sophisticated socio-economic order emerging in Western Europe, and its aggressive rationalization and individualism” (169), the German Romanticists advocated instead for a focus on individual cultural heritage.

But, just as the Enlightenment philosophers failed to imagine how their prescription for a meritocratic society could become an expectation of broad liberty and equality for the masses, Mishra describes how the Romantic movement failed to anticipate that their focus on national cultural heritage could transform into an aggressive nationalism. Leaders eager to cement their power quickly learned how to turn celebration of national identity into a hatred of the other, rallying populations around a visceral antagonism toward other nations and cultures. Mishra points out that “an early critic of nationalism noticed its malign dependencies on various enemies for [its] self-definition.” (206) In fact, in rallying people around this hatred of outsiders:

demagogues were helped by the repeated failure of liberal-bourgeois democracy to respond to the masses of people struggling with the fear and uncertainty provoked by the vast and opaque process of modernization. From the 1870s onwards … a suspicion intensified across Europe that parliamentary democracy, easily manipulated by elites with sectarian interests, was deceitful, or at least incapable of achieving general well-being. (235) 

Not surprisingly, the hatred these demagogues fomented led to a series of increasingly destructive and deadly wars.

The ramifications of the deep-seated frustration that has inevitably followed in the wake of the shift to a meritocratic society have continued into the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, including in the communist revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere, in the religious ferment that led to revolution in Iran and the development of ISIS and al Qaeda, and in the rise of white nationalists in the US, as well as other hyper-nationalist groups globally. However different their particular paths, the motivations for each of these can be more profitably understood, in Mishra’s analysis, as founded on the ressentiment of the masses of people who support them. (An interesting point to note is that, even as one can celebrate the abatement of global poverty and so of inequality in some global sense, most individuals end up focusing on and reacting to the increasing inequality in their particular country.)

Thus, according to Mishra, “the repellant rhetoric of ISIS” (81) and their claims that their fight is all about religious differences with the West should not be taken at face value. Rather, the leaders of Islamic fundamentalist movements have mimicked past demagogues who, while espousing a convincing narrative about the others to be hated, in reality have simply played off the fundamental social and economic frustrations of their populations. And this explains, as well, how seemingly successful Islamist college graduates become terrorists – the key is to not assume that some level of material success trumps deep-seated social and cultural frustrations.

In a similar manner, the fertile ground for explosive anger provided by these frustrations can be seen in the particular narratives spun by leaders of both fascist and communist movements in the 20th century. In Mishra’s view, the rise of communism becomes a natural outgrowth of this anger, an attempted path forward to resolve the visible shortcomings of the liberal democratic, meritocratic system. Again, Mishra does not defend communism, any more than he does Islamic Fundamentalism or other such responses to the liberal democratic political and economic order; his point here is to demonstrate how the appearance of these revolutions is inevitable given the apparent, ever-present failures of the system that grew out of the Enlightenment in Western Europe.

Mishra’s vision of ressentiment as an inherent outcome of the industrial and materialist civilization also changes the nature of the present-day discourse over the sustainability of capitalism, or whether sufficiently regulated capitalism can be made to work; such questions suddenly become moot. Instead, in his analysis, it is the fundamental existence of a system based on rational, meritocratic competition that inherently lays the groundwork for its own failure. Referencing again the thinking of Rousseau, Mishra notes that

a power lacking theological foundations or transcendent authority, and conceived as power over other competing individuals, [is] inherently unstable. It could only be possessed temporarily; and it condemned the rich and poor alike to a constant state of ressentiment and anxiety. (327) 

With the Enlightenment, society became unmoored, and the many and varied attempts to-date to find an alternative path to a stable, sustainable social, political and economic structure have failed to establish a workable solution.

Admittedly, Mishra doesn’t bring forth any easy answers in his book. Certainly, he’s not advocating a return to aristocracy; he’s simply pointing out that the shift away from a stable, ordered society with a strict social and religious hierarchy, into a world order in which it was claimed that everyone had the possibility of being free and equal, combined with a highly competitive, zero-sum economic system, has led to a profound frustration, and generated an anger that has inevitably, and repeatedly, boiled over. One can certainly wish that he came with solutions; but a useful service can be simply to make everyone clear on the nature of the problem. This Mishra does quite effectively.

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Other notes and information:

As a specific example of how the Enlightenment proposition on equality reached far beyond its intended audience of <i>men of means</i>, as described above, a quote from Thomas Piketty's <u>A Brief History of Equality</u>:

At the end of the 1780s, the colony [of Saint-Domingue, modern-day Haiti] had more than 470,000 slaves (90 percent of the population), 28,000 Whites (5 percent), and 25,000 <i>m&eacute;tis</i> and free Blacks (5 percent). ... 

The system [of slavery] was in a phase of accelerated expansion when the French Revolution broke out.  In 1789-1790, free Blacks claimed the right to vote and to participate in assemblies.  This seemed logical, given the resounding proclamations regarding equal rights that were being made in Paris, but they were refused that right.  The slave uprising began in August 1791, after a meeting ... in which thousands of maroons took part.... (70-71)

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Book Review: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" by Annie Proulx

Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999)
Annie Proulx (1935)
283 pages

In Annie Proulx’s collection of short stories Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the state’s rugged rangelands not only provide the setting, but also play a central role in events. The farmstead owners and ranch hands in these stories find themselves in an often bitter struggle against a land prone to extremes; and, those who escape to the city or the far-flung rodeo circuit fair little better, indelibly connected to the land they have left behind.

Proulx (/ˈpruː/, I had to look it up...) characterizes the unremitting force of this land at the heart of all of these stories in the powerful opening lines of People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, a tale of two families who arrive to Wyoming from elsewhere in the country looking for a fresh start, and who, through inscrutable twists of fate, come to cross paths in a violent reckoning of frontier justice:

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bride overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (97)

The opening story of the collection, The Half-Skinned Steer, features an octogenarian who left Wyoming as a young man, escaping his father’s struggling ranch and never going back. Learning of the death of his brother, who had remained home and taken over the ranch, he decides to drive for the funeral, from his east coast home. The trip leaves plenty of time for his thoughts to drift into a morass of recollections about his last days on the ranch; but, as he at last approaches his boyhood home, his dark reminiscences become manifest in a natural world that seems to rise up to greet him.

Many readers will recognize the final story in the collection from the well-known film it spawned of the same title: Brokeback Mountain. Two down-on-their-luck ranch hands in their late teens hire on “as herder and camp tender” (254) for a sheep operation; the pair are tasked with herding the sheep up into the summer grazing lands on the eponymous range while keeping their charges safe from predators. Having first met when they hired in, they come to find each other welcome companions, and as the summer goes on the isolated meadows allow their intimacy to grow in ways that surprise both of them, and that leaves them profoundly connected well beyond that summer. They struggle to adapt to their subsequent lives off the mountain, however, in a society that would violently react to knowledge of their relationship.

The tension between the pair’s relationship and the expectations of the community they live in highlights a theme that runs through many of the stories in this collection. As Proulx writes in Pair a Spurs, Wyoming’s stark and unpredictable landscape has bred a stubbornly resilient populace, one that has adopted an “unwritten motto, take care a your own damn self” (149). But this celebrated independent streak only goes so far – stray outside the bounds of expected behavior and the community will all too quickly engage aggressively in your business, your independence be damned.

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Other notes and information:

The book is sprinkled through with a half dozen or so gorgeous painting by William Matthews, such as the one below.

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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Book Review: "Small Wonder" by Barbara Kingsolver

Small Wonder (2002)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
269 pages

Traumatic events have a way of focusing the mind, revealing to a person what really matters to them. For author Barbara Kingsolver, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 appear to have had just such a clarifying impact. Asked the following day “to write a response” to them, she ended up producing several essays that together helped her process the horror of what happened by examining connections to the larger challenges and complexities of our present day, global civilization. The resulting pieces, along with others that followed and some earlier essays that touched on the same issues, eventually came together in the book Small Wonder.

Kingsolver reveals the themes that tie together the broad range of topics in this collection, and her goal in addressing them, in the eponymous opening essay: 

Political urgencies come and go, but it’s a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding. (21) 

In each essay, Kingsolver strives to “raise up a yell across the fence” on issues typically shrouded and clouded by ignorance and often bad faith arguments. Her knowledge and concern ranges widely, from the continued environmental degradation of our planet to the tragic short- and long-term devastation that war imparts on the vanquished – as well as the putative victors, from the risks of modern agricultural practices to the false narratives around poverty in the U.S.

The intersection of the environment and agri-business takes center stage in A Fist in the Eye of God, in which Kingsolver explores the dangers of genetically modified seeds. She dismisses as short-sighted the typical arguments made in their support: their supposed importance for feeding the world’s growing population, and the claim that they pose no health concerns; such assertions, she argues, fail to acknowledge the dangers of the loss of genetic diversity caused by the shift to manufactured seeds. Over millennia, plants have developed a built-in robustness to changing conditions – in years that are cooler or hotter, calmer or windier than others, the genetic variation in natural seeds will mean that some percentage will grow into plants that can survive in such conditions. By contrast, while GMO seeds may have greater productivity in a normal year, they will be less capable of adapting to the vagaries of the climate over the long run.

Compounding this lack of robustness to varying conditions, some producers of such seeds have maneuvered to protect their investment by adding genetic modifications that don’t allow the resulting plant to create viable seeds. She points out that farmers using such seed cannot follow the ancient practice of holding back a portion of their harvest for the next year’s planting; instead, they need to buy new seeds each year. Thus, farmers must earn sufficient money from the current crop to afford the next year’s, leading to another kind of lack of robustness for farmers, as a bad crop year or falling harvest prices can leave them unable to pay for the new seed. This tension between the profit focus of seed manufacturers and its impacts on farmers is part of a larger dynamic succinctly captured by Colin Tudge, in his book The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact: “... the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.”

For Kingsolver, the bottom line is that, given the bountiful outcome provided by nature after millennia of evolution, humankind should take care “to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer’s whip and chair, but with … reverence.” (108)

In the essay Marking a Passage, Kingsolver turns to her hometown and her vocation as a writer, lamenting the closing of a local, beloved, independent bookstore, one that she notes was important in the success of her first novel. Her description of “those sad last weeks of its closing sale” (221) reminded me of my own feelings at the loss of such a bookstore I had long frequented, Shaman Drum. Right up to the end, I was, as Kingsolver writes, “banking on a miracle” (221) that it remain open; I recall asking the cashier almost pleadingly, as I paid closing sale prices for some books, If I pay full price will it enable you to stay in business?.

Linking the shuttering of her favored local bookstore to broader societal implications, Kingsolver makes a plea to put “an extra dollar or two back into our hometown’s economy, rather than sending it off to a distant, faceless conglomerate.” (220) It can feel quixotic to fight back against the rise of such “conglomerates,” but her arguments resonated with me. I have my own small way of pushing back on them: using the Amazon search engine to look up information about a book, but then jumping over to my local bookstore’s website to order the book from them – really, how often does one need next day delivery on a book?

Across the essays collected in Small Wonder, Kingsolver touches on environmental, political, and social topics that continue to roil the world today, two decades after these essays first appeared. Generally, she begins locally, setting the stage by describing a very personal scene or moment around or outside her home, or on a trip she has taken into nature, before pivoting to explore the global concerns it implicates. Thus, her daughter’s discovery on a vacation trip to the beach that a beautiful shell she had hoped to add to her collection still has its hermit crab occupant becomes a mediation on the too often willful neglect of concern for animals; and, visits to the Yucatan peninsula and to the wild Pacific coast of Costa Rica become jumping off points to describe the loss of wilderness forest and critical animal habitat, respectively.

As a trained biologist, Kingsolver brings a strong, technical training to accompany her wonderful abilities as a writer. This combination enables her essays to be persuasive clarion calls for change in how we treat both the natural world and one another, presented within engaging prose at once demanding and compassionate. In more than one essay she acknowledges her own challenges and imperfections in fully abiding by the way of life she calls us to.

Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we’re worth, that we’re in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don’t come from it, we’re not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It’s deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we’re constrained by the laws of biology. (226)

Ultimately, however, she returns consistently to her key message: we must all constantly strive to treat our world as a gift that requires our care, not a personal play pen for us to exploit.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson

Termination Shock (2021)
Neal Stephenson (1959)
708 pages

A recently released report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes disturbingly clear that nations have failed to take the actions necessary to address global warming, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres lamenting “a litany of broken climate promises.”   Certainly, the debate in the United States over climate change has become so filled with rancor and bad faith arguments that little, if any, nuanced public – or political –discussion about it (or much else, it must be said) appears possible. Globally, while the question of the reality of climate change may be less divisive than in the US, the political will to act has been, for the most part, just as weak.

In his novel Termination Shock, author Neal Stephenson projects this lack of political engagement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as persisting into the coming decades, even as the resulting impacts continue to worsen. He also portrays the governmental abrogation of responsibility as symptomatic of a broader unwillingness of politicians to control the actions of the rich and powerful, particularly in the U.S.

As a consequence, even as rising temperatures leave parts of the world increasingly inhospitable, and rising sea levels threaten ever more islands and coastal regions, Stephenson imagines countries leaving it to their populations to find ways to cope, particularly in the dogmatically free-market Western economies. The novel in fact turns on the idea that, in an environment of government inaction and free-market ideological dominance, some among the wealthy elite will decide to take matters into their own hands. Not surprisingly, they will justify their engagement by creating for themselves a narrative for action that deftly combines humanitarian concern over the global impacts of climate change with an opportunity to profit by addressing them.

Precisely such reasoning motivates the character T. R. Schmidt, an enterprising, in-your-face billionaire from Texas who’s made his money from “a vastly successful regional chain of family restaurants cum-mega-truck-stops.” (141) Schmidt decides to implement a geoengineering approach to countering the immediate effects of climate change while longer-term strategies for reducing CO2 emissions are developed. He unabashedly declares his motives as a mix of Somebody’s got to do something now! and the opportunity to maintain his profit margins by finding a way for people – especially in his part of the US – to continue a lifestyle of profligate energy use that supports his business interests.

The story opens as Schmidt pulls together a group of leaders whom he hopes will support his efforts out of a shared interest in avoiding sea level rise. Realizing he cannot engage government officials, hamstrung as they are by national political realities, he turns to powerful global elites who wield significant economic and political influence in places threatened by rising seas, such as The Netherlands, Venice, London and Singapore. He brings them together in southern Texas at the site of an operation he has built for executing his geoengineering plan, hoping that being present to view the initial launch of his project will convince them of its viability, and so to join him in expanding it world-wide.

Of course, altering the climate through geoengineering, despite being just as human-induced as the problem of climate change itself, leaves in place the fundamental dynamic that some will benefit while others suffer – it only shifts which parts of the world fall into each camp. And so, as TR spins up his efforts, he must contend with those who feel that they will be negatively impacted, and who will therefore go to great lengths to stop him. The story develops toward an inevitable confrontation as TR and his supporters contend with attacks from those arrayed against them.

Stephenson’s approach to the story in Termination Shock has similarities to an earlier novel of his that I’ve read, seveneves; each has a long, relatively deliberate – if still action-filled – build-up laying the groundwork for a dramatic climax, and each provides science and engineering geeks with fairly detailed explanations of the technology involved. In seveneves, the first two-thirds of the story is set in our near future, describing an existential cataclysm that fundamentally alters our biological and social future, before a reader turns the page to encounter a chapter titled Five Thousand Years Later, and discovers the world that has arisen as a consequence. I found that story brilliant: engaging, exciting, and ultimately thrilling the imagination. (My review linked to at right.)

In a similar way, the first two-thirds of Termination Shock set the stage for the inevitable conflict, which then plays out quickly. The entire story takes place over a period of a few years, several decades from now, and while it opens with a bang – a dramatic plane crash – it then becomes an odd mix of adventure and long, drawn out set-up. I found myself enjoying the story, but also constantly waiting for it to take off, in some sense; and, when it finally reaches its climactic moment, I found it a bit underwhelming given the long build up.

Stephenson’s setting of the novel in our near future, and its theme of humankind’s reaction to the threats of global warming reminded me of another novel set in the same time frame and dealing with the same issues: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which I read just a few months ago. (My review linked to at right.) Both stories imagine a world muddling through the next few decades, unable to marshal an effective, global response to the threat of climate change.

However, whereas in Stephenson’s story this results in a wealthy few implementing a particular geoengineering technology, Robinson portrays a world in which a broad variety of technical and economic approaches are explored by groups of all kinds, from governments to industries, private individuals to terrorist organizations, all of it largely uncoordinated and with mixed results. Appropriately, both stories end with the future uncertain; but the chaotic hodgepodge of climate related actions Robinson imagines in his story seem the more likely scenario as, in the face of climate related disasters, citizens of many countries not only take action themselves, but also finally force political institutions to act.

Nonetheless, Stephenson’s Termination Shock delivers readers action playing out on a global scale, while exploring the existential threat to civilization of climate change and the inherent challenges of using geoengineering approaches to address its impacts.

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Other notes and information:

A well-done graphic on the evolution of Earth's temperature over the past 22,000 years at XKCD.

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf