The big-box store is indistinguishable from the warehouse, from the factory, from the hospital, from the rail yard or the abandoned mall sprawled out in the lowlands. And compared with these, the lights of people’s houses uphill are almost invisible, like embers fading to ash.
When Ferguson was burning, the National Guard set up base camp in the parking lot of Target. Men armed with automatic weapons guarded the Ross Dress for Less.
Beyond the border of the parking lot was nothing but humid darkness, a few porch lights like torches held above the black water of a swamp. The soldiers looked out into that darkness as if expecting something. This is what happens when the tension under the surface of the cul-de-sac breaks.
[Phil A. Neel. “The New Geography of Suburbia: An Anatomy of America’s Hinterland.” New Labor Forum. 2018.]
St. Louis is where storms collide. […] And as the air currents grapple over the middle-American sky, the storm-swollen Mississippi grinds forward below. Once-uncommon “freak floods” are now standard, the levees overcome every few years and large chunks of St Louis and its surrounding suburbs washed away by the intractable inertia of a river bound to outlive any city.
In recent years, growing climate chaos has only intensified this ambient war, each “extreme weather event” more volatile and less predictable. […]
The result is another slow apocalypse.
In January 2016, people from the surrounding suburbs poured into Red Cross shelters, unable to return to homes torn apart by the rising water. But even with such disasters gradually becoming the new, more violent equilibrium, federal aid is perpetually insufficient. The Red Cross itself was a minimal presence compared to the swarm of church groups sifting through the wreckage to offer disaster relief. In a landscape of increasingly perpetual crisis, even the somewhat mundane organizing of church groups takes on an almost prophetic weight. Politics in these conditions can only appear apolitical, as all functional organizing is given political significance when confronted with devastation of such scale: Baptists and Mennonites organizing supply caravans through the wreckage of long-decayed postwar suburbs, the crosses emblazoned on their white vans floating above silt-clogged cul-de-sacs. […]
Such stories of environmental destruction are, however, only one dimension of a much-deeper global economic catastrophe that takes different forms in different regions. […]
[Phil A. Neel. Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict. 2018]
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