July/August 2024 Cowl by George Packer

For its July/August situation, The Atlantic has made local weather change its focus, main with at present’s cowl story by employees author George Packer on the rise and potential fall of Phoenix, Arizona. Packer’s piece will likely be adopted by options from employees writers Ross Andersen, who reviews from Greenland, and Katherine J. Wu, who reviews from Australia, together with senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, who writes on the necessity for local weather reparations. In an editor’s word for the difficulty, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes: “Loyal readers of this journal know that we’re preoccupied with issues of local weather change, and that we fear about the way forward for our dwelling planet … We have now an extended historical past of curiosity right here. The nice conservationist John Muir roughly invented the national-parks system in The Atlantic. John Burroughs defended Charles Darwin in our pages. Rachel Carson wrote her earliest essays, concerning the sea, for us. And, in fact, The Atlantic printed a lot of Thoreau’s most interesting and most enduring writing.”

In his cowl story, “The Valley”—the second-longest that The Atlantic has printed up to now 40 years—Packer gives a sweeping, kaleidoscopic have a look at the precarious political and bodily ecology of Phoenix, demonstrating that the nation’s fastest-growing and most dynamic area accommodates, in microcosm, all of America’s most contentious and harmful points: local weather change and election denialism, schooling and immigration, homelessness and zoning, the way forward for the working class and of a multiethnic democracy. Phoenix’s contradictions are so nice—explosive inhabitants and financial development paired with existential political and environmental challenges—they elevate questions concerning the metropolis’s sustainability, and concerning the sustainability of the American political venture. Phoenix, Packer argues, makes you keenly conscious of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility; development retains coming at a livid tempo, regardless of many years of drought, and regardless of political extremism that makes each election a disaster threatening violence.

“Democracy can also be a fragile artifice,” Packer concludes, after spending eight months reporting in Phoenix. “It relies upon much less on custom and regulation than on the shifting contents of particular person skulls—perception, advantage, restraint. Its sturdiness below pure and human stress is being put to an intense take a look at within the Valley. And since a imaginative and prescient of vanishing now haunts the entire nation, Phoenix is a information to our future.”

Extra tales within the situation will deal with local weather change from quite a lot of views and areas of the globe. In a bit publishing on June 11, Newkirk argues that America owes a debt to different nations for its position in accelerating local weather change, and that paying this debt could also be one of the best ways for the world to avoid wasting itself. Coming June 12 is the characteristic by Andersen, who traveled to Greenland to report on new technological interventions that would save otherwise-doomed glaciers. In her piece publishing on June 17, Wu reviews from Australia on the difficulties the nation faces in defending its most prized and lovable species, the koala, as these animals struggle to outlive not simply local weather change however different outdoors threats, resembling chlamydia.

George Packer’s “The Valley” is printed at present at TheAtlantic.com. Please attain out with any questions or requests to interview Packer or any of the difficulty’s contributors.

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