Reclamation & Dancing To Prison
What happens to the natural world when people disappear? Also, innocents caught up in the Strike Hard Against Crime Campaign.
Featured Articles
The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?
The Guardian • 28 Nov 2024 • ~4100 words
Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria.
When people imagine ecosystems recovering, this return to forest is often what springs to mind. But forests only represent a small sliver of possible habitats. For other species, the currency of life is light, and a dense, closed canopy of forest is impossible to survive. A swallow is perfectly adapted to vast, open fields: the curve of its wings and distinctive forking tail designed for fast pursuit of insects hovering above meadows. A starling murmuration, moving across the sky like spilled pepper over a tablecloth, is an adaptation to open fields: repelling predators, protecting the roost. Vast numbers of species adapted and co-evolved with these open places – plants, mammals, insects, grazers, species like wildflowers, that relish disturbance and light. The rich biodiversity of open grasslands can be even greater than that of temperate forests.
Dancing To Prison
China Books Review • 27 Nov 2024 • ~4350 words
1983’s Strike Hard Against Crime Campaign led to the arrests of many innocent victims, caught up in a culture of fear. One of them was imprisoned for organizing an unofficial dance party — until he broke out in a daring escape.
If you were convicted in the Strike Hard Campaign, it was impossible to be declared innocent. This is the logic of the Communist Party. No matter if you appeal and refuse to accept your guilt, no matter how hard you work, your sentence will not be reduced. So, given the massive momentum behind the Strike Hard campaign, and despite the ever-growing pile of unjust cases, very few people dared to risk filing a complaint. I had to go along with the prevailing custom.
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A Place for Grief
Commonweal • 25 Nov 2024 • ~2900 words
Why we still need graveyards.
Her work on virtual afterlives began as a study of martyrs and the cult of the saints. She noted how the physical presence of the body, or part of the body, of someone who had led a saintly life conferred a kind of sacrality on the place of rest, as if there was a sacred presence even in death. This was the closest I had come to a confirmation of my sense that what was missing in cremation and the scattering of ashes was a recognition of a physical space as a site of personal presence. My family and I certainly mourned my wife’s death, and we have developed rituals for memorializing her life. But these traditions of mourning and memory have lacked a physical dimension.
