Disposable City by Mario Alejandro Ariza

Mario Alejandro Ariza, author of Disposable City.
  Read the NYT interview here. 

Mario Alejandro Ariza. Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020.

Mario Ariza's book, Disposable City, takes a front line and personal look at the impact of anthropogenic climate change in the city of Miami, Florida. 

I am headed to Miami in a few days for the meeting of the American Academy of Religion Southeast Region. This is an annual gathering of religion scholars and students from colleges all over the Southeastern U.S. to discuss all manner of academic religious topics. This year it happens to be held in Miami, Florida, a city at the epicenter of climate change. So to prepare for my Religion and Nature session, I have just read his book.

Ariza is a journalist and this book is a work of journalism. Ariza takes us with him as he investigates, interviews, and reports on the many facets of this complex issue. Interestingly, the book also came from Ariza's three years as a Michener Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. And that shows. It isn't a dry book, but a work of creative non-fiction. Each chapter is a story in which the reader journeys with Ariza to a new part of the city and region, meeting interesting and compelling people, and getting a close-up, hands-on view of one thread of the climate disaster slowing but inevitably approaching Miami and South Florida. Miami, he tells us, is a "blisteringly new city, even by American standards. Most of the housing stock in Miami-Dade county was built after 1970" (89). He touches on everything from the real estate market, king tides, pythons in the Everglades, water management infrastructure, community organizing in Little Haiti, and to the offices of scientists, politicians, and courtrooms in which climate change decisions are being made . . . or avoided. The reader gets a detailed tour of the city and region, personalities, history, cultures, and inequities. The book is an amazing picture of a vibrant and fragile American city with an uncertain future. I learned so much about Miami, its history and cultures, its optimism and growth, as well as its multifaceted struggle with the most important global issue of our lifetime.

Ariza's intensely local focus is compelling. The book emphatically and unwaveringly points to the real impact of anthropogenic climate change and makes it personal. Ariza tells us how this city is drowning and how these people are impacted. As readers, we are drawn into the stories of those who are both effected by climate change and who are working passionately to pull Miami out of this environmental death spiral. At the same time, the local issues are woven into a global story that affects all of us.  

This map from National Geographic shows how
sea level rise will radically alter
South Florida and the city of Miami.

Chapter 5 "History Is a Swamp" looks at the doubly threatened Everglades, the unique and once massive freshwater wetland known as the River of Grass. Cut off from its water source of Lake Okeechobee and inundated with fertilizer run-off, the Everglades has shrunk and withered. At the same time, rising sea levels are causing rapid "saltwater intrusion" that is radically changing the ecosystem (130).  Ariza introduces us to Michael Frank, an elder of the Miccosukee tribe who is deeply engaged in the struggle to save the Everglades. The Miccosukee, like other Native people, are deeply connected to land in their stories, history, and lifeways. They are land-wise and interact with the landscape as a person and a community of which they are part. When the Miccosukee nation was being hounded and  threatened by the U.S. Army genocidally empowered by the Indian Removal Act, the Everglades embraced the people, hide them, and provided a refuge and home (128-29). Now they have adapted to fight the political and legal battles that will shape the future of their homeland. Although communicating that Native vision and relationship to land is difficult. I wish we could have learned more about this in Ariza's book. However Michael McNalley's Defend the Sacred:Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment is a great resource to learn more about how Native people have been approaching and fighting these battles at the frontlines of the ecological crisis.

If you are interested in Miami, other coastal cities, if you are concerned about the environment and about climate change, I highly recommend Disposable City. Just remember that what happens in Miami affects the entire nation. Ariza's discussion of climate refugees, displacement, and migration, powerfully communicates how Miami's future with climate change is eye of a hurricane of social change that will spin out in a "massive internal migration" that will reshape the U.S. (231). Yet, he doesn't leave this as an abstract issue. Ariza shares his own personal grief about the devastating impacts of this unfolding reality on the lives of real people (224-25). Ariza's transparency calls us into a more personal involvement and approach to these issues. What are the climate-related stories of tragedy, stress, migration, and upheaval that have impacted our own lives and those of our neighbors? Are we listening and telling these stories.

Ariza definitely does. He ends Disposable City by envisioning a somewhat optimistic future. It is a future in which Miami does not die, but survives and adapts. It is a story of human innovation and cultural creativity in developing new ways of life in the midst of climate change, sea level rise, and ecological stress. This is a story of Miami, but also a story that involves us all. Human-caused climate change is inevitably re-making the world. Will our human communities continue to hold stubbornly to the values, lifestyles, and institutions that led us to this brink? Or can we change, re-make our own relationship to land, ecosystems, and the other beings that we live among? 

In Chapter 4, Ariza and a filmmaker friend kayak up the Miami River through the heart of the city. This chapter and its epic waterborne tour from Virginia Key to the Miami International Airport is worth reading just on its own. As the pair float around a bend in the river near the airport, they encounter two people standing on the bank under the spreading branches of a poinciana tree. Both are dressed in white, conducting a religious ritual. Ariza's friend quickly recognizes them as "Santeros" (123). They are practitioners of Santeria, one of the Afro-Caribbean religions that emerged from the forced migration and enslavement of West African people. Ariza recognizes something significant perhaps transcendent in that moment and writes, "I can't help but feel like I've entered the realm of Yemaya, the mother of the waters, the Yoruba deity worshipped by African diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic" (123). As a scholar of religion, this scene grabbed my attention with its compelling possibilities. What answer does Yemaya offer to the crisis that faces Miami and her waters? Do these religious practitioners bring a different understanding of water, river, and ocean that offers new possibilities of a more ecological relationship? Ariza describes a religiously inspired connective energy that reaches from Miami, to Cuba, to the coast of West Africa. Could religions help to unite human communities in responding to climate change? Religion can be a dangerously conservative and retrograde social force. But it also is a source of values, ideas, symbols, rituals that can motivate human communities in transformative ways. We need to further explore the ways that religions can be a resource for the species adaption that we must navigate. How can religion help us move into a post-Anthropocene era where we learn to live well in a world we have changed and devastated?

Circe by Madeline Miller

 

Circe by Madeline Miller, Little, Brown and Company, 2018, 385 pages.

Retelling ancient myths for a contemporary audience seems to be a popular form of fiction writing these days, a branch of the fantasy genre. Rick Riordan has had major success with this for children and young adults. Madeline Miller, who has a MA in Classics from Brown University, brings more depth her retellings. It shows in the nuanced story with its host of references to classical literature. Her strengths are her familiarity with the world of Greco-Roman myth coupled with her humanizing approach that fleshes out the two dimensional mythic characters. 

Circe is the story of a nymph, a disappointing daughter of the sun god Helios, banished into exile on the island of Aeaea. The novel follows Circe through hundreds of years of her immortal life - from her time as a solitary witch on Aeaea developing her powers of magic, her struggles with her family and the various gods, her interactions with Daedalus and the Minotaur, Odysseus, her time as a mother raising a difficult son, and her later interactions with Telemachus and Penelope.

What is this book about? Despite the obvious answer of "relationships," there are four important themes in the book I would like to recognize.

First, the transformation of Circe. Circe craves attention and relationship - she takes risks to relate to others. Yet when she is banished to the island, she is thrust into isolation - settling into it, while also craving connection. Her isolation eventually becomes availability - whether for the roving god Hermes,  the bad daughters of the minor gods who are temporarily sent to her island for punishment, or for wandering sailors who happen upon her shores. Her availability becomes vulnerability and is taken advantage of. She suffers manipulation, abuse, and endures various forms of assault. 

When Odysseus is on the island, Apollo appears to Circe with a prophecy. Its delivery is an intense scene of violation and assault. Apollo is aloof and condescending, cringing away from the sound of Circe's human-like voice. When the prophecy comes, it is like an attack of divine violence:

"The wind stuck me across the face. I had no time to cry out. It rushed into my throat, battering its way to my belly as if all the sky were being funneled through me. I gagged, but its swelling  orce poured on and on, choking off my breath, drowning me in its alien power. Apollo watched, his face pleasant. . . . 'You dare,' I said. "You dare to misuse me on my own island? I am Titan blood. This will bring war. My Father _'" (229).

Of course it doesn't bring war. Neither her father, nor Apollo, nor anyone else cares about the assault, the indignity, the violation. As a result, she learns the necessity of creating and maintaining boundaries. Magic is the primary way that she creates these protective boundaries. She hides the island behind illusion to avoid rapacious sailors. She spends her life shielding her island from Athena who has threatened her son Telegonus, conjuring a boundary through rigorous magic working that repulses the gods and their intrusions.

This world of the gods is a world of taking without compassion reminds me of our world. It is at root a spiritual issue. Buddhism has understood the spiritual and ethical problem with taking, possessing, and owning. But Christianity has not. There is an assumption of possession, a supposition that things are ours to be taken within Christianity. Genesis is read to say that everything was created for us therefore it is already ours and can be taken. In the central biblical story of liberation and redemption - the Exodus - there is a taking of the land, wresting it from its inhabitants through violence and force. This centers the posture of taking and possessing. When this assumption gets framed within capitalism, it becomes about owning and using and reduction to commodity.

"Circe the Sorceress," John William Waterhouse, 1911-15

Second, Magic. Miller reclaims or or at least revisits the figure of the witch through Circe. Circe's powers, while impressive and strong enough to make others afraid, are refined and developed through learning, experimenting, dedication, and work. Circe's sister, Pasiphae, is also a witch but her powers are weaker than Circe's. When Circe enters Pasiphae's workroom, she see nothing but a few herb "and rudimentary ones at that . . . . she was lazy, and here was the proof. Those few simples were old and weak as dead leaves. They had been collected haphazardly, some in bud, some already withered, cut with any knife at any time. I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch" (127). 

Sorcery, she says "is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung" (83).

This work, knowledge, learning, commitment all speak to Circe's virtuous inner life. And even more so, witchcraft might indeed be always an act of resistance, but it is not evil. Miller states that all witches have one thing in common, "they are women with more power than other people - men especially - think they should have" (Reading Group Guide, 4). Circe tells her sister and her readers "You were wrong about witchcraft.. It does not come from hate. I made my first spell for love of Glaucos" (156). Witchcraft, as seen through Circe, is the hard work of love, of protection, and even justice and judgment (Scylla and the rapacious men turned to pigs).

Third, Earth connection. Circe's magic grows along with her connection to the earth. She awakens to the living world, the powerful energetic quality of the earth, plants, springs, and landscapes. When she is exiled, she begins to experience her island in a deeper way - as a place of natural power. She works with the plants, learning from them, learning their properties, how to manipulate and use them. Turning the island into a home involved communing with it, bonding and taming it, the lions and the wolves living in harmony with her. On Crete, she climbs the sacred Mount Dicte in a mystical reverie, feeling the mountain thrumming under her feet. She could feel the herbs "swelling in their hollows, breathing tendrils of magic into the air." She was at one with the power of the mountain "the branches laced over me. The shade rose deep as water, tingling across my skin. The whole mountain seemed to hum beneath me" (128). 

Miller ask her readers as well to become witches in this way. Like Circe, to see the earth as a place of beauty and power - to awaken to its own intrinsic living qualities. To learn to live with the earth and its species. To learn their ways and their secrets, to become part of a community with them. 

Fourth, retelling the Odyssey. The novel revisits a number of intertwined Greek myths, most famously the Odyssey. And Miller puts her own spin on these. She seeks to personalize and humanize Circe as a woman and a witch. She brings a certain critical perspective to Odysseus, portraying him first as the heroic if troubled lover of Circe, but then layering on an anti-heroic twist. By bringing Telemachus and Penelope into the story as the wounded son and jaded wife, we see Odysseus through different eyes. We see his cruelty and its impact on those around him, and his dangerous descent into control, paranoia, and rage. In Telemachus, Miller gives us a Greek hero who rejects the heroic, spurns the gods, and chooses a quiet life without glory. Perhaps we are ready to rethink about The Odyssey, glory, heroism, rulers and their power along with Miller's novel.