Sustainability in the Valley of the Sun
When Andrew Ross first came to the Phoenix, he was interested in learning what local artists were doing to revitalize downtown, a desert city with an urban core that, to many urbanists, leaves much to be desired. No city exists in a vacuum, however, and Ross soon came to the conclusion that to understand Phoenix he had to understand the story of the other cities and sprawling suburbs throughout the valley. It was through this research that he concluded that the Phoenix metro area — which includes nine cities with populations of 100,000 or more — was, as he puts it in the subtitle, “the world’s least sustainable city.”
Some may take issue with that claim, but Phoenix’s problem is evident: a sprawling population of four million and counting in a sun-scorched desert certainly poses significant sustainability challenges. Further, as Ross argues, a prevailing culture of rugged individualism and a widespread aversion to all forms of regulation have only exacerbated the sustainability challenges.
As a relative newcomer to Phoenix, I was particularly interested to learn what is being done to make Phoenix more sustainable, and what obstacles stand in the way. According to the book, the obstacles have for the most part gotten the upper hand. But with a heightened awareness of the need for more sustainable living across the country and around the world, Ross believes that Phoenix can point the way to the future, for better or worse...
Read my full review of Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City (Oxford University Press) at Englewood Review of Books.
My review of Paul Farmer’s “Haiti After The Earthquake” for PRISM Magazine
Like many in the field of international relief and development, January 12, 2010 is a date I will not soon forget. That's of course when that devastating earthquake struck Haiti.
The news from Haiti has been sobering these past two years, but good, dedicated people -- Haitian and otherwise -- continue to help Haiti build back better. It’s been a learning experience for a lot of us, and I know we’ll hold on to what we’ve learned for a long time.
One person who has much to teach us about Haiti is Dr. Paul Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist who has split his time over the past few decades between pioneering community health initiatives in rural Haiti and teaching at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is also the founding director of Partners in Health and has written numerous books.
Because of all this, I’m grateful for Dr. Paul Farmer’s latest book, Haiti After The Earthquake (PublicAffairs). I read it last fall, and I’m pleased to say my review appears in the new issue of PRISM magazine, and for now you can preview the new issue below. My review is on pp. 43-4 (pp. 45-6 using Issuu).
I'd encourage you to read the rest of the great content in the magazine as well, and consider subscribing. I'm a regular contributor (see the rest of my stuff here), and as a little FYI, my next piece is slated to be the May/June cover story, focusing on farmworkers here in the US and the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
[Photo credit: The Daily Beast]
Wilderness, grace and the journey to the common good
Seeking the common good is something that most Christians, at least in theory, consider integral to the faith. But what does it actually look like? Where do we find inspiration or instruction for the journey? And where will the journey take us?These are the questions Walter Brueggemann explores in Journey to the Common Good (Westminster John Knox). As a world-renowned Old Testament scholar, he sets out to locate the answers in three places:
- Exodus, which sheds light on the journey from anxiety to neighborliness;
- Jeremiah, an invitation to choose life over death; and
- Isaiah, which helps us move from loss to restoration.
I won’t attempt to do justice to his arguments here, but each of the three is an important way of understanding the journey to the common good.
I found the section on the Exodus particularly meaningful. In the Exodus, we see how those living lives dominated by anxiety and scarcity aren’t likely to seek the common good; they’re going to be too busy simply trying to survive. After God uses Moses to lead his people out of “the anxiety system” of Egypt, God miraculously provides manna (or “wonder bread,” as Brueggemann calls it), demonstrating divine generosity and abundance.
But as the biblical narrative makes clear, the people of God didn’t find it easy to move from the culture of scarcity to the culture of abundance overnight. That’s because having left the anxiety system of Pharaoh, they found themselves not in an ideal place of safety, security and comfort, but rather in the wilderness. Brueggemann writes:
“Wilderness” is a place, in biblical rhetoric, where there are no viable life support systems. “Grace” is the occupying generosity of God that redefines the place. The wonder bread, as a gesture of divine grace, recharacterizes the wilderness that Israel now discovered to be a place of viable life, made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.
Brueggemann goes on to argue that for us today a similar “departure” is required -- if not from a literal Pharaoh, then from adherence to whatever twenty-first century anxiety systems we find ourselves in. If we buy his argument that living in a culture of anxiety and scarcity all but precludes the pursuit of the common good, then the flip side is that when we experience God’s generosity and abundance (“our daily bread,” you might say) and recognize it for the grace that it is, we are freed up like never before to be good neighbors and to seek the common good.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” says Jesus. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
The journey to the common good takes us from scarcity to abundance, and from abundance to the practice of neighborliness. The challenge for all of us, then, is to cultivate lives of neighborliness right here in the wilderness. It may not be a place entirely to our liking, but it is a place of viable life, “made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.”
Do we truly believe that the wilderness in which we live can be a place not of scarcity but of abundance? How does that shape our understanding of the journey to the common good?
[Photo credit: Thomas Dwyer/Flickr]
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