Two new books argue from different angles that natural disasters—like flooding in North Carolina caused by Hurricane Florence—make inequality worse. Jedediah Purdy in his new book, “This Land Is Our Land,” breaks down the politics that created the climate crisis, identifying the extractive practices and competitive ways of thinking that brought on the Anthropocene and imagines a system that could help us get out of it. Purdy argues, we will need to establish what he calls “commonwealth” values, which will animate a way of living and relating to one another that’s not zero-sum, but where “my flourishing is the condition of your flourishing, and yours is reciprocally of mine.” In “The Geography of Risk,” Gilbert Gaul focusses on coastal communities from Texas to New Jersey, where post-hurricane recovery efforts have brought floods of federal disaster funding and insurance money. This “seemingly endless loop of government payouts,” he writes, keep developers and homeowners building, rebuilding, and expanding, in “one of the most ecologically fragile and dangerous places on earth.”
By Rachel Riederer. The New Yorker. October 17, 2019.
