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Looking into the Heart of the Machine
The night air in the high Sierra was crisp and faintly pine-scented. We had tumbled out of the cabin in our pajamas, my husband, kids, and I, to gaze at the stars. We don't get to see them much in Berkeley where we live, thanks to light pollution. But up in this mountain valley where we had come for a brief break, they hung clear and bright by the billions. We stood there gazing until our necks ached. Then my husband and four-year-old son lay down on the cold ground and gazed some more, talking about the Milky Way, and shooting stars, and satellites.

As I soaked in the beauty of the moment, I had to resist the almost instinctive desire to capture the scene on my phone. That urge was yet another a reminder of how much nearly everything we do today, almost every experience we have, tends to be filtered through technology.

The subject has been on my mind a lot lately as we’ve just wrapped up a special fall issue of the Journal exploring our complicated relationship with technology — how it has been the source of environmental damage and how, at the same time, it may offer us the scope of repairing some of that damage. This issue, as our guest editor Paul Kingsnorth writes, reopens “the necessary and urgent questions about where technological ‘advancement’ is taking us,” and examines “the unspoken assumptions at the heart of the Machine.”

Watch out for it. I think you will find it provocative.

Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
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Brazil's Forest Fires. More Trump Bizarreness. The Keystone Zombie.
The raging fires in the Amazon rainforest that have grabbed world headlines are linked to forest clearing by farmers and ranchers. That deforestation, it turns out, has been tied to two Brazilian firms that have made major donations to Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is still flip-flopping on international aid offers to help fight the blazes, but his new buddy Trump has been patting him on the back for his handling of the crisis.
 
The Donald, meanwhile, has been busy sitting out climate talks at the G7 meeting in France. It’s unclear if Trump missed the climate sessions on purpose or due to a scheduling snafu, but either way, the faux pas didn't stop him from calling himself "an environmentalist" just a few hours later.
 
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Former Journal managing editor Amy Westervelt’s incandescent rage about "the loudest voices" covering environmental stories and "the patriarchal, capitalist pyramid" that promotes business-as-usual technofix solutions to the climate crisis is a thing of beauty to behold. But more importantly, her writing reminds us why it's absolutely normal and intellectually honest to get emotional, and yes, angry, about how corporate capitalism is destroying our world. Don't miss "The Case for Climate Rage" in Popula.
 
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