In the coastal, rainy city of Kanazawa, Japan, landscape architect and researcher Juan Pastor-Ivars discovered something surprising: gardens in the center of this city of 460,000 contain species of animals, plants, and insects that no longer live in the surrounding mountains and protected wildlife areas outside the city. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, scientists discovered that an astounding 2 percent of the world’s species can be found within the borders of Mexico City, a metropolis of nearly 9 million people.
These recent findings emphasize that humans don’t always need to be destructive forces on the environment—in fact, they can be positive influences on biodiversity and life. And one particularly counterintuitive implication is that a rich, biodiverse ecosystem doesn’t have to be at odds with dense city-building.
They had climbed 3,000 feet up a steep trail covered in snow and ice. Less-seasoned hikers probably would not have stopped. But Bartell and Mitchell have been scaling mountains for decades; they’ve each summited this one more than 400 times. They knew what could go wrong.
Getting to the top one more time might be easy, they figured; getting down might not.
Set in contemporary Nigeria, Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s second novel, “A Spell of Good Things,” is a pointed warning about the dangers of choosing to look away from the deep economic fissures that run through a community. Whatever we might do to distance ourselves from the destitute — taking refuge in tidy suburbs, expunging the poor from our scenic trails — in any society lives can and do intersect. These intersections expose the flimsiness of the illusions the privileged cling to, that they can both preside over and hide from the impoverished, and that there is no cost to doing so.
When Sherriff’s novel was first published, it alerted England to its complacency before the storm of total war with fascist Germany. Sherriff also seems to have recognized that war would usher in the end of the British Empire, already in its long twilight. For readers today, many elements in the novel will call to mind our own recent experiences with the coronavirus pandemic, ultranationalist politics, widespread religious fanaticism, the global climate crisis and senseless, brutal wars of attrition around the world. In short, “The Hopkins Manuscript” doesn’t simply — or simplistically — envision what some have called a “cozy catastrophe.” It remains a relevant cautionary tale.
In 1993, a cargo ship called the Golden Venture ran aground on a sandbar off the Rockaway Peninsula in New York. The ship, which had set off four months earlier from Bangkok, had stopped in Kenya and rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach America. It carried a desperate cargo: 286 undocumented people from Fuzhou in China, who had made the voyage in the clothes they stood up in, without any kind of adequate sanitation on board, and little food or water. With the ship stranded offshore, most of the migrants, stick-thin and delirious, jumped into the freezing sea – it was 2am – to try to reach the promised land, the lights of Coney Island visible across the bay. Ten people drowned, the rest were picked up by the quickly scrambled authorities on the beach to be held in various prisons, some for four years, while they sought asylum. About half were eventually deported.
The New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe used that tragedy as the embarkation point for his landmark “deep dive” into the criminal underworld that brought – and brings – vast numbers of Chinese people to the US.