The Indian corporation Adani is establishing one of the world’s largest coal mining operations in Australia, affecting Aboriginal lands as well as the Great Barrier Reef. The toll on the land and sea, says Juru elder and environmentalist Carol Prior, will be felt around the world—in the loss of a rare and beautiful ecosystem, and a rare and beautiful culture.
Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson
In Australia, a new mining megaproject threatens to devastate the Great Barrier Reef and the land of First Nations peoples. The planned Carmichael mine, set to be one of the world’s largest, will be located in the northeastern state of Queensland, within the vast Galilee Basin. It will be owned and operated by the Indian conglomerate Adani, which plans to export most of the coal to India by sea, via a soon-to-be-expanded port that sits on the Great Barrier Reef.
Russia's actions in Ukraine show that for Vladimir Putin, the Cold War never ended. Now the US and its allies must prepare for another lengthy power struggle. But no international coalition can be effective while Russian energy reserves supply a quarter of Europe's natural gas. A long-term US energy strategy is the best way to counter Russian power.
Russian president Vladimir Putin. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru
This week, Crimea voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine. Flouting international censure, Russia has just annexed the breakaway region. The US and its European allies have responded to the crisis so far with sanctions, but Russia has scoffed at these rebukes, stating they would have “no effect” on Russian policy.
US president Barack Obama has stated that America does not see Ukraine as a piece on “some Cold War chessboard.” But Russian president Vladimir Putin clearly does see the world this way. And he is winning. He has captured Crimea like a pawn and is now likely looking toward other parts of eastern Ukraine, planning his next move. It’s America’s turn, and it is letting the clock run out.
The US and other NATO countries need to stop fooling themselves that they can intervene in Ukraine (here is a very interesting dissection of why). In fact, they should stop pretending that they have any real influence over Russia’s actions. Until Europe no longer depends on Russia’s state-owned energy giant Gazprom for a quarter of its natural gas, there will be no real way to crack down on Russia. The US and its allies need to start developing a long-term strategy to counter Russia’s global influence and aggression, and the key to this will be a comprehensive energy policy: giving Eastern European countries like Ukraine an energy alternative to Russia’s natural-gas monopoly.
At this point, I should admit a personal bias. I was born in the former Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. My family comes from Vinnytsia, a city of about 350,000 located roughly halfway between Odessa and the capital city of Kiev. My parents were political dissidents, whose marriage ceremony took place in a prison camp for those who opposed—or just disagreed with—the USSR. While attending Moscow State University, my mother spent her spare evenings bent over a typewriter, manually copying banned manuscripts for underground distribution: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and other authors I took for granted, reading them in the security of a New England high school years later. My uncle was persecuted by the KGB for his poetry, and ultimately expelled from the country. So, I have no sympathy for Russia’s slow return to totalitarianism over the past decade.
I also recognize the warning signs. Russia’s systemic persecution of minorities, such as recently enacted laws against the gay community. The country’s ever-bolder moves to beat down dissent, such as a literal public flogging of the political punk band Pussy Riot. The moves to silence free speech and the press. Bullying of smaller neighbors to spread Russia’s influence and agenda. Most worrisome, the cult of personality being built around a leader who presents himself as all-powerful and paternal. Russia is marching down a familiar path. And speaking as someone whose family remembers the horrors of Russian pogroms and Soviet purges, I know where the path leads.
America spent forty years and trillions of dollars in the last Cold War with Russia. And now it needs to prepare to do so again. It needs to play Russia’s Cold War-era power game—and win. If left unchecked, Putin will turn the clock back to the Soviet era, recreating the authoritarian police state the retired KGB colonel probably misses and stamping out democratic movements throughout Russia’s sphere of influence.
Russia now effectively controls the southern peninsula of Crimea, the strategic location of the port city of Sevastopol. Now that Putin has annexed the region, he will need to negotiate with Kiev’s new leaders (Crimea relies on mainland Ukraine for most of its utilities). Meanwhile, clashing political protests have turned deadly in several eastern Ukrainian cities that, like Crimea, have ethnic Russian majorities. According to Ukraine’s new government, Russia is inciting the unrest. It may use the violence to justify more military interventions, following the same pattern it used in Crimea—and before that, in South Ossetia, a region it helped separatists to wrest from Georgia in 2008. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to civil war. However, it is more likely that Putin will simply use the threat of military action as another bargaining chip, to force Ukraine to agree to considerable political concessions. He doesn’t want to destroy the country, but to cement his control over it.
Even if Russia invades other areas of eastern Ukraine, there will be no meaningful military response. After more than a decade of costly and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has no stomach for further armed conflict. And without America’s army, no country will be willing to support Ukraine in a bloody conflict with a former superpower. Ukraine’s new leaders know this. Though they have mobilized their army, they have no real plans to fight Russia. Their troops are merely an attempt to draw a line in the sand, a show of strength to discourage further aggression.
Nor can Ukraine count on Russia bowing to international pressure. The US and its European allies did announce sanctions against Russia this week, restricting the travel and freezing the international assets of a short list of Russian and Ukrainian officials. However, these amount to little more than a wag of the finger—and Russia interpreted them as such. Europe’s dependence on its gas means that few will sign onto the kind of serious economic sanctions that could actually hurt Russia. So instead, we get harshly worded threats—Obama’s warning that Russia will face “greater political and economic isolation”—and other largely symbolic rebukes, such as the push to evict Russia from the G8 club of nations.
Reviving the aborted US plan to set up a missile-defense system in Poland might deter Russia. And stripping it of the honor of hosting the 2018 World Cup would certainly bruise Putin’s pride. But even if Europe and the US retaliated in these harsher ways, they would be unlikely to change Russia’s bellicose foreign policy. The fact that Russia invaded Crimea right after spending years of effort and many tens of billions of dollars trying to improve its reputation with the lavish Sochi Olympics proves how little international opinion matters to it. Putin is willing for his country to be the world’s black sheep, as long as it is one of the most powerful ones in the flock. Domestically, his aggressive stance in Ukraine has actually caused his popularity to skyrocket, making it even less likely that he will back down.
In all honesty, Kiev’s only viable option is to negotiate a diplomatic agreement with Russia to end the crisis—one that will likely be more of an appeasement than an agreement. In the short term, there is little that the international community can do to help.
However, short-term thinking is part of the problem. So far, the international media have largely focused on Russia’s belligerent actions on the ground. Yet Russia’s chief geopolitical weapon is not its troops, but its energy resources. Russia has 47.8 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, almost five times as much as the US. And Russia is not afraid to use Gazprom as a weapon to punish recalcitrant nations, as it proved when it shut off gas to Ukraine in 2006 and 2009. Now it is threatening to call in Ukraine’s $1.5 billion gas debt, which may collapse the country’s already unstable economy. It may cut off gas to Ukraine once again. (Luckily it is now March—the last time Russia withheld gas was in the middle of a brutal winter.)
If America hopes to put an end to Russia’s growing antagonism and totalitarianism, it needs to fight fire with fire. The US has newly tapped reserves of natural gas, thanks to the recent boom in shale-gas production. In a few short years, it will go from being a major importer of natural gas to being an exporter. Expanding existing hydraulic fracturing operations in the Marcellus, Bakken, and Eagle Ford shale plays will expedite the production of this strategic energy resource. More importantly, the US can enact policies to promote the export of natural gas to Europe. In this way, the US can weaken Russia’s sway over the continent and make sure its allies’ energy dependence no longer hobbles any international efforts to keep Russia in check.
In countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, nuclear power is another means of shielding these countries from Russian influence. Ukraine, for example, has fifteen nuclear power plants. Most of the logistical support and fuel for its nuclear infrastructure comes from Russia. Imagine if this assistance came from the US instead. Beyond technical assistance and partnerships, the US can also intervene more directly in the energy market. For instance, when price disputes in 2009 prompted Russia to retaliate by turning off Ukraine’s natural-gas supply, the US could have subsidized nuclear-energy prices, neutralizing the Kremlin’s strong-arm tactics.
If the US invests in nuclear reactors in Eastern European countries, it would also counterbalance Russian power in the region in more subtle ways. The natural partners in these co-ventures would be the billionaire oligarchs who already control most of the infrastructure in these countries. These men wield great, almost feudal, power. Lucrative energy agreements with them would allow the US to buy their influence—and counter that of Russia.
Ukraine is currently trying a similar strategy, appointing oligarchs to governorships in the eastern part of the country. The gamble is that by tapping these men for leadership posts, Kiev’s leaders can indirectly win support and prevent these regions from seceding. The risky strategy seems to be paying off. In the eastern city of Donetsk, the billionaire Serhiy Taruta was appointed regional governor; soon after, the city’s police force evicted pro-Russian protesters from the parliament building they had occupied and arrested Pavel Gubarev, an organizer of mass demonstrations pushing for Donetsk to separate from Ukraine. While partnering with shady oligarchs can be a politically unsavory course of action, it could prove effective.
Fracking and nuclear power have serious environmental risks. But it is important to remember that Russia’s former satellites are already heavy users of these two sources of energy—about half of Ukraine’s electricity is produced from its nuclear reactors. And there is no reason that the US can’t help these nations build an infrastructure of solar panels, wind turbines, and other alternative sources of energy, too. Along with natural gas and nuclear energy, investing in green technologies would not just help America kick its addiction to Middle East oil, but would also enhance its ability to defend Ukraine and other fragile democracies around the world.
In the twentieth century, our Cold War conflict in Russia was waged just as much in the laboratory—to win the Space Race and the nuclear-arms race—as on any battlefield. Now, America and its allies are engaged in an energy race—and are woefully behind. The US can’t just respond to each new crisis manufactured by Putin with ineffective sanctions and stern words. It needs to take the long view. For once, it needs to think about its endgame.
Editor’s Update, March 27: President Obama stated yesterday that Europe needs to “diversify and accelerate energy independence,” and America could play a role in this: “The United States as a source of energy is one possibility, but we’re also making choices and taking on some of the difficulties and challenges of energy development, and Europe is going to have to go through some of those same conversations as well.”
Correction, March 22: An earlier version of the article mistakenly listed Ray Bradbury, rather than George Orwell, as the author of a banned manuscript.
Best of In The Fray 2013. Each spring, hundreds of foreigners converge on Mount Everest, hoping to conquer the world’s highest peak. With them come jobs for Sherpa guides, porters, and guesthouse workers—and lethal risks for those stuck on the mountain’s crowded slopes.
Ever since 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, many more have aspired to follow them to the top of the world. Every year, hundreds of foreign adventurers climb Everest—at 29,029 feet, Earth’s highest peak—each paying tens of thousands of dollars for the opportunity.
For these tourists, conquering Everest is often a lifelong ambition. But for their local guides and porters, it is a mere job—albeit a dangerous and well-compensated one. A porter carrying goods to the Everest base camp on Nepal’s border makes an average of nine dollars a day, more than three times the daily wage of a typical worker in Nepal. High-altitude workers can earn much more: hiring a Sherpa to climb with you costs $5,000 to $7,000, plus tips and bonuses.
And yet few workplaces boast as high a mortality rate. Just last year, eleven people died attempting to scale Everest—the largest death toll since 1996, the mountain’s deadliest year, when over two days alone a blizzard led to the deaths of nine climbers (a disaster documented by Jon Krakauer in his book Into Thin Air).
The photographs above document my travels last summer through the mountains of Nepal. I began my journey in the northeastern district where Everest is located, Solukhumbu. Later, I spent several weeks with a team of Nepalese mountain guides training in Kakani, one hour north of Kathmandu. In exploring the trails and talking with numerous guides who have worked the Himalayan peaks, I gained a sense of the ambivalence that locals have about the growing international popularity of Everest, which in recent years has brought them rising shares of both bounty and danger.
One of over 120 ethnic groups in Solukhumbu, the Sherpa ethnic group has come to control the tourism and mountaineering industry in the district, and their name has become synonymous with the trained personnel who help foreigners up the slopes (Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, paired up with the New Zealand mountaineer Hillary on Everest’s first successful ascent). For some Sherpas, the work they do above the clouds is a calling. “Some people like to drink; some people like to climb mountains,” says Indra Rai, a Nepalese mountain guide in his mid-twenties. “I like the mountains.”
A Nepalese porter takes a wooden door up to the Everest base camp.
Everest is not for amateurs. Foreigners who seek to scale it from the south must first make a two-week trek to the base camp and then spend six to eight weeks acclimating their bodies to the thin mountain air before the five-day climb to the peak can even begin. But as grueling as the journey is for Everest’s newcomers, the veterans who lead them skyward have a much more challenging task: setting up fixed lines and ascenders—secured ropes, and the metal devices that clamp onto those ropes, which climbers use to hoist themselves up the mountain.
“We climb twice,” says Chhiring Dorje Sherpa, a Nepalese mountain guide in his early thirties. (The ethnic group’s name is also used as a surname in Nepalese culture.) “First, we go up to set the ropes and camps, then we go down to collect our clients and take them to the top.” Often, those fixing the ropes are not just Nepalese Sherpas, but mixed teams of Nepalese and Pakistani guides—working together in spite of the language barrier.
The demand for these mountain men (and women—Sherpas are known to be relatively respectful of gender equality) is increasing. On May 23, 2010, there were more successful ascents of Mount Everest—169—than had occurred in the three decades since Hillary and Norgay first reached the peak. The influx of climbers in recent years has been a boon to Solukhumbu’s economy. Foreigners do not simply employ Sherpas on the mountaintops; they also stay at the family-owned guesthouses scattered along the path to Everest.
Pasang Karesh, forty-five, owns one such guesthouse in Gorak Shep, the Nepalese town closest to Everest’s southern base camp. He speaks of how the tourist boom has transformed the area: the trails are becoming more commercialized, he says, with the outsider-driven demand for accommodations and food supplies spurring gentrification. The recent changes include the construction of a mobile tower in Gorak Shep several years ago—explicitly built to cater to those on the mountaintops who wanted an alternative to costly satellite phones.
As more people from around the world muster the resources (and recklessness) to scale the world’s tallest peak, Everest has itself become commercialized. Privileged Westerners come by the droves to “climb for a cause”—from child poverty to water conservation. Scaling the peak has become just another goal for some to check off on their life’s bucket list.
More worrisome, the mountain’s slopes have become crowded, a situation that veteran mountaineers deplore as dangerous. More than 200 people have died on Everest, and even though fatalities happen less frequently these days, the recent surge in climbers has meant that more than a quarter of those deaths have occurred since 2000. There is a very narrow window between May and June when Everest’s slopes are relatively less perilous, and during that time hundreds of climbers can crowd the so-called “Death Zone”—altitudes above 26,000 feet, where oxygen becomes scarce and mental faculties quickly deteriorate. (Climate change may also be making the climb more lethal, as the mountain’s layers of ice and snow melt and leave the path rockier and more treacherous.)
Last year, an expedition went up Everest to clear debris and retrieve the abandoned corpses of previous climbers. The five-person team ended up having to wait four hours in the Death Zone, as climbers going up “Hillary’s Step”—a sheer rock wall just below the summit—jammed the path down. A South Korean climber died, one of Everest’s four fatalities that day.
Nima Sherpa, a twenty-nine-year-old medic, ticks off the many afflictions that beset those who venture into Everest’s unrivaled altitudes: frostbite, snow blindness, hypothermia, delirium. The Sherpa guides who risk their lives climbing the Himalayas’ toughest peaks cannot dwell on these dangers, though: they have families to support. “The pay is good, and this is their work,” he points out.
And yet that is, perhaps, part of the problem. “When your family needs that money,” another guide says, “sometimes you don’t insist a weak climber turn back.”
Stephanie Lowe is an adventurer and storyteller. She is the founder of Playfull Productions, a firm dedicated to educating and empowering through play.
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He used to make counterfeit credit cards. Now Mansfield Frazier has embarked on an even more audacious project: launching a commercial vineyard in the middle of a poor, inner-city Cleveland neighborhood.
Story and photos by Karen Schaefer
The Vineyards of Chateau Hough, a new winery launched by ex-convict and entrepreneur Mansfield Frazier in one of downtown Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods. Frazier has ambitious plans for urban farming in Hough: his next project is tearing down the Victorian house alongside his vineyard so that he can build a cellar greenhouse for growing shiitake mushrooms.
A garden hose snakes across the intersection at Hough Avenue and East Sixty-Sixth Street, in a poor urban neighborhood about a mile east of downtown Cleveland. One end is clamped to a city fire hydrant. On the other end, a gaunt man with a weathered face delivers a steady spray of water to the roots of a grapevine.
Around him, another half-dozen workers, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, are hoeing, clipping, and tying up the tender young grapevines of nearly three hundred plants, stretching wires between sturdy wooden posts to trestle the vines. Most of these workers are members of a nearby halfway house, performing court-imposed community service.
Once a deserted lot, the field where they work now boasts three quarters of an acre of prime Cleveland farmland. On one side is a derelict commercial building, partially obscured by weedy trees. On the other side, paint peels from the wooden siding of a boarded-up, white Victorian house.
Welcome to the Vineyards of Chateau Hough.
In the 1960s, the predominantly black neighborhood of Hough was the scene of Cleveland’s race riots, which left four dead and the city burning. For decades, the neighborhood was in decline. The area still has high crime figures and an average income well below the poverty line. Three years ago the corner lot was an overgrown eyesore, made vacant by the demolition of an apartment building abandoned in bankruptcy.
Then local entrepreneur Mansfield Frazier took over the land. At sixty-nine, Frazier is a stout man, whose salt-and-pepper beard skims the broad planes of his smiling face. He is self-educated, a Cleveland native, and a former convict (he prefers the term “formerly incarcerated”). And he is the visionary behind Chateau Hough, a vineyard in the inner city.
His personal story has traced much the same trajectory as downtown Cleveland’s over the past few decades: working-class life disrupted by a descent into lawlessness and poverty, followed by a slow recovery and reorientation toward new, less conventional livelihoods. Frazier grew up about a mile from Hough. He got married at seventeen (much too young, he admits). After high school he got a job with the local electric company. He aced the entrance exam, only to be put to work cleaning toilets. “I worked my way up to be the top welder on the steam line,” says Frazier, “but they would never promote me. They wanted me to train other guys less qualified, to promote past me. And it got very aggravating after a while. I was about to go postal.”
Mansfield Frazier.
After the 1966 race riots tore apart the area, Frazier left Cleveland and began a twenty-nine-year career in counterfeiting. “I manufactured what are called counterfeit access devices, which are credit cards. And I did that all over the country,” says Frazier. “I didn’t mean to be a criminal, I meant to be an outlaw. There’s a difference, you know. Outlaws live outside the law. I didn’t have much respect for American law, because it wasn’t treating people fairly.”
The authorities failed to see the distinction. Frazier says he was never caught, but he was turned in more than once by fellow criminals and served several sentences in various prisons. But in 1992, his life changed while he was working in a prison library. “I was a tutor in math and English and I was reading an article by William Raspberry,” says Frazier, referring to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist (Raspberry, who wrote about social issues such as race and poverty, died in July). “And I thought he was alright, but he was speaking from wealth — he’d never lived in the projects. So the other clerk said, ‘You think you can write something better?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah!’ So on a dare, I started writing.”
While in jail, Frazier wrote and published From Behind the Wall (Paragon House, 1998), a commentary on crime, race, and the underclass. The book came out just a few days before his release. Frazier says that’s when the prison psychologist asked him a question: once he got out, was he going to go back to counterfeiting “and make everything in that book a goddamn lie”?
“That stopped me in my tracks,” says Frazier. “I felt like I’d been hit by a two-by-four.”
Frazier decided to see if he could make a success at something other than crime. After his release, he spent some time helping to build houses. Then he launched into his career as a writer. He got a job working for Cleveland’s black newspaper, the Call & Post, and later moved to the City News. He started Reentry Advocate, a bimonthly magazine that now appears in state and federal prisons in twenty states across the nation. These days, his essays on politics and race appear frequently in the Daily Beast, and he also writes a column for a local online magazine, CoolCleveland.com.
Thomas Mulready, publisher of CoolCleveland.com, admires Frazier for his fearlessness. “He’s not afraid to tackle taboo subjects,” Mulready says. “He says things other people aren’t saying.” In a recent commentary on the site, Frazier proposed that Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted of child sexual abuse, should commit suicide.
“I’m a provocateur,” Frazier admits. “I take contrarian points of view. And my background gives me a unique perspective that a lot of people might not have.” Comments about Frazier’s essays show up in almost every issue, Mulready says. “People do disagree with him. But he’s unusual — he often comes back and corrects himself and evolves his position.”
But after years in jail, just writing about social ills wasn’t enough for Frazier. He wanted to do something more tangible to change his community — to help “recreate the black middle class,” in his words. When he got out of prison, Frazier settled down in Hough. He built his own house there and stocked it with vegetable beds, a grapevine, and nut trees. Then he began work on another of his ideas.
An Oasis in a Food Desert
Frazier thumbs through a copy of his magazine Reentry Advocate, which seeks to keep ex-convicts from landing back in prison. After years in prison for counterfeiting credit cards, Frazier became a successful journalist and is now embarking on a new career as an urban farmer.
Across the Rust Belt in recent years, in the empty lots of cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Youngstown and Detroit, urban gardens have been sprouting like spring mushrooms. Generally speaking, urban agriculture is nothing new. In her book Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, journalist Jennifer Cockrall-King points out that urban gardens flourished during World War II: at one point, 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables were grown in these “victory gardens.” (In comparison, local foods expert Brad Masi estimates that today’s urban gardens in greater Cleveland produce about 1 to 2 percent of local food consumption; in cities like Chicago, it may be as high as 5 percent.)
What is perhaps different about today’s urban farms is the focus on reclaiming tracts of land in blighted downtown neighborhoods and planting viable businesses on them. And while the movement is still small, a number of trends in recent years have converged to support it. Against a backdrop of growing interest in climate change and pesticide-free produce, books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and documentaries such as Food Inc. have extolled the environmental virtues of locally grown, small-scale agriculture. Urban farming projects have gained national exposure with the success of pioneers like Will Allen, a former professional basketball player and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who heads one of the country’s largest urban agriculture programs in Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the mortgage crisis that set in motion the Great Recession five years ago has brought about an abundance of available land, as abandoned homes and cratering real estate values have made it affordable to farm again on entire city blocks.
Mansfield Frazier was one local entrepreneur who saw an opening. In 2009, as his city was still reeling from the recession, he applied for an initial $18,000 grant from Reimagining Cleveland, a citywide program designed to support sustainability projects that rebuild neighborhoods. Frazier’s idea was to start a farm on an abandoned city lot. It was not just about making money, he says, but about providing food alternatives in a low-income neighborhood with plenty of fast food, but few healthy options — what experts call a “food desert.”
“What you see young mothers putting in their grocery carts is appalling,” says Frazier. “You’ve got to make healthy choices. You can’t raise kids off of Twinkies and that sugary fruit punch.”
A vineyard was the first stage of Frazier’s plans for his nonprofit farming venture. He admits he didn’t know much about wine when he started (“I’m an expert — at taking the cork out of the bottle”). But Frazier won over his skeptics on the grant committee with his personality and passion, and over the past three years he has studied the art of winemaking intensively through his collaborations with local experts, learning enough to start advising other would-be vintners in the city. “Can’t be that hard, it’s the world’s second-oldest profession,” Frazier jokes. “Grapevines have been around forever. The great thing is, you can screw them up and they still come back.”
Frazier shows one of his workers — also a former inmate — how to tie up some grapevines. Many of the vineyard’s workers are ex-offenders from a nearby halfway house who are performing court-ordered community service.
Neighborhood Progress, a Cleveland nonprofit that funnels federal dollars into local urban agriculture projects, boasts of Frazier’s vineyard as one of their biggest success stories. “His vision is huge — and it’s long-term,” says Lilah Zautner, the organization’s program manager. “He practices what he preaches, he walks the walk. For him to say ‘I want to put a winery and a vineyard in the middle of the inner city in the Hough neighborhood’ is an amazing vision. But also not just to have that vision, but to systematically make that happen.”
The grant from Reimagining Cleveland provided Frazier with the start-up capital for his farm, but local government has also helped him build that: as part of its land-bank program, the city of Cleveland is letting him use the lot virtually for free, so long as he pays the property taxes. Since his business is nonprofit, donations provide the rest of his funding, and local volunteers help out in the fields. And thanks to an agreement with a nearby halfway house, most of the vineyard workers are ex-offenders performing unpaid community service.
“It gives me a chance to mentor,” Frazier says. “We talk when we’re working. Guys say, ‘I’m going to get out, going to get me a dope bag.’ And I say, ‘That didn’t work too well last time. Maybe you want to think about doing something else.’”
Now that the winery is in business, Frazier is moving ahead with plans to expand his urban farm. “That building we intend to do fish-farming in,” he says, pointing at the decaying commercial building next to his lot. “The county wants to give me that building also. They don’t own it, but they’ll take it from the owner; it’s a blight. So we’ll do them a favor and save them from the taxes.” Likewise, Frazier is paying off someone else’s $1,600 tax bill in exchange for the sagging Victorian house on the other end of his vineyard, whose basement he plans to convert into a bio-cellar, a semi-subterranean greenhouse that will be covered with a twenty-foot-high roof of plexiglass. There he’ll grow shiitake mushrooms for local restaurants (they’re selling now for $20 a pound, he notes). Across the street on another vacant property, Frazier sees a vegetable garden whose produce will go to area food banks.
In Hough, the supply is certainly there to meet the demand. Over the last decade there has been some reinvestment in new condominiums and private housing, but much of the neighborhood is still in disrepair, with land bank-owned boarded-up houses and vacant lots. (Overall, Cleveland has 1,200 acres of land — almost 10,000 city lots — available for projects like Frazier’s.)
Just having an urban farm nearby can shape the ways that people in the neighborhood look at their food, Frazier says. “The goal is to train kids and let them see how crops grow, and you can change their eating habits. I think that’s critically important. We are a very unhealthy nation.” And the presence of a growing, locally owned business in Hough will make the community healthier in other ways, too. Frazier sees urban agriculture jobs as a good fit for former inmates reentering the workforce — and as a productive outlet for young people as well, “to keep them off the streets and out of prison.”
Workers tend to the vineyard’s grapevines. Frazier plans to lease the abandoned commercial building in the background from Cleveland’s land bank so that he can convert it into a facility for fish farming.
That’s what Frazier means when he talks — with his characteristically heady ambition — about “recreating the black middle class” in Hough. The neighborhood doesn’t need saviors; it needs investors to tap the potential that’s already there — in the soil, and in the people. “I don’t think the neighborhood is in that much need of redemption,” Frazier notes. “I don’t think the neighborhood is bad.”
This fall, Frazier harvested his first crop. He doesn’t have a winemaking license, so he’s invited amateur vintners in the area to come and use his Traminette and Frontenac grapes. Frazier personally prefers sweeter wines, like Riesling or Moscato. But he says he doesn’t care what kind of wine comes from the grapes. He just hopes that one day locals will be able to buy a bottle of Chateau Hough.
“Everybody wants to see what the ground has wrought,” says Frazier. “And it’s impossible to tell — you can’t predict what the wine’s gonna taste like. And I’m getting curious.
“Who knows? I might even make an award-winning wine.”
Karen Schaefer is a freelance writer in Ohio.
Dear Reader,In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
Sunset on a stretch of the Pripyat River, in the radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Andrew Blackwell)
In ITF‘s interview with Andrew Blackwell, the author of the book Visit Sunny Chernobyl talks about his travels to the world’s most polluted places. One point he raises is that there’s no way to return the environment to the “pure, pre-human phase” of its existence — and that this is a misguided ideal to begin with.
Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.
Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.
Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.
Perhaps it says something about humanity’s self-centered view of the world that the catchphrase for the environmental movement is “save the planet.” Planet Earth doesn’t need saving. If life can survive in the pitch-dark, pitiless abyss of the deep ocean, or recolonize remote islands after volcanic explosions wipe the landscape clean, or — as Blackwell points out — thrive in irradiated zones where human beings now fear to tread, then you can imagine that life will eventually adapt to whatever nightmare scenario Homo sapiens visits on its terrestrial neighborhood. (Of course, species higher up on the food chain will vanish — as they already are on track to do — but give the Earth a few more billion years, and perhaps complex life can evolve once again even on an inhospitable, dangerously polluted planet.)
As Blackwell points out, the environment in the modern age is never “pristine.” And that seems to fit with the way of nature, with its (evolutionary) love of mixing and hybrid forms. Nature revels in the “impure.” As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, flowers arise from mud; the idea of “purity” is in our minds. Regardless of what we do, nature will find a way of dealing with it, because it is, at heart, impure and impermanent.
The point is, life on Earth doesn’t need us; we need life on Earth. Other species on the planet can play a long game, and wait us out, with time and evolution on their side. We can’t. And yet in the United States and many other countries, the popular will is weak to do something about climate change and environmental degradation more generally.
In part, it may be a question of how we frame the problem. Two of the most potent symbols of climate change are melting glaciers and starving polar bears — not the kind of imagery that does a good job of drawing people to see the very real threat to their daily lives. Ironically, even phrases like “saving the planet” tend to make environmental problems appear distant from everyday, “real” concerns. They make environmentalism seem like something you do off in a forest somewhere, away from other people: campaigning to protect far-off waterways and species, crusading like some kind of modern-day monk on behalf of a utopian, preindustrial past. In reality, the core concern of the environmental movement is the most pragmatic of goals: ensuring that we human beings have the food, dry land, and clean water and air that we need, say, to live.
Perhaps it’s time to change the name of “Earth Day.” It’s not a day to celebrate some abstract ideal. It’s a day of judgment. It’s not about the Earth and its survival. It’s about human beings. It’s about whether we are smart enough to value the neighborhood we’re lucky to live in — or content to watch it burn around us.
ITF speaks with Andrew Blackwell about his new book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, a travel guide to the most polluted places on the planet. Even sites ravaged by radiation and industrial waste, he argues, can still be places of “nature, wildness, and beauty.”
A man paddles across the Yamuna River, India’s most polluted.
Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places By Andrew Blackwell
Rodale Books. 320 pages.
Journalist Andrew Blackwell traveled to seven of the most polluted places on the planet: from the nuclear disaster zone of Chernobyl, to the smog-ridden city of Linfen, China, to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In his new book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Blackwell details his often humorously grotesque experiences hanging out in these past and present eco-disasters. In The Fray culture editor Susan M. Lee talked with him about his travels, the unique charm of the globe’s dirtiest corners, and the myth of pristine nature in an age of climate change. (Disclosure: Andrew Blackwell is president of ITF’s board of directors.)
You were inspired to write this book by a trip to India that you took years ago.
I heard how polluted Kanpur was supposed to be. It had just been named the most polluted city in India by the government. And it certainly lived up to that expectation. But I learned, after the fact, that I really enjoyed my time there — strictly as an interesting place to visit. So I had this flash: I just realized that, almost because they were polluted, there were all these places around the world that you would never really bother to visit, that you were missing out on because they had this stigma of pollution attached to them.
Did you have any expectations of what you would find, before you started out on your trips?
I thought the destinations would be a lot grosser than they were. As I went along, I realized I was in danger of not getting enough grossness in, and doing my due diligence for a book about pollution. Fortunately, I ended up being fazed by the Yamuna River in northern India in the last chapter. There was no way to say that it didn’t smell really, really gross. But otherwise, the visceral sensory experience of the locations was not nearly as intense or offensive as I expected. But that might have something to do with my message, which was not to find the grossest place but to find places that were the ultimate examples of a particular kind of environmental problem. And that didn’t always line up with the place being unpleasant.
Andrew Blackwell aboard the brigantine Kaisei, en route to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
What did you enjoy the most on these trips? What were the highlights?
In almost every case, it was experiences I had with people I met. I think that’s often true either about reporting or about travel. It’s less about whether you saw this or that building and more about the kinds of people you met.
In Chernobyl, my guides Dennis and Nikolai and I are drinking and totally wasted. And I see they are thinking, “Oh, he’s not joking — he really wants to see what’s fun and interesting about this town, not just what the horror story is.” People do respond to your curiosity and sincerity. Like the time with the sadhus [ascetic, nomadic Indian monks]. I’m with these guys and they’re wearing robes and paint and we’re camping in the countryside and they’re completely taking care of me and feeding me. They were so friendly and solicitous, almost to a degree that they drove me insane. That was a special experience.
What were some of the challenges you encountered in writing about the world’s most polluted places?
Some of the regular problems of traveling, such as: I don’t speak Chinese and I don’t speak Portuguese. On a topical level, while these places are real and their [environmental]issues are all real — and I certainly don’t want to be thought of debunking these issues — they’re often hyped. Maybe not by serious journalists, but at a popular level. A lot of the time, I did go into each location expecting it to be more spectacular. What I realized was that the story was more subtle and much harder.
But I think it ended up making the book stronger in the end — that struggle became a theme in the book. For example, that popular image of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a solid mass is not true. But it’s still a powerful image that persists, even in the minds of people fighting the problem.
A smokestack disappears in the haze surrounding Linfen, China. The city is notorious for having some of the worst smog in the world.
In the book, there seems to be a recurring theme of problematic ways of viewing nature, even by modern environmentalists. Could you talk a little about these alternateviews of nature?
Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.
Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.
Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.
The destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant, with a view of the steel and concrete “sarcophagus” built to contain Reactor No. 4, which is still dangerously radioactive.
So you’re sort of trying to demystify these polluted places as well as the idea of pristine nature?
Yeah, exactly. There are people out there doing some interesting work on showing ways in which places that are thought of as pristine aren’t. And I’m working from the other end, by finding places that are considered to be horror stories and “anti-nature” and saying it’s also still a place that has nature, wildness, and beauty.
Do you think that your background had anything to do with your desire to write about environmental and industrial issues?
I don’t know what comes from my family or what just comes from me. But my brother was trained as a scientist. Now he works doing visualizations at the California Academy of Sciences. My dad is an engineer. His dad was an engineer. And I have a cousin who’s a geologist. So science has always been special to me.
I grew up mostly in Seattle, but before that our family lived in Japan for three years. I lived in Japan for first, second, and third grade. And we also did a lot of traveling in the summer since we were in Asia. We went to Indonesia, Singapore, and a number of other places. That was a really formative, great experience. Just that a place can be bizarre and strange and can be welcoming and fun. I think Japanese culture especially, at least thirty years ago, was extremely safe — and people were friendly, probably because I was American and different and had blond hair.
If you could have included other places, which ones would they be?
I wanted to go to the oil fields in the Niger Delta. Two things kept me from doing that. The two or three people I talked to sort of were cautious. You want to make sure you’re in safe spots. And also I didn’t want half the book to be about oil-related locations. I wanted a better spread.
I really wanted to see ship breaking in India or Bangladesh — these incredible beaches where they tear ships apart. The world is just a candy store for this stuff.
Interview has been condensed and edited.
An oil tanker carrying twenty million gallons of crude oil approaches Port Arthur, Texas.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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Type "green cleaners" into any online search engine and you’ll get links to sites giving you "recipes" for do-it-yourself cleaners to brand-name environmentally-friendly cleaners.
Although buying Earth-friendly brands like Simple Green are fine for the environment and maybe a more familiar buying process, they can be much pricier than chemical cleaners.
On the other hand, making your own green cleaners is cheap and just as, or even more effective than, using harsh chemicals — and much better for your own health, too.
There are usually the same natural ingredients listed on most of the do-it-yourself sites: 1) white vinegar 2) hydrogen peroxide 3) baking soda 4) castile soap
White vinegar has many different uses. Combine it in a spray bottle with water and it’s a glass cleaner. It kills bacteria, so it can also be combined with the castile soap to clean countertops, floors, and toilets or to rinse dishes.
Hydrogen peroxide is a bleach alternative and non-toxic to the environment. Anything that usually takes bleach can be substituted with HP instead. HP is also an antiseptic that can clean superficial skin wounds, be used as an oral rinse to whiten your teeth, and work as a hair lightener. Combine it with baking soda and castile soap to clean and whiten the bathtub and sinks.
Baking soda is a gritty powder that can be used in places that need scrubbing. A very effective way to unclog drains is to combine one cup of baking soda and one cup of white vinegar to a pot of boiled water. It will fizz up when the ingredients are added, and that’s what will purge your drains of clogs. Pour it down the plugged drain, flush with water, and voila — the drain will be miraculously unplugged. I actually used this as a last-ditch effort on a slow drain that has been backing-up for years. I had been using a chemical unclogger because it seemed so stubborn that only chemicals would unplug it.
Castile soap is a vegetable-oil-based natural soap. You can go one step further and actually make it yourself (there are lots of recipes online), but it’s usually reasonably priced. Dr. Bronner’s is a good brand that can be found online or at places like Trader Joe’s. This soap is used in place of other soaps, like dishwashing detergent, bathroom cleaner, laundry soap, and shower gel. I’ve read online accounts of people even brushing their teeth with the soap.
Some other green cleaning ingredients (that I haven’t tried but are also popular) are lemons and borax.
If you have chemical cleansers in the house, it’s best to use them up before you go green — because if you throw them out, it’s just as bad for the environment as using them.
And not all your old standby cleansers are necessarily bad for the environment. Ivory Soap is pretty much natural and not bad for the Earth. Also look for words like biodegradable surfactants — and anionic and nonionic on dish and laundry soap labels.
According to the media, one of the latest green movements is happening in churches, synagogues, and mosques around the country. Several news organizations have already done stories about people from different faiths who all have the same goal of saving the environment.
The Weather Channel’s "Forecast Earth" profiles Baptist pastor and environmental advocate Dr. Gerald Durely, who was inspired by the environmental film The Great Warming. Dr. Durely says in the piece: "As one who believes that the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, is that we have an obligation to ensure that what God has created, we keep together." The pastor has taken his environmental message and movement to his congregation because he says it will "make a difference for my children, my grandchildren, and generations to come when we begin to conserve and do what it is on this Earth that is so important."
ABC News looked into a North Carolina church that for the second year in a row is having a so-called "carbon fast" for Lent:
"Lent is a traditional time when we talk about reducing," said the United Church’s pastor, Richard Edens.
Lent is the 40-day period in which Christians fast and atone to prepare for Easter. This year the congregation has weekly themes; for example, one week they save water, another week they eat only locally-grown produce. And they are part of a growing international movement of carbon-fasters.
New Jersey Jewish News reports on a Jewish environmental organization’s call to synagogues to become more environmentally friendly by changing their old incandescent lightbulbs to energy-efficient ones:
"We’re trying to make our synagogue more energy-efficient, so it was a natural process," [Kevin Fried of Montclair, NJ’s Bnai Keshet synagogue] said. "We’re doing our part to help the environment. A couple of weeks ago we held a screening of An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore’s documentary on global warming) and had CFLs [compact fluorescent lightbulbs]" on hand for people to see and purchase.
The article also features other energy-saving tips from the Coalition for the Environment in Jewish Life.
CNN reports on the "greenest" Canadian Church that is a model of eco-renovation. Father Paul Cusack of St. Gabriel’s Parish says he is "trying to raise the consciousness of people through the beauty of creation." And asks his parish: "What are we going to do as individuals in this community to change our lifestyle or anything else to facilitate the healing of the Earth?" The renovated church itself is a model of environmental-friendly architechture. Among its Earth-friendly features are large windows to draw in solar heat and a living wall that is a natural air purifier. And as Father Paul says, "It’s not words that make the difference, it’s actions."
The Washington Post and Newsweek‘s "On Faith" section online addressed interfaith environmental care. Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core brings together Evangelicals and Muslims to work for the greater good. Patel writes:
The Holy Qur’an teaches that God created Adam to be His servant and representative on Earth with the primary task of caring for the beauty and diversity of creation…In my Muslim outlook, I believe this is moving creation in line with the intention of the Creator.
Among Patel’s interfaith initiatives are Earth Day programs involving different faiths.
keeping the earth ever green
*Please note that ever green is religion neutral and does not advocate for or against any religion, but I am always happy to report on anyone or anything that is helping the environment regardless of motivation.
With the February 5th primary almost here, where the majority of the states vote to choose who they want as their party’s presidential candidate, ever green is looking at their environmental history to determine who the standout candidates are.
Senator Hillary Clinton is the Democratic presidential candidate who ever green stands behind. Her environmental record is ongoing; according to Grist, she has sponsored or co-sponsored almost 400 lawmaking proposals about energy or the environment. And this continues even as recently as last week. In the midst of her non-stop campaigning Clinton still managed to co-sponsor Senator Barbara Boxer’s bill to reverse the EPA’s global warming waiver decision. This controversial decision blocked states’ own efforts to cut vehicle emissions. Also note that 17 other senators co-sponsored this bill, including Senators Barack Obama, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Ted Kennedy, to name a few. Senator Clinton has also introduced legislation to amend the Defense Authorization Act to include global warming as a threat to national security. This amendment has passed congressional approval twice, was vetoed once by President Bush, and now again is pending his approval. For her campaign, she promises to reduce electricity consumption, support a $50 billion alternative energy fund, greatly increase fuel-efficiency standards, and green up low-income homes, among other things. Clinton’s presidential campaign is carbon neutral. And the nonpartisan group, League of Conservation Voters (LCV), gives Senator Clinton a 90 percent lifetime environmental voting record, which is a very high average considering it spans from 2001 when she was first elected to office.
Although ever green is not Republican, I do stand up for Senator John McCain as presidential candidate for that party. As noted in a previous ever green post, McCain co-sponsored the 2003 Climate Stewardship Act that the Republican majority Senate at the time rejected. According to the League of Conservation Voters, McCain is the only Republican presidential candidate who has done or said anything at all about environmental issues and global warming. The other candidates have barely acknowledged global warming as an issue or problem. Senator McCain, although only receiving a 26 percent lifetime environmental voting record, was the only Republican who bothered to answer the LCV’s questionnaire. For his campaign, McCain doesn’t lay out any specific numbers as do the Democratic candidates on environmental issues; instead he acknowledges that there is an interdependence between economics and the environment and that they both need to be healthy to work. He also is an advocate for nuclear energy as an alternative and clean energy source.
Billions of cigarette butts get tossed out onto the streets, creating ugly litter and causing toxic chemicals to be released into the environment. Watch as ever green explores this issue:
One of the must-do events for eco-conscious folks is to attend one of the Live Earth concerts this July. According to the official website, the event will be a "24-hour, 7-continent series of 9 concerts taking place on 7/7/07 that will bring together more than 100 music artists and 2 billion people to trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis." And yes that does mean that there will be a concert on the continent of Antarctica, which, however, can only be attended by the 17 research scientists already there. But in terms of the other continents, anybody can go listen to music and learn about how to save the planet.
In recent years, Al Gore has been one of the greatest influences in the rise of interest to conserve the planet. His highly popular documentary An Inconvenient Truth helped the cause of global warming; and, through his efforts, environmentalism is no longer a bad word. But the question of ecological responsibility during huge mega-stage musical events seems illogical.
The Live Earth organizers claim that this event will use new Green Event Guidelines (GEGs) as outlined by LEED, the Green Building Rating System. A quick visit and search on the LEED website didn’t show any sort of GEGs. A call to their customer service to find out about this led to only a voicemail saying to leave a message. Granted, the new GEGs could be so new that there is no information about them yet, but since this concert is such a big event that could yield a lot of publicity for LEED, one would think they would have info about it.
The place that there are GEGs is in the Live Earth press kit, which of course they want to publicize. So according to this, Live Earth will use renewable energy and biodegradable plastics, recycle, offset carbon emissions, and use hybrid vehicles among other things. Environmental advisor John Rego says that this event is breaking ground for the live event industry and is a learning process because of the newness. He goes on to say that educating the people involved in this event about minimizing their environmental footprint, from which they will be able to take and make good in future events, is key.
The real question is what sort of impact will happen regardless of all the so-called environmental precautions taken. Thousands of people converging for a day in one area has to have a negative effect. Most of the people who will attend this concert probably think they care about the environment enough, so how does this event really "trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis?"
A harmful detriment to people’s health comes from outside forces. You can paint your house whatever color you like as well as design the interior, but you can’t control things like how loud your neighbors play their music or the jackhammer noise from when they decide to renovate.
Living in a city gives off a hum of noise from things like traffic, construction, and air conditioning units. Noise pollution can ruin sleep, create headaches, and essentially lower the enjoyment of life. Watch below for more on this problem:
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