April 23, 2020 57
a five-mile seawall for Staten Island—
are already in the works.^6 But depend-
ing on the design, walls that spare
Manhattan or even New York City as
a whole could redirect storm water
and sediment toward other boroughs
or states. It’s nearly impossible (and
impossibly expensive) to build a net-
work of walls that protects the entire
agglomeration. They would have to end
somewhere. The Jersey Shore? Dela-
ware? Virginia? Imagine the response
of states, cities, and citizens abandoned
in the flood zone. Consider the variet-
ies of environmental injustice ahead.
Some of these injustices are already
upon us. Even within an affluent so-
ciety such as the US, richer, more
politically powerful states and cities
frequently command more public re-
sources for rebuilding and adapting
after storms than poorer ones. Accord-
ing to a recent study of policy response
to the string of powerful hurricanes
of 2017, “The federal government re-
sponded on a larger scale and much
more quickly across measures of fed-
eral money and staffing to Hurricanes
Harvey and Irma in Texas and Flor-
ida, compared with Hurricane Maria
in Puerto Rico. The variation in the
responses was not commensurate with
storm severity and need after landfall.”^7
States like California and New York
have far more capacity to invest in ad-
a p t a t i o n m e a s u r e s t h a n d o o t h e r c o a s t a l
states like North Carolina, South
Carolina, or Louisiana—not to men-
tion US territories like Puerto Rico.
The disparities are greater, and more
grotesque, in the developing world,
including the Caribbean islands, whose
exploitation helped produce the wealth
that affluent nations now invest in their
own climate security. One of the cru-
elest features of the climate crisis is
that poor nations, which bear so little
responsibility for global warming, are
most susceptible to its effects.
Purdy is aware that inequality is the
enemy of both domestic and interna-
tional cooperation, which any fight
against climate change will require. In-
stead of (or, perhaps, prior to) propos-
ing familiar policy fixes, such as a wealth
tax or reparations, he suggests we
revive an older ideal, the “common-
wealth,” which “might be an economy
where no one gets their living by de-
grading someone else, nor by degrad-
ing the health of the land or the larger
living world,” a community in which
“the flourishing of everyone and every-
thing would sustain the flourishing of
each person,” and “a way of living in
deep reciprocity as well as deep equal-
ity.” Such prose may rankle those who
were put off by Purdy’s early communi-
tarian writing in For Common Things
(1999), but in This Land Is Our Land
he uses policy ideas, not just philosoph-
ical ones, to make the case for a GND.
The Green New Deal, he writes, is
best thought of as a jobs program; so,
too, are the Department of Homeland
Security and other large government
projects: the Defense Department
spent $250 billion on private contrac-
tors in Iraq and Afghanistan between
2007 and 2017, for instance, and the
US continues to subsidize the oil and
gas industry. An ambitious infrastruc-
ture project designed for sustainability,
therefore, is actually consistent with
recent American policy. What’s dif-
ferent about the GND, he says, “is the
recognition that, in the Anthropocene,
remaking the economy and remaking
our relation to ecology are two sides of
the same change.”
Ending fossil fuel subsidies is just
the beginning. Purdy condemns states
and the federal government for lax
regulation of industrial agriculture,
mining, and water management that
result in dangerous pollution. He calls
for shoring up massively popular en-
vironmental protections, including
the Clean Water Act, that the Trump
administration is rolling back. More
innovatively, he insists that activists
and policymakers recognize environ-
mental injustices that are not usu-
ally framed as environmental. The
Farm Bill, for instance, provides $65
billion in subsidies every five years
to an industry that’s been quick to
produce unhealthy food made from
corn syrup and soybean oil, but slow
to reduce carbon emissions or pro-
mote nutritious diets. Climate policy,
Purdy understands, is not just what
happens at the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency; it’s what we do with pub-
lic transit, public housing, and public
works. The Green New Deal is what
brings everything together.A Planet to Win: Why We Need a
Green New Deal is a collective en-
deavor, written by four young intellec-
tuals (a journalist, a sociologist, and
two political scientists) who are part of
the climate movement they’re studying,
and the tone of this short book is urgent
and pragmatic. It’s also refreshingly op-
timistic and future-oriented, filled with
specific ideas for how to decarbonize
the energy system, build affordable
housing and public transportation,
expand parks and public recreation fa-
cilities, and renegotiate global trade re-
gimes so that human rights and public
health are properly valued. “Fighting
for a new world starts with imagining
it viscerally,” the authors write. Their
portrait of a planet transformed
by a GND is designed to spark that
effort.
Aronoff, Battistoni, Cohen, and
Riofrancos are motivated by the trou-
blesome fact that we have very little
time—roughly the ten years spanning
the 2020s—to decarbonize the econ-
omy, lest we pump so much greenhouse
gas into the atmosphere that cata-
strophic warming becomes irreversible.
Following Bill McKibben, they note
that the only way to do this is by bury-
ing fossil fuels, including those that are
already primed for distribution. Taxing
carbon to increase its price may help a
little, but “a carbon price low enough
to be politically viable won’t be high(^6) The US Army Corp of Engineers was
considering building a massive retract-
able gate stretching across the mouth
of New York Harbor that would wall
the city off from the sea in the event of
a storm, though the plan was recently
abandoned after being criticized by
Trump. Although the gate was of du-
bious efficacy, the real significance of
the decision is that the Trump admin-
istration has cut off a potentially large
stream of federal funds to New York
City’s adaptation efforts.
(^7) C. E. Willison, P. M. Singer, M. S.
Creary, et al., “Quantifying Inequities
in US Federal Response to Hurricane
Disaster in Texas and Florida Com-
pared with Puerto Rico,” BMJ Global
Health, January 18, 2019.
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Monster is not scary or mean like other monsters. He’s kind of tall and his head is skinny,
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“The experience of reading Green, or so I find,
is far more animating than the ordinary reading
experience and extends far beyond the usual
confines: It can be almost physical, as if the
thought or sensation expressed on the page
were being generated by one’s own, not the
author’s mind.... One is mesmerized, thrilled,
transported, often by the very recklessness
entailed by an underlying and urgent purity
of vision.” —Deborah Eisenberg
Surviving presents a miscellany of Henry Green’s
writing, and is as reflective of his extraordinary
and unclassifiable genius for the word as any of
his great novels from Living to Loving to Nothing.
Readers will find remarkable stories from the
1920s and 1930s; Green’s telling of his time in
the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz; a short,
unpublished play, Journey out of Spain; journal-
ism; and the hilarious interview with Green that
Terry Southern conducted for The Paris Review.
Edited by the novelist Matthew Yorke, Green’s
grandson, Surviving also includes a memoir by
Green’s son, Sebastian Yorke, that is a brilliant
portrait of this maverick master.
ALSO IN THE NYRB CLASSICS SERIES
LOVING • CAUGHT • BACK • BLINDNESS
LIVING • PARTY GOING • DOTING • NOTHING
NYRB is continuing to publish books during this
difficult time, though our New York office is closed
and we are not able to accept direct orders.
http://www.nyrb.com
SURVIVING
Stories, Essays, Interviews
Henry Green
Introduction by John Updike
Edited by Matthew Yorke
With a memoir by Sebastian Yorke
Paperback • $18.95
Surviving and the other Henry Green
titles may be purchased from many
independent bookstores, some of
which will mail books. Please call
your local store for their ordering
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