J ournalism for P eople B uilding a B etter W orld
E H T adical R l e v Tra E U S S I *
S ummer 2019
YOU e s cau y a : m YOUR G N NI NGE ns R A *W HA N pla C o t O I T A VAC
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HOW CAPITALISM PLAYS ON OUR FEARS OF AGING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: TEACHING RACIAL JUSTICE OR WHITE PRIVILEGE? US $6.50 Canada $6.50
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Issue 90 YesMagazine.org
Are We Doing Vacations Wrong? How to Be a Better Guest The New Co-op Alternative to Airbnb A Route 66 Road Trip Through Indigenous Homelands Off the Beaten Path at Home: How to Find New Routes Through Our Daily Lives
SOLUTIONS WE LOVE
YES! BUT HOW? 9 Climate Action Styles: Which One Are You? | 6 People We Love Shutting the Door on Amazon | 10 The Page That Counts | 12
1 DO YOU BELIEVE IN A BIPARTISAN APPROACH? Citizens’ Climate Lobby is an option for those who believe the best strategy is to gain support on both sides of the aisle. The group trains citizens in ways to build political will in their communities and to effectively lobby their members of Congress. It asks volunteers to bring respect and empathy to all of those encounters, even when talking with people who may vehemently disagree with their cause. What distinguishes Citizens’ Climate Lobby from many climate groups is its singular legislative goal—to see a fee placed on carbon, with the proceeds returned to citizens as dividends. After more than 10 years of lobbying, a bill similar to their proposal has been introduced with bipartisan sponsors in the House.
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YES! BUT HOW?
Cathy Brown Illustrations by Delphine Lee
9 CLIMATE ACTION STYLES WHICH ONE ARE YOU?
M
OS T OF US HAV E H E ARD ABOUT U. N. R E SE ARCH E RS WARN ING that we need to make
dramatic changes in the next 12 years to limit our risk of extreme heat, drought, floods, and poverty caused by climate change. Report after report about a bleak climate future can leave people in despair. But there’s another option that’s good for you and the planet. Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology and environmental studies at The College of Wooster, says getting involved with a group can help lift your climate-related anxiety and depression in three ways: Working with like-minded folks can validate your concerns, give you needed social support, and help you move from feeling helpless to empowered. And it can make a difference. “Groups are more effective
than individuals,” Clayton says. “You can see real impact.” So join forces with like-minded citizens and push for change. The U.S. Climate Action Network lists more than 175 member organizations, which are activist groups working through energy policy to fight climate change. And that doesn’t include all the environmental groups out there. So you have lots of options for getting involved. Full disclosure: I found my activism comfort zone with Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I love its bipartisan, nonconfrontational style, and it suits me. What’s your climate action style? I’ve done some matchmaking for you. Here are nine activism styles that might fit, along with some groups that align with them. Pick one, and you can start making change. yesmagazine . org
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I
f you’re one of the more than 1.4 billion international leisure travelers who left your home for someone else’s in 2018, then chances are you’re familiar with the quote “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” First written in 1869 by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, this quote is so hyped you can find it copied and pasted into Instagram captions, travel blogs, and memes, on posters, mugs, and luggage tags. It continues: “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Too bad it’s such a lie. The flawed core in this thinking, that those who have the privilege and access to travel are more enlightened than those who haven’t—especially considering the world’s most well-traveled people brought smallpox and small-mindedness everywhere they went—can be found in Twain’s usage of “our people.” We can assume he wasn’t accounting for the vast majority of this world’s people of color who cannot travel for leisure but are rather unwilling hosts to foreign occupations or peoples being displaced by extractivism and war. We know for sure he wasn’t referring to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, whom he disparages as fit subjects for extermination in The Noble Red Man, his 1870 takedown of author James Fenimore Cooper’s romanticism. And he wasn’t referring to the stolen Africans and their descendants who were forced into chattel slavery and who were “vegetating” in their respective little corners of the Earth before those innocents ventured abroad and stepped foot on their lands. So, what is the truth about travel? Are we doing our vacations wrong? The truth is that tourism, like any other capitalistic project, is about consumption for profit. But “place” isn’t an endlessly renewable commodity—it is someone’s home, and the communities who call it so rarely factor in fairly to our conceptions of travel as an enlightening project. From the economic instability that tourist cultures
It’s not unusual for Honolulu tourists to visit ‘Iolani Palace, the former seat of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. But DeTour guide Terri Keko‘olani uses the visit to discuss the U.S.-backed coup in support of military and business interests after the death of King Kalākaua. YES! P H OTO BY A A RON K. YOS HINO
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Radical Travel Are we doing vacations wrong? How to be a better guest in someone else’s homeland. Bani Amor
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3 WAYS TO TRAVEL TO BUILD REAL RELATIONSHIPS
Linköping, Sweden JOHANA DAHLBERG
SHARE A MEAL IN A LOCAL HOUSEHOLD. Eatwith.com
TRADE OFF HOSTING. More than
and Mealsharing.com connect travelers with people in host countries who love to entertain. Prices vary. Eight other guests and I recently paid $49 each, staying past midnight sharing food, wine, and conversation in the home of a French journalist covering the yellow vest protests in Paris. Saigon Hotpot (saigonhotpot.vn) sets up meals in university students’ homes as well as city and street food tours in Ho Chi Minh City.
2,000 households in 48 states and 50 countries participate in the Affordable Travel Club (affordabletravelclub.net), a Washington state-based hospitality exchange group for people over 40. Hosts offer an extra bedroom, breakfast, and an hour of their time to acquaint travelers with the area. Members pay a gratuity of $15 (single) or $20 (double) per night to defray costs, but most hosts open their homes for the experience of meeting new people rather than the income.
WALK AND TALK. Spend
time with a Global Greeter (globalgreeternetwork.com) volunteer who likes sharing what they love most about their hometown. Greeters act not as guides, but as new friends in destinations all over the world. I recently hung out with Valerie, 42, a volunteer in Lyon, France, wandering through the city’s network of underground passages and visiting her favorite places, such as sampling oysters and white wine at a Sunday market. The service is free, although visitors are welcome to make an online donation to the Greeters network. Carol Pucci
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VISIT A NATIONAL PARK—BUT TAKE THE TRAIN. Help decrease
vehicle traffic at these parks and support the struggling Amtrak, which offers trips to places like Yellowstone National Park, The Grand Canyon, and Glacier National Park. You could travel roundtrip to the Grand Canyon, stay two nights in a hotel and two nights onboard, with breakfast and dinner included. Or maybe a trip to Glacier aboard historic Empire Builder with three nights in a hotel and a tour of the park. Over 100 packages are available. (amtrakvacations.com)
3 WAYS TO TRAVEL TO PROTECT NATURAL RESOURCES
DO SOME CITIZEN SCIENCE.
If you’re out and about in nature, there are a ton of projects you can plug into, like a BioBlitz using the iNaturalist app. It’s a cool exercise that lets you record as many plant and animal species as possible in a designated area and time, while contributing useful data for science and conservation. A green tree frog in Texas and a wapiti in Alaska are just two of the over 206,000 species documented so far. Or you can measure light pollution and send your data to web app Globe at Night.
BUILD A TRAIL IN WASHINGTON STATE. Washington Trails Association offers a volunteer vacations program where you can escape for eight days with a group of fellow volunteers to help maintain trails. Trails are important to our environment because they help limit potentially negative impacts on natural areas. Food and tools are provided, and there are camping options available as well, including car and backcountry. There’s time to relax and explore on your own. Options include Kalaloch Beach on the Olympic Peninsula, Lake Chelan in the Central Cascades, and Deception Pass State Park on the Puget Sound. (wta.org) Yasmeen Wafai
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YE S! PHOTO BY ALEX GARLAND
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Camping at Alabama Hills, Inyo County, California. Globe at Night is an international citizen science campaign that invites people to collect data on night sky brightness. PHOTO BY TOMMY LISBIN
JUST THE FACTS
Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz
The High Costs of an “All-Inclusive” Deal
M
ore people than ever want “all-inclusive” vacations—airfare, lodging, all-you-can-eat buffets, and drink coupons at a remote sunny resort or on a cruise ship. Demand for resort vacation packages has risen at least 75 percent since 2011, and for cruising, at least 20 percent. They are an attractive option for travelers who want to stretch their dollars and not hassle over arrangements. Many people already suspect that traveling this way offers little meaningful cultural exchange. But more importantly, it’s a terrible deal for the people who live where you’re going.
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But dollars spent at all-inclusive resorts hardly benefit local economies at all. Overall, 80 percent goes to airlines and resorts’ international corporate owners.
Turkey
90%
1
All-inclusive vacation revenue that “leaks” out of the country:
Caribbean
80%
Tourists invest a lot of money …
Thailand
About $4 billion a day globally. Top 3 in tourist spending in other countries: China U.S. Germany
U.S. tourists spent:
$135 billion 2016
9%
70%
… in destinations dependent on tourist dollars. Direct contribution of tourism to these economies:
40%
2017
of GDP
Maldives
35% British Virgin Islands 28% Aruba 26% Seychelles 19% Bahamas 15% Belize 2.7% U.S.
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80%
of all-inclusive guests do not regularly leave the resort.
1 in 3
never leaves the resort to dine locally or go on a local excursion.
5
Who profits? Distant corporate owners.
3 Coastal development that is foreign-owned:
Locals get low-paying, seasonal jobs.
Belize
90%
Which means staff from abroad get the top jobs.
Resorts owned by European entrepreneurs:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic 48 of 50
Resort hotel rooms registered outside the country in an international tax haven:
Barbados workers on short-term contracts:
27% 9% At all-inclusive hotels
At all-inclusive hotels
80%
At other types of hotels
Pre-tip monthly wages in Kenya (shillings):
18,666
Dominican Republic
21,300
100,000
At other types Overall median of hotels in 2014
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Megaresorts contribute to inequality. Tourists often have more access to local resources than the local people do. In Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, $3,800 buys a oneweek package at Barceló Bávaro Palace: 11 restaurants, casino, theater, night club, shopping center, and water park with a pirate’s playground, wave pool, and waterfalls.
Local tap water is not potable.
Dominican Republic
3.9 billion
tourists annually
$7,052
per capita GDP
1 in 3
residents lives in poverty
Punta Cana has the country’s highest percentage of aquifers ruined by salinization due to beach erosion from climate change and resort development.
Kenya
87%
of tourists stay at allinclusive resorts
Daily water use per capita by tourists in developing countries is 10–15 times more than by locals.
$1,594
per capita GDP
36%
of residents live in poverty
Sources: 2013 U.S. Consumer Travel Report. 2018 Cruise Industry Outlook. 1. U.N. World Tourism Organization Tourism Highlights. World Travel and Tourism Council 2018 . 2. Global Exchange 2013. European Tourism Futures Institute, “Ethical issues of all-inclusive tourism” May 2015. Tourism Concern, “Perceived Impacts of All-Inclusive Holiday Packages on Host Destinations” 2015. UNEP 2002, Tourism’s Global Environmental Impacts 2018. 3. Tourism Concern, “Working condition in Hotels” 2014. 4. Latino Rebels 2018, World Bank, Expedia/Barceló Bávaro Palace, USAID Dominican Republic Climate Change Vulnerability 2013. 5. European Tourism Futures Institute 2015. Worldwatch Institute. PHOTO BY VESI_127/GETTY
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WHY YOUNG JEWS ARE DETOURING FROM ISRAEL TO PALESTINE Some Birthright trips to Israel have turned into political engagement. Lornet Turnbull
Shoshi Parks
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n her first visit to Israel a decade ago, Sarah Brammer-Shlay joined her voice to the prayerful murmurings of the multitude of women, their heads bowed against the ancient stones at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. In the south, she climbed Masada, King Herod’s desert fortress overlooking the Dead Sea and the site of the last Jewish stronghold against Roman invasion. And she strolled the beaches and hung out with trip mates and new Israeli friends in bars and clubs in Tel Aviv, a spirited city that feels more Florida during spring break than ancient holy place.
Sarah Brammer-Shlay is a rabbinical student in Philadelphia. She’s also an activist, part of a growing movement of young American Jews working to help ensure that others visiting the Holy Land are prepared to travel there authentically.
YES! PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE NOLT
For Brammer-Shlay, it was as if her entire childhood—Hebrew school, Jewish youth group, and the stories her parents told her growing up in the Midwest—had been preparation for this Israel trip. “I had been talking about Israel my whole life, like I’d been there, so it was very exciting and powerful to finally actually get there,” she says. She had known little about the Palestinians there, of their decades-long struggle under Israeli rule. The trip had been arranged and paid for by Birthright Israel, the world’s largest educational tourism program, which
serves 18- to 32-year-old Jews from the diaspora. A rite of passage of sorts for 700,000 young people over the last 20 years, Birthright says the goal is to strengthen their Jewish identity by creating and reinforcing a connection to Israel. Those 10 days in the summer of 2010 had left Brammer-Shlay wanting to know more. So a little over a year later, on a semester abroad in Jerusalem, she visited the West Bank and began to discover just how much her education on Israel had left out. A rabbinical student in Philadelphia, yesmagazine . org
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OFF THE BEATEN PATH AT HOME How to find new routes through our daily lives. Richard Schiffman
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ABOUT YES! MEDIA
FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Christine Hanna
Dear readers, If you are holding this magazine, you may be one of our thousands of devoted print readers who simply love the feel of YES! in real life. You like settling in with it when it comes in the mail. Maybe you consume it all at once, or maybe you savor it over a few weeks. Or maybe you simply like having it around the house because you know it holds hopeful possibilities for a better world. Maybe you saved every single back issue (you know who you are!). Well, dear reader, we love you right back. And, for every one of you loyal print readers, there are hundreds of online readers who have never seen YES! in print. We publish every print story on our website, and some are tremendously popular. Sarah Lazarovic’s “Borrow the Sugar” comic essay from our spring Dirt Issue has already been viewed 114,000 times and shared on Facebook more than 21,000 times. What you may not realize is that we can only fit 25 percent of our stories into a print magazine. Three times more are published on our website. Because so many people read them and share them, they have tremendous impact across the country. A great example is “For Women, by Women: A Sisterhood of Carpenters Builds Tiny Houses for the Homeless” by Lornet Turnbull. We published it on our website in August 2018, and it’s been read nearly 200,000 times so far. It is about a crew of volunteer tradeswomen who came together to build a tiny-house community for homeless women in Seattle. The women carpenters, electricians, and plumbers knew the project would help their homeless sisters. What they didn’t realize was how much solidarity the project would bring, as well. Unlike their regular, male-dominated worksites—where the tradeswomen often deal with a culture of harassment and disrespect—the Whittier Heights Village site quickly became a warm, collaborative space where the women shared skills and support and created friendships. As soon as the story was published, Turnbull and Alice Lockridge, the organizer for the tiny-house project, began getting requests for more information. Groups across the country wanted to know how they could do something similar—for homeless people, veterans, LGBTQ communities, Native Americans, and others. It turns out the healing power of a small group of volunteers helping others cannot be underestimated. Our story has now inspired similar construction projects in development across the country. And that’s all thanks to the generous donors who make all YES! stories possible. The power of YES! is in the alchemy between the stories themselves and the people who read them. So growing our community of readers is critical to our mission. You can help! Give a gift subscription, become a monthly donor, share stories online, or simply pass along this issue once you’ve read it. Thank you for helping YES! inspire a more just and sustainable world. With gratitude,
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How Do We Teach To Kill a Mockingbird Now? Harper Lee’s novel is the closest thing America has had to required reading. But the book’s failings in confronting racism are more apparent than ever to White educators—and Black ones wonder what took so long. DJ Cashmere
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BOOKS + FILMS + AUDIO
Illustrations by Fran Murphy
Mental Illness Has a Poverty Problem Why economic equality is not enough to fix our mental health care system. Eleanor Goldberg
THIS JUNE MARKS ONE YEAR SINCE THE DEATH of chef Anthony Bourdain. As the date approaches, his estate is set to release a new book filled with anecdotes and photos from friends and collaborators. Similar memorials will give fans a chance to revisit a personality they admired. But they will also bring up a difficult question: What could drive someone who appeared to have such a full and enviable life to kill himself? Perhaps we shouldn’t have been that shocked. Rates of mental illness are higher in countries like the United States—among both rich and poor people. According to social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-Being, severe income inequality might be the reason. For example, the U.S. has three times as much mental illness as more-equal countries, like Japan and Germany. When there are vast differences in income, there’s also overwhelming pressure to constantly prove our value by accruing fancy cars, clothes, and homes, and traveling to far-off places. This trend heightens status anxiety, which can lead to feelings of shame, loss of control, depression, and other mental health issues, according to the authors. These risks remain in place whether you’re well-off and competing with the private-jet-owning 1 percent or if you’re living paycheck to paycheck and sizing yourself up against families who don’t need as much support. The stress of it all means people who feel they can’t measure up are also more likely to retreat from society. People who experience “status anxiety” are less likely to
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