When you think of storm chasers, maybe the movie “Twister” comes to mind. But, as Sarah Stillman writes in her deeply reported piece from this week’s issue, there is another kind of storm chaser: women and men who are part of a “transitory workforce, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild.” In an era of ever more extreme weather, the disaster-recovery industry is booming—and it operates on distressingly familiar lines. Workers are often connected, via a network of subcontractors and brokers, to large disaster-restoration companies, which themselves are backed by private-equity firms. The work can be meaningful and pay well, but it is also poorly regulated and dangerous, especially during the pandemic—and health insurance and paid leave are scarce. In her reporting, Stillman spoke with more than a hundred workers, storm survivors, labor advocates, and climate-change experts. One worker is Bellaliz Gonzalez, a fifty-five-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela. In her home country, Gonzalez worked as an environmental engineer, running several national parks. In the U.S., she has turned to manual labor, addressing “damage inflicted by hurricanes, fires, floods, and tornadoes across seven states, scrubbing mildew blooms and clearing pools of toxic sludge from universities, factories, and airports.” Gonzalez gives a name, a face, and a human story to the people living and working in what is largely a shadow world. As Stillman writes, “news cameras descend when a storm or a fire arrives but move on before the work of recovery—often its own disaster—begins.” —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Read “The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters.” Sarah Stillman has written recently about the race to dismantle Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the public-health dangers of mass incarceration during the pandemic. | | | |
- What’s the deal with the Roys? Writing about HBO’s “Succession,” Naomi Fry notes, “There are times when the series feels almost Seinfeldian in its cyclical efforts to capture a group of eccentric, petty characters as they try, again and again, to one-up one another.”
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- P.S. Maybe Halloween reawakened you to the joys of candy. Or else a season of overindulgence has suggested that you need to get a grip. Either way, perhaps you should start eating candy like a Swede. As Hannah Goldfield has noted, “every Saturday is effectively a national holiday, called lördagsgodis, which means ‘Saturday candy.’ ” As part of an old public-health initiative to cut down on tooth decay, “Swedish citizens were urged to have as much candy as they liked, as long as they limited their consumption to one day a week.”
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Today’s newsletter was written by Ian Crouch. | | | |
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