Reviews From the Edge

Larry Gibson was one of the last enclaves of resistance against Massey Energy. Until 2009, when it was bought by Alpha Natural Resources, Massey Energy was the largest coal producer in Central Appalachia. Gibson’s paltry strip of land is all that remains of the 250 acres his family once owned for generations. Although he estimates there are hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of coal beneath his feet, he has steadfastly refused to sell. The surrounding hillsides are a post-industrial wasteland of blasted and barren moonscape dotted by toxic tailing pits. “They’re going to destroy my state,” Gibson says, “and the government’s going to give them the incentives to do it.” According to Chris Hedges, co-author (with cartoonist Joe Sacco) of the bold new book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, in a world of unfettered capitalism, where government oversights have been removed and the natural world commoditized for profit, places like Appalachia are where the collapse of globalization and the end of the world ecosystem are now being meted out.

For two decades, Hedges was a foreign correspondent on “the outer reaches of empire,” covering places like the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Like him, Sacco spent many years embedded in war zones. His graphic novel Palestine won the American Book Award, and his Footnotes in Gaza and Safe Area: Gorazde have received much critical praise. Following the recession of 2008 and the devastating financial consequences to millions of families across the United States, Hedges and Sacco decided to look inward.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the result of a two-year journey to the western plains of Pine Ridge; the dead city of Camden, New Jersey; the coal mines of southern West Virginia, and the produce fields of Immokalee, Florida. Hedges calls them “sacrifice zones,” places exploited for their resources and then left to rot from urban decay and industrial waste. The book is equal parts oral history reader, travelogue and political manifesto, offering a series of portraits of ordinary people caught in the cross-hairs of corporate abuse and government indifference. Incorporated into the written text, Sacco’s affecting illustrations frequently appear as portraits, landscapes and cartoons. Frightening at its most graphic and enraging in its eloquence, this book by Hedges and Sacco paints a portrait of an unsustainable society on the precipice of economic and environmental disaster.

Hedges provides a disconcerting and devastating narrative. It begins with the genocide of Native Americans, which served the perpetrators as a kind of blueprint for exploitation and, for the reader, gives some historical context. Native people in the U.S. were murdered by the tens of thousands and corralled into ghettos, their ancestral lands and culture robbed from them in the name of “exceptionalism,” the belief that Americans had a God-given right to the country’s resources. What do Hedges and Sacco find in the wake of such destruction? Pine Ridge is a place where 60 per cent of the residents live below the poverty line, and the infant mortality rate is five times the national average. At any given time, over half of the houses lack electricity and running water. It’s the kind of stuff, told through the voices of the victims, that hits like a hammer.

During the post-war era, Camden, New Jersey was awash in manufacturing jobs. The shipyard, which once employed almost 40,000 workers, had built some of the United States Navy’s largest warships. It was also the home of Campbell Soup and RCA. But that was before those companies sought out low-waged foreign labor and shipped their production facilities overseas. What Hedges and Sacco found was a dead city. Infrastructure had decayed, whole neighborhoods were barren, and basic government services had all but ceased to exist. The only visible jobs were those related to the illegal drug trade and, ironically, the scrap metal business. According to Hedges, Camden is “a poster child for post-industrial America. It’s a window into the dead end that will come to more and more Americans as corporations ‘harvest’ what is left of the nation for short-term profit.”

In some places, the physical destruction is inescapable, with Sacco’s ink-saturated images adding an oppressive gothic element to the narrative. Almost 50 per cent of electricity generated in the United States is fueled by coal, two thirds of which is mined in the Appalachian Mountains. Consequently, eight hundred square miles of the oldest mountain range in the world, the lungs of the eastern seaboard, has been blasted away in mountaintop removal. That’s the process of sheering off the top of a mountain and digging downward to get at the mineral resources. Coal dust rains down on many communities. Toxic tailing pits leech into the water tables and sometimes flood towns. Cancer has become an epidemic. Here Sacco’s evocative illustrations are at their most effective, occupying mental and geographic spaces no photographer could possibly access. One particularly striking scene is the portrayal of former coal miner Rudy Kelly. Sacco takes us inside the mine of Kelly’s youth, when mechanization and rudimentary safety practices were decades away. According to Kelly, “The company did anything they wanted to do. You had to make a living, and they knew it. They knew you’d do anything to try to feed your people, and they were hard on you.”

The book is not all doom and gloom. At the end of Hedges and Sacco’s two-year journey, in September 2011, several hundred activists, who had been forcibly removed from occupying Wall Street, set up camp four blocks away in Zuccotti Park, later remained “Liberty Square.” The Wall Street protests sparked the global “Occupy Movement.” It’s there that Hedges saw the blueprint to fight back, a mainstream movement working outside the parameters of the corporate state that sought “to make the politically impossible the politically inevitable.” Hedges is, therefore, hopeful: “Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power.”

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt would interest readers of economist Jeff Rubin’s The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. What reads like a terribly prophesy, is, in fact, a re-imagining of the 20th century’s industrial legacy; as much as a reaction to the peak oil movement and climate change as it is to the post-9/11 world. However, the book is not without its faults. At several points, Sacco’s illustrations interrupt Hedges’ writing mid-stream, and there is a tendency to overgeneralize some very complex issues. But, for its ability to account for the unaccounted, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt remains a remarkable achievement of frontline reportage.

"The Disease of Empire" first appeared in Our Times.