But Villarán is a long way from Lima: “i live in san diego, california, and write about extractivism on a computer made primarily from minerals. you’ll be one year old next week.”
Villarán’s use of the term “extractivism” suggests both extremity—and of course the consequences, local and global, immediate and long-term are extreme—and activism, or political activity, which of course economic activity is, no matter that the mining barons and tech titans might insist otherwise.
Villarán wants this town to stand in for the way he—and we, including the citizens of Morococha—are complicit in the extractive economy. And he knows he is an extractivist, too. Not just because he uses a “computer primarily made from minerals” but because he, a white-coded descendant of Peruvian elite, is collecting the stories of these mountain people (many of them indigenous)—extracting them—to be put to use in this project. And the project, yes, might “bring attention” to the plight of these (unnamed) people on this South American mountaintop, but it will also advance Villarán’s career. In one of the many interstitial sections he refers to as “process notes,” he asks himself “do I have the right to tell the story of morococha?”
Over the near-decade of Villarán’s work on this book—of travel to Peru, of collecting the testimonios of erstwhile Morococha residents, of sifting through official decrees and transcripts of public meetings—Miqel grows up, moves to the other side of the country (the United States) with his mother. Villarán falls in love with a new partner, they conceive a child, decide her name will be Ramona. But she dies in the womb. Villarán’s existential crisis begins in earnest.
What is the point of this?
What is the point of a dissertation or a poem or a primal scream in the face of so much loss, so much hopelessness?
In “The Question of Loss,” Villarán considers the death of his unborn daughter, which was followed by the unexpected death of his older brother and coincided with the loss of many of his interviews when his phone breaks—they are “trapped within that disabled device.” Taken on its own, this could seem a symptom of monstrous ego, to compare the loss of some work with the loss of two lives. But the sudden obliteration of all the work he’s done—the eradication of the stories he’s extracted from his subjects and the notes he’s extracted from the world around him—throws that “what is the point?” question into a stark relief. Villarán had made a trade: his absence from friends and family, his distance from his son in return for his painstaking documentation of Morococha.
you were in your mother’s womb
when I started writing this book
now you’re in kindergarten
learning how to read
i wonder what you’ll say
when you read this:
Even if he hadn’t lost much of his reporting, Villarán wonders what, exactly, he’s learning:
i talk to the people
and study and visit the sites
and listen to the experts
and i understand less
and less
about what to do
As I worked on this review, a story came across my social media feeds. It had to do with Shell, specifically that company’s efforts to study global warming and its implications for the fossil fuel industry. There was a link to a PDF that opened up a report called “Scenarios: 1989-2010 / Challenge and Response” from Shell’s Confidential Group Planning.
Shell’s scientists in the 1980s gamed out two future scenarios. As though they were preparing a report for a cartoon supervillain, they called these scenarios “SUSTAINABLE WORLD” and “GLOBAL MERCANTILISM.”
I don’t have to tell you which path the supervillain chose.
As a result, the Shell scientists predicted, we would see “more violent weather—more storms, more droughts, more deluges, mean sea level would rise at least 30 cm.…
“Civilization could prove a fragile thing… The logic of SUSTAINABLE WORLD is a society choosing to channel some investments into environmental maintenance against this contingency…
“An individual may be powerless to impose restraint under these circumstances but, collectively, society is not. Rules can be devised, agreed upon, and enforced so that the capacity of the commons is not exceeded and access to the commons is equitably distributed.”
If powerful Shell—or some group of people at the mega- corporation—can both identify the need for collective action in protecting the commons while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility for or possible agency in effecting that action, what can Villarán, or you, or I do?
We can say again and again until we’re no longer here to say it:
be more effective
be more noneconomic