The College Hill Independent Vol. 38 Issue 8

01 new in Rhode Island: worker co-ops

02 big data energy

03 Crimetown and Providence beyond the mob

Volume 38 • Issue 08

April 05, 2019

the College Hill

Independent

the Indy

a Brown * RISD Weekly

R n* A B row

D IS

ly Week

The Indy Contents

From The Editors We received the following letter last week, which felt urgent enough to share:

Cover Graphic Coding #1 Raina Wellman News 02 Week in Dismemberment Signe Swanson, Ben Bienstock & Sarah Clapp 05 “Have You Eaten?”

Kudrat Wadhwa Metro 03 Cleaning Up the Workplace Sara Van Horn 09 Sealing the Deal Hal Triedman 14 A Friday For Our Future Mara Dolan Features 07 Waterlog Tara Sharma Ephemera 11 WARMING NEUTRAL COOLING Katherine Sang & Star Su Literary 12 Home Ayleen Sánchez

“A fortnight ago a handsome plaque or pennant appeared on the brick display wall overlooking the “farm”--the oval campus featuring a sculpture (by Gilbert Franklin) where Angell and Waterman converge at Benefit Street. It showed the logo of a pack of Camel cigarettes, with pigeons perching on top. Beneath that startling image there was a rectangle depicting the migration of springtime arriving birds. I took a break to search for my old-fashioned camera, but by the time I came back, that strange and wondrous and mysterious message had vanished into the void. I went into the student quarters of the refectory to investigate who had designed and displayed this cryptic address to the public passersby.

Nobody knew anything about it, so I walked downhill to consult our Illustration Department. Its staff likewise was innocent of any knowledge of the origin or meaning of that “telegram” nor had anyone seen it! I am NOT hallucinating, I can describe each and every detail of the design. I have no concrete evidence to prove this tale to be true, nor any fellow witness of its very existence. As a very longtime professor here, I nevertheless ask readers of the April 5 issue of the Indy if anyone out there, out here, knows anything either of the artist who created the object or of any interpretation of the meaning of its juxtaposition of symbols.

Camel cigarettes in that pack holds a nostalgic hint to me: my father’s favorite choice, no menthol, no cork-tip, no carefully chosen color scheme to imply the health benefits of nicotine, just an honest old-time recognition, frank and blunt, about the macho romance of a plain cigarette that can cure the common cold or its sore throat!!! But what of those pigeons or those migrating feathered friends?

There is indeed a pigeon club (I am its founding faculty supporter/advisor.) just above the poster, if that is what it was. Which may in part explain the purpose of the surprise collage. I write this letter to inquire if whoever made it or placed it there can contribute a word of explanation to encourage my research, my inquiry, my quest, please e-mail me at mfink@risd.edu. Thanks for rescuing me from my uncertainty and curiosity.”

- Professor Mike Fink, Literary Arts + Studies, RISD

X 13 The Weekly Indy Wordsearch* Jorge Palacios & Alex Westfall

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Arts 15 Rhode Island Is Famous For You Ella Comberg Science & Tech 17 Rendering Big Data Gemma Sack

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner

Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly

Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim

Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson Eve Zelickson

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VOL 38 ISSUE 08

Staff Writers Jesse Barber Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Gemma Sack Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague

Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Alana Baer Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll

Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu Business Maria Gonzalez Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

Signe Swanson Will Weatherly Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang MVP Jacob Alabab-Moser *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling Katrina Northrop Chris Packs

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

WEEK IN DISMEMBERMENT

BY Ben Bienstock, Sarah Clapp, and Signe Swanson ILLUSTRATION Sarah Clapp DESIGN Amos Jackson

A DICHOTOMY OF BAGELS

A firestorm erupted on Twitter last Monday when Alek Krautmann, a DC-based Missouri native, posted a photo of what he termed “the St. Louis secret of ordering bagels.” This secret—which perhaps should have stayed tucked away in the “Rome of the West”— involves slicing bagels not horizontally, but vertically, like a tiny loaf of bread. It didn’t take long for a digital mob of angry NY-ers to tweet back a colorful array of insults at Krautmann, as well as the Midwestern city he comes from. “St Louis, fuhgeddaboudit,” scolded Chuck Schumer, one of NY’s two very milquetoast Democratic senators. The NYPD also chimed in, with Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea thanking posters for reporting Krautmann’s “crime.”

Though we’re based out of Providence, the Independent is disproportionately staffed by native New Yorkers. The easy take, therefore, would be to write that our entire newspaper sides with the cops on this issue. However, after much deliberation, we here at the Indy have chosen to take a more polemical stance on #bagelgate by offering up the possibility that, maybe, NYC has already dug its own grave with respect to the sanctity of its local flare. NY can’t justify its claims to authenticity after making the bagel Instagrammable vis-a-vis its invention of things like rainbow bagels, or the entire enterprise of Smorgasburg. There’s a deli in Park Slope called Shelsky’s that most New Yorkers would consider legitimate, even though its menu is a pastiche of nostalgic deli items belonging to completely unrelated ethnic communities. (Gravlax and whitefish on the same menu? Fuhgeddaboudit!) Even the NY bagel’s most important ingredient—the city’s tap water—is portable in 2019, given the tech-based solution offered by the New York WaterMaker Machine.

The Indy seeks to offer a departure from the ontology of the origin. In the post-secular era, we must conceptualize faith as an individuated affair, a multilateral system of coexisting, distinct beliefs—the act of belief itself supersedes the notion that any one faith must rule at the institutional level. Some people cut their bagels in half at the center and some (maniacs) cut them into twenty pieces. Our present condition can nonetheless be contained within a certain symbol the bagel provides us—the symbol of the hole. Maybe, the bagel hole is the hole in our hearts that we’re constantly chasing—or a hole where our childish dreams of genuine Being go to die. It is a lack and can never be returned to us.

-SS

A CASE OF THE MONDAYS

They always come back, even after diligent beachcombers pick up the remains, and children damp from an evening’s swim pocket a loose eyeball, a stray receiver, an entire cat. For the past 35 years, the beaches of Brest, France have been graced with the continuous presence of Garfield, or rather, the Garfield novelty telephones that waves keep washing to shore.

“It never stops,” said Claire Simonin Le Meur about the Garfield phones, a 1980s product released to commemorate the character’s notorious likeness: plastic orange body, lazy smile, eyelids that raise and droop depending on whether the receiver is in the cradle. They arrived with the tides without explanation, relentless like a tabby’s appetite for lasagna. At first, they were a curiosity, a miracle even—a lifetime supply of free phones for the people of France (if you could detangle the seaweed). There were many questions to ask about the phenomenon, such as how? and why? and Garfield?, but as the saying goes: Don’t look a gift cat-telephone in the mouth.

But Claire Simonin Le Meur did. She is the president of Ar Viltansoù, an anti-litter organization that sees the fleet of felines as a dangerous environmental hazard rather than a rich seaside tradition. After more than three decades, they decided to put “ending pollution” in front of “just letting a weird thing happen,” and began to investigate the mystery. When local farmer René Morvan heard about Ar Viltansoù's kitsch kitty crusade, he recalled when the Garfields first arrived in his boyhood: a storm had struck the coast, sending a shipping container jam-packed with TeleGarfields careening into a sea cave.

“At the time, there was a lot of things that came to us from the sea,” said Morvan, perhaps teasing at a secret history of Bugs Bunny lunch boxes and Dilbert beer koozies rising up from the foamy deep. Breaking his silence on the whereabouts of the the comicstrip sea debris, Morvan led members of Ar Viltansoù to the cave. Garfields abounded, glorious to behold.

Those damn eco-warriors probably thought they’d won the battle against Garfield and all he stands for—indulgence, misanthropy, plastic waste harming coastal ecosystems­ —but their precious environment had allied with the cat. After so many years, the shipping container had become immovable, buried beneath rocks. The tides of the Atlantic will always come in, and so will the GarfPhones, shining, decrepit symbols of a simpler time—of analog technology, of things washing to shore and people being cool with it, of Garfield.

All of the Independent’s journalists are dues paying members of the Garfield Fan Club, so naturally we were planning a staff trip to Garfield’s hometown of Muncie, Indiana to pay homage to the rascally cat with a sampling of Providence delicacies—pasta baked with Mayor’s Own, a gallon of Dunkin’ to satiate his caffeine addiction. But when we discovered that the real International Site of Garfield is in northwest France, we decided to risk cold early spring temperatures and the wrath of angry environmentalists to visit our pop culture hero in his briny lair. We found Garfield, tangled in his own wires and covered in barnacles, and we felt it­—validation. We here at the Indy hate Mondays. Always have. It’s good to find someone, or something, that understands.

-SC & BB

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Sara Van Horn ILLUSTRATION Illustrator DESIGN Christie Zhong

CLEANING UP THE WORKPLACE Fuerza Laboral pioneers the first worker cooperative in Rhode Island

Last December, in a spacious, carpeted conference room inside Navigant Credit Union in Central Falls, nineteen graduates of the second annual Cooperative Academy lined up to receive their certificates. Before posing for a picture and enjoying celebratory sandwiches, they listened to short speeches by Rhode Island State Senator Sandra Cano and Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, who spoke with energy about the importance of worker solidarity in the face of wage theft and discrimination. The Cooperative Academy, offering three-hour classes on cooperative formation every Saturday for both Spanish and English speakers, was completely free; the only requirement for entrance was interest in learning more about the alternative business model celebrated by the Academy’s organizers.

The graduates, most of them residents of Central Falls, hailed from a variety of professions and cultural backgrounds, but they shared a common frustration with the exploitation within Rhode Island’s labor market and a belief that worker cooperatives could provide a crucial solution: “We are part of a new process,” said graduate Claudia Galeano, “that is turning employees into employers.”

The second annual Cooperative Academy, spearheaded by Central Falls-based workers’ rights organization Fuerza Laboral, has concrete aspirations for its graduates: it seeks to recreate the process of educating and organizing that led, last year, to the creation of Rhode Island’s first official worker cooperative: Healthy Planet Cleaning Cooperative (HPCC).

According to Fuerza Laboral, whose organizing strategy includes legal, legislative, educational, and direct action tactics, a worker cooperative is a business where all employees, or “members,” share equal ownership of the business and equal voting power over its decisions. Within a worker cooperative, there is no structural hierarchy—no lower-paid employees and no CEOs—and no shareholders with voting power.

Currently, HPCC services residential and office buildings in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. It owes its existence to both Fuerza Laboral’s first Cooperative Academy and new legislation that is redefining the possibilities for worker self-determination.

The passage of Rhode Island Senate Bill 676, whose stated purpose is to incentivize worker cooperatives, amended the legal definition of a corporation to include cooperatives—governed by members with one vote each—and granted these member-owners the rights of stockholders. As the first cooperative to be legally recognized in Rhode Island, HPCC represents a significant success in the expansion of an alternative, ethical economy through collective organizing.

“Everybody should be looking at this new way to do business,” Raúl Figueroa, the Community Organizer for Fuerza Laboral, told the College Hill Independent, “It gives the power of the decision-making back to the people doing the work.” This newly-recognized business structure emerges from a long tradition of cooperativism in Latin America and offers Rhode Island a potentially more permanent solution to labor violations and economic injustice than the often frustrating strategy of legal and direct action tactics.

a clear necessity within Rhode Island’s cleaning industry. The business, which employed almost 10,000 people in 2017 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is characterized by a wide range of workplace violations. As Figueroa described to the Indy, there’s little job security within an industry that usually pays minimum wage; often, despite years of dedicated work for the same company, employees can be fired without previous notice. Fuerza Laboral also receives frequent complaints from workers of sexual harassment by employers, fellow employees, or those in charge of transporting workers to the houses or businesses to be cleaned.

There is also the problem, ubiquitous in a variety of industries throughout Rhode Island, of wage theft: the illegal practice of denying wages or benefits due to employees. For Oscar Leiva, co-founder of HPCC, the experience of wage theft was a catalyzing reason to join the cleaning cooperative; as he told the Indy, he simply didn’t want to participate in companies that robbed their employees. Heiny Maldonado, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Fuerza Laboral, also cited the problem of wage theft as contributing to Fuerza Laboral’s search for alternative business models.

“Salaries provide the working class in Rhode Island with their provisions and sustains their dreams,” she told the Indy: “When their salaries are robbed, what are people going to eat?”

For years, Fuerza Laboral has received complaints of wage theft from community members who come to the workers’ center seeking assistance in recovering their stolen salaries. For undocumented workers, wage theft is especially prevalent, with employers often using documentation status as coercion. According to Figueroa, undocumented workers are less likely to come forward, pursue grievances in court, or do anything, for that matter, to raise their public profile.

Despite clarity within US labor laws about minimum wage and overtime pay, the legal process of recovering wages is usually difficult and lengthy.

To ensure employer compliance, Fuerza Laboral also utilizes direct action tactics, staging protests to bring the corporate crimes into public light. In August of 2016, for example, the cleaning company Dependable and Affordable Cleaning Inc. refused to pay eight workers who had worked more than 40 hours cleaning student housing at Providence College, claiming both that the job wasn’t satisfactory and that the workers had never been hired by the company. In response, Fuerza Laboral organized a protest outside CEO David Civetti’s Johnston home and, when Civetti continued to deny wages, a second protest outside his Providence offices, which resulted in all eight workers receiving full pay. But, after many years of fighting the same abuses, this process can seem futile and systematically ineffective. “Personally, I felt like the firefighters,” said Maldonado. “You’re just putting out a fire here and there and the problem persists because, in the end, it’s a vicious cycle.”

For the organizers at Fuerza Laboral, the worker cooperatives they’ve been working to establish over the past five years present an alternative to the experiences endured in an unethical and discriminatory +++ industry. Much of this effort has been legislative and culminated in the passage of Senate Bill 767 which The need to implement ethical business models is establishes a “statutory vehicle” for cooperative

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businesses, allowing them the same powers, privileges, and restrictions as a business, including worker protections—such as temporary disability insurance, workers compensation insurance, and state unemployment insurance—and member rights as shareholders.

(While Rhode Island cooperatives have the choice to allow non-members to invest in the company, this legal definition of a cooperative prohibits nonmember shareholders from voting.) And while it was not illegal to form a cooperative prior to this legislation, cooperatives then did not have state recognition and therefore did not have an identity around which to organize themselves. Alternative business structures without a binding state contract—such as a limited liability company (LLC) or a partnership—facilitate the easy dissolution of cooperatives and are not as successful in the bidding for state contracts.

Despite its perceived association with socialism, the legislation faced surprisingly little political resistance. This was due, in large part, to Fuerza Laboral’s educational campaign, intended to convince people across the political spectrum of the economic benefits of locally-run cooperatives whose business taxes would go directly to the state. After the passage of the bill in October of 2017, Fuerza Laboral conducted surveys to determine what potential industry would be most profitable in Central Falls, organized interested members through the first Cooperative Academy, and finally launched HPCC in May of 2018.

Outside of a distinct legal definition and structural organization, cooperatives are premised on a profoundly different set of values. According to Figueroa, “Cooperative values are straightforward.

A cooperative is a business that is accountable to its members. It is not profit-driven. It gives everyone at the table a voice. The cooperative will serve the members, not outside investors.” A crucial characteristic of worker cooperatives, such as HPCC, is the opportunity for self-development. When one is working for a contractor, Leiva described, the work is very limited, the pay is low, and one is constantly under the direction of someone else. Within a cooperative, because employees control the future of the business, “You can develop yourself and protect your rights.” Workplace necessities, like workers’ compensation and other forms of insurance, that are often neglected by companies looking to cut costs are guaranteed with worker cooperatives. As Maldonado points out, “Workers who are also owners are not going to rob themselves.”

Members can also undergo additional trainings and achieve additional certifications if they so choose.

This structural difference is extremely powerful: as Daisy Salvador, another co-founder of HPCC, told the Indy, “I feel good saying that we have a business, that we bring work to other people, that we are not going to have bosses who disrespect us.” +++ The process of acquiring cleaning contracts, publicizing the cooperative, and achieving the necessary certifications has not been easy. Healthy Planet Cleaning Cooperative still boasts only a handful of members—all of whom work multiple jobs—and finding long-term cleaning contracts within an established industry remains difficult. (HPCC currently has

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only eight residential and three business contracts— relatively few for a company that hopes to provide fulltime employment for its members.) The long journey towards the establishment of HPCC has required the support of many dedicated organizers, lawyers, and workers, including the POWER Network (People Owning Wider Economic Resources), which includes Navigant Credit Union, Rhode Island Small Business Development Clinic, the Center for Family Life, and the City of Central Falls, as well as Fuerza Laboral.

The campaign also owes much of its public support to the Rhode Island Center for Employee Ownership (RI CEO), a volunteer organization that focuses on educating the public about the structure and benefits of worker cooperatives.

In addition to supporting Healthy Planet Cleaning Cooperative, the POWER Network is lobbying for a bill that would facilitate the transformation of local businesses into worker cooperatives; if passed, this legislation would establish a way for CEOs and business owners who want to retire (or who are facing bankruptcy) to pass on collective ownership to their employees. As Ellie Wyatt, a volunteer for RI CEO told the Indy, this would be an extremely important piece of legislation: “In North Providence, within a block, there was a deli and produce store that went out of business, Christiansen’s dairy went out of business, and a furniture store went out of business. Those are businesses that could have transitioned had people known about the idea.”

organizers behind this cooperative campaign take inspiration from their countries of origin. Both of HPCC’s co-founders, Oscar Leiva and Daisy Salvador, first experienced cooperatives in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively. Leiva believes that witnessing the positive effect of cooperatives, a common business model across a variety of Guatemalan industries, has had a direct influence on what HPCC is trying to do.

Figueroa, who learned about cooperatives growing up in El Salvador, traces their history from their European origins to their ubiquitous existence throughout Latin America. In El Salvador, Figueroa described˛to the Indy, there are farming cooperatives, coffee cooperatives, agricultural cooperatives, and fishing cooperatives which have “come out of communities in need.”

The turn to cooperativism in Latin America comes from a history of economic injustice throughout the region. As Maldonado told the Indy, “We come from economies in crisis, from countries with broken economies. So in an organic, natural way, we have developed cooperativism for ourselves, which has allowed the economy be more sustainable and the community to thrive.”

Additionally, many of these cooperatives explicitly focus on providing childcare and family support, work that remains largely uncompensated and unrecognized within the labor structure of the United States.

As Figueroa described, “All throughout Latin America, cooperatives are a whole community. Members have created schools and universities—a whole community of services—where you can feel comfortable knowing +++ that your child is getting a free education and childcare.

The cooperative is not focused on profits, but serving The formation of worker cooperatives as a response the community and the families of their members. to economic injustice is not a novel idea. Instead, the Echoing Figueroa’s description of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

extensive welfare support of cooperative economies in El Salvador, Maldonado describes the extremely well-developed cooperatives that have existed for many years in Colombia. According to her, the ultimate goal of this cooperative campaign is to recreate this network of services within the Central Falls community. In a state that has failed to raise minimum wage to $15 an hour, ensure adequate public school education, or provide comprehensive childcare services, the search for alternative forms of support remains extremely relevant. And within an economy dominated by big business and characterized by labor violations, the need to create ethical business models is also pressing. The organizers and members of HPCC want to make sure that working—and living—in Rhode Island soon looks very different.

Interviews with Heiny Maldonado, Daisy Salvador, and Oscar Leiva were translated from Spanish by the author.

SARA VAN HORN B’21 is a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Coop.

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"HAVE YOU EATEN?"

KASHMIR: LIFE UNDER SIEGE: PART 1 This week, the Indy News section begins a two-part series on the occupation of Kashmir, focusing on narratives that both Western and South Asian mainstream media outlets often overlook. Check back next week for a piece about the Indian state’s enforced disappearances of Kashmiris.

content warning: state violence and sexual assault Military barracks line both sides of the airport runway in Srinagar, the capital city of the Indian-occupied state of Jammu and Kashmir. The airport is full of policemen and soldiers, closely monitoring travelers passing through. The Srinagar airport, with its constant surveillance, is a microcosm of the region, where life is colored—if not completely dictated—by army occupation. Day in and day out, Kashmiris travelling by foot, bus, and car are stopped and asked to show their IDs. The prevalence of military checkpoints serves as a constant reminder that the Kashmiri people live under a military occupation and that their presence in their native land requires verification by the Indian Army. Curfews, hartals (mass strikes), and internet shutdowns, sometimes lasting months at a time, have all become routine in the region.

Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) is the most militarized zone in the world with over 700,000 troops stationed in the region. The presence of the military is a stark reality with army cantonments and soldiers with AK-47s juxtaposed with quotidian restaurants,

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stores, parks, and private homes. The Indian military is protected by the draconian Armed Forces Special Protection Act (AFSPA), a colonial era law that grants special powers to the Armed Forces in so-called “disturbed areas.” This law has been put into effect in regions throughout India, like Assam and Manipur in the northeast in 1958, Punjab in northwest India in 1983, and Jammu and Kashmir since 1990. AFSPA endows virtual immunity to the Indian Army, which has not been held accountable for gross human rights violations including enforced disappearances, pellet gun shootings, mass murders, and rapes. Living under such repressive rule has deeply affected the social fabric of Kashmir.

I spent part of my summer in 2018 in Srinagar as fieldwork for my senior thesis in Anthropology. This article is based on my research and experience and the lived reality of Kashmiris who shared their perspectives with me. +++

Military occupation is not restricted solely to the physical presence of the army; it seeps into every aspect of life in Kashmir, including food and agriculture. In 1947, when India and Pakistan gained independence from the British, Kashmir was primarily self-sufficient, meaning that everything that was consumed was produced in the region itself. The state’s only imports were salt, tea, and clothing from Central Asia and modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan. Additionally, Kashmir exported three times more goods than it imported. Since then, that figure has changed tremendously. Kashmir now imports seven times more goods than it exports. Military occupation has transformed Kashmir from a trade surplus to a trade deficit region, ripping away its status of self-sufficiency.

Kashmir imports even basic necessities such as rice, the staple grain of the region. In fact, rice functions as a pertinent lens for examining the military occupation. Since 1947 and the creation of borders in the region, Kashmir has been forced to trade solely with India. One of its major imports from India is rice

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BY Kudrat Wadhwa ILLUSTRATION Carly Paul DESIGN Amos Jackson

Rice, Agriculture, and Military Occupation in Kashmir

from Punjab, which is significantly cheaper than rice produced in Kashmir, as it is grown on a large-scale using industrial methods. Due to its economic viability, Punjabi rice is quickly replacing the consumption and production of Kashmiri rice. This demonstrates that occupation has not only affected the people of Kashmir, but has also impacted the agriculture and economy of the region.

Revolution”, which completely changed how agriculture was practiced in the region as it transformed from small-scale subsistence farming to industrial agricul“Batt-e khyowa?” meaning “Have you eaten?” is ture that involved the usage of chemical pesticides a question that most Kashmiris are familiar with. and fertilizers. This program was driven by the Ford After greeting friends and family, it is custom to ask and Rockefeller Foundations in conjunction with the whether they have eaten. The word “batt-e” here World Bank and the Indian government. During this stands for meal. The word “batt-e” also means “rice,” period, the Cold War, with the US on one side and the which shows the centrality of rice to a Kashmiri meal. USSR on the other, was at its peak. While India, a part Moreover, “batt-e” is crucial to people’s identity. As my of the Non-Aligned Movement, was officially neutral, friend and colleague Qadir told me, “We Kashmiris this was a time of powerful peasant and working-class are a rice-eating and rice-producing people.” Qadir mobilization across the country. Alarmed by growing added that Kashmiris are incredibly attached to their peasant movements in India and other newly indepenland: a land that grows various fruits, vegetables and dent countries around the world and hoping to prevent rice. In fact, most Kashmiri homes, including some in the spread of communism, the above-mentioned instithe capital city of Srinagar, have a plot of land meant tutions offered the “Green Revolution” as an alternafor subsistence agriculture, where the family residing tive to the “Red Revolution” of the USSR. in the home grows a small amount of food for their The Green Revolution was part of a worldwide consumption. phenomenon that began in Mexico and then transRice is a labor-intensive crop that requires lated to various countries including India, Brazil, the immense care by the farmer. Rice is also a water inten- Philippines, Malawi and Guinea. These changes sive crop and is particularly suited to Kashmir, which is involved an industrialization of agriculture and the a mountainous region abundant in rivers and streams. usage of chemical pesticides and fertilizers as well as Although the state continues to grow rice, according to technologies such as tractors and mechanized irrigaofficial records, the amount of land under agriculture tion. Importantly, the Green Revolution included the has decreased considerably, from 163,000 hectares introduction of “HYV” or High-Yielding Variety seeds. in 1996 to 141,000 hectares in 2012—a loss of 22,000 HYVs were laboratory developed rice and wheat seeds hectares over 16 years. Going by these numbers, that were designed to yield over twice the amount of Kashmir is losing an average of 1,375 hectares of agri- crop as compared to regular seeds. cultural land per year. Instead, Kashmiris are now However, while these seeds were more productive, eating rice grown in Punjab, a state in the northwest and brought in immense revenue, they necessitated region of India. Punjabi rice, which is viewed as synon- large amounts of water in the form of mechanized ymous to Indian rice, is significantly cheaper than rice irrigation. In addition, HYVs were not suited to the grown in Kashmir, as it is mass produced with chem- environment of Punjab and needed huge quantities ical fertilizers and pesticides. However, this was not of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to assist in their always the case. growth. These pesticides included toxic chemicals like DDT and endosulphan that have now been banned +++ globally.

The introduction of such harmful chemicals in Because of its optimal weather and abundant fields, large quantities has caused horrific and devastating Punjab was chosen in the 60s for a large-scale agricul- consequences. Thousands of Punjabi residents are tural industrialization program known as the “Green now suffering from fatal diseases including various kinds of cancer. According to an NBC report, the state of Punjab has the highest cancer rates in the entire country. Further, Punjab is home to the “cancer train” which runs from Bathinda to Bikaner carrying cancer patients and their relatives to the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Hospital in Rajasthan. Although the “Green Revolution” is often touted as a success story because it transformed Punjab into the “grain bowl” of +++

India, its costs were disastrous as it also transformed the state into the “cancer capital” of the country. +++ Under the occupation, Kashmir serves as a market for rice produced using industrial techniques in Punjab which is cheaper than rice produced using indigenous methods in Kashmir. This has significantly affected Kashmiri rice, the production and consumption of which is deeply tied to Kashmiri identity. Moreover, it carries numerous health risks for the consumer as evidenced by the catastrophic after-effects of the Green Revolution in Punjab.

Kashmiris are fully cognizant of this change in their food and agriculture and its deeper significance to their personhood. Many Kashmiris I met with spoke of the brutality of the army and how they would trespass on their fields and sometimes even burn their crops. They spoke of an environment of deep threat and insecurity and how they often feared leaving their homes to go to their fields and orchards.

Additionally, they spoke of how instead of eating Kashmiri rice which is dense and nutritious, they now consume Punjabi rice which, despite being cheap, is light and unfulfilling but more importantly, is contaminated with “poison.” “Poison” here refers to chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in rice production in Punjab. Some drew a larger connection between the brutality of the occupation and poisonous Punjabi rice and spoke of how the state of India is not only violating them through enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings and violence but is also targeting them by feeding them poisonous and contaminated food.

Most often, the conversation returned to the cruelty of military occupation. When I asked Imtiyaz, who runs a retreat in Kashmir, how the current circumstances have affected food and agriculture, he flipped the question and responded, “How can we even think of food when our necks are being strangled?” stressing the gravity of military occupation and the fact that under it, people’s basic human rights are mercilessly violated. In a place like Kashmir, food, agriculture, and the economy cannot be separated from human rights and military occupation since they are all inextricably intertwined.

KUDRAT WADHWA B’19 believes that everything, including food, is political.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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WATERLOG

BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Amos Jackson

On swamps, deserts, and sites of old selves In Southern Appalachia, the forests have been burying themselves for millennia. The trees collapse where the forest floor puddles: thick floods trap the air between them, rainwater pressing down slowly on what once was high above. With time, the whole forest will slip beneath itself, its once-canopy secured with a topcoat of acidic mud. Underground, saturated, nothing can grow or fully decompose.

to give you this book. Or, I come back to this book again and again. Other times, a box of caramels, tea, tamarind candy. When I was sixteen, a ring, along with a square note: My friend wears a ring for each life milestone. Here is one for right now. When I was thirteen, my sister gave me a small willow tree to take the place of the old one that had uprooted in the storm the August before. Hurricane Irene left behind matted branches and a misshapen trunk, which we chopped into ottoCoal is made of plant matter drawn of all of its oxygen, man-stoops and watched as its knots slowly came pressurized at the base of a bog for millions of years. undone.

The plant never fully decays here. Instead, waterlogged, it fossilizes. Geological processes push coal At the end of the letter Meara gives me an adjective through different forms. First peat, then lignite, then for the next year of my life. It’s an adjective she recalls bituminous coal, then anthracite—the messy black from when she was my age. Fifteen: green. Nineteen: matter used for heating commercial buildings. The subtle. Seventeen: sexy. I spend birthdays slipping final and most compressed form of coal is the graphite into the new membrane. It always takes some time to we put in pencils. get used to it. A year later, the word begins to makes sense. I keep the letters and the adjectives in a box on I spend a day in June wading through an Appalachian my bedroom shelf. I hang the most recent one on the bog. Beneath me plant matter decays in a process wall in front of my desk. When I was younger I thought slowed by too much water. All the time in the world about the adjectives constantly. I believed the word is pressing into the bog, an accordion of geologic offered me a self to become. I wove them into my eras culminating in the quiet weight of this late-day sentences; I wove them into my speech. I thought about humidity. But the water holds the old life in place. I them when over the phone. I told Meara stories from make my way through it, barefoot, the last person in my week. Each adjective is different from the last, and a line of fifteen. Our path draws to the surface a thin larger. Each new adjective holds inside of it all of the glaze of cold mud. Carnivorous plants fringe the floor old ones. The adjectives are growing older. On March around our feet. I peer into the bowl of a pitcher plant 2nd the adjective is a word in the bottom right corner and find inside of it the silky molt of a dragonfly. of a piece of cardstock, and one year later it has grown into a body.

I want to know what it feels like to unclip the things inside of me and let them live in a swamp. Dislodge If a body were a swamp, what would it look like? Would what a body has learned and leave it there for a few it leave behind old membranes, or would it hold them months. In the swamp the insides will neither grow nor all in, where they will compact? For a year I keep the die. There, they will not need to learn. For the rest of adjective in my spine and my feet, hoping that it will the summer I live in the Southern Appalachian forest take. So far, it always has. Somewhere in the body there alongside the fifteen other swamp-goers. Each evening is always space to hold a new word. of the summer we sit in a circle to figure out how to live in a community. In the circle we are steeping in each +++ other’s mannerisms, inflections, gestures. They move fluidly about the space, inhabiting each of us for some I learn about bog bodies in a high school science class. time. The three-sided shelters we sleep in at night are The photographs of the bog bodies show clenched neither fully inside nor fully out. At night, when dark- human faces turned to sooty rubber. Chapped lips ness mimics a wall, it’s almost as though the space is sealed in decades and anoxic water. The skin has sealed—but when we wake in half-dream state to a been pulled of all of its breath, suspended indefinitely thunderstorm pressed against the tin roof, there's no in half-preservation, half-ossification. Pressure so stopping the deafening white noise. gradual that it seems for centuries as though everything is still. The bog pays attention to the bodies’ The mold had been growing on everything since organs and shapes, preserving the parts exactly as they the very first day. There were some items that, upon were. The bog plugs the passageways: even the fingerarriving in the forest, I quickly realized I would not nails have no need to grow. need: a wool hat, a cloth bag. In the beginning I tried folding the things up and securing them deep inside In the middle of a lake is an eighty-meter drop, circled the shelter, hoping that the interior space would keep by a fraying rope. I want to know what it feels like to them dry. But the mold reaches the insides, too. One float over it. Knee-deep swimmers cluster where the day at the end of the summer, I am struck by the disori- water is light. Some of them reach down to the bottom enting feeling that this forest is my entire world. The of the lake and scoop pillows of white sand to spread on feeling lasts just a few hours before I am reminded their arms and faces. The silky calcium smells vaguely of the rest of my world, silently seeping in. When we like sulfur. When pressed onto skin, I read online, the leave the forest, we see that everything we brought bottom of this lake exfoliates and soothes. from home is speckled with green—even the things we thought were safe inside. I thought these spots couldn’t Also online are satellite photographs of the lake overbe reached, but the rain seems to find home in the laid with a grid that frames the blueblack hole in the center of everything. center, a puncture in a soft and translucent oval. At some point the ground gave way and the center fell +++ through. In the middle of a lake is a mountain inverted, its insides gutted, the hollow filled with water.

I want to know what happens when a self stops outgrowing itself. I have a hunch that maybe it The center is where the whole lake expands. Lake upon becomes something like coal. lake upon lake, until it darkens to black. A piece of outer space the earth sucked back in. Sand-covered bodies Every March for the last six years my sister has given loom over the dark bowl, treading the perimeter where me a birthday letter, looped in black pen on the back the water is pale and shallow. They are seeing someof a postcard. My sister is ten years older than me and thing raw, it seems. A whole lake under the pressure of she has picked her postcards carefully. She will give the itself. Dense and fleshy lake, accidentally exposed to card with an object. Sometimes, a book, inscribed on the sun, unsure of how to take it in. the inside with my name and a phrase: I’ve been waiting

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But something is steeping in the center of the lake.

There is matter where the light won’t reach. The water in the middle glints no tint of green; what is here does not grow or die but instead just rests. Around the cavity the lake is pushing out thin strands of light that catch at the surface of the water, glittering. For hours I float in the thinnest parts, watching the line where blue mixes with dark. I wait for the colors to blend, maybe when the currents shift or the light winds itself back in, but everything stays in place.

Place a self in a swamp, and watch as it unlearns the lines by which it has always lived. In swamps, matter slows, tangles, decays, and grows. If you look carefully, you will find that they are everywhere: the floor of the forest, the knots in the body, the residues of memory.

I am learning how to inhabit the swamps, and I am taking my time. When I finally find myself inside of one, I remind myself to hold still. The matter, though slow, is buoyant. There is life here, too. +++ The swamps in sentences are difficult to find. I search for the sentences that hold themselves still despite being surrounded by motion, but it seems there are very few of them. Some linger for two or three words before collapsing forwards. Most sentences are bursting with breath.

During the 37th year of her life, Lyn Hejinian wrote an autobiographical prose poem composed of 37 paragraphs, each of them 37 sentences long. Read the swirling sentences and watch as they remain unsettled, a suspension of particles looking to combine or to curdle. The paragraphs make themselves into tanks; I start in the middle of the page and follow what I can, floating outward.

It is impossible to return to the state of mind in which these sentences originated. Reflections don’t make shade, but shadows are, and do. We have come a long way from what we actually felt. The refrigerator makes a sound I can’t spell. It is hard to turn away from moving water. Listen to the drips. Enormous boulders perpetually gliding upward.

The dog was lying in the sunlight not the sun.

Lately the days have been clotting when I have least expected it. I do not know what to make of time that does not move forward, but I would like to learn what grows there. When I was young I imagined that all of the days were shoddily sewn together in one long, thin quilt. The quilt was the length of my lifetime. Each night as I fell asleep the seams of that day came loose, and a piece of the quilt would fall away. I never knew where the old days went: if the fallen pieces of cloth collected someplace in a pile, if the cloth grew moldy. I wonder at what point the old days became threadbare.

But before they did, maybe they clung to their stitches, refusing to decompose. Something must’ve been growing inside of them, even when they seemed to be gone. Most sentences insist upon on birthing the next.

The days will not stop producing more. I wonder what it would take to let them steep in a swamp. I have learned to live my life in line-form, but there are some things I will always keep encircling.

I’m watching a film from the perspective of a nearly-dead fish on the floor of an Atlantic fishing boat. At the beginning I have no idea where I am, and I quickly learn that the film doesn’t care to orient me. Soon I come to understand that I have been given a prosthetic for the eyes of something very small, an entity spattering some kind of life, a piece of matter easily subsumed by the bodies around it. For two hours Leviathan heaves and slides. Water swells through the boat, pulling the world into coherence. Wet salt

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freckles the lens and every few moments a black wall of ocean holds the whole image in a thundery pulp.

Sometimes the pulp takes longer to settle, and when this happens I look to the carpeted floor of the classroom and feel something like gravity inside of me as my visual plane lingers in a suspension of particles.

Time is passing in the middle of the Atlantic and I am left with little to follow. Something tilts and there is light, and in the corner of the screen a wet fin of a nearby fish sputters. The plane bends again and a thin ridge of water slicks the lens. I am pressed up against the floor of a fishing boat, waiting for the muffled world to crystallize. I watch as it takes its time, and I watch as it really never does. +++ The Dead Animal Dump bowls beside a desert road and fills with sunlight like a bucket in the rain. Here is where the Death Valley flesh takes its time to unfix: the dead dairy cows, the pigs, the horses, the dogs. Lard from the kitchen congealing inch-think in the spaces between them. The circle of animals sinks into the side of a mountain and at sunset the light is pooling neon. It soaks inside of creases of rotting fur and gathers in the bends of old bones.

Each time I see you something has gone wrong with the weather. The pattern is insistent. Last January an ice storm came to the valley for two days and to get around it we drove in a circle for fifteen hours. When we reached Las Vegas we became suddenly sleepy but walked up and down the strip because we were not convinced it had been a full day. The next morning we ate pale eggs in a blue diner and wondered when the ice storm would drink the clear sky. Last March we met at the bus station and walked through downtown Providence as jagged wind bent inside of our clothes and kept us frozen and wordless for two days. In June Death Valley held in the heat like a headache. We soaked naked in the reservoir and dried in the sun until we ran out of water to drink. We walked through barley fields steeped in fishy water and I could not remember from where we came. The pattern will not let go. In August we curled beneath a granite cave as a rainstorm swallowed the pond beside us. That day we lost feeling in our limbs and let them lay together all afternoon, sleeping on soft stone. Late-year humidity muffled every Providence sunset for two weeks in October and in January we snowshoed to the pond when it was negative twenty-five degrees, pressed our feet to the top of the solid body of water, held each other’s bodies with our whole bodies so we could keep our hands in our pockets. We think sometimes that the pattern is pulling us together. The outsides reaching for the insides. At this point we are not sure what we would do without it. For some time here we are still because we need to be still. We meet in the center each time, where everything else, for a few days, seems to be meeting too.

We park a chipping blue truck by the edge of the pit and unload from the trunk a bucket of dead chickens. They fall along the side of a sun-baked cow, the tiny bodies settling facedown in the buckles of skin along the crest of the ribcage. Where the cow’s neck ends and the head begins is where the skin has been carved, dry and curling along the edges, slumping in a pile where the animal is still soft. I learn the cow has been there for +++ the last four months: too much alfalfa makes the body bloat to death.

Fifteen days down the Colorado River we camp beside Two Hundred and Twenty-Two Mile Creek, an outwash Nothing surrounds the contents of the Dead Animal of sun-worn clay pebbles splaying from a side canyon, Dump except sunlight. The body of a goat is coming running dry for ten of the twelve months of the year. apart at the belly. The skin breaks in layers. From the We spend the final afternoon napping on the riverbank. thinnest and pinkest layer a translucent oval organ is When I cannot fall asleep because of the heat I push pushing out, looking for sunlight to coat it. The dead chapped heels into sand until I reach cool weight, and goat’s eyes are open—two flattened stones fixed to the for a moment I am near the core of the earth. rest of the dried landscape, as though two long pieces of string tie the eyes to the desert valley. The dead We wake in the afternoon to hot walls of wind and a animals have nothing to float inside of but sunlight. single cloud taking shape along the sandstone ridge.

For the first time in two weeks the light is dilute. We The animals smell like nothing. The June sun and the are disoriented. The wind slips into us and all we can green beetles have sucked the rot away. The greying think to do is go to sleep. To escape the wind I sink to fur glints shiny, churned by the sun, turned to resin. my shoulders in the river water and count to ten.

The desert leaves the spilling organs suspended, the bodies sanitized, the upturned eyes opaque and clean. There are dead things floating at the surface: a raven, I wonder when the bodies decompose. If it happens at a bat, a ringtail cat. Insects clustering on rotting wood. night, in the dark. If the dead animals sit in stillness This eddy is the Lost and Found of the Grand Canyon, until the heat slips away for a few hours and the light where all of the life and possessions of the first two releases the bodies, lets the flesh spread. hundred and twenty-two miles find their rest, offering themselves once more in a slow and steady whirlpool. +++ Pangs of hot wind bring sand pinpricks and dead animal smell to the alcove where we search for sleep

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at night. When we cannot find it after hours of waiting, we slip our shoulders and scalp into the cold, moving water once more. Our bodies are slack, our bodies are wide awake. The river is sifting us in circles.

At night we cannot see the insides of these rotting currents. We know only that the water is thick, the water is fast, and the water has travelled two hundred and twenty miles from the Glen Canyon Dam, gushing from the bottom of snowmelt into billion-year-old black rock. The water does not forget anything, I learn as I scrub away the thin film of sand that formed to my skin when the hot night wind blew the ground away.

I would like to have a memory like this water, to toss back and forth the things I know to be true, let them swim around in circles night after night, until maybe someday they will decompose, or maybe they never will. +++ At the edge of the desert valley the lake is not really a lake but a hardened salt pan through which we tread barefoot with your dog, his paws and our heels puncturing its crisp surface step-by-step. From time to time we rest knee-deep in the mud made cold and harsh by shards of salt. Later in your room we peel the mud from our legs and and find in its impressions soft cuts where the minerals tightened around skin. You examine the rawness of my knees, the spots where salt stripped something away, and all of a sudden the room is full of our limbs.

There must be a way to love from the knees. Most people learn to love from the head, often the eyes, sometimes the hands. Track the growth that has taken place behind the face. There is easy evidence for this type of change: old versions collect in every space you inhabit. But it is harder to reach the swamps in the knees, the elbows, forearms, thighs, feet.

There are parts of my body that I recognize from when I was small. Here, maybe, is where the body, for twenty-one years, has stilled. Strawberry bruises, my brother would call the bloodblooms on our knees after scraping them on the sidewalk. We found them in the summertime. The welts would always heal within the week.

Lately I have been searching my knees for the outlines of old strawberry bruises. They have to be somewhere here: not much has changed. There is so much to learn here—where the kneecap skin gathers, where growth has slowed. My brother and I examined our knees in awe when the strawberry bruises arrived each summer, sockless and soft-limbed on the driveway. And when silently, they mended themselves, we began to forget they were ever there.

TARA SHARMA ’20.5 wants to send you to the Dead Animal Dump.

FEATURES

08

BY Hal Triedman ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Christie Zhong

SEALING THE DEAL Competing narratives of conservation in the Narragansett Bay

It was not ideal weather for seal watching. The wind coming off of Rome Point was strong and unflagging, pressing against my back, gently pushing me towards the water’s edge. From the shoreline, the rocks where seals typically lie appeared as nondescript grey specks.

Seals prefer calm, sunny days where they can bask in the warmth while the rocks heat up beneath them.

Rome Point is a small nature preserve in North Kingstown; a dirt path leads you through the sparse forest and opens up onto a rocky beach. I had traversed the rocks on a chilly evening at sunset because harbor seals are Rhode Island’s official state marine mammal, figuring prominently in local narratives about marine conservation, and Rome Point is one of the most trafficked seal-watching sites in the state. From November to April each year, a visitor to Rome Point can almost surely expect to see seals hauled out on rocks offshore.

I squinted over the water at the rocks, and began to dig through my bag to find the binoculars I had borrowed for the day. +++ Every November, as temperatures begin to fall, harbor seals start to show up in the waters off of Rome Point, and all across Narragansett Bay. They swim south for the winter from their breeding grounds off the coasts of Maine and southeastern Canada. After spending a winter in the relative warmth of Rhode Island, they migrate north again come May. Not much is known about the seals’ local ecology while they’re in the bay: what they eat, what eats them, and their ecological significance—and by extension the bay’s capacity for long-term population sustainability—largely remain a mystery.

And their charisma is unimpeachable. They have impossibly large black eyes and whiskers, are lovably lazy on land, and lithe and graceful in the water. Most consequentially, though, their population has rebounded from a critically low level over the last 50 years. That has led some to see harbor seals as a legislative success story, a highly visible bright spot in an often-dark discourse surrounding conservation.

Whether that narrative of success serves as a model for effective, publicly-driven legislation on conservation or an ineffective fixation that draws attention away from more nuanced ecosystem-wide problems remains an open question. +++ Ecologically speaking, Narragansett Bay is limited.

Instead of creating deep waters necessary for complex forms of life, recent ice ages leveled and scoured the bottom of the bay, leaving its average depth a mere 26 feet. The highest attainable degree of biological and ecological complexity is limited by these shallow waters—for organisms that live here, lifespans, reproductive cycles, and food chains are relatively short.

This geological lack of complexity continues to be compounded by human industrial activities.

Narragansett Bay was one of the estuaries most affected by unchecked development. Rhode Island was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, and the state is still grappling with the environmental legacy of that history and industrial development more broadly. In 1989, an oil tanker called the World Prodigy ran aground off Newport’s shore, leaking 300,000 gallons of oil. Until the early

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2010s, Providence’s combined sewer overflow directed raw sewage into the bay. Narragansett Bay was a prime dumping ground for industrial waste and runoff, which drove away or killed off many species and limited the ecosystem beyond the constraints imposed by the shallow water.

Abundant harbor seals were hunted by Native Americans and early European colonists for meat, leather, and oil. As commercial fishing became more prominent in the area, seals were perceived as competition for fish stocks, leading Massachusetts and Maine to put a bounty on seals from 1888 to 1962. The financial incentive to hunt seals depleted their populations, which reached a low point in the 1960s. In 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act made seals a federally protected animal, and they have quickly bounced back.

Now, their population is relatively stable—they aren’t listed as endangered by federal or state authorities, and are a species of “Least Concern” according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest conservation network.

The key to understanding the narrative power and symbolism of harbor seals and their relationship to conservation in Rhode Island lies in this exceedingly neat story. It’s a narrative of successful problem-solving presented by organizations that want to showcase their ability to solve other ecological problems. In this version of events, decisive human action by the state saved a species on the brink, which has gone on to serve as a proxy for conservation in Narragansett Bay generally.

Now, at least two companies in Rhode Island offer weekly paid seal-watching tours, and since 2008 sealwatching enthusiasts have chronicled, in a well-updated online blog, seal counts and behaviors. There are viral videos of thousands of seals beaching in southern Massachusetts. Save The Bay is the largest environmental group in Rhode Island, with a focus on marine conservation. Since the 1970s, Save the Bay has conducted local environmental advocacy, educational programs, and volunteer habitat restoration. Since 1994, they have run an annual bay-wide volunteer seal count, and produce a well-publicized report on harbor seals every year.

There’s just one problem: the neat narrative produced by placing seals front and center isn’t the whole truth. Though they may be highly visible, using them as the charismatic mascots addresses only a small, migratory part of the ecosystem. The seal population may be stable, but the bay still faces invasive species of grass invading local salt marshes, persistent algae blooms that deplete areas of oxygen, recreational and commercial overfishing, widespread predator depletion, and the ever-present threats of climate change. The waters of Rhode Island are facing as many complex and existential ecological issues as ever.

These issues speak to a larger conflict over the narrative direction of the conservation movement. Broadly speaking, there are two ideological camps: one that emphasizes public engagement and flexing political will (we’ll call them the conservation idealists, or conversely the nonprofit realists), and one that emphasizes deep scientific knowledge and well-informed technocratic decision-making (we’ll call them the conservation realists, or conversely the nonprofit idealists). Both recognize the complex, pressing, and systemic problems at stake when we talk about conservation—but the conflict over which approach becomes dominant remains.

+++ Save The Bay’s work mostly falls into the conservation idealist, public-facing engagement camp. July Lewis, Save the Bay’s volunteer coordinator, has short brown hair and plastic-rimmed glasses, and each impassioned anecdote she delivers seems to energize her. She is in charge of coordinating and compiling the annual bay-wide seal count. “[Seals are] charismatic megafauna, those big animals that people really gravitate to,” she says. “They’re sort of symbolic of the environment you want to protect.” Although the hard science backing up Save The Bay’s conservation effort is critically important to her, she notes that the seals are “also a talking point about how alive the bay is” for her organization. Educating people about a thriving and charismatic species means they will be more likely to protect and keep the bay clean, she says.

Lewis is sympathetic to the ongoing plight of less charismatic species throughout Narragansett Bay but realistic about the likelihood of mounting successful awareness campaigns on these grounds alone. “We’re going to talk about seals whether they’re in trouble or not, because they’re very appealing, and they’re very cool, and they’re a success story,” she says. “For other organisms that don’t have the charismatic qualities of a marine mammal, we will talk about them if they’re specifically in trouble or if there’s something we can specifically do to help them.” In other words, the less visible members of the ecosystem—the crabs, clams, small fish, and algae—have a harder time standing on their own. Despite the fact that salt marshes are a buffer against sea level rise and storm surges, it’s difficult to elicit empathy by pointing to widespread salt marsh loss, because that habitat degradation has happened slowly, over the course of centuries.

Mark Bertness is a marine ecologist at Brown University with a shock of grey-white hair and a voice that fills up his windowless basement office. He mostly agrees with the conservation realist camp, aligned with deep scientific knowledge and highly informed decision-making. He says that “using seals as a barometer for the health of the bay is ridiculous … They’re just migrants coming by. People get excited about them, but as indicator species they’re pretty worthless.”

Instead he says that the focus of conservation efforts should be the more esoteric, mundane species that make up Rhode Island’s salt marshes and rocky shores: “Mussels, barnacles, things that live in the intertidal [zone]—they’re the things that can suffer [from broader environmental problems] ... People focus on charismatic species. Well, charismatic species are not necessarily the ones you should focus on. You should focus on the foundation species that support all these things.”

When Bertness talks about “foundation species,” he’s talking about the myriad small (sometimes microscopic) organisms that make up the lowest trophic levels of an ecosystem. Some of these species, like algae and plankton, are photosynthetic and serve as the basic food source of nearly every other organism in the food chain. One example of the impact of local environmental policies on foundation species is wastewater treatment plant runoff. This runoff is largely responsible for high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the bay, and in the right conditions, these excessively nutrient-rich waters can lead to seasonal algae blooms, which in turn create oxygen-deprived dead zones in the bay. Species that can’t move from these oxygen-free zones often die in the process. The impact

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of these organisms is huge—it’s safe to say they are the base upon which the entire ecosystem rests.

If you heard the story of the bay’s harbor seals from only July Lewis or only Mark Bertness, you would come away from the conversation with wildly different conclusions. To Bertness, “The bay’s in tough shape.

And people that don’t want to talk about it as being in tough shape, they’re not being honest.” To Lewis, “[Seals are] a way of sharing a success story of environmental legislation: it’s like, ‘These seals weren’t here, and we did something to protect them, and now they’re back.’”

Lewis’s narrative is guided by an understanding of how to tell cohesive and compelling stories of success to human stakeholders, even if those stories elide some critical details about the health of the Rhode Island’s waters. These kinds of stories galvanize people to care about their local marine environment and, just as importantly, they contribute to the long-term sustainability of an important conservation organization that has historically done consequential work. Conversely, Bertness’s narrative is guided by a keen awareness of what has been overlooked: a detail-oriented perspective focusing on the importance of the ecological foundations of the bay. But that perspective is an unrealistic model for creating nonprofits that are financially sustainable and capable of functioning long-term.

Bertness bridges this dilemma by considering his role in the discourse of conservation to be that of truth-telling advisor. His job isn’t to sugarcoat reality, it’s to describe it. “If you’re going to be somebody… that informs conservation groups like The Nature Conservancy—national organizations—you gotta be honest with them. If they don’t know the truth, how are they going to manage things?” He doesn’t consider his audience to be the public; instead of motivating people to act, he seeks to inform and direct the structural basis of the conservation dialogue more broadly. In

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

practice, that looks like deemphasizing the ecological role of seals (and the resulting necessity to center them in conservation) in favor of more nuanced problems.

Regardless, harbor seals are back, and it seems like they are here to stay. Between 1981 and 2001, the seal population increased at a yearly rate of 6.6 percent.

The pup count also increased, at a rate of 14.4 percent annually during this period. Despite some worries about recent seal epidemics leading to some mass die-offs, the bay-wide seal counts have recorded only small fluctuations in population in recent years.

As the rocks 200 yards away came into focus, my breath caught for a second. Two seals lay there. They weren’t doing much, to be completely honest. But let me tell you, even from afar they were really cute.

HAL TRIEDMAN B ‘20.5 wants you to know that you should never get too close to seals while they’re resting on a rock—it’s a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

+++ It’s hard to get people to connect with the sea. We can’t see into an ocean’s depths, or navigate its waters with the ease we feel on land. Unpredictable tides, waves, and winds constantly remind us how illusory our landbased sense of autonomy and control is. It is in this context that our culture fixates on marine mammals like seals. The thought that something warm-blooded and cute, with eyes that reflect a glint of our own humanity back at us—something “like us,” for lack of a better term—can thrive in such a hostile environment provides some comfort and an avenue for connection.

Back at Rome Point, I finally found the binoculars I was searching for at the bottom of my bag. I raised them to my eyes and squinted through them towards the rocks that were known as common seal haul-outs.

“THE BAY’S IN TOUGH SHAPE. AND PEOPLE THAT DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT AS BEING IN TOUGH SHAPE, THEY’RE NOT BEING HONEST.”

METRO

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WARM ING

ginger.

She’s hot, spicy, and does not take well to any attempts to cool her down. If you want to breathe fire, drink the boiling concoction your mother has made. If you’re not convinced that you could decimate a small city in one breath, chew the gristled slivers at the bottom of the bowl. Insides guaranteed to be set on fire within five seconds. Dragon outfit does not come with the deal.

prawns.

My parents used to shell my prawns. By the end of it, their hands were red, bloodied with chili oil and shellfish guts. When I stopped being a baby, I swallowed my pride and rallied the troops. The wobbling mess of brain can only be coaxed forth with vigorous chewing while the sliver of tail meat can only be extracted by a precise configuration of chopstick, tongue, back molar.

Now I know why people leave the shell on—it’s where all the flavor is. The meat is just the consolation prize for making it through.

sticky rice.

NEU TRAL

Forget oatmeal, sticky rice should be the way to start your day. As a signifier, sticky rice holds it all. At dim sum, it means the savory lick of a lotus leaf. At home, it means digging for the golden crisping at the bottom of the clay pot. If you’re like me, do all of these while no one’s looking, Goldilocks-style. I’m sure she would shut up eating this.

white funghi soup.

Here are some truths: 1. Funghi get a bad rap. If you’ve ever laid eyes on Fungus Maximus (Laverna’s minion, Fairytopia, circa 2007), I see where your prejudices are coming from.

2. Mushrooms do not stand up well in soups. Mushrooms do not stand up well on pizza. As a matter of fact, mushrooms do not stand up well anywhere. What they lack in spine, they make up for in gooey collagen. Or so your mother says.

3. Anything with rock sugar tastes good. Rock sugar and water? Songs of syrup. Rock sugar and dirt? Songs of mud pie. Rock sugar and fungus? Well, I will fight you to the death on this. Weapon of your choice. You bet I’m coming armed with a baton of rock sugar.

mung bean.

Mung beans are the unsung hero of beans.

Beans are generally heroic but which ones do you know can hold their own served as dessert and as dinner? Lie on a velvet bed of beef stew? Whisper their way through tapioca? It’s okay, we don’t care you’re slurping. You’re safe because everyone around you is too busy slurping their mung beans too.

COOL ING

soybean milk.

I know what you’re thinking. Really? Soybean milk?? You like drinking chalk? But soybeans are good for you, like ancient-Chinese-medicine-says-so kind of prescription. It’s also usually accompanied by a dough component, a milk and cookies situation your ancestors were probably in on. If you’re not dunking your mantou in your milk, you can be sure there are graves being turned over.

green tea.

All green tea is good but some green tea is better than others. If you don’t receive your leaves in an unlabeled bag from a village in China, it might be time to make new friends. Perks of being in the Green Tea Mafia include drinking water that tastes like freshly brewed spring. Vibrant, but bitter for no good reason.

bitter melon.

Q: What’s green, lacks structural integrity, but has an unforgettable name?

A: Bitter melon is aggressive and rude, despite its soft and mild appearance. It’s the vegetable who wipes their nose on the inside of their T-shirt. But their ubiquity in soup, stir-fries—even your scrambled eggs—reminds you to be charitable. Not all melons were born sweet and juicy.

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05 APRIL 2019

H O M E

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BY Ayleen Sรกnchez DESIGN Justin Han & Shuchi Agrawal

05 APRIL 2019

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05 APRIL 2019

A FRIDAY FOR OUR FUTURE An interview with the organizers of the Rhode Island Youth Climate Strike

BY Mara Dolan ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Amos Jackson

At 11AM on Friday, March 15, hundreds of thousands of students around the world walked out of their classrooms. From London to Tokyo to Kampala, young people took to the streets in a global strike from school, demanding climate action. Here in Providence, two hundred and fifty students rallied at the State House with banners, signs, speakers, energy and conviction.

In seven short days, two Rhode Island activists, Joelye Lann and Amick Sollenberger, were able to mobilize hundreds of people from across the state to go on strike together. At 17 years old, these two activists are students themselves, and they were asking their high school and middle school peers to walk out of their classrooms with them. Hundreds of their fellow students answered the call. They gathered on the State House steps, hoisting up hand-painted signs that read “It’s OUR Future,” and “Step Up or Step Aside!,” and made their voices heard.

The #ClimateStrike originated with 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who first made headlines when photos of her sitting outside the Swedish parliament with a sign that read “School strike for climate" surfaced. As the original striker, Thunberg leads by example in asking young people to frame their climate advocacy in terms of their own precarious futures. Last December, she made waves by shaming presidents and prime ministers at the United Nations climate negotiations in Poland as they celebrated their incremental but totally inadequate progress: “You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to act like your house is on fire.” When faced with criticism that skipping school was not an effective way to make change, she responded, “Why should any young person be made to study for a future when no one is doing enough to save that future?”

When the young Swedish activist asked students to join her for a worldwide day of school strikes, it was an unprecedented call upon youth to take climate action.

Within days of putting out her call, students took on the mantle of organizing in over 100 countries and 1,000 cities worldwide. The Youth Strike for Climate movement in the US, spearheaded by Isra Hirsi, 16, and Haven Coleman, 12, demands, "With our futures at stake, we call for radical legislative action to combat climate change and its countless detrimental effects on the American people." They called on their peers across the country to to join them on March 15, and launched a website to connect students to the closest protest to their school.

In Rhode Island, two young women, Joelye Lann and Amick Sollenberger, both 17, took the lead. When Joelye went to the website to find the closest strike, she was surprised to learn that none had been planned in the entire state. When she reached out to national leadership to confirm this was the case, she was encouraged to plan one for Rhode Island herself. After reaching out to Sunrise RI, the local hub of a national group of climate activists led by young people, Joelye was connected to a second student interested in planning a strike in Rhode Island: Amick. Students of North Kingstown High School and Lincoln School, respectively, the two began planning the strike together with less than a week before the day of action.

Though both of the young women are not new to

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activism—Joeyle helped plan the March for Our Lives student walkout last year, and Amick has long been involved in her school’s environmental action club— this protest was different. On this one day, Rhode Island youth joined their peers from around the entire world to demand climate justice—in one unified voice.

The College Hill Independent sat down with the two Providence organizers, Joelye and Amick, to talk about their experience building youth power for a global and local movement, why they do this organizing work, and what comes next in this fight.

Amick: I feel like there are more people who are apathetic than actively opposed, which is unfortunate, I guess, but all those people who are apathetic are just people who could be mobilized if they were given enough impetus to do that. I remember seeing one of those graphs with the passive supporters and active supporters, and the passive supporters is really large, and in my community that group is definitely the majority. I could tell that when doing outreach for the strike and talking to people about whether they would strike.

The Indy: Why did you want to do this kind of work?

The Indy: Do you feel like there are relationships between the movements for climate justice and other Joelye: I think it’s important to do strikes and protests movements for social justice in your schools? because as a student, as a 17-year-old, I can’t vote yet.

It’s so disheartening, but I’ve definitely heard from Amick: In general, climate justice has sort of started my representatives, “you’re not voting for me, so why to be that thing that does bring together all the social does it matter?” It matters because we’re going to be justice groups we have. We’ve been having a lot of voting for you, and we care. We still have opinions and meetings in 2B1, which is our racial justice group, those opinions are backed up by science and facts. That we’ve been having meetings about environmental means something. justice and what that looks like in Providence and how it relates to our work. And in our feminist club, we’ve Amick: One of the first ways that I got involved was also talked about it—but I think this is all something when my friends brought me to some of the No LNG that’s happened recently and we need to keep working protests,* and it got me thinking about how fossil fuel towards. It’s all connected. infrastructure is negatively impacting people’s lives and this is happening here in Rhode Island. This is The Indy: What comes next for you and your work in happening now. But we’re at a point where we can climate justice? change it. Rhode Island is a small state and we could be leading the way, but we’re not.

Amick: Right now our group is planning a week where in our classes, we ask that we talk about climate justice The Indy: It’s really interesting to think about how through the lens of that specific class. I think it’s really youth movements are in this moment where there is important we talk about this as much as we can, in so much power being built across the country, whether school and out of school. Realizing that it ties into it’s against gun violence or [for] climate justice. How literally everything we’re learning in school, it’s an eye do the young people in your schools, in your commu- opening thing. nities think about this power, feel about the strike, and what Friday meant for them?

The Indy: Is there a particular moment from Friday that felt special to you?

Joelye: These are causes that unite us because we’re all facing them. We need to show that students care, Amick: I was walking from the other side of the State because we do. There are so many obstacles to us House, and the moment that I walked around to the getting involved, whether it’s school, or not being able front and saw all the people there, that was a powerful to vote, or drive to things, or have resources. So when moment. we do show up, it makes it that much more powerful.

Joelye: I got there with a few people and got there on the The Indy: Did you face resistance or obstacles in getting early side. We were walking out of the parking lot and students involved? we saw another group walking in, another group ready to strike, and we just felt like, we’re ready to do this! I Joelye: There were definitely some teenage boys who was like, we really reached people! That whole day, I tried to make it into a joke. But I think as people start just felt like, yes, this is a serious issue, but we did this. thinking about their futures, they’re going to start We pulled this off. caring about these issues. It might be disheartening at first, but because so many people do want to act, some- MARA DOLAN ‘19.5 wants us to follow the lead of thing is going to have to happen. young women more often. She is a member of Sunrise RI. Amick: I’ve had trouble getting boys involved in environmentalism. I don’t know, it has to be made mascu- *No LNG in PVD is a campaign dedicated to resisting line somehow for men to care about it. I’m not exactly the construction of National Grid’s liquified natural sure how to confront that but it’s something to think gas facility in the Port of Providence, home to working about. Our speakers were mostly women, and when class communities of color already burdened with the you looked into the crowd, it was all girls. vast majority of Providence’s toxic waste and energy facilities.

The Indy: How do you think about building support with people who weren’t involved?

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RHODE ISLAND IS FAMOUS FOR YOU Crimetown, and the problem of Providence's mob narrative My Italian-American father tells one of our family’s best stories. I heard it again recently after I asked him, mostly in jest, if we might have ties to the capital-F Famiglia. His answer, so fabled over the years that I can’t guarantee its accuracy, was as follows: My father attended a family reunion sometime in the early nineties to the east of JFK Airport near Howard Beach, the Italian-American enclave where his mother grew up. He and his then-girlfriend arrived at the event in their Volkswagen Jetta. Upon entering the lot, he noted a Ferrari in the spot next to his. Over the hours that followed, my uncle would be thrown into a pool, fully clothed and unsmiling. My dad would rehearse small talk with distant relatives, yelling over the reverberations of low-flying planes landing at JFK. Most memorable was his great-aunt Gladys who, looking out upon the cabal of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Italians hanging onto the edges of the pool, would say “They’re beautiful, and they’re all crooks.” +++ Despite its weakening influence these days, the legacy of the Mafia remains integrated into Italian-American life. This is in no small part due to the mainstream American cultural artifacts—popular films, television shows, and more recently, podcasts—that have dramatized white organized crime with usually impressive artistry: HBO’s The Sopranos has had a renaissance as it celebrates twenty years since it first aired in 1999; Jennifer Egan’s novel Manhattan Beach, which fictionalizes crime bosses in 1940s Brooklyn, was selected to epitomize New York City as the “one-book-onecity” pick in 2018; and Crimetown, a podcast about the mob in Providence, has held its own on the top of iTunes’ charts soon after it was released in 2016. For my grandmother and many older Italian-Americans like her, the criminal strand of their ethnic heritage—and especially the popularity of its fictionalizations—is disturbing. Likewise, when The Sopranos wanted to promote their show in Providence, a city known for its unusually large Mafia presence, former Italian-American mayor Buddy Cianci turned them down. “When I was a kid,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I always felt that [the Mafia] was a stain on Italian Americans.” But with little-to-no evidence of discrimination against Italian-Americans today, the shame Cianci and my grandmother once felt about the Mafia has been resurrected as a younger generation’s excitement at the possibility of familial closeness to the Famiglia: to me, it’s thrilling that I might be related by blood to a popular mythology.

The podcast Crimetown, however, renews the problem of the mob for 2019: this time, it stereotypes not an ethnic subculture, but the city of Providence.

Produced by the beloved Brooklyn-based podcast network Gimlet Media, the show traces the recent history of Providence through the Patriarca clan, which headed the New England mob from the Coino-Matic, a vending machine storefront in Providence’s Federal Hill, for the better part of the 20th century.

Over eighteen episodes, Crimetown’s hosts Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier dart back and forth across Atwells Avenue to interview former mob bosses in their Federal Hill triple-deckers. In post-production, they lace together the audio of these interviews with headlines from yellowing Providence Journal clippings and hyper-dramatic narration. Smerling and

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Stuart-Pontier, neither of whom is from Providence, told Interview magazine that although they initially thought the podcast would focus on the lives of a few former members of the mob, they then “stepped back and said ‘oh, we’ve got to tell the story of this whole city.’” But what made Crimetown so successful on a national level—its willingness to take on the big story and caricature its players—is also what makes it so grating to listen to when you live in Providence. The podcast set out to tell “the story of this whole city,” and it instead told only the Italian sliver, ballooning the antics of Federal Hill so extensively that the rest of the city’s identity is wedged into a corner, still lorded over by long-dead mob boss Raymond Patriarca in the same way Crimetown says it was when he was alive.

Current Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza seems to agree: in an apt revision of Mayor Cianci’s rejection of The Sopranos, Elorza called Crimetown “terrible for the city” in an interview with WPRI soon after the podcast was released. While the mayor cited real estate developers who are unwilling to build in Providence as long as the city has a Mafia-induced “cloud” hanging over it, the podcast might be bad for more than just the city’s business interests. If Smerling and Stuart-Pontier construe, for a massive national audience, a master narrative about Providence that’s grounded in Mafia lore, is there any room for a new, non-Italian story for the city? Will Federal Hill always stand tallest?

Crimetown, which tells the easiest story Providence has to offer, seems to insist that the answer is yes. +++

intertwined with the mob by way of the building trades.

The mob and the mayor were, quite literally, building the city in their image.

Through union deals and other unethical business entanglements, the podcast draws out an unlikely parallel between Mayor Cianci and the men of the mob. Once his adversaries, they later become his counterparts. This narrative reaches its apex when Cianci and ’90s Providence drug kingpin Charles Kennedy become friends while both are incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix, New Jersey in the late 2000s. Before he was jailed, Kennedy lived in an estate in East Greenwich, Rhode Island that he termed Castle Dracula. “He drove a flashy black Mercedes convertible,” reads an NBC10 write-up on Kennedy. “Scantily clad women partied at his secluded…estate. His pets? Wolves, a pack of them.”

When the listener learns of Kennedy’s friendship with Cianci at Fort Dix, it ’s both a sign of how the mayor had tumbled and pleasurable in the way, say, a video of a monkey riding on a dog’s back is: it’s an unlikely friendship. Crimetown milks this moment for all it’s worth.

“Buddy Cianci,” reads Smerling, “in a prison cell with Rhode Island’s most notorious drug dealer…sitting side by side on a bunk, passing sections of the newspaper back and forth, making jokes that only another Providence political junkie would get.” Evidently, there’s a joyful vindication (at least for Crimetown’s hosts) in this scene. The parallel stories they’ve been telling over the course of the podcast have finally intersected in dramatic fashion: at a prison in New Jersey.

+++ The bulk of Crimetown’s episodes guide us through the true recent history of the city and its mob: after The story of the mobster (criminal, low-life) and the decades of corruption in City Hall—usually in relation mayor (upstanding, beloved) sharing a jail cell in to Raymond Patriarca, whose underlings would get matching tracksuits provides listeners with an undeniaway with heists and murders by paying off and threat- ably entertaining image, but the comparison it sets up ening officials—former Providence Mayor Buddy is ultimately faulty. In practice, the crimes that landed Cianci would run as “the anti-corruption candidate.” the two men in prison were dramatically different: The great irony of Providence, according to Crimetown, whereas Kennedy orchestrated the smuggling of is that Cianci, who made his career as an anti-mob cocaine from Colombia to New England, making “10, prosecutor before he was elected in 1974, would 15 thousands [dollars] a week” for himself—a pracbecome the city’s most famous mayor not for draining tice that funded his Gatsby-esque parties at Castle the swamp, but for violence and corruption of his own. Dracula, attended by Foxy Lady strippers—Cianci’s Notoriously, Cianci burned his ex-wife’s lover with a graft was a more communal project, integral to the lit cigarette and bludgeoned him with a fireplace log at city’s urban development and economic revitalizathe mayor’s Power Street home. After his resignation tion. The mayor’s violent crimes against his wife’s lover and a stint as a local radio show host, he was re-elected were forgiven or forgotten by the people of Providence, for another three mayoral terms. Ultimately, it wasn’t who voted him back into office, religiously listened to the assault that brought Buddy down, it was RICO: the his talk show, and bought his “Mayor’s Own” brand Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, tomato sauce. They came out in droves for his funeral a law passed to prosecute mob bosses that was often in 2016, and they’ve generally remembered him fondly wielded against white-collar criminals like Cianci. since. His collaboration with the mob—that is, his As former Providence crime reporter Ian corruption—is widely known, but like his Providence MacDougall writes in n+1, public works projects like accent, his toupee, and his refusal to publicly chastise those implemented under Mayor Cianci some twenty Shepard Fairey (then a student at RISD who vandalyears ago as part of the city’s so-called “Renaissance” ized a Cianci billboard), it’s just another item on the (most notably, the uncovering and rerouting of the laundry list of the things that made the city love him.

Providence River) “required the cooperation of the “He never stopped caring about Providence” read labor unions, and it was an open secret that some Cianci’s mayoral campaign slogan in 1990, and it’s of them had deep mob connections, including the true. He rerouted the river, paid off the unions, and Laborers’ Union, widely believed to have been over- went to prison so the rest of us could have Waterfire. seen by a shadow leader, Raymond Patriarca.” As The false parallel that Crimetown draws between Crimetown makes clear, proto-gentrification efforts Kennedy and Cianci is similar to the quieter likeness undertaken by the city (then perceived as a neces- the show elucidates between the fictional men of Mafia sary means of saving the struggling city from popula- media and the real-life Mafia of Providence. They both tion decline and its desolate downtown) were deeply work as a narrative techniques and fail as a political

05 APRIL 2019

BY Ella Comberg ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Bethany Hung

exercises. For the podcast to portray Patriarca as a Tony Soprano-type figure, Atwells Ave as a nexus of organized crime, and Providence City Hall as exceptionally corrupt is, by no means, a stretch. But to collapse the story of Providence’s recent history into a story of mafioso criminality—the very thing that makes the podcast good theater—is in fact harmful for the city writ large.

On the most basic level, Crimetown is annoying because it asks us to listen to two men from Brooklyn tell us what Providence is like (they say things like “this story, it really sums up Providence” when recounting how a mob boss’s sister sat on the jury for his trial). On a less petty level, equating Providence to its mob-centric narrative elevates the significance of Italian-American history in the city to the detriment of other ethnic histories. Organized crime may have, in material ways, ‘run this town’ in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—and Crimetown traces this history nicely—but it digs no deeper than to say that they did, and that the city’s dealings were corrupt in the same way the mob was. Despite the podcast’s willingness to deviate from objective reporting (the hosts constantly offer pithy reminders like, “this is Providence, where relationships go as deep as tree roots”), it refuses to probe the harder stories about Providence: that the mob was collaborating with the city’s Italian-American mayor, that the mayor was giving jobs to his family and friends, and that they were doing in the name of reshaping the city’s built environment was ultimately a way for the city’s large, but by no means majority Italian-American population to maintain a white, old-country clamp on a changing—that is, diversifying—city. It’s not a coincidence that Waterfire, perhaps Cianci’s most lasting mark on the city, is a mock-Venetian festival complete with gondola rides and prosecco. +++ In Providence, the mob held on as long as they could.

But as RICO brought down the remaining living bosses, as the long-standing omertà (or, code of honor) collapsed, as Mayor Elorza beat out Cianci in 2014, and as the Hispanic population in the city more than doubled from 1990 to 2010, the mob began to fall. It went from operating as a fixture of political social life for Federal Hill residents and other Rhode Islandbased Italian American communities to inhabiting the imaginary of a program like Crimetown. Today, 14 percent of the city’s population is Italian-American, and 42 percent is Hispanic, according to census estimates.

As the city’s demographics have changed, Mafia reminiscence has remained popular as ever. In his article “Mafia nostalgia...it’s a Rhode Island thing,” ProJo reporter Andy Smith traces the state’s tendency to remember its recent criminal past fondly, citing Crimetown’s role in renewing the city’s interest in this strand of its past. In that article, Tim White of WPRI told the ProJo that “every time he runs an organized crime story...he gets at least one phone call telling him the streets were safer when the mob ran things.” There’s no evidence to support this this claim; it’s imagined, not factual, that the Mafia was in any material way good for the city (although perhaps the families who Raymond Patriarca bought turkeys for on Thanksgiving would disagree). Still, nostalgia

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

persists. “Somehow you can see yourself in it,” Steven O’Donnell, former Superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police told the ProJo. “These are guys who grew up in the projects in Providence. It’s unusual and very relatable at the same time.”

Of course, to see yourself in Patriarca or Cianci or Kennedy, men who committed varying degrees of violent crime, is an exercise unique to white, usually Italian Americans. To claim, as so many older ItalianAmericans do, that the city was safer when the mob ran things is, in no uncertain terms, a way to demonize other ethnic-based subcultures that commit organized crime—like the Black, Asian, and Latinx gangs of Providence today—while venerating their now-defunct Italian counterparts. In practical terms, today’s groups are almost identical to those of Patriarca’s day: bosses at the top puppeteer underlings below, who do the grizzlier work of committing murders, trafficking drugs, and holding up convenience stores. Still, despite their organizational similarity, in terms of perception in the city and criminalization by the state, the two groups couldn’t be more different.

In 1986, Joseph Bevilacqua, the Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, was forced to resign after the ProJo published a photograph of the judge zipping his pants outside of a Smithfield motel that he had rented off the books for extra-marital rendezvous with the help of mobster Robert Barbato. Today’s courts, in contrast, are decidedly not in cahoots with Black gangs. RICO, the legislation that was used to bring down the Mafia, has only become more powerful with time. Prosecutors, using RICO against gangs, can now scour the internet for evidence. Daniel Small, a former federal prosecutor, told the ProJo that “rap videos, photos and social-media posts” can now be used as proof “that defendants were running an enterprise.” In October, six Black members of the Chad Brown gang, based out of the Chad Brown housing projects in Smith Hill, were indicted on racketeering conspiracy charges after the Providence Police Department employed The National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, “a sophisticated data collection system to link suspects to patterns of violent crime.”

Gone, it seems, are the days when Tony Soprano— or, Raymond Patriarca—could simply kill any member of his clan who he suspected of wearing a wire to protect himself from prosecution. Indeed, as Crimetown makes clear, the mob was integrated into city government in Providence all the way up until the end of the 20th century and therefore insulated from prosecution until the feds intervened with RICO and Operation Plunder Dome, the investigation that sent Mayor Cianci to jail. In recent years, Rhode Island has cleaned house of organized crime in Providence City Hall and the Statehouse. But this shift not coincidentally parallels the emergence of today’s Black, Latinx, and Asian gangs that the state now seeks to criminalize with a force never wielded against the Patriarca clan.

like me to them. Still, all Italian-Americans have somewhat unwittingly been looped into the big family by way of the media that validates our cultural experience through the Mafia. When I watch The Sopranos and listen to Crimetown, I care less about the heists or the murders than I do the operatic soundtracks and what kind of cured meat the characters are eating, which harken back to a familial history I know I have but can’t quite reach. If in the Mafia’s heyday it maintained power by ‘taking care of its own,’ today’s mostly-defunct Mafia still functions as it’s supposed to through Crimetown, which indebts me to the cultural network it creates.

In Providence, where, as Ian MacDougall writes, “Italian-Americans had long been kept from power by the Yankee plutocracy,” the mob was a way to assert ethnic power: Mayor Cianci famously denied building permits to the University Club, a highbrow social club on the East Side, after he was not admitted as a member. “The toe you stepped on yesterday,” he yelled at the club’s management, “may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today.” To line Atwells Avenue with Italian-owned businesses, to fill City Hall with a 36 year-long parade of Italian-American mayors (Cianci, Lombardi, Paolino, Cicilline), and to carve out Waterfire, the city’s defining cultural event as an ode to the old country, was in many ways a magnification of the University Club incident. Italian-Americans claimed Providence as their city—and it stuck. In fact, it stuck so profoundly that Italian-American culture by way of the Mafia is now Providence’s dominant history.

It stuck so insistently that today’s ethnic enclaves— which have supplanted Italian-Americans in the city’s economic and cultural margins—are effectively barred from inhabiting Providence’s master narrative when the one propagated by Crimetown stands so tall in contemporary imagination. We all seem to have been strong-armed into the big family of the Mafia, whether we want to be or not.

“It gives me some pause,” said WPRO radio host Dan York of Crimetown in an episode of his nightly talk show. “The weirdness of that series,” he said, is that “all the players are now guests...doing a variety show.

The FBI and the state police guy and the bad guys are all sharing the stage now and chumming about the old days...And you that doesn’t help. Nostalgia over bad behavior doesn’t help going forward.” York’s question of what Crimetown means for Providence’s future is a good one. Perhaps the city—via figures like York and Elorza—can slap Crimetown on the wrist. Perhaps, if we’re being optimistic and use Crimetown as our impetus, we can re-render an image of Providence that reflects the contemporary reality of life in this city. That reality is one where a new immigrant class has, despite serious suppression efforts by the state and the city’s white citizens, materially and spiritually remade the city in their image. But if you only listened to Crimetown, you wouldn’t know it.

+++

ELLA COMBERG B’20 hopes she doesn’t get whacked for writing this piece.

The mob, which originated in Sicily in the 19th century as a holdover of feudalism as the country transitioned to capitalism, carried into the United States as an informal alternative to the white, Protestant state. Its structure, then and now, is familial. The Patriarca crime family and New York’s Five Families are not related by blood, and neither are Italian-Americans

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RENDERING DEEP TIME

Reckoning with climate change and

“Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.” This is the metaphor that writer John McPhee offered in his 1981 book Basin and Range to explain the concept of “deep time,” or the idea that the history of the earth reflects natural changes and evolutions so gradual they cannot be comprehended through measurements such as days or years. Writing in The Atlantic, David Farrier, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, defines deep time as “the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it.” To quantify this concept feels almost beyond our grasp: while humans have existed on Earth for a few hundred thousand years, the earth is over 4.5 billion years old. The existence of human life as we know it is a blip in Earth’s history—something we often hear, yet rarely comprehend how shocking it really is.

We have geologists to thank for the concept of deep time. Through their study of the earth’s structure and substance in the last 200 years, by looking back at fossils and strata, Earth and planetary scientists have pieced together large swaths of Earth’s natural history, revealing an unfathomably long and ecologically varied past. Most geological research involves the collection, classification, and examination of physical objects— tangible evidence of the earth’s history. But new technologies and big data approaches, connecting previously isolated records through digitization, could revolutionize geological research. Along with artists and writers who portray the natural world, big data could transform the way we represent deep time, both literally and conceptually. With the specter of climate catastrophe looming, a shift in the way we think about deep time can help us reframe our understanding of humanity’s place in Earth’s history. +++ In December 2018, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) approved an emergent project called Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) to create a digital, all-encompassing network of Earth Science databases in order to emancipate data from inaccessible physical collections. Currently, most geological data are stored in analog collections such as the British Geological Survey’s (BGS), which holds millions of fossils in boxes in colossal industrial warehouses in Nottingham, U.K. DDE is not the first effort to digitize geological records on a large scale, but it seems to be one of the most promising: while other efforts have largely been directed by American and European scientists, the Chinese government, which oversees significant Earth Science research endeavors, has agreed to support DDE, providing crucial funding and access to vast amounts of data. At a February meeting of international Earth Science organizations in Beijing, 80 geoscientists hoped that DDE might be usable by the International Geological Congress in March 2020.

In an interview with the College Hill Independent, Karen Fischer, a professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, compared DDE to other international efforts to create large-scale geological databases. “If there is significant money coming from the Chinese government behind this effort, and if there is a real buy-in from a wide variety of

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international researchers, it could be very important,” Fischer told the Indy. “There are a lot of other efforts [like this], and who uses them is very much dependent on who knows about them … so [these efforts] are heavily used by scientists in the US and in Europe.”

Professor Fischer believes DDE might look most like EarthCube, one such initiative of geoscientists and the US National Science Foundation, which aims to “transform geoscience research by developing cyberinfrastructure to improve access, sharing, visualization, and analysis of all forms of geosciences data and related resources.” EarthCube-affiliated organizations have digitized a wide variety of Earth Science datasets, such as records of grain size of transported sediment, soil moisture near well holes, and rainfall nutrient fluxes, among many others. EarthCube projects include an attempt to integrate data from multiple paleobiological databases. Creating a more comprehensive visualization of Earth’s fossil record, it combines practices of geoinformatics and bioinformatics, to develop an integrated data system for geological field sciences that incorporates data from multiple sub-disciplines. EarthCube incorporates a wide variety of data to piece together a digitized understanding of Earth's systems, creating a fuller picture of Earth's historical and present conditions.

Like EarthCube, DDE will attempt to use big data to integrate our understanding of Earth’s systems to digitally encompass and represent the span of deep time. According to Michael Stephenson, a paleontologist from the BGS who was quoted in Science Magazine, the “idea is to take these big databases and make them use the same standards and references so a researcher could quickly link them to do big science that hasn’t been done before.” In the eyes of IUGS, DDE will be “a new scientific paradigm for research.” DDE will be an open platform, meaning that it will use an accessible interface, and will comply with aptly named FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) for scientific data management.

Because DDE is in its beginning stages, and very few scientists have spoken about it publicly, it is hard to know how its interface will look and feel, or how it will function. “[It’s] probably going to archive samples from [certain] locations,” Fischer told the Indy. “I would assume that there will be an overlay of mapping software where you could interrogate a region and say, 'What are all the samples that have been collected here,' or you could interrogate it by time, and select the samples that pertain to a certain point in time.”

What we do know is that the IUGS imagines DDE as a one-stop hub for geological data, allowing Earth Scientists from different fields to access a vast repository of records that might help them answer large or pressing questions. For example, DDE might allow scientists to better understand the long history of biodiversity, to map geological hazards, or to predict future geological events. Professor Fischer believes that DDE, and other big data approaches like it, have the potential to revolutionize geological research. “In these large databases you can apply different types of data more efficiently,” she told the Indy, “and I think that is revolutionary, because all of a sudden you can start to see patterns using these tools that weren’t apparent before. And we’re just at the very beginning of being able to do that.”

+++ Though John McPhee popularized the term “deep time” in the late-20th century, the concept arose much earlier from geologists’ discoveries of Earth’s history during the 18th century. In 1788, Scottish geologist James Hutton challenged the prevailing idea that the Earth exists on the same time scale as human life.

Through his observations of the Scottish landscape, Hutton concluded that geological structures were formed by processes such as sedimentation, erosion, metamorphism, and lifting, which are all so slow that they could not have occurred within the arc of human history. As John Playfair, one of Hutton’s colleagues, remarked: “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far back into the abyss of time.”

While deep time was originally a discovery insular to the scientific community, in the 20th century, historians and writers of science like John McPhee brought the concept into the public imagination. But without an understanding of geological history—and sometimes even with this understanding—the concept of deep time remains almost impossible for most people to grasp. Stephen Jay Gould, popular biologist and science writer, argues in his book, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, that humans can only truly comprehend deep time through metaphors, which relate the elusive concept through understable references. In a 1903 essay, Mark Twain offered another illuminating metaphor: “If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age.” By shifting deep time to the realm of the comically minuscule, metaphors like this allow us to bring it within our grasp.

At the same time, though, they shrink the concept so much that they obscure its magnitude.

But even a numerical quantification of the earth’s history does not help people internalize the idea of human transience. As McPhee explains, “Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.” Without metaphor, the hundreds of thousands of years of human life on Earth feel just as innumerable and beyond our imaginations as the multiple billions of years of the Earth’s history. In this way, our inability to comprehend deep time prevents us from seeing the history of the Earth in its totality: we fail to comprehend the world as bigger then us.

Both artists and scientists have grappled with the problem of representing these ideas. In 2014, the National Academy of Sciences curated an exhibit that brought together artistic interpretations of deep time, such as paintings, photographs, and sculptures at their facility in Washington, D.C. The pieces in the exhibit ranged from abstract light sculptures, topographical maps, and photographs of rock formations, among others. The curators argued that art, similar to metaphor, is a “way of knowing” for scientists, and is particularly important for geologists: “Art creation— something as simple as making a mark on a piece of paper—is a cognitive act…the act of drawing a rock formation creates a connection and understanding that is more informative to the student than other forms of documentation and recording.” Photographers, whose mimetic work by nature forces them to confront the

5 APRIL 2019

BY Gemma Sack ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Bethany Hung

geological history potential pitfalls of literal representation, have offered special insight into what it means to visualize deep time. Terry Falke, whose photograph of three cyclists observing a large rock formation is included in the National Academy of Sciences exhibit, suggests that to consider deep time requires humans to step outside of our frame of reference: “A person would have to take themselves out of the human context to begin to think in terms of geologic time. They would have to think like a rock.” Human time, as Falke implies, presumes the notion of dominion, whereas rock time has no conception of a hierarchy of life on Earth, or of the centrality of one species—rock time emcompasses totality. +++ What does it mean to understand the world on a geological timescale? Deep time is not only beyond comprehension because of the challenges of representation, but also because it profoundly destabilizes dominant Western worldviews. Deep time demands that we fundamentally reconsider our understanding of history, and upends foundational Biblical and anthropocentric narratives of the world. The Biblical vision of human life, posits human life as separate from, and supreme over, the natural world: “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky’” (Genesis 1:26). While Biblical time centers humans in the history of the Earth, deep time, which is akin to the rock-oriented timescale Falke described, deflates our importance.

Though the roots of the human-centric view of Earth’s history extend as far back as the Bible, we are living in a distinct age of human life on Earth. Scientists have described our current geological age as the Anthropocene, meaning that human activity has been the dominant influence on the climate and environment. Some date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago or to the mid-19th century Industrial Revolution, but many have settled on the Great Acceleration of the mid-20th century, when human population and consumption boomed. In the age of the human, where the anthropocentric view of the earth is backed up not only by religious mythology but also by scientific expertise, our failure to conceptualize deep time results in a distorted vision of our minuscule place in the world, and thus obscures our understanding of the implications of human-caused climate change.

Photographer Emmet Gowin, who was quoted in the National Academy of Sciences exhibit, has articulated the need for humans to consider deep time in the context of Biblical narratives and climate change: “Man cannot afford to conceive of nature and exclude himself.” Gowin's work, which depicts human impacts on the natural world, such as man-made disasters, and abandoned factories and nuclear plants, forces us to confront the often devastating wounds humans can inflict on nature. His photographs reveal the dire consequences of imagining ourselves outside of nature.

Multitudes of scientists concur: as documented in the New York Times’ longform report on climate change, “Losing Earth,” humans’ industrial practices have warmed the globe more than one degree Celsius in the last 200 years. A warming of five degrees, which many

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

climate scientists believe is a reasonable possibility, has ignited very real fears of human extinction.

And so, the seeming inevitability of enviormental catastrophe demands critical reflection. Climate change-induced fatalism is prompting us to shift our thinking about the Anthropocene and the place of humanity in the Earth’s history. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” To reckon with the concept of deep time means to situate ourselves in Earth’s history and to imagine both the past and the future. In our current era, where capitalist modes of thinking emphasize short-term rewards over long-term consequences and the prospect of climate catastrophe makes the future of human life on Earth appear uncertain, the need for this reckoning is increasingly pressing. This reckoning is only possible if we use all the tools at our disposable to understand our place within geologic history, rather than outside of it. +++

of the implications of climate catastrophe must shift. Human-induced climate change might end the Anthropocene and human life as we know it, but the history of the Earth is much larger than humanity. As journalist Alan Weisman argued in his book The World Without Us: “Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.” If we understand human life in Earth’s history as the tip of a fingernail on an outstretched arm, or a coat of paint on the Eiffel Tower, the end of our era feels somehow more natural or cyclical.

This shift in our understanding of deep time does not mean that climate catastrophe should not feel tragic—the impacts of climate change will certainly be excruciatingly painful, and as long as we can act, we should attempt to mitigate these impacts. Nor is this to say that our ecological crisis is outside of human control: politicians often weaponize arguments like this to deny humans’ role in environmental degradation, and valorize the system of capitalism that engenders it. But with the long view of history in mind, we can understand that our climate catastrophe—and even the end of human civilization—is not totality. If we can visualize deep time, we can remove ourselves from the center of our narrative. Only then can we begin to imagine ourselves as perhaps not inconsequential, but fundamentally ephemeral, and find some sort relief in that.

Despite metaphorical and artistic attempts to understand and represent deep time, we do not seem to have internalized the concept. DDE, an inward-facing, expert-oriented tool probably will not revolutionize the concept of deep time: it will be a very useful tool for helping scientists conduct research, but most people GEMMA SACK B’21 is thinking about the Voluntary will not have access to it. But DDE, might, however Human Extinction Movement. present an answer to the problem of representation.

A big data approach that incorporates the vastness and human incomprehensibility of data might be the closest we could come to representing deep time. If big data allows us to move past metaphor or artistic depiction into the realm of actual visualization, it also allows us more easily to conceptualize Earth systems and Earth’s history in totality.

Perhaps the most pressing consequences of changing the way we understand the Earth will concern the way we think about (and thus take action on) climate change. DDE could enable significant innovation in climate science that, optimistically speaking, might inform policy approaches, or, from a more realistic perspective, allow us to predict future natural disasters precipitated by climate change and mitigate their impacts. But if DDE, or any of the other big data approaches to visualizing geological history, changes the way we situate human life in our understanding of the earth’s past and future, our conception

SCIENCE & TECH

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the list FRIDAY 4.5

The BIG Spring Book Sale Rochambeau Library (708 Hope Street) 4/5-6, 1-5:30PM (List)en, we’ll be honest with you: sometimes this page is willfully, flamboyantly stupid. All that’s gonna change.

This week’s List is about getting down to BRASS TACKS, getting REAL. We’re going to send you to go buy a bunch of cheap books… but make them BIG! Binch Press Grand Opening Party 131 Clay Street, Central Falls (Suite 211) 7PM Is this a publishing house? Juice bar? Gym for swear-averse #nastywomen? None of the above, thank god.

Instead, this is a cooperative printmaking and ceramics space, a wonderful thing, since it can often be so hard to access studio equipment when you’re striking out on your own. Go support some people trying out a new thing.

SATURDAY 4.6

UNBOUND 2019 Art Book Fair Fleet Library (15 Westminster Street) 11AM-6PM The title of this annual showcase of printed matter seems to suggest a spring break, "Books Gone Wild" vibe, but really it’s chock full of tame art magazines in a library that used to be a bank. (Not that we have anything against magazines! Please hire us!) Anyways, there are often a few gems in the mix, and sometimes you can even bring a few zines home with you for free.

SUNDAY 4.7

3rd Annual Pancake Breakfast Chepachet Farms (226 Tourtellot Hill Road, Chepachet) 4/6-7, 8-11AM Not only will this event feature all-you-can-eat pancakes, but there’s also an on-site petting zoo replete with goats, cows, hens, foals, and other farm animals.

This means that there’ll be a bunch of animal feed dispensers filled with soybean pellets, in case you’re looking for a more heart-healthy breakfast option.

MONDAY 4.8

Martha Nussbaum Books on the Square (471 Angell Street) 7:30-9PM Philosopher Martha Nussbaum comes to town this Monday to discuss her new book, The Monarchy of Fear, about America’s political condition post-Trump.

Her take is that the political is always emotional, and that disaffected white Rust Belt denizens voted for Trump because they’re all really sad. Try going to this reading and wailing!

3rd Annual All You Can Eat Pierogi Day! Krakow Deli Bakery Smokehouse (855 Social Street, Woonsocket) 4/7-8, 12-8PM // $7.89 On July 13, 1238, Saint Hyacinth visited Kościelec, and on his visit, a storm destroyed all crops; Hyacinth told everyone to pray and by the next day, crops rose back up. As a sign of gratitude, people made pierogi from those crops for Saint Hyacinth. On April 7, 2019, this LW will be visiting Woonsocket, and on this visit, a storm will destroy all crops. I will tell everyone to pray and the next day, crops rise back up. As a sign of gratitude, Krakow Deli will serve all-you-can-eat pierogies from those crops for a reasonable fee of $7.89.

TUESDAY 4.9

Free Cone Day 2019!

Like No Udder (170 Ives Street) 2-9PM As the steward of a back page which frequently peddles the lowest brand of puns, it takes one to know one. Like No Udder—perpetrator of not only a crime of intentional quirky misspelling, but also a VEGAN JOKE—you’re on watch! Everyone should get a free cone from you guys anyways, as restitution. To our readers on the other hand—act fast, there’s apparently only 700 free cones to go around.

WEDNESDAY 4.10

10th Anniversary of the Black Lavender Experience Rites and Reason Theatre (155 Angell Street) 4/10-13, 7-9PM The Black Lavender Experience is an ongoing project by Brown’s Africana Studies Department and the Rites and Reason Theatre to feature black queer artists and to showcase work rarely put on anywhere else. This anniversary celebration will include performances, workshops, and panel discussions featuring Lenelle Moïse, a “a powerful, electrifying performer, a poet, a playwright, a songwriter, an immigrant and a feminist.”

THURSDAY 4.11

Forest Theory, Occupation, and an Archive of the Future Cogut Institute for the Humanities (172 Meeting Street) 4-5:30PM Macarena Gómez-Barris is a professor at Pratt and the Director of the Global South Center, which focuses on decolonial methodologies of studying social science, politics, and art. This talk, based on her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, will focus on deforestation through the lens of Indigenous aesthetics and social movements.