Lindsay Makowski and her bulldog in her living room in Silver Spring, Md. Ms. Makowski owns numerous handguns which she got after getting into a bad situation with a former boyfriend.
(L) Ben Baker stands on the railway tracks that run by his home in in
Ashburn, Ga. He is posing with his beloved 20 gauge pump action shotgun.
(L) Writer Dan Baum at his home in Boulder, Colo. Mr. Baum with his
cherished 7.63mm C96 Mauser which was manufactured in 1896.
“There were times when I thought it would never happen,”
Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent, said about her recent trip to Moscow.
“I’m still amazed.”
I too was amazed when I received an encrypted email at
2am one recent October morning, with a photo of her and three other
whistleblowers standing shoulder to shoulder with one of the most wanted
men on the planet.
When Edward Snowden abandoned his Hawaii home, a long-term
relationship, and a six-figure salary as a government contractor in
order to lift the veil on the US's transnational surveillance system, he
also left behind any sense of safety or security. The US Justice
Department has charged the 30-year-old former "infrastructure analyst"
with theft of government property, and two serious charges under the
Espionage Act. The former director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, even
recently "joked" during a cybersecurity panel that Snowden should be put on America’s kill list. (Rep. Mike Rogers R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, responded, "I can help you with that.")
For four high-profile former spooks, each with their own
histories of whistleblowing and government persecution, arranging a
secret meeting with the world’s most wanted whistleblower was no simple
thing. In early October, they embarked on their mission to inaugurate
Snowden into the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a
group of ex-intelligence officials who demonstrate “courage,
persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences.” They
had chosen Snowden as the awardee of their 2013 Sam Adams Integrity
Award, and felt it would only be right to deliver the award—a
candlestick holder made on a 3D printer—in person. They would be the
first Americans known to meet with him since he arrived in Moscow on
June 23.
Holding a 3D-printed candle to power: From left, Coleen
Rowley (retired FBI agent), Thomas Drake (former NSA senior executive),
Jesselyn Radack (former Dept. of Justice advisor), Snowden, Sarah
Harrison (WikiLeaks journalist), and Ray McGovern (retired CIA
analyst).
“Arrangements were made,” said Thomas Drake, a former
senior executive at the NSA who was on the trip and who spoke carefully
about its details. Drake, who warned about abuses at the agency after
9/11 and was indicted under the Espionage Act before most of the charges
were dropped, has been cited by Snowden as an inspiration. After
Snowden's disclosures, Drake warned him publicly to “always check
six"—make sure you know what's behind you. "Obviously, with Snowden, no
communications can be electronic.”
The term "logistical nightmare" springs to mind, but that
would be an understatement. The challenges of what they called the
"mission to Moscow," of communicating with and meeting with Snowden
without revealing his location to people armed with the arsenal of
technology Snowden has revealed, appeared insurmountable when the group began planning their trip in earnest in early August, at a hacker conference outside Amsterdam.
“We cannot be entirely sure, but it would appear that we
did successfully meet Snowden without being tailed or giving his
location away,” said Drake, who spearheaded the planning of the trip.
“We arrived in Russia not knowing where we would meet him—and of course,
we did not meet him at his place of residence. This level of security
was at his request, and agreed upon to protect his safety.” They met in
an undisclosed place that Rowley said was "probably a third location" in
a series of possible rendezvous points, in order to throw off anyone
who might be following them, and perhaps to keep the visitors in the
dark too.
Given the risks and difficulties of transportation,
accommodation, and communication between Snowden and his visitors, it's
not improbable, as some observers have speculated,
that Russia's state security services are responsible for their eminent
asylee. Some reports that emerged after the whistleblowers’ visit
referred to metal detectors at their meeting place, and the presence of
Russian officials. The visitors said that Snowden's attorney, Anatoly
Kucherena, and a translator were also in attendance, along with the
British journalist Sarah Harrison, of Wikileaks—"his shepherd, friend,
protector and constant companion since Hong Kong," according to
Radack. Ed's father, Lon, would visit the following day. But they would
not discuss other people who may have been at the ceremony. “Russia has a
duty to protect Ed as an asylee,” Drake explained. “That should tell
you everything you need to know.”
However hard they are, the challenges of
reaching Snowden might be somewhat diminished if you're already familiar
with the ins and outs of government power, as the Sam Adams Associates
certainly are. The award they were bringing was named for a CIA analyst
who, in 1967, discovered that there were more than half a million
Vietnamese Communists under arms, which was about twice the number that
the US command in Saigon would admit to, lest the narrative of the war's
"progress" prove to be false. Adams protested within the system, and
after retiring from CIA in 1973, wrote an article about about what he
called a CIA conspiracy for Harper's, testified before
Congress, and helped CBS News make a documentary. But up until he died
from a heart attack in 1988, he was nagged by the thought that he could
have said and done more. The new whistleblowers are determined to avoid
that regret.
“The US has unchained itself from the constitution,” said
Drake, who has spent the past few years railing against the government's
massive collection of Americans' data, which violates the Fourth
Amendment's principle that "searches and seizures" require warrants.
Snowden is a constitutionalist too, and when asked in an online Q & A what
he would say to other potential intelligence agency whistleblowers, he
expressed his nationalism in the plainest terms: “This country is worth
dying for."
Snowden's decision to expose the NSA, made in service, he's
said, to the American public and the Constitution, comes at a serious
personal cost. His year-long asylum protects him in Russia, but beyond
those borders, he risks prosecution, or worse. It's easy to imagine life
that has been hollowed, exiled in a freezing, alien terrain by his
crisis of consciousness; his daily existence shaken by the constant
anxiety of his inevitable persecution.
To the contrary, though, Snowden is doing “remarkably
well,” said Drake, who noted his "wicked sense of humor." Rowley rather
casually told me he “seemed fine.” There, they described a man living in
asylum, not as a fugitive—and not, as Snowden made sure to explain, as a
pawn of the Russian government. (His passport was revoked by the
U.S. while in transit to Ecuador, he points out, and his every move is
watched by Wikileaks' Harrison.) His biggest concerns, his visitors
said, tended to go well beyond his own safety.
“He has a poker face,” said Rowley. “He talked a lot about
the need for reform in the US—personal issues didn’t come up much.” What
about former director Hayden’s thinly veiled assassination comments?
“We asked him about that. It didn’t shake him at all. He shrugged it
off.”
Rowley, herself a remarkably resolute character who was
recognized as a Time Person of The Year in 2002 for her whistleblowing
at the FBI, describes Snowden as “one of the strongest and most stable
characters I have ever encountered.” He is practical and focused, she
added, an Epictetian stoic who carried on with life as best as possible,
sometimes getting out and about in Moscow (according to his attorney),
and apparently, working too. Rowley said Snowden's new gig is “working
on internet services of some sort.” No surprise there, but Snowden’s job, like his location, is likely to remain a closely guarded secret, for now at least.
Snowden's remarks at the Sam Adams Associates dinner, via Courtesy Wikileaks/The Daily Conversation
Being a Sam Adams Associate may not endow you with any
added sense of security, but it aims to provide a comforting sense of
solidarity. After the two-hour award ceremony, which included individual
speeches, an exchange of human rights texts and Russian literature, and
accounts of radical moments in American history, the attorney and
translator left, and the whistleblowers chatted until the early hours.
Another of his visitors, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department
ethics attorney and whistleblower who has represented Thomas Drake and others, chose to read from Albert Camus.
“We have nothing to lose except everything," she recited.
"So let’s go ahead. This is the wager of our generation.” She drew
parallels between Camus’ wager and what Snowden called "the Work of a
Generation" in a statement he recently sent to the European Parliament's
Civil Liberties Committee. Radack reminded Snowden too that Camus
rejected what he termed “the paltry privileges granted to those who
adapt themselves to this world," adding, “those individuals who refuse
to give in will stand apart, and they must accept this.” Stoicism, not
anger, it seems, is a consistent motif among the US's intelligence
whistleblowers.
Ray McGovern, the 73-year-old founder of the Sam Adams
Associates, isn't among Snowden's generation, but he supports his
"wager." A former high-ranking CIA analyst who served under seven
presidents, McGovern argues that young people today who have grown up
with the internet possess technical abilities and a corresponding
conscience that motivates them to keep it free.
"One of the things that impressed me most," McGovern wrote,
"was Ed’s emphasis on the 'younger generation' he represents—typically
those who have grown up with the Internet—who have
(scarcely-fathomable-to-my-generation) technical expertise and equally
remarkable dedication to keeping it free—AND have a conscience."
"It is the sort of idealism,"
said Jesselyn Radack, "that allows someone to undertake such a
magnificent act of civil disobedience. It’s an idealism that believes
the democracy he once knew can be reined in from the surveillance state
it has become, if only the public knew what was going on.”
Drake, who has been thinking a lot lately about civil
liberties in the digital age, believes that an internet-connected
generation that remembers the pre-9/11 world may “carry new principles
to do with the democratization of information and the protection of
civil liberties that help us resist this dystopic nightmare.” Perhaps
serving as some measure, the number of people using the anonymous web
browsing program Tor has rocketed since the Snowden revelations.
Will this generation manage to curtail the kind of dragnet
surveillance that Snowden helped disclose, whether through political
change or technological evasion? Do Americans want to resist the
spied-upon world that Snowden said he didn’t want to live in? In the
Nation, Radack described Snowden as “idealistic—in the best sense of the
word. It is the sort of idealism that allows someone to undertake such a
magnificent act of civil disobedience. It’s an idealism that believes
the democracy he once knew can be reined in from the surveillance state
it has become, if only the public knew what was going on.”
There was a dose of realism in their meeting too. “He was
always talking about what should we do next, how to achieve reform,”
Rowley said, recounting the whistleblower's three main political aims.
First, he would like to see section 215 of the controversial post-9/11
PATRIOT Act, and particularly section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act,
repealed, ending two elements of legislation that permit the collection
of metadata and warrantless surveillance, with dubious
constitutionality."
Snowden also said he wants to see the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) amended, as this is the legislation that permits the interception and storage of private electronic communications.
Third, he urged that an independent body conduct a thorough inquiry
into the surveillance practices of US intelligence agencies on a broader
scale. Rowley reminded me that the NSA is just one of sixteen US
intelligence agencies—and that there are around 2,000 private security
contractors. “There is even more going on than Snowden knows about,” she
said.
And for us, the public, too. Glenn Greenwald, who took hold
of Snowden's documents (Snowden has said he no longer has them),
estimates that he and other journalists are only about halfway through
the release of Snowden's trove of exported documents. And some of the
most shocking revelations, I am told, are yet to come.
The revelations likely won't end there. The ex-spooks tell
me, with scant detail, that more whistleblowers have begun to come
forward. There's a sense now that dawn is breaking in the Information
Age, revealing a staggering new horizon. If information is power,
Snowden has helped foretell a decade of unprecedented public
empowerment, his supporters say. He may be called an idealist for
wanting to change the world, but in the eyes of those who have dared to
tread a similar path, he already has.
“It is never about the majority,” Drake said of the
people who are instrumental in protecting the freedoms of the public,
“nor has it been throughout our history.”
In this excerpt from the forthcoming Junkyard Planet, author Adam Minter explores China's central role in the world's vast global recycling trade.
By Adam Minter
A Shanghai scrap yard (Adam Minter) China’s
reputation as the “world's factory” is well-established. But what
happens to everything the world throws away? Since 2002, the
Shanghai-based journalist Adam Minter has sought to find out. The son
and grandson of scrap metalists, Minter traveled throughout the world to
investigate how what we discard—and reuse—helps drive the global
economy.
Minter, who has written for a variety of publications (including both the print and digital versions of The Atlantic), now writes a weekly column on China for Bloomberg. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book Junkyard Planet, which will be published by Bloomsbury Press on November 12, Minter travels to the epicenter of the global scrape trade: southern China.
I remember the first time I reported in Foshan, China, population 7 million.
I flew into Guangzhou Airport, where I was met by a scrap dealer, his
sleek BMW, and a fresh-from-the-countryside driver. It was 2002, and
Foshan wasn’t much more than a spread-out set of underdeveloped villages
somewhere west of a Chinese wherever. I’d only been in-country a couple
of weeks at that point, and I’d had trouble finding Foshan on a map.
This all seemed like a bad idea.The drive from the airport traversed
newly built highways and not so newly built country roads lined with
high-voltage power lines that sagged to a few feet off the ground.
Overloaded delivery trucks were the dominant means of transportation,
jamming up the roads and—when there were shoulders—the shoulders, too.
Back then it took almost two hours to reach the faux-rococo
Fontainebleau Hotel, a yellowed porcelain doily in the heart of Foshan’s
Nanhai District.
Cigar-chomping scrap dealers from around
the world sat in baroque chairs and discussed where they’d get a decent
hamburger when they made it up to Shanghai on the weekend.
By then, Nanhai was already one of the world’s biggest processors
of scrap metal, and you only needed to walk into the lobby to know it.
Set amid lush, manicured landscapes that would make Louis XIV
blush, cigar-chomping scrap dealers from around the world sat in
baroque chairs and discussed where they’d get a decent hamburger when
they made it up to Shanghai on the weekend. But that wasn’t all: at any
hour of the day, you could walk into the lobby of that hotel and find at
least a couple of Caucasian scrap exporters having tea, coffee, or
whiskey with a couple of Chinese scrap importers while some of Guangdong
Province’s finest prostitutes sashayed by, on the way to visit clients
upstairs. If you needed to know the price of insulated copper wire—well, the global market was being made right there, all day and all night long.
Jet lag defined much of what happened in the Fontainebleau in those
days. I remember seeing scrap guys consuming breakfast at midnight,
steaks at 7:30 a.m., and poorly mixed cocktails any time at all. But that
was just as well, because scrap processing was (and often still is) a 24-
hour-a-day activity in southern China. It had to be: Two decades into
the country’s modern development, everything was starting to
accelerate: airports, highways, apartments, cars. And everything,
needless to say, needs metal.
Take, for example, subways: On the day I moved to Shanghai, it
had precisely three subway lines. Ten years later it’s the world’s
largest system, with 11 lines and 270 miles of tracks. However, China
lacks ready access to sufficient raw materials of its own to build all
those subways, so in very short order it’s become a net importer of
scrap copper, aluminum, steel, and the other metals needed in the
infrastructure of a modernizing society.
Back then, if you were jet-lagged and had an amenable scrap-metal host
(and they were all amenable if it meant access to American scrap metal),
you could head out to the scrapyards in the dead of night. You’d arrive
in the processing zones via expensive cars that zigzagged down a narrow
brick-lined alley, out into a boulevard with murky, poorly lit signs,
back into an alley, finally pulling up at some metal gate
indistinguishable from other metal gates. The driver would honk, the
owner would roll down his window so the guard could see him, and a
worker would push aside the gate. Then you’d drive into a wide lamplit
space, the headlights bouncing off piles of metal fragments, giant bales
of wire, and, off to the side, a shed where two or three men—it was
mostly men—fed scrap cables into machines that ran an incision along the
insulation. Nearby, another team—often female—used that incision to pull away the insulation and expose the copper wire.
What I saw was so alien—except for all of that scrap. I knew
what that was. It looked like what we used to send to China, only now it
was in China. Automobile scrap (Adam Minter) Meanwhile, over in the farthest corner of the yard, the flicker of flames
might send black smoke into the not-quite-as-dark night. The smell
would be noxious (and, depending on the wire, dioxin-laced), but the
goal would be anything but: profit. Wires too small to run through the
stripping machines were a favorite item to burn, but anything would do
if copper demand was strong; in the morning, the copper could be swept
out of the ashes. One night, I recall clearly, I saw a row of a
halfdozen electrical transformers—the big cylinders that hang on
power lines and regulate the power—smoking into the night. When I
realized what they were, I backed off: older transformers contain highly
toxic PCBs. But nobody seemed to mention that to the workers who,
through the evening, poked at the flames. I didn’t like it, but there’s
not much to be said when you’re standing in the middle of a scrapyard in
a village you’ve never heard of in a province you’ve just barely heard
of, as the guest of somebody you’ve just met. I wasn’t sure that I was
in much position to be complaining, anyway: I’m a child of the industry
too.
To be honest, I was shocked by the number of people who worked in these
scrapyards, and by their low pay. But I was not shocked by the menial
jobs, and I was not surprised by the pollution. After all, my
grandmother and her siblings cleaned metal into adulthood, and her
younger brother, Leonard, told me that he knew how to “break” a
motor—that is, take it apart with hammers and pliers, and extract the
copper—as well as anybody in the Twin Cities. That’s what you do when
you’ve got nothing else— and their generation didn’t have much else.
That wasn’t the only thing the Chinese and my family had in common.
For example, I’m not ashamed to admit that my family often
paid contractors to burn our wire in farm fields outside Minneapolis (we
also ran an aluminum smelter with an open smokestack—arguably a
worse off ense). If it couldn’t be burned, it would’ve been landfilled,
and so we were doing what countless other scrapyards were doing in those
days: using the cheapest means available to clean up other people’s
messes.Those days are over (for my family, at least) but I know of
people who still do it in North Dakota— and there isn’t an impoverished Chinese farmer among them.
To be sure, Foshan in the early 2000s was far more polluted than anything I saw in the United States while growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, and surely more polluted than what my great-grandfather knew in his early years. But from my perspective, that difference was a matter of scale, concentration, and history. For better or worse, they weren’t doing anything in 2002 that we didn’t (or wouldn’t) do in 1962. They were just doing much, much more of it. And as dirty as it might have looked at times, I didn’t get the sense that the people around Foshan felt that scrap was “dumped” on them. Instead, they actively imported it, or they migrated from other provinces to work on it.
The pay, after all, couldn’t be beat, especially if you were
uneducated and illiterate. Depending on the scrapyard, salaries might be
anywhere from 10 to 20 percent higher than what the local high-tech
factory might pay. By U.S. standards, though, it wasn’t much: maybe $100
per month plus room and board. Still, if your prospects were limited to
a life of subsistence farming, that was more than enough money to
send home to pay school fees. The next generation would have a better
life, and the negative health consequences of scrapyard conditions could
be worried about later.
***
In 2011 I fly into Guangzhou on one of my twice-yearly trips to its scrapyards,
and lo, there’s a subway that will take me to Foshan in less than an
hour. Nanhai, which had once felt to me like a Wild West
outpost divorced from all non-scrap-metal reality, is now another suburb
of yet another Chinese megalopolis (Guangzhou: population 20 million
plus). As I climb out of the station, I glance around me: I’m at the
intersection of two busy, newly paved roads and four pieces of entirely
empty farmland. Two blocks away, however, is the incoming wave of
wealth: dozens of construction cranes hovering over dozens of
high-rises, some as tall as 30 stories, each taking a bite out of open
space recently home to farms. I roll my suitcase in their direction,
through crabgrass and dirt littered with paper instant noodle bowls, to
the front door of a new five-star Intercontinental Hotel, next to a new
three-block-long shopping mall.
When people ask me why China needs all the scrap metal Americans send
to them, I wish I could show them the view from my hotel room that day.
20 stories below is that shopping mall, as big as anything I grew up
visiting in suburban Minneapolis. It required steel for the structure,
copper and aluminum for the wiring, brass for bathroom fixtures, and
stainless steel for all of the sinks and railings. And that’s just the
start.
Then there’s this: On the other side of the mall, in all directions,
are dozens of new high-rises—all under construction—that weren’t
visible from the subway and my walk. Those new towers reach 20 and 30
stories, and they’re covered in windows that require aluminum
frames, filled with bathrooms accessorized with brass and zinc fixtures,
stocked with stainless steel appliances, and—for the tech- savvy
households—outfitted with iPhones and iPads assembled with aluminum
backs. No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of
steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium,
zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else
labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources of
its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper,
of which
2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70
percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other
words, just under half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap
metal. That’s not a trivial matter: Copper, more than any other metal,
is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power
and information. So what would happen if that supply of copper were cut off ? What if Europe
and the United States decided to embargo all recycling to China, India,
and other developing countries? What if, instead of importing scrap
paper, plastic, and metal, China had to find it somewhere else? Some
Chinese industries would substitute other metals for the ones that it
couldn’t obtain via recycling—that’s technically doable in many
cases—but for some applications (like the copper used in sensitive
electronics) substitutions are not possible. That leaves mining. To make
up the loss of imported scrap metal, there’d need to be a lot of holes
in the ground: even the best copper ore deposits require one hundred
tons of ore to obtain one ton of the red metal. What would the
environmental cost of all that digging be? Would it exceed the
environmental cost of recycling the developed world’s throwaways? What’s
worse?
***
In October 2012 I drive north on Minnesota’s Highway 53 into the so
called Iron Range, which once supplied the American steel industry with
some of the world’s purest ore. As I approach Virginia, Minnesota, I
begin to see the high, looming walls of dirt excavated from pits as
deep as 450 feet, and as wide as 3.5 miles. They look like crater walls
from the highway, left by meteor impacts and defining the landscape for
miles. If you climb one (I did), you’ll look out at a lifeless gray
moonscape. This is what’s left behind when steel is made from iron ore,
and not scrap metal. I continue north for nearly an hour and then take a
right turn just outside the town of Ely, onto Highway 1. It’s beautiful
out here, green, lush, and uninterrupted. I see only two other cars on
the road for the first 10 miles; I stop my car on bridges over the
shimmering blue Kawishiwa River without fear of being hit; I close my
eyes down by the water, the only thing cutting the heavy blanket of
silence the individual
lapping waves.
Foshan, China, is the living, breathing
alternative to the mine that will one day be dug somewhere near Spruce
Road. It’s not the cleanest industrial town I’ve ever seen, but it
doesn’t leave me with a feeling of intense personal loss.
I follow directions given to me earlier that morning and take a
sharp left on to Spruce Road. There, at the intersection, is a
bumper-sticker festooned minivan that belongs to Ian Kimmer, staff
member with Friends of the Boundary Waters, a group that aims to
protect, preserve, and restore the federally designated million-acre
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), one of the largest
unspoiled regions in the United States.
Ian has a big job. From the time the BWCAW was established in 1978 until now, the communities that surround it have expressed considerable hostility to the idea of an unexploitable wilderness in their midst. From their perspective, wilderness inhibits growth and the resource extraction industries that their towns and families were built upon. So far, they haven’t made much progress in turning back or damaging the mostly pristine status of those million acres. But that’s likely to change, and the single factor responsible for the shift is one that scrap-metal men know well: the price of copper.
For decades, geologists, mining companies, and miners have
known that the land around the BWCAW contains deposits of copper ore.
But those ore deposits are of such low quality that nobody could figure
out how to mine them profitably. Then, in the 2000s, China entered
the market for copper. What had once been worth 60 cents per pound
became an occasionally $4-per-pound commodity, and a low-grade,
unprofitable ore deposit became a mother lode that mining executives
speculate might be the largest untapped extractable copper reserve in
the world, worth around $100 billion.
Ian shakes my hand, takes a seat in the front seat of my Saturn,
and sends me down the rutted dirt lane that is Spruce Road. On the left
side, he notes, is the BWCAW. On the right, he says, pointing, is where
the mining companies are doing test drilling.
“It’s that cut-and-dried?” I ask.
“Yep.” He asks me to stop, and we walk up a hill. Near the top, we
reach a crumbling gray and red rock outcropping. It contains copper ore,
he explains, as well as something called sulfides. When rain or snow
comes into contact with sulfide ore like this, Ian explains, it produces
caustic sulfuric acid. “That’s why the rock is so crumbly.”
Ian points at the base of the outcropping, where a
several-foot-long streak of dirt is completely devoid of vegetation.
“That’s where the acid leaches out and down the hill,” he explains,
killing the vegetation. The phenomenon is not unique to northern
Minnesota. Sulfide ores are mined around the world, and the left over
rock—the tailings—have become a long-standing environmental problem,
contaminating rivers and lakes, and killing vegetation and the wildlife
that depends on a clean environment.
According to Twin Metals, the mining company that controls the rights to
the ore on this side of Spruce Road, Ian and I are standing atop 13.7
billion pounds of copper, 4.4 billion pounds of nickel (used to
make stainless steel), and some of the world’s richest untapped precious
metal reserves outside of South Africa. Twin Metals hasn’t received the
permits to mine, yet, but if and when they do, each ton of copper will
require the processing of as much as 100 tons of ore. Multiply 100 tons
of sulfur-bearing ore by the 13.7 billion tons of copper beneath my
feet, and the scale of the problem becomes epic.
What will happen to the 99 tons of sulfite rock once the copper has been
extracted from it? Some will go back into the ground, Twin Metals
claims, but an unknown percentage of those billions of tons will need to
remain on the surface, exposed to rain and snow.
But that’s not the only surface impact of this proposed project.
Twin Metals is promising an underground mine—an “underground city”—using
a method called “block caving.” Superficially, at least, block
caving sounds like a great compromise: the miners get the ore, and the
wilderness remains untouched. But that’s not how things work in reality.
At some point, the surface will subside into all of the space left
behind by the excavated ore, leaving a landscape substantially different
from the one that was there before the mine. Rivers and creeks might be
redirected; new lakes might be created. But that’s the thing: nobody
knows for sure. The one thing everyone knows, though, is that the unique
character of this natural landscape will forever be altered.
Ian and I get back into the car, and he directs me down Spruce Road and
an in-progress logging operation just off the BWCAW boundary. Trucks are
loading freshly cut logs onto flatbeds, leaving behind little more than
scrub. But Ian wants me to look past the logging, to two chest-high
pipes painted red and sticking out of the ground like pins. “That’s a
test drilling site,” he tells me. “There’s hundreds of them all over the
place. They’re looking for the richest places to run the mine.”
No Chinese company is involved in the Twin Metals project (the company
is a joint venture between Canadian and Chilean firms), but Chinese
demand is what makes the mine a virtual certainty. While Twin Metals
investigates northern Minnesota, the Chinese are already digging some of
the biggest and most controversial copper mines in the world today. In
Afghanistan, the Aynak mine threatens ancient Buddhist sculptures. In
Burma, a copper mine run by the Chinese military is destroying ancient
farmland and causing mass protests.
Let me be clear: a doubling of U.S. copper scrap exports to
China wouldn’t halt this destructive trend. But it might just reduce
some of the demand for that virgin copper.
In any event, when it comes out of the ground, all of that Chinese
mined virgin copper will have competition—from imported scrap metal, as
well as from the scrap metal that the Chinese are generating in
greater volumes at home. But cut off access to imported scrap copper,
and the demand for mined copper will only grow— including the demand to
allow mining in more places like Spruce Road.
Foshan, China, is the living, breathing alternative to the mine
that will one day be dug somewhere near Spruce Road. It’s not the
cleanest industrial town I’ve ever seen, but unlike Spruce Road and its
test drilling sites, it doesn’t leave me with a feeling of intense
personal loss. If anything, I always leave Foshan energized.
***
Abandoned cars near the Great Salt Lake in 1974 (US Environmental Protection Agency)
For the last two decades, much of the U.S.-and European-generated scrap
metal exported to China flowed into Foshan, home of the
Fontainebleau Hotel. But these days, if you’re riding on the elevated
highway that cuts through and above most of Foshan, you won’t see any
piles of metal, much less the smoke of burning wire and unvented
furnaces. The people who live in Foshan’s expensive new high-rises won’t
tolerate it. Instead, you’ll just see under-construction buildings and
long strip malls filled with restaurants and small workshops that sell
construction-related supplies.
These days you need to turn off the highway, down the narrow city
streets, and then into the even narrower lanes and alleys of
Nanhai. The buildings are one and two stories high, and every one sits
behind a high brick wall. But if you’re lucky or—even better—invited, a
gate will open here or there, and you’ll see piles of baseball-and golf
ball-sized metal chunks; neat stacks of baled-up wire; machinery that
takes fistsized chunks of shredded automobiles and sorts them by size;
and workers slowly combing through those same chunks, sorting them by
metal type. It’s a cleaner and wealthier Foshan, where worker salaries
have quadrupled in a decade and many of the earliest and biggest
recyclers sit
on fortunes worth hundreds of millions.
I saw workers in little more than
T-shirts, cotton slacks, and sandals working around open furnaces; I saw
other workers using cutting machines and acetylene torches with their
bare hands; and even today I’m not surprised to see scrapyard employees
going about their work in flip-flops.
With a whiff of controversy and not a bikini in sight, a US-educated
business graduate was selected as the first Miss Universe contestant to
represent Myanmar in more than 50 years.
Moe Set Wine will take
her place on stage at the global beauty pageant in Moscow next month,
reflecting dramatic political and social changes in the former
junta-ruled nation, which last fielded a Miss Universe contender in
1961.
"I feel like now I am part of the history and I feel like
a soldier that is doing something for the country and my people," the
25-year-old said after her selection late on Thursday.
Hemlines
are rising in the country formerly known as Burma as it opens up to the
world after decades of iron-fisted junta rule ended in 2011.
But still not everyone approves of scanty dress.
When racy shots of one model wearing a two-piece swimsuit appeared online a few years ago, she received abuse and threats.
So the Miss Universe hopefuls were careful not to bare any midriff in the swimsuit section.
"My personal view is that the competition presents a good image of our
country, but if you look at what they wear, it is not what a lot of
people here like," Deputy Culture Minister Than Swe told AFP.
Myanmar's traditional dress, which is still mandatory in high schools,
universities and most state workplaces, is the demure "longyi" -- a
sheet of cotton or silk cloth wrapped around the waist and stretching to
the feet.
But the younger generation, especially young urban
women, are increasingly shunning the national garb and embracing
unconventional alternatives as they brush aside concerns about morals
and modesty.
"Myanmar people dared not wear clothes like this
in the past. Now things are improving, and people dare to wear things,
so as a designer I can create what I like. So I'm glad things are
changing," said Htay Htay Tin, who designed all the contestants'
outfits.
The CIA no longer has any overseas "black site" prisons where they used
to carry out "enhanced" interrogations far away from the soil (and
civil rights laws) of U.S. prisons. But if Americans are holding an
al-Qaeda leader on a U.S. Navy ship in international waters, what's
legally stopping them from performing similar work there?
That's essentially what the American Civil Liberty Union is asking today. We know longtime suspected al-Qaeda leader Abu Anas al-Libi was captured by American commandos over the weekend and is now being interrogated off the Mediterranean coast on
board U.S.S. San Antonio, without being read his Miranda Rights or in
the presence of a lawyer. He will eventually be tried before a federal
court in New York for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania,
but until then he'll be held under the laws of war. As the Pentagon and legal experts explained over the weekend,
that's the same legal justification used to authorize military force
against al-Qaeda at the beginning of the war on terror. But until
al-Libi makes it to New York, he's free of a lawyer and the protection
usually offered by the civilian court system, adrift in the middle of
the sea.
"It appears to be an attempt to use assertion of law of war powers to
avoid constraint and safeguards in the criminal justice system," Hina
Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national
security wing, told the Associated Press. "I am very troubled if this is the pattern that the administration is setting for itself."
Government officials were keeping mum with regards to the interrogation
techniques being used on the San Antonio right now. "He is in our
custody and he will be treated like anyone else," Rep. Dutch
Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told CNN Monday morning.
He wouldn't say whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" were being
used, cryptically saying that "If he does not want to talk, he will go
through our system," Ruppersberger said.
The model for al-Libi's detention was written in 2011, when the
administration captured Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Canadian-Somali
citizen accused of aiding terrorists, and held him aboard a U.S. warship
for about two months before he was delivered to New York to face
terrorism charges. He eventually plead guilty and agreed to tell
authorities everything he knew.
Some legal experts expect al-Libi's situation to play out in the exact
same way. "Don't expect al-Libi to stay in military custody for more
than a few weeks," predicted Robert Chesney, co-founder of the blog Lawfare, over the weekend.
"This situation will unfold just like the capture of Ahmed Warsame a
few years ago, meaning that after a period of no more than, say, 6-8
weeks, al-Libi almost certainly will be flown to the United States to
face a criminal trial." But some legal observers think the
administration should probably hurry unless they want another human
rights headache on their hands. Just Security's Meg Satterthwaite explains:
So long as he is not held outside the regular U.S. legal system, al-Liby is presumably not at risk of refoulement (though a transfer to Guantánamo or Bagram would raise refoulement issues). Al-Liby’s detention on a ship, and his interrogation by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group without
judicial oversight or legal assistance, will quickly run afoul of human
rights law concerning due process, however, and if prolonged and under
incommunicado circumstances, could amount to an enforced disappearance.
The United States should transfer al-Liby to the United States and
bring him under judicial protection without delay.
The administration, for now, is keeping mum about what's happening
aboard that ship. "As a general rule, the government will always seek to
elicit all the actionable intelligence and information we can from
terrorist suspects taken into our custody," National Security Council
spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the AP. [Inset: Reuters]
If Obama Can Do it, So can Putin Russian
President Vladimir Putin attends the launch ceremony of the Nyagan
power plant in Nyagan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been nominated for a Nobel Peace
Prize by an advocacy group for his efforts to prevent an attack on
Syria.
Putin was nominated by the International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World.
During a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday, members of the group
said Putin was far more deserving of the peace prize than U.S. President
Barack Obama, who received it in 2009.
The group said while Obama had continued to lead American military
operations abroad, Putin has consistently opposed military intervention
throughout the two-and-a-half year Syrian civil war, which was left more
than 115,000 dead according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Putin, a former KGB agent, is credited with commanding a war against
separatists in Chechnya and approving a full-scale attack on Georgia
over a minor border dispute.
The 2013 Peace Prize recipient will be announced in Oslo on Oct. 11;
nominations for this year’s prize had to be postmarked by Feb. 1.
Jesus Christ's Superstar (The Gospel According to Carl Lentz)
With the Lord as his
swagger coach, the 34-year-old pastor is turning Hillsong Church in New
York City into a Pentecostal powerhouse and a destination for the in
crowd. Drawn by his concertlike sermons and pop-idol looks, Lentz's fast
growing flock of groupies includes Justin Bieber, NBA superstars, and
young Hollywood celebs. But whom, exactly, is this new apostle of cool
seeking to glorify?
By Howie Kahn
Photographs By Robbie Fimmano
Carl Lentz steps into a cloud of
silver-blue
light and hits the stage at the venerable New York City concert venue
Irving Plaza, primed to bring the Word. The 34-year-old pastor of Hillsong Church NYC
is wearing his Sunday best: black YSL wing-tip boots, black Nudie
jeans, and a short-sleeved All Saints denim work shirt. He's backed by
an 11-piece rock band that sounds like a born-again Coldplay and a
neon-lettered projection: ALWAYS. ONLY. JESUS. Sweeping
back his mohawk as shreds of rainbow disco-ball light pass across his
bearded face, Lentz revs into his first 45-minute sermon of the day.
"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, just like going to Krispy
Kreme doesn't make you a doughnut"; then, "If you think I'm one of
those weird stalker pastors . . . you're right." Lentz scans the
two-tiered auditorium packed with congregants—they're mostly in their
twenties and thirties, with a smattering of recognizable actors and
athletes. But the range of true believers here also encompasses
suburbanites, hurricane-devastated families from the Rockaway section of
Queens, and people praying to beat cancer or to find financial
stability. They hang on Lentz's every word: "We're in the control-freak
capital of the world, where people want everything but want to give up
nothing. When it's always only Jesus, you're not the boss—He is."
As Lentz paces the stage
on this sweltering mid-July afternoon, balancing quick, sharp movements
with sudden moments of reflective stillness, he comes off as less
feverish holy roller than cool Pentecostal populist—his message being
that of love, acceptance, and total surrender. Lentz delivers it in
expressions of faith so pithy and catchy they play back in your head
like a pop song: "You don't have to believe to belong here." "It's not a
feel-better message, it's a be-better one." "We don't want your money, but God wants everything."
They drive his preaching style—what he calls his "homiletical
habitude." Lentz, who was born into a devout Christian family, spent his
early years in a white-collar suburb of Chicago, but when he was 11,
his dad, a television-ad salesman for Pat Robertson's Family Channel,
took a job at the network's headquarters in Virginia Beach—that's where
Lentz picked up his slight southern twang, which intensifies when he
preaches. "I'm going to say things that disrupt you," Lentz says,
wrapping up his sermon. "It's the full Gospel—I have to do it. I owe you
that as the pastor of this church." On cue, the house band strikes up,
and Lentz quickens his cadence to match the building bass line. "We're
going to sing our way out of here," Lentz says. The crowd sways to the
music, raising their hands in surrender. Lentz blesses them all, then
exits stage left.
"He is going to be huge," predicts today's guest speaker,
Priscilla Shirer, a 38-year-old minister. A rising star in her own
right, Shirer was flown in from Dallas to lighten Lentz's load. He
normally preaches at all six Irving Plaza services, beginning at 10 A.M.,
with lines of devotees wrapped around the block for each one. But today
he is leading only the last three services because he's running on
three hours of sleep, having just returned from the annual Hillsong
Conference in Sydney, Australia.
Hillsong NYC exudes a start-up vibe, but the church is actually a
franchise. It's an extension of the Australian Pentecostal megachurch
and multimedia conglomerate Hillsong, which has more than 20,000 members
in the Sydney area, chart-topping musical acts, DVDs, books, and
satellite churches in 11 countries—and took in $58.3 million in 2012
(including $25.9 million from tithes). After initially receiving
financial support from the mother ship, Lentz says, Hillsong NYC, which
passes around black donation buckets at every service, is now
self-sustaining. Lentz was educated in the early 2000s at Hillsong
International Leadership College, where he met his future Hillsong NYC
partners: Laura Lentz, his wife and fellow pastor, and Joel Houston, the
33-year-old son of Hillsong's cofounders, Brian and Bobbie Houston. But
it's Lentz, with his supernatural magnetism, who is the face of
Hillsong's first foray into American Christendom. "People call New York
the church-planting graveyard," Lentz says. And yet, just three years
after its launch, Hillsong NYC draws 6,000 people to its services every
Sunday and has just added two more at a chapel in the Gramercy Park
neighborhood. "I see our church taking ground in a major way," Lentz
says. "In five years, I want a giant version of what it is now."
Lentz has already shared the pulpit with megapastors like Joel Osteen
and T.D. Jakes at Christian conferences. This month, he'll preach to
sellout crowds at Hillsong's debut conferences in America, first at New
York's Radio City Music Hall, then at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Lentz's digital persona is going viral. He has 65,000 Instagram followers, who "like" it when he mugs beside a tank-topped Justin Bieber
(the two trade Scripture-based texts daily) or poses with the newly
baptized—by Lentz—NBA superstar Kevin Durant and Jay-Z (snapped on the
day Durant, with Lentz's spiritual counsel, signed with Roc Nation
Sports). Lentz conveys a hip, iconoclastic image: religion in a designer
wrapper.
"It's a reaction against the fundamentalist evangelical culture of
the eighties and nineties," says Brett McCracken, the author of Hipster Christianity: When Church & Cool Collide.
"Dynamic speakers have always risen to the top, from Charles Spurgeon
to Billy Graham. The difference now is pastors like Lentz wear skinny
jeans and beards and quote Jay-Z. They gain authenticity from caring
about the same things as you do. Part of the brand is saying you don't
think about the brand."
Lentz is aware that endorsements from Bieber and Durant, especially
when tweeted and Instagrammed, pay dividends. "I'm an advertiser," Lentz
reasons. "You are God's ambassador—as if He is making his appeal
through you. We're essentially His commercial."
• • •
In the Pentecostal worldview Carl Lentz subscribes to, all human
talents are expressions of the Holy Spirit. Lentz believes his swift
ascent is part of God's plan, his past full of portent. His earliest
memories involve working in a soup kitchen and ministering to prisoners
with his father. As a teenager, he says, he gradually turned away from
God—toward basketball, earning a walk-on spot as a shooting guard at
North Carolina State. "I was teammate of the year," Lentz says,
"breaking up fights, signing guys out of jail." But he left the team
during his sophomore season. "Something in my heart shifted," he
continues. "I felt like if I stayed, I couldn't serve God. I felt like I
was going to die."
At age 20, Lentz lit out for California, where he attended King's
Seminary in Van Nuys while working part-time at the Gucci store on Rodeo
Drive. His pastor in Virginia Beach, Wave Church's Steve Kelly,
suggested that Lentz check out Hillsong International Leadership
College. Attending Hillsong after King's, Lentz says, summoning a
basketball analogy, was "like going to UNLV instead of Princeton.
Princeton wins with backdoor cuts, whereas UNLV is running, gunning,
getting dunks, and popping their jerseys on the way back up the floor.
That's the way I wanted to relate to Jesus."
After marrying Laura and graduating in 2003, Lentz moved back to Virginia Beach and jumped into the ministry at Wave Church, where he rapidly built a following with his hip-hop-infused "Soul Central" services. Then, on New Year's Eve 2009, Lentz flew to New York to meet Joel Houston—who was already well known as the frontman of the Christian-rock band Hillsong United—to discuss a scenario that the two had dreamed about in Sydney: a Hillsong church in Manhattan. A couple of months later, when they got the go-ahead from Joel's parents, Lentz jumped at the opportunity, which he views as a manifestation of God's plan. The night Lentz, his wife, and their three young children pulled into Brooklyn, he says, the family car was broken into. "We couldn't find a place to live, because you have to prove you make, like, 900 grand a year," Lentz says. "So by God's grace, some real-estate agent, who just loved us, found us a spot in Williamsburg. It was a brand-new building, and the dude cut us a deal. We have a doorman, which was all my wife wanted to feel safe."
In the beginning, Hillsong NYC was less a church than a series of informal meetings on park benches and in pizza joints. Lentz recalls canvassing the streets with Houston, talking to whomever they could about Christ. The size of their meetings grew, and after one attendee fainted in an overcrowded TriBeCa apartment, Lentz decided it was time to seek a larger venue. A Hillsong contact who works for the concert-promoting group Live Nation helped Lentz secure Irving Plaza, and Hillsong NYC held the first of its weekly services there in February 2011.
As his church grows in numbers and notoriety, Lentz knows he'll be subjected to intense scrutiny—not least because of Hillsong HQ's controversial past. There was the admission from Joel Houston's grandfather Frank Houston, a leader in the Australian Pentecostal movement and Hillsong's patriarch, that he had sexually abused a boy in New Zealand. Hillsong Church is also the target of widespread allegations of homophobia. Lentz says gays are welcome at Hillsong NYC, but he declines to address the topic of same-sex marriage with me. It's clearly not worth the risk. Lentz maintains that his job is more about uniting people than dividing them. "It's harder to feel welcome in some local churches than it is to meet Jesus," Lentz says elliptically. "If Jesus walked into New York City, he wouldn't be able to get into some of the places they profess to worship him in."
• • •
What some people call swagger, Carl Lentz calls the grace of God. Justin Bieber's longtime manager, Scooter Braun, says Lentz "has that X-factor, that thing you're born with that makes people gravitate toward you. I'm a proud, practicing Jew, but you don't have to be Christian to be moved by Carl's words and his passion." When Braun and Bieber met Lentz for the first time—introduced by a mutual friend, the Seattle pastor Judah Smith, backstage at a Bieber concert in New Jersey—Braun was wary. "I'd had bad experiences with people claiming they were all about God," Braun says. "My reaction was just to get him out." But when they met again at a pickup basketball game at Shaquille O'Neal's house in L.A., the two men bonded. "Carl has never asked for anything other than friendship," Braun says, "and has given nothing but friendship in return."
Lentz has earned the trust of many young famous Christians. At that same 5 P.M. service in mid-July, the 24-year-old actress Vanessa Hudgens and her 21-year-old boyfriend, Austin Butler, were seated in the front row, with Butler's costar in The Carrie Diaries, AnnaSophia Robb, 19, a row back. As Lentz began to preach the Word, Robb tapped out notes on her iPhone. When the pastor left the stage, Robb, who recently moved into the same apartment building as the Lentzes, turned to me and said, "You can feel the favor of God in this church." After his sermon, upstairs in Irving Plaza's greenroom, Lentz meets with a grieving couple who just lost their 4-year-old son in a car accident. Lentz prays with them, huddling in a tight circle, finishing just in time to change back into his stage clothes and deliver again at the seven o'clock service. When Lentz hauls himself back to the greenroom 45 minutes later, he's gutted. He shuts the door and sits gingerly on a couch, alone, brushing his hair back. He leans forward, elbows on knees, hands joined, eyes closed. He's sweating and sniffling; a tear runs down his cheek. One more service to go.
Lentz quickly collects himself and opens the door to find Roc-A-Fella Records cofounder Damon Dash waiting, unannounced, with an entourage of two.
"That was like a rock concert with a message," Dash says, introducing Lentz to someone he refers to as "the biggest DJ in China."
"You mind if I get your details?" Lentz asks. "Give you a holler? Grab a coffee?" The two exchange numbers, and Lentz heads back downstairs to preach his final sermon of the night.
"Jesus," Lentz says, bathed again in silver-blue light, "I pray tonight you have your way. There will not be one of us who leaves here as we walked in."
• • •
Four days later, Lentz hits the road: There's Hillsong's European conference at London's O2 Arena; an event in Joplin, Missouri, called Project Restoration, to which Lentz was personally invited by a woman who'd driven to New York just to ask him to heal her tornado-ravaged town; and a trip to preach in New Zealand. On the day Lentz returns to New York, nearly three weeks later, he heads to Harlem to coach his church's basketball team in a game at storied Rucker Park. He rolls uptown in a caravan of Chevy Tahoes filled with former and current NBA talent, including the Golden State Warriors' All-Star forward David Lee. Justin Bieber's onetime "swagger coach" Ryan Aldred, a.k.a. Ryan Good, sits in the back of one SUV. "All the other teams are sponsored by rap labels and drug dealers," Lentz says. "We're the only church team in the history of the league."
During the game, Lentz, in a loose-fitting Ksubi Baddies tank top and a camouflage baseball cap, sits anxiously on the bench, eyes narrowed, turning his cap forward then backward. He appears even more intense than he does in church. By the fourth quarter, Lentz's squad of ringers, the Hillsong NYC Hustlers, have a 15-point lead. When Lee seals the deal with his third dunk in a row, Lentz shoots up off the bench and exchanges a flying body bump with his Warrior. His commitment to winning is total.
That was made clear four Sundays earlier, during his final sermon of
the night. Wiping sweat from his brow under the disco ball, Lentz cited
John 6:53 and spoke of a total commitment to Christ: "Unless you eat the
flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in
you." He then explained the meaning of Jesus' words: "When you take a
bite of me, when you really follow me, everything in me goes in you—you can't pick and choose." Lentz leaned out over the edge of the stage, his voice rising. "You have to be consumed with this. I'm talking about flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, everything in me, in you, and if you're not about that, you need to go follow somebody else."
Lentz was ostensibly talking about his savior, but it almost sounded
like he meant himself. "Because this is not a game. I am not a circus. I
am not just traveling around doing cool things. I am after followers."
THE CIRCLE OF LOVE
Carl Lentz has a knack for making famous friends, from true believers to adoring admirers. 1. AnnaSophia Robb
The Colorado-raised Carrie Diaries star uses Hillsong NYC as a cure for homesickness and now lives in the same apartment building as Lentz. 2. Kevin Durant
Lentz baptized the NBA superstar and serves as his spiritual counselor;
the two hit the gym together whenever they're in the same city. 3. Scooter Braun
Braun's first reaction to Lentz? "That guy is definitely not a pastor!" Now Lentz has the full trust of Bieber's Svengali. 4. Damon Dash
The Roc-a-Fella Records cofounder recently visited Hillsong NYC, telling Lentz: "That was like a rock concert with a message." 5. Jeremy Lin
When he's back in New York, the former Knicks and current Houston Rockets point guard often attends Lentz's services. 6. Vanessa Hudgens
The Spring Breakers co-star and her actor boyfriend, Austin Butler, are Hillsong NYC regulars and friends with Lentz's whole family. 7. Justin Bieber
Last year, Lentz and the King of Teen Pop bonded over pickup b-ball; now they exchange texts about Scripture every day. 8. Tyson Chandler
With his wife, Kimberly, the Knicks' star center traveled with the
Lentzes to this year's Hillsong Conference in Sydney, Australia.
Everyone knows that the sexual revolution invented sex, right? Oh, people have been doing this for millennia? With Masters of Sex
premiering Sunday, it's clear sex how-to is more than a one-off source
of fixation. But what did sex manuals look like before contemporary
iterations like The Lovers' Guide
or Savage Love? Nerve scavenged Google Books to find out just how
variable (and seemingly ahead-of-its-time) sex advice can be. Some of
it's beautiful, some of it's weird, some of it's eerily
prescient: Here's our favorite historical sex advice. (Illustrations
might be NSFW.)
1. The School of Venus, 1680
This premodern sex manual is surprisingly frank about sexuality,
covering seemingly anachronistic ground like condoms, female orgasms,
and fuck buddies. Samuel Pepys, noted diarist,called it "the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw" -- and then bought it. Excerpts and illustrations below. (h/t The Appendix)
2. An ABZ of Love, 1963
A favorite of Kurt Vonnegut's, this tender sex manual authored by
Danish couple Inge and Sten Hegeler promises: "aspects of sexual
relationships seen from a slightly different standpoint.” In the
Hegelers' case, that meant a progressive approach to LGBT rights,
sexism, and family-oriented sex ed, often penned in a sweet, wry tone.
"We are none of us so full of common sense as we would like to think
ourselves. So there are two paths we can take: one is try to deny and
suppress our emotions and force ourselves to think sensibly. In this way
we run the risk of fooling ourselves. The other way is to admit to our
emotions, accept our feelings and let them come out into the daylight.
By being suspicious of all the judgments we pass on the basis of what we
feel (and not until then) we shall taken a step towards becoming
practitioners of common sense."
Penned by R.B. Armitage, M.D., this guide for "For Young Wives and
Those Who Soon Expect To Be Married" is morally a mixed bag. On the one
hand, Armitage spends several chapters talking about the major hip new
technology of his time, eugenics. Not so great. But there's also advice
that sounds surprisingly contemporary, namely, on the ethics of birth
control and abortion. It's still just another old white guy talking to
women about their bodies; but it's pretty cool that he grasped the
importance of planned parenthood and the weight of such a personal
choice before there was a Planned Parenthood or Pro Choice. The more
things change...
"One of the most distressing features of the popular prejudice against
Birth Control, arising from a total misconception of the subject, has
been the widely spread and popularly accepted notion that Birth Control
is practically analogous to abortion[...]. We realize that in exercising
control over the entrance gate of life we are not fully performing,
consciously and deliberately, a great human duty, but carrying on
rationally a beneficial process which has, more blindly and wastefully,
been carried on since the beginning of the world. There are still a few
persons ignorant enough or foolish enough to fight against the advance
of civilization in this matter; we can well afford to leave them
severely alone, knowing that in a few years all of them will have passed
away. It is not our business to defend the control of birth, but simply
discuss how we may most wisely exercise that control." (Via.)
4. Kama Sutra, 400 BCE-200 CE
Everybody knows the Kama Sutra is kinky. But what you probably didn't
know is that its fascinations don't stop at the art of human pretzels.
In Sanskrit Kama means sensual pleasure (one of the four goals of Hindu life) and Sutra,
the root-word for English's "sew," means thread. All told, the Kama
Sutra is a vast compendium of prose, poetry, and (eventually)
illustration which served as both a practical guide to sex and a long
treatise on love, family, and well-being. But while beautiful, to modern
eyes it can get downright weird. For example, want 2400 year old
Viagra? Try bee stings.
"When a man wishes to enlarge his lingam, he should rub it with the
bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing
it for ten nights with oils, he should again rub it with the bristles as
before. By continuing to do this a swelling will be gradually produced
in the lingam, and he should then lie on a cot, and cause his lingam to
hang down through a hole in the cot. After this he should take away all
the pain from the swelling by using cool concoctions. The swelling,
which is called 'Suka', and is often brought about among the people of
the Dravida country, lasts for life.” (Via)
5. The Canons of Theodore, ca. 900
Contrary to popular belief, the Catholic church was a rapidly changing
institution over the course of the 500 some odd years that make up what
we now call "the Medieval Era." Penitentials are one such artifact of
that transitioning. First compiled by Irish monks in the 6th century,
penitentials are little handbooks that detail the sins a monk might be
likely to hear in confession.Though they might cover anything from
murder to eating habits, sex was the main course for these monastic
manuals. The Canons of Theodore, whose manuscript is featured
below, is one example. The proscribed punishments in these things aren't
that weird -- just seemingly arbitrary. But the many yays and nays of
monastically approved sex in the 10th century are totally wacky. (See:
flowchart.)
No that's not a zipcode-- it's the year Lady Sei Shonagon completed her
surprisingly fresh collection of musings on life, love, and the art of
negging. The Pillow Book belongs to a genre of writing called zuihitsu, which -- and I'm sure I'm mincing culture horribly here -- was more or less collected bedside Post-it notes. Very bloggerly. The Pillow Book feels particularly anachronistic because it was written by a woman, so instead of getting some kind of 11th century Act Like A Lady
pulp, you end up with chapters called "Men Have Really Strange
Emotions." No joke. Want some commentary on celebrities schtupping the
maid? The Pillow Book's got you covered: "Sometimes a man will
leave a very pretty woman to marry an ugly one." Or how about what it's
like to order from ModCloth? "It is a great pleasure when the ornamental
comb that one has ordered turns out to be pretty."
"I greatly enjoy taking in someone who is pleased with himself and who
has a self-confident look, especially if he is a man. It is amusing to
observe him as he alertly waits for my next repartee; but it is also
interesting if he tried to put me off my guard by adopting an air of
calm indifference as if there were not a thought in his head. I realize
that it is very sinful of me, but I cannot help being pleased when
someone I dislike has a bad experience."
That's essentially what 
Russian
President Vladimir Putin attends the launch ceremony of the Nyagan
power plant in Nyagan.
