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Isabella Alexander, Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge: Very in-depth study of how the British government used maps and law in the era of British naval dominance. Maps are within copyright, yet not “authored” in the same way as fiction, music, or even works of history—they are far more concerned with authority and accuracy to the real world. They are also usually the product of multiple individuals’ differing contributions, making it easier to locate copyright in the publisher rather than a human author. But they were also so expensive to produce in the first centuries of copyright/printing—in part because of the difficulty of collecting the relevant information, which is still high—that not even exclusive rights could make mapmaking profitable. Even copying existing maps was expensive because of the costs of printing and engraving. Alexander argues that claims of accuracy and authority were made to escape charges of infringement (we actually did work ourselves); at the same time, a court proceeding could itself serve as a validation of a map’s authority. For government maps, this was part of a “branding” strategy sounding more in trademark than copyright—their origin and accuracy were linked.
For naval charts, copyright wasn’t useful as a revenue-raising tool, but it allowed the Admiralty to assert rights in the intangible content, guaranteeing their accuracy as well as enhancing the Admiralty’s own claims of authority/knowledge. Thus, maps were an important vector for the concept of a derivative work: “the rights began to be seen in more abstract terms, as being able to control copying beyond the initial form in which the particular commodity was placed upon the market.” Labor and skill, not just inspiration, also had to be part of the copyrightable work. At least at first, adding labor (contrasted to “servile” copying) could avoid an infringement charge, but that changed over time. “Where we saw eighteenth-century courts taking a fairly permissive approach to map copying where the result was an improvement, by the middle of the century, a second, and more restrictive line of authority began to emerge.” British courts—in a move ultimately rejected by the US and in its extremes by most jurisdictions—began requiring mapmakers to count the mile markers themselves, rather than relying on existing maps.
Craig N. Murphy & JoAnne Yates, Engineering Rules: A history of voluntary rulemakings by builders of different things, including the internet; though government is often assumed to be the catalyst for standardization, people often benefit from it (it’s nice to be able to reach any email address from any other! It’s nice that tires and gas and screws come in standard sizes/grades!) and thus demand it even without government intervention.
Governments, meanwhile, suffer from opposition by local groups that don’t want to give up the way they’re doing it, so it takes them much longer to act, at which point they often adopt the privately agreed-on standards. The consensus process of modern standardization, they argue, creates a separate realm from the market and the polis—a social arena where people often commit to the idea that any standard is better than no standard; where opposition from one group can stalemate the adoption of a standard but consensus requirements usually prevent railroading the enactment of one; but also where winning in the market can sometimes allow a big company to set the standard. Shipping containers were a success story, in part because only American firms already had significant business based on non-standardized sizes; color TV standards were not, because producers from different countries used different standards and national interests came into play.
In the late 1980s, by contrast, “large information technology companies in the United States and elsewhere turned away from multistakeholder consensus-based standard-setting organizations and toward each other to address their standardization needs, especially around attempts to establish open, rather than proprietary, systems in many areas.” Instead of seeing standardization as valuable, they embraced particular technologies as valuable and therefore deserving of being the standard. Standard-setting organizations started seeing their targets as customers, not citizens, which led to less democratic process. They also started reaching out from things like container sizes to things like “what counts as fair trade chocolate?” The strongest argument for that is that governments “are often reluctant to set necessary standards simply because constituents who are already following other standards will object to the cost of switching,” leading to least-common-denominator rules, while private parties can agree on higher standards.
Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York: Police administrators, by deciding who was worthy of recruitment to the force, decided who could be included in whiteness/racial state-building, and which “races” were law-abiding and assimilable versus those that were “innately criminal and worthy of exclusion and violence.” Thus, white administrators were eager to find Italian or Chinese officers who’d help Americanize their groups, but not Black ones. Early twentieth century NYC had squads tasked with patrolling specific racial groups, inspired by earlier “native policing” in the American west and overseas; many members of the force had actual military experience of this. With the rise of empire and anxieties over immigration, “police administrators, in New York and across the country, increasingly saw their cities’ residents as existing on a spectrum of racial and cultural difference, and as a result, enacted policies that mirrored colonial methods of law enforcement.” They sought to make “foreign” populations legible and controllable. Among other things, “[e]ven groups like Germans, who had been in New York for decades and thrived inside the police department, suddenly triggered a seemingly newfound insecurity among police commissioners over their inability to communicate with English-speaking police. According to the colonial imperative to surveil and to subordinate, speaking German in front of a police officer who spoke only English now posed a potential threat to the prevailing order.”
I did not know that, in 1857, the state created a competing police force for NYC, and for several months the city’s police battled the state’s for legitimacy, including both legal and violent physical battles. To break up the Democratic monopoly on police power, the state ended a requirement that police officers had to serve in the ward where they lived, with long-term consequences for their connection to the ethnic enclaves they patrolled. The state won, and absorbed most of the Irish police, “starting a long process of the formerly foreign subject being absorbed into whiteness and belonging,” whereas “the exclusion of African Americans from the police force denied them access to jobs where violence was legitimate and respectable.”
Of course, the interpenetration of military and police continues today. The book points out that, “[a]fter the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik briefly became the interim interior minister of Iraq. Once in Baghdad, his primary task was to organize and train the nation’s police force.” Heckuva job!
Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics: Blue-collar conservatism, in this telling, is the idolization of law-and-order, which means jobs for white men who probably didn’t graduate from college, combined with rejection of welfare liberalism for everyone else. They saw their jobs and the wealth transferred to them as legitimate because of their “hard work,” but other forms of state aid seemed unfair. Lombardo argues that perceived economic risks, not just cultural change, spurred white working-class conservatism. “The politics of gender, sexuality, and especially race were intimately tied to economic motivators, but broadly conceived economic well-being—especially the feeling that blue-collar whites were on the losing end of a zero-sum game for limited urban and welfare state resources—formed a foundational prong of their political transformation.” This conservatism, he argues, was more religious/Catholic than the conservative movement in the South and West.
Lombardo describes this conservatism as racially influenced but “class-forward.” At the same time, class wasn’t a matter of cash. “Blue-collar” “was not limited by economic or occupational distinction. Instead, it was a cultural class identity indebted to a sense of blue-collar authenticity, an ethos based on the shared values of hard work, sacrifice, toughness, pride, and tradition. ... The very fluidity of the blue-collar identity allowed whites who were economically working class to claim privileges of the white middle class while simultaneously allowing middle-or even upper-class whites to invoke the values associated with blue-collar authenticity. These categories transcended economic standing because upwardly mobile working-class whites could work their way up the social ladder to a higher class position, but remain culturally blue-collar.” Gotta say, this read a lot like a bunch of ways to say “racism,” and in fairness Lombardo maintains that none of this was ever separate from racism and white privilege.
Instead, “blue-collar whites learned to change the way they discussed race, even in pursuit of the same racially restrictive policies. Whereas middle-class Southerners and neoconservative intellectuals extolled the virtues of meritocracy to dispute racially inclusive housing, education, and employment policies, working-and middle-class whites in cities like Philadelphia pointed to their blue-collar identities.” Lombardo wants us to recognize that this denial of white privilege was extremely important rhetorically and emotionally, even though the privilege still existed. It became the foundation for policies like mass incarceration and approval of police violence. White people knew the police as friends, neighbors, and family, and denied that police behaved any differently to Black communities (or if they did, they deserved it). As one representative white woman said: “I find it hard to believe any school in this city is as bad as I have read. Nor will I ever believe they were neglected because they were in Negro neighborhoods.” Instead, she implored the school board to “start giving some thought to white children.”
Frank Rizzo—police chief and later mayor—relied on a Trumpian performance of masculinity and “law and order” (for some) with similar, albeit more local, results. Amidst bribery accusations, he and a crony failed a lie detector test, which he’d previously touted as infallible; his accuser passed. His supporters didn’t care. “Most of them blamed ‘the biased media.’ Many of them thought Rizzo had earned his ‘dream house’ and congratulated the mayor on its purchase, even after evidence proved his administration had misused public funds to construct the house.”
White Philadelphians believed that their hard work had earned them the right to support from a welfare state, including aid to parochial schools, which they fought hard to secure. And, fifty years later, they’re poised to get it from a friendly Supreme Court.
Rizzo eventually lost his office because of Black votes and white flight. (A police spokesman said that the 1985 police bombing that killed six Black adults and five Black children wasn’t killing, but “suicide.”) These whites, Lombardo argues, stayed with the Democratic party long enough to shift it away from welfare liberalism.
Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic: If you wanted more science along the lines of The Last of Us, here you go! Fungi are generally not as much of a threat to warm-blooded creatures as bacteria and viruses because they aren’t as heat-tolerant. But if they evolved to become so, we could be fungus-riddled toast, because most of the things that kill fungi also harm humans. Fungal diseases destroyed billions of chestnut trees in a few decades; they took out the banana that preceded the Cavendish, and bananas are the world’s fourth most important staple crop, providing 30 to 60 percent of daily calories in a few places. Returning to diversity in food sources is, among other things, protection against the fungal apocalypse.
Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: Thesis: “Even parts of humanity that didn’t fuck around are in the finding out phase now.” Floods, fires, crop-eating bugs, bacteria-containing permafrost, migrating disease-bearing animals, and more are what we’re reaping. Unfortunately, when your building is so hot that opening doors burns your hands, you’re also cognitively impaired—heat makes us more impulsive and violent; suicide and violence against others increases, and possibly even the likelihood of civil war.
One study estimated that 489,000 people worldwide died directly from extreme heat in 2019, “more than the number of deaths from guns or illegal drugs.” Even a quick transition to clean energy would leave half of the world’s human population—more than three billion people—exposed to life-threatening heat and humidity by 2100.
Biology puts limits on us: “no matter how much water you drink, your body can only replace about two quarts of water per hour—so if you are in a hot place for a long time, dehydration is a concern.” There were other incredible details on animal heat adaptation, including in Saharan ants and camels, and role of heat in promoting bipedalism, then the influence of being able to sweat to cool down in enabling endurance hunting. “Sometimes bumblebees get so hot that they fall dead out of the sky.”
While some adaptation is possible, replacing existing infrastructure with, e.g., “rail lines that don’t melt and houses that aren’t ovens and asphalt that doesn’t turn to pudding” would take both resources and time, neither of which are readily on offer. Instead, people will mostly do what they’ve always done—migrate—except that will cause even more disruption. (There aren’t many Border Patrol agents in areas where it’s hot and dangerous to cross the border, which funnels migrants to those places; the Border Patrol has thus weaponized heat already.) Meanwhile, Americans are still moving preferentially to places in the US at higher risk for heat, because of bad government policies and because those places tend to be cheaper and have more space.
More biology: In hotter temperatures, rice—a staple crop—takes more arsenic out of the soil, creating more health risks. Plant-eating caterpillars mature in 21 days instead of 28, making for more generations (and more evolution) every season. Coral reefs have lasted 250 million years; they might have 50 years left.
There are alternatives for dealing with heat, but air conditioning is more pleasant, so we ignore them even as our cities must grow to handle a growing population. All isn’t lost, though we may have to give up things like old buildings that can’t handle green roofs or solar cells. What do you want to do with fifteenth-century Venetian palazzos sinking into the lagoon? How much is their preservation worth?
Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis: Detailed examination of a wicked problem where understanding the causes doesn’t help too much with the solutions. Living conditions in Central America have gotten really bad, so trying to tell people to stay there will generally fail. One reason they got so bad is the history of US support for torturers and looters who were also anti-Communist.
The Cold War also shaped immigration policy—when Reagan took office, the US was mostly focused on legalizing undocumented immigrants and dealing with Mexicans at the border, but Cold Warriors wanted to offer asylum to victims of communism. When they guessed how many asylum-seekers the US might see a year in 1980, they more than tripled the existing numbers to come up with the inconceivably large number “five thousand.” Then Castro took advantage of the US’s willingness to accept Cuban refugees to empty prisons and psychiatric institutions—about thirty percent had criminal records, and fewer than half had families waiting. And of course, as always, there’s racism: “After the Department of Justice moved one population of Haitian detainees to a holding center in Big Spring, Texas, the state’s senior Republican senator, John Tower, called the White House in a rage. ‘You have tripled the black population of Big Springs,’” he accused.
Meanwhile, the US was supporting a Guatemalan regime that displaced more than a million indigenous people and killed two hundred thousand. More than 20 percent of surviving Salvadorans were in the US after 12 years of fighting. Did we care? In 1984, “at a time when 25 percent of asylum seekers were obtaining a positive result, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were being rejected at a rate of 98 and 99 percent.” Although they were often victims of political persecution—young men who wouldn’t join the army to rape, steal, and torture other people were at the risk of being tortured themselves—men in particular had trouble overcoming cultural norms against discussing what they’d endured, making it easier to write them off as economic migrants.
And then the feedback loop began. As undocumented Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants poured in to places like LA, they encountered limited opportunities and anti-gang policing, “which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country.” Gangs formed in the US; then mass deportations sent young people “back” to already-struggling countries they could neither remember nor navigate, where they were perfect candidates for the gangs there, either as targets, participants, or both. “American deportation policy had turned local street gangs from LA into an international criminal network.” This also meant that Salvadorans feared deportees, making it hard for them to transition into noncriminal lives or find work. Often, their only noncriminal option was … call centers, which found El Salvador a good place to do outsourcing because of how many people spoke California English. Blitzer follows one hard-working deportee for a number of years; of thirty people on his original deportation flight, less than five survived the reporting. One thing he notes was that gang life was also pretty awful: MS-13’s annual revenue was $30 million (in contrast to multibillion-dollar Mexican cartels or Yakuza) and its members averaged $65/month, half the minimum wage of a day laborer in the agricultural sector. But what should they do? “[T]eenage gangsters were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets.”
By the time of Trump, the US policies weren’t about Communism any more, but about pretending that the Central American governments were functioning democracies, allowing us to deny asylum. In Honduras, though, the winning presidential candidate was secretly funded by stealing from the national health-care program. The result was another $ 290 million siphoned off. “Thousands of people with treatable illnesses died because of drug shortages. Some hospitals had replaced prescription drugs with sugar and water.”
Climate change, of course, is going to make all of this harder. Increasing temperature and rainfall fluctuations make subsistence agriculture less sustainable. Of course people are going to leave, and they rationally do so in “caravans,” which afford protection from the criminal gangs (and government officials) that prey on migrants. And the caravans won’t have individual leaders who might be kidnapped by the gangs. Unfortunately, this contributes to the increasing toxicity of immigration as a political issue in Mexico, where people trying to cross into the US face extreme violence.
This is an infuriating book with no solutions to offer, only portraits of endurance and grace among unspeakable horrors. One last dose of infuriation: The US knowingly housed migrants in conditions where covid was sure to spread, then (only then) deporting them to countries without functioning health-care systems, where they spread it further. So, I guess not being deliberately cruel and counterproductive would be the beginning of a start.
For naval charts, copyright wasn’t useful as a revenue-raising tool, but it allowed the Admiralty to assert rights in the intangible content, guaranteeing their accuracy as well as enhancing the Admiralty’s own claims of authority/knowledge. Thus, maps were an important vector for the concept of a derivative work: “the rights began to be seen in more abstract terms, as being able to control copying beyond the initial form in which the particular commodity was placed upon the market.” Labor and skill, not just inspiration, also had to be part of the copyrightable work. At least at first, adding labor (contrasted to “servile” copying) could avoid an infringement charge, but that changed over time. “Where we saw eighteenth-century courts taking a fairly permissive approach to map copying where the result was an improvement, by the middle of the century, a second, and more restrictive line of authority began to emerge.” British courts—in a move ultimately rejected by the US and in its extremes by most jurisdictions—began requiring mapmakers to count the mile markers themselves, rather than relying on existing maps.
Craig N. Murphy & JoAnne Yates, Engineering Rules: A history of voluntary rulemakings by builders of different things, including the internet; though government is often assumed to be the catalyst for standardization, people often benefit from it (it’s nice to be able to reach any email address from any other! It’s nice that tires and gas and screws come in standard sizes/grades!) and thus demand it even without government intervention.
Governments, meanwhile, suffer from opposition by local groups that don’t want to give up the way they’re doing it, so it takes them much longer to act, at which point they often adopt the privately agreed-on standards. The consensus process of modern standardization, they argue, creates a separate realm from the market and the polis—a social arena where people often commit to the idea that any standard is better than no standard; where opposition from one group can stalemate the adoption of a standard but consensus requirements usually prevent railroading the enactment of one; but also where winning in the market can sometimes allow a big company to set the standard. Shipping containers were a success story, in part because only American firms already had significant business based on non-standardized sizes; color TV standards were not, because producers from different countries used different standards and national interests came into play.
In the late 1980s, by contrast, “large information technology companies in the United States and elsewhere turned away from multistakeholder consensus-based standard-setting organizations and toward each other to address their standardization needs, especially around attempts to establish open, rather than proprietary, systems in many areas.” Instead of seeing standardization as valuable, they embraced particular technologies as valuable and therefore deserving of being the standard. Standard-setting organizations started seeing their targets as customers, not citizens, which led to less democratic process. They also started reaching out from things like container sizes to things like “what counts as fair trade chocolate?” The strongest argument for that is that governments “are often reluctant to set necessary standards simply because constituents who are already following other standards will object to the cost of switching,” leading to least-common-denominator rules, while private parties can agree on higher standards.
Matthew Guariglia, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York: Police administrators, by deciding who was worthy of recruitment to the force, decided who could be included in whiteness/racial state-building, and which “races” were law-abiding and assimilable versus those that were “innately criminal and worthy of exclusion and violence.” Thus, white administrators were eager to find Italian or Chinese officers who’d help Americanize their groups, but not Black ones. Early twentieth century NYC had squads tasked with patrolling specific racial groups, inspired by earlier “native policing” in the American west and overseas; many members of the force had actual military experience of this. With the rise of empire and anxieties over immigration, “police administrators, in New York and across the country, increasingly saw their cities’ residents as existing on a spectrum of racial and cultural difference, and as a result, enacted policies that mirrored colonial methods of law enforcement.” They sought to make “foreign” populations legible and controllable. Among other things, “[e]ven groups like Germans, who had been in New York for decades and thrived inside the police department, suddenly triggered a seemingly newfound insecurity among police commissioners over their inability to communicate with English-speaking police. According to the colonial imperative to surveil and to subordinate, speaking German in front of a police officer who spoke only English now posed a potential threat to the prevailing order.”
I did not know that, in 1857, the state created a competing police force for NYC, and for several months the city’s police battled the state’s for legitimacy, including both legal and violent physical battles. To break up the Democratic monopoly on police power, the state ended a requirement that police officers had to serve in the ward where they lived, with long-term consequences for their connection to the ethnic enclaves they patrolled. The state won, and absorbed most of the Irish police, “starting a long process of the formerly foreign subject being absorbed into whiteness and belonging,” whereas “the exclusion of African Americans from the police force denied them access to jobs where violence was legitimate and respectable.”
Of course, the interpenetration of military and police continues today. The book points out that, “[a]fter the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik briefly became the interim interior minister of Iraq. Once in Baghdad, his primary task was to organize and train the nation’s police force.” Heckuva job!
Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics: Blue-collar conservatism, in this telling, is the idolization of law-and-order, which means jobs for white men who probably didn’t graduate from college, combined with rejection of welfare liberalism for everyone else. They saw their jobs and the wealth transferred to them as legitimate because of their “hard work,” but other forms of state aid seemed unfair. Lombardo argues that perceived economic risks, not just cultural change, spurred white working-class conservatism. “The politics of gender, sexuality, and especially race were intimately tied to economic motivators, but broadly conceived economic well-being—especially the feeling that blue-collar whites were on the losing end of a zero-sum game for limited urban and welfare state resources—formed a foundational prong of their political transformation.” This conservatism, he argues, was more religious/Catholic than the conservative movement in the South and West.
Lombardo describes this conservatism as racially influenced but “class-forward.” At the same time, class wasn’t a matter of cash. “Blue-collar” “was not limited by economic or occupational distinction. Instead, it was a cultural class identity indebted to a sense of blue-collar authenticity, an ethos based on the shared values of hard work, sacrifice, toughness, pride, and tradition. ... The very fluidity of the blue-collar identity allowed whites who were economically working class to claim privileges of the white middle class while simultaneously allowing middle-or even upper-class whites to invoke the values associated with blue-collar authenticity. These categories transcended economic standing because upwardly mobile working-class whites could work their way up the social ladder to a higher class position, but remain culturally blue-collar.” Gotta say, this read a lot like a bunch of ways to say “racism,” and in fairness Lombardo maintains that none of this was ever separate from racism and white privilege.
Instead, “blue-collar whites learned to change the way they discussed race, even in pursuit of the same racially restrictive policies. Whereas middle-class Southerners and neoconservative intellectuals extolled the virtues of meritocracy to dispute racially inclusive housing, education, and employment policies, working-and middle-class whites in cities like Philadelphia pointed to their blue-collar identities.” Lombardo wants us to recognize that this denial of white privilege was extremely important rhetorically and emotionally, even though the privilege still existed. It became the foundation for policies like mass incarceration and approval of police violence. White people knew the police as friends, neighbors, and family, and denied that police behaved any differently to Black communities (or if they did, they deserved it). As one representative white woman said: “I find it hard to believe any school in this city is as bad as I have read. Nor will I ever believe they were neglected because they were in Negro neighborhoods.” Instead, she implored the school board to “start giving some thought to white children.”
Frank Rizzo—police chief and later mayor—relied on a Trumpian performance of masculinity and “law and order” (for some) with similar, albeit more local, results. Amidst bribery accusations, he and a crony failed a lie detector test, which he’d previously touted as infallible; his accuser passed. His supporters didn’t care. “Most of them blamed ‘the biased media.’ Many of them thought Rizzo had earned his ‘dream house’ and congratulated the mayor on its purchase, even after evidence proved his administration had misused public funds to construct the house.”
White Philadelphians believed that their hard work had earned them the right to support from a welfare state, including aid to parochial schools, which they fought hard to secure. And, fifty years later, they’re poised to get it from a friendly Supreme Court.
Rizzo eventually lost his office because of Black votes and white flight. (A police spokesman said that the 1985 police bombing that killed six Black adults and five Black children wasn’t killing, but “suicide.”) These whites, Lombardo argues, stayed with the Democratic party long enough to shift it away from welfare liberalism.
Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic: If you wanted more science along the lines of The Last of Us, here you go! Fungi are generally not as much of a threat to warm-blooded creatures as bacteria and viruses because they aren’t as heat-tolerant. But if they evolved to become so, we could be fungus-riddled toast, because most of the things that kill fungi also harm humans. Fungal diseases destroyed billions of chestnut trees in a few decades; they took out the banana that preceded the Cavendish, and bananas are the world’s fourth most important staple crop, providing 30 to 60 percent of daily calories in a few places. Returning to diversity in food sources is, among other things, protection against the fungal apocalypse.
Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: Thesis: “Even parts of humanity that didn’t fuck around are in the finding out phase now.” Floods, fires, crop-eating bugs, bacteria-containing permafrost, migrating disease-bearing animals, and more are what we’re reaping. Unfortunately, when your building is so hot that opening doors burns your hands, you’re also cognitively impaired—heat makes us more impulsive and violent; suicide and violence against others increases, and possibly even the likelihood of civil war.
One study estimated that 489,000 people worldwide died directly from extreme heat in 2019, “more than the number of deaths from guns or illegal drugs.” Even a quick transition to clean energy would leave half of the world’s human population—more than three billion people—exposed to life-threatening heat and humidity by 2100.
Biology puts limits on us: “no matter how much water you drink, your body can only replace about two quarts of water per hour—so if you are in a hot place for a long time, dehydration is a concern.” There were other incredible details on animal heat adaptation, including in Saharan ants and camels, and role of heat in promoting bipedalism, then the influence of being able to sweat to cool down in enabling endurance hunting. “Sometimes bumblebees get so hot that they fall dead out of the sky.”
While some adaptation is possible, replacing existing infrastructure with, e.g., “rail lines that don’t melt and houses that aren’t ovens and asphalt that doesn’t turn to pudding” would take both resources and time, neither of which are readily on offer. Instead, people will mostly do what they’ve always done—migrate—except that will cause even more disruption. (There aren’t many Border Patrol agents in areas where it’s hot and dangerous to cross the border, which funnels migrants to those places; the Border Patrol has thus weaponized heat already.) Meanwhile, Americans are still moving preferentially to places in the US at higher risk for heat, because of bad government policies and because those places tend to be cheaper and have more space.
More biology: In hotter temperatures, rice—a staple crop—takes more arsenic out of the soil, creating more health risks. Plant-eating caterpillars mature in 21 days instead of 28, making for more generations (and more evolution) every season. Coral reefs have lasted 250 million years; they might have 50 years left.
There are alternatives for dealing with heat, but air conditioning is more pleasant, so we ignore them even as our cities must grow to handle a growing population. All isn’t lost, though we may have to give up things like old buildings that can’t handle green roofs or solar cells. What do you want to do with fifteenth-century Venetian palazzos sinking into the lagoon? How much is their preservation worth?
Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis: Detailed examination of a wicked problem where understanding the causes doesn’t help too much with the solutions. Living conditions in Central America have gotten really bad, so trying to tell people to stay there will generally fail. One reason they got so bad is the history of US support for torturers and looters who were also anti-Communist.
The Cold War also shaped immigration policy—when Reagan took office, the US was mostly focused on legalizing undocumented immigrants and dealing with Mexicans at the border, but Cold Warriors wanted to offer asylum to victims of communism. When they guessed how many asylum-seekers the US might see a year in 1980, they more than tripled the existing numbers to come up with the inconceivably large number “five thousand.” Then Castro took advantage of the US’s willingness to accept Cuban refugees to empty prisons and psychiatric institutions—about thirty percent had criminal records, and fewer than half had families waiting. And of course, as always, there’s racism: “After the Department of Justice moved one population of Haitian detainees to a holding center in Big Spring, Texas, the state’s senior Republican senator, John Tower, called the White House in a rage. ‘You have tripled the black population of Big Springs,’” he accused.
Meanwhile, the US was supporting a Guatemalan regime that displaced more than a million indigenous people and killed two hundred thousand. More than 20 percent of surviving Salvadorans were in the US after 12 years of fighting. Did we care? In 1984, “at a time when 25 percent of asylum seekers were obtaining a positive result, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were being rejected at a rate of 98 and 99 percent.” Although they were often victims of political persecution—young men who wouldn’t join the army to rape, steal, and torture other people were at the risk of being tortured themselves—men in particular had trouble overcoming cultural norms against discussing what they’d endured, making it easier to write them off as economic migrants.
And then the feedback loop began. As undocumented Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants poured in to places like LA, they encountered limited opportunities and anti-gang policing, “which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country.” Gangs formed in the US; then mass deportations sent young people “back” to already-struggling countries they could neither remember nor navigate, where they were perfect candidates for the gangs there, either as targets, participants, or both. “American deportation policy had turned local street gangs from LA into an international criminal network.” This also meant that Salvadorans feared deportees, making it hard for them to transition into noncriminal lives or find work. Often, their only noncriminal option was … call centers, which found El Salvador a good place to do outsourcing because of how many people spoke California English. Blitzer follows one hard-working deportee for a number of years; of thirty people on his original deportation flight, less than five survived the reporting. One thing he notes was that gang life was also pretty awful: MS-13’s annual revenue was $30 million (in contrast to multibillion-dollar Mexican cartels or Yakuza) and its members averaged $65/month, half the minimum wage of a day laborer in the agricultural sector. But what should they do? “[T]eenage gangsters were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets.”
By the time of Trump, the US policies weren’t about Communism any more, but about pretending that the Central American governments were functioning democracies, allowing us to deny asylum. In Honduras, though, the winning presidential candidate was secretly funded by stealing from the national health-care program. The result was another $ 290 million siphoned off. “Thousands of people with treatable illnesses died because of drug shortages. Some hospitals had replaced prescription drugs with sugar and water.”
Climate change, of course, is going to make all of this harder. Increasing temperature and rainfall fluctuations make subsistence agriculture less sustainable. Of course people are going to leave, and they rationally do so in “caravans,” which afford protection from the criminal gangs (and government officials) that prey on migrants. And the caravans won’t have individual leaders who might be kidnapped by the gangs. Unfortunately, this contributes to the increasing toxicity of immigration as a political issue in Mexico, where people trying to cross into the US face extreme violence.
This is an infuriating book with no solutions to offer, only portraits of endurance and grace among unspeakable horrors. One last dose of infuriation: The US knowingly housed migrants in conditions where covid was sure to spread, then (only then) deporting them to countries without functioning health-care systems, where they spread it further. So, I guess not being deliberately cruel and counterproductive would be the beginning of a start.