News with Nuance: Jan. 12, 2024

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hey Readers,

Happy 2024! I have to admit to beginning this New Year with a solid dose of overwhelm for what’s currently happening both in the world-at-large and in my own little family and personal world (nothing earth-shattering there, just kids getting older, things breaking around the (old) house and new book deadlines approaching!) I’m also feeling a steady undercurrent of trepidation, as we approach another fraught Presidential Election in the U.S., and as war continues to rage in Israel and Gaza and in Ukraine, with violence and conflict and poverty and danger also simmering in several other hotspots around the world and throughout America.

Given all this, I’m grateful to remember that each time I do these News posts, it gives me an opportunity to sift through all the news and bring a bit of perspective and humanity to that general sense of foreboding and fear. Again due to the calendar, we’ve got a few weeks worth of news here, and there’s a lot to cover. I’m reminded today of the Bible reading during Advent (the pre-Christmas season of the Church), where Jesus reminds those who follow him to “be alert.” There’s lots of reason not to bury our collective heads in the sand as we begin 2024. The forces that threaten human freedom and thriving, and love and peace, are very real, and they’re well-organized and well-funded. But the resistance is strong, too, and it only gets stronger when we remember that we’re not alone.

You’ll find all that and more below as we cover the News with Nuance for the start of 2024. Let’s get to it!

An aerial view of used clothes discarded in the Atacama Desert, in Alto Hospicio, Iquique, Chile, on September 26, 2021

Photo by Martin Bernetti, AFP via Getty Images

The Headline: Burn After Wearing: A mountain of used clothes appeared in Chile’s desert. Then it went up in flames

One of my goals with this newsletter is always to find stories that tell a much bigger, global story about the ways that unfettered greed and amoral capitalism lead to our dehumanization and disconnection from one another. This story, and really this image above, tell that bigger story in a really powerful and poignant way, while also offering up examples and narratives from individuals who are working to bring about restoration, reconciliation, and hope in the midst of waste and destruction.

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is home to one of the world’s largest trash heaps of discarded clothing, its weight roughly equivalent to one or 2x the weight of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In this article, you’ll read how the pile was incinerated in a huge bonfire, complete with several mini-explosions. You’ll read how the oil and synthetic materials used to make the cheap, disposable clothing (like the outfits we buy on Amazon) created toxic fumes and flames for the people who live around the trash heap. You’ll read about the hundreds of mini-dumps still located in the desert after the large pile was burned, about mothers of young children who smell the burning every morning when they go to buy bread, and how they have to force their children to play indoors. And you’ll read about the courageous people who call the desert and its surroundings home, who are trying to find ways to recycle and reuse, to re-create beauty in the midst of so much waste and destruction.

As I read this story and view the vast piles of discarded clothing, images from social media influencers whiz through my mind: encouraging us all to BUY BUY BUY SALE SALE SALE. I think of the siren song of sustainability but also how capsule wardrobes and calls to minimalism are often just thinly veiled excuses to get us to buy more stuff.

That pile is really, really daunting. It feels completely overwhelming. And that’s why I’m so encouraged by the myriad stories of individuals who are stepping into the trash heap anyway, to try and recover some vestige or beauty or hope. It’s reality, and it’s a helpful analogy for 2024 in America, too.

The Quote:

Thirty miles south of Iquique, toward the city’s main airport, on her family’s farm, Astudillo and her parents drop pieces of used clothing on the ground, but in a purposeful way. Over the past 20 years, Astudillo’s father has experimented with growing trees in the infertile, saline soils. Many of his efforts failed until he began using certain fabrics to mulch his trees. This improves the quality of the soil, enabling it to retain moisture. For the past year, Astudillo has been working with one of the Zofri importers, who asked to remain anonymous. She consults with his staff about the clothing bales and recommends ways of sorting the material into specific categories based on fiber content, some of which she collects personally. Those items — a pair of cotton shorts, a T-shirt, a blouse — become mulch for a pine and eucalyptus forest rising in the desert.

Recently, as Astudillo was leaving the farm, she stashed a few perennials in her truck and drove them to Manuela’s compound in Paso de La Mula. Just beyond Medina’s courtyard, where sky- blackening fires had once burned, Astudillo troweled a small hole for the plants. As she dug, she dislodged several odd socks and a faded blue sweatshirt — discarded clothes that had survived the fires, but were buried by bulldozers. 

Astudillo filled the hole, amending the desert sand with compost and garden soil. “For me it’s like a Band-Aid for a wound that is so big in that place,” she said. Then she tucked in cardinal flowers — a native plant whose petals resemble shooting flames. 

Story by Julia Shipley and Muriel Alarcón, Grist and El Pais

Spanish language version available here

For more on climate change, conservation, and how consumerism can threaten our community connections, here are three more stories:

Native tribes are getting a slice of their land back — under the condition that they preserve it

Solar energy shines on the Iron Range; will politics throw shade?

Did Chip and Joanna Gaines' 'Fixer Upper' break Waco?

The Headline: At ICJ, South Africa accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza

The Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel, followed by Israel’s deadly assault against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which has led to mass destruction and huge loss of civilian life, including thousands of children, is one of those current world realities that hangs in the background of all of our lives, reminding us of the great human power to kill and destroy one another, too often also in the name of religion.

Every morning, when I get my World newsletter from the Washington Post, I can sense myself tensing up - bracing myself to read that day’s news from the Holy Land. There seems to be no end to the pain, suffering, and sin committed by world leaders bent on power and destruction and hate.

One of the lines in this article spoke to that sense of helplessness and powerlessness and hopelessness inside me that this conflict so often evokes. It actually comes from a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which reads in part: “Israel is accused of genocide while it is fighting against genocide.”

I will say plainly that I am no fan of Netanyahu’s. I think he has been proven to be a small and craven man, willing to sacrifice the well-being and peace of his country in order to postpone his own criminal trials. That being said, his statement is worth unpacking. What it reminds me of is the heartbreaking and terrible way that those who have been victimized can sometimes go on to victimize others. One cannot call for ceasefire and lament the unspeakable violence and death in Gaza without also coming to terms with the antisemitism and hatred for Jews that was apparent in the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. And of course the whole story of the modern-day nation of Israel involves also the European history of antisemitism, which led to the Holocaust, but also the history of pogroms and violence against Jews for centuries. And still also the ongoing anti-Muslim discrimination and violence that occurs in Europe and America today, and the underlying racism that infects how so many of us view world conflicts and wars.

As much as I wish to look away from the complexity and pain in the Holy Land, there is much wrestling called for here. In this story we are reminded also of the historical role of South Africa as former apartheid state now working to fight against race-based discrimination in another part of the world, and also to assert the voice of the Global South and nations whose leadership is not predominately White.

The Quote:

Israel launched its onslaught after a cross-border rampage on Oct. 7 by Hamas militants in which Israeli officials said 1,200 people were killed, mainly civilians, and 240 taken hostage back to Gaza.

Israel says it is waging war against Palestinian militants, not the Palestinian people.

Laying out its allegations of genocidal acts, South Africa also pointed to Israel's sustained bombing campaign and to comments by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who said early in the war that Israel would impose a total blockade as part of a battle against "human animals".

"The evidence of genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible," Ngcukaitobi said.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group".

Story by Stephanie van den Berg, Anthony Deutsch and Toby Sterling, Reuters

More from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank

Longtime Israeli-Palestinian friendships fracture after Oct. 7 attack

Al Jazeera says Israeli strike killed another child of Gaza bureau chief

Palestinian and Israeli cartoonists see the war differently (and the same)

More News from the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024: from Minneapolis to Midwestern farm labor theft to migrants to Ukraine to Eritrea to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election to miraculous deplaning and the powerful and costly witness of poets …

I watched ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’ so you don’t have to

Minnesota dairy farm faces $3 million wage theft lawsuit involving hundreds of workers

Asylum seekers faced severe abuse in ICE detention under Trump, suit says

She’s 16. The war in Ukraine wrecked her city — and her childhood.

An African gulag so ghastly that inmates risk death to escape

It Will Be an Election Unlike Any We’ve Lived Through. Are the Democrats Prepared?

Democracy is at stake in the 2024 US election

Miracle at Haneda: how cabin crew pulled off great escape from Japan plane fire

In Life and Death, Libyan Poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi Sang the Song of Derna

Russian poet receives 7-year prison sentence for reciting verses against war in Ukraine

This Week in Christian Nationalism and Religious Extremism

While this newsletter won’t focus overall on Christian Nationalism, each Friday I will