Every day, new books arrive in the offices of Utne Reader. It would be impossible to review all of them, but a shame to leave many hidden on the shelves. In "Bookmarked," we link to excerpts from some of our favorites, hoping they'll inspire a trip to your local library or bookstore. Enjoy!
 

Arctic Alaska has quickly become the most contested land in recent U.S. history. It’s home to vast natural resources and a precariously balanced—and highly threatened—ecosystem. In this excerpt from the collection Arctic Voices (Seven Stories Press, 2012), writer Nancy Lord gives an account of a gathering of Yup’ik Elders facing the troubles of thinning ice in the Bering Sea.

In the late 1970s, the residents of St. Louis, Michigan, found their community in the middle of a Superfund site—an area of land and water deeply contaminated by Velsicol (formerly Michigan) Chemical. Years later, with the cleanup largely failing, a citizen taskforce took on responsibilities of rebuilding. In Civic Empowerment in an Age of Corporate Greed (Michigan State University Press, 2012), professor Edward C. Lorenz evaluates several case studies in community development—perhaps the solution to rising, damaging corporate irresponsibility. In this excerpt from the book's introduction, Lorenz begins the argument that communities are the agents of civic reform.

 

For many in Kenya, their government is a black box. Attendance records for members of Parliament are kept secret, and the Parliament website has little to no information on its members. Frustrated by this flagrant lack of transparency, Ory Okolloh co-founded the website Mzalendo to keep an eye on her government. She was motivated by the challenge of acting, rather than just complaining, and because, “if you let them get away with stuff they will.”

Concerned citizens, developers, and bloggers around the world are using the internet to promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. In Jordan, where complaints “are really a tradition,” Waheed Al-Barghouthi helped start Ishki, a clearinghouse for Jordanian griping online. In Chile, Felipe Heusser and Rodrigo Mobarec started Vota Inteligente, a website that fact-checks politicians and gives Chilean citizens more information about their government officials.

Projects like these are often disjointed, addressing specific needs of their communities without realizing that there is a vast network of people around the world working on the same problems. The new Technology for Transparency Network is trying to change that by bridging the gap between bloggers and civil society and fostering collaboration among disparate civic-engagement and good-governance projects.

In the next three months, the Technology for Transparency Network will produce 32 case studies of different good-governance projects and 16 blog posts highlighting other projects. In an interview with Utne.com, David Sasaki, the research director of the Technology for Transparency Network, says that the project is trying to figure out “what works well and what doesn’t and sharing that information.” The network plans to challenge project leaders to figure out how their work could creat concrete, offline change. With help from the network, projects could potentially attract funding from organizations like the Omidyar Network, which funds the Technology for Transparency Network.

The first three projects have already been chosen, and, according to Sasaki, the Technology for Transparency Network is already fostering cooperation between different good-governance groups. Eight researchers are sifting through the web, trying to figure out which websites, Facebook groups, or government projects will be highlighted next. Sasaki said, “a difficulty here is that there are so many new media for transparency projects coming up left and right,” and it’s hard to choose which ones are best suited for the network.

Volunteer researchers are also being asked to collaborate with the site in researching and interviewing founders of different projects. Anyone who’s willing to invest a few hours is able to work with the Technology for Transparency Network and help figure out how technology is able to promote good governance and civic engagement. The project is an opportunity to do what Okolloh tried to do with Mzalendo and say, “Enough talking, some acting.”

Source: Technology for Transparency Network 

Image by Erik Hersman, licensed under Creative Commons.

Religious Americans are up to four times more likely to be active in their communities than nonreligious Americans—and the link is causal, according to new research from Robert Putnam and David Campbell. The scholars have observed increases in civic involvement that come after individuals join a religious group.

“The reason for the increased civic engagement may come as a surprise to religious leaders,” the Christian Century writes. “It has nothing to do with ideas of divine judgment or with trying to secure a seat in heaven. Rather, it’s the relationships that people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism. . . . The theory is if someone from your ‘moral community’ asks you to volunteer for a cause, it’s really hard to say no.”

Source: Christian Century

Paul Krugman is optimistic. “So optimistic,” he says, “that friends have been asking me if I’m feeling alright.” The New York Times columnist and liberal savior has a gleam of excitement in his eyes as he holds forth before a packed, silver-haired audience at Temple Israel in Minneapolis. While America is in a crisis now, he says, “the possibilities for change are once again very great.”

Krugman was in town recently to tout his latest book, The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton). His central point is this: So-called movement conservatives have been winning elections by exploiting Southern whites’ racism. Since grabbing power, they’ve pushed an agenda that promotes economic inequality, helping the mega-rich get mega-richer.

Krugman’s good news is that the times of darkness shall soon draw to an end, and we may see a glorious realignment in the U.S. political system. That is, if a true liberal takes hold of the offices of government. Responsible policy-making could reverse the country’s decline by pushing ambitious social policies that drastically reverse inequality.

Pundits have parsed Krugman’s points and exchanged heated parlays about his prose. The book’s been pretty much reviewed to death, so I’ll spare you any more diluted  Krugman-summary in lieu of a few quick thoughts about what’s missing from Krugman’s analysis.

Krugman seems to be talking about a purely political change, not a social change. He looks at the cogs and gears of democracy—who’s in power and what they do with their power. He doesn’t imagine this new glorious revolution as arising, Athena-like, from the split skulls of the citizenry’s discontent. No. He imagines a purely political solution to a purely political problem that just happens to have social side-effects.

So what’s left for citizens to do? Hope. Hope that the Democrats’ presidential nominee is a good one. Hope that the Democratic presidential nominee wins. Hope that the next president does all the great things we hope that he or she will do, like reform the health care system.

Despite the audacious optimism of Krugman’s predictions for America’s future, there’s something disappointing about his myopic focus on politics and policy. The Bush years left us with a host of political problems, to be sure. But the political problems seem inexorably connected to a web of social problems that politics alone cannot fix. How can politics alone restore our faith in the media, how can politics alone resurrect reasoned debate, how can politics alone soothe our disillusioned democracy?

I wish that Krugman would have told another story to the excited crowd, about how they could change the course of the country, about why they mattered—those citizens who gobble up his columns twice a week, week after week. Because in our outpouring of enthusiasm for the progressive sage, there was something more than politics; there was an invigorated sense of civic engagement. To think that mere citizens can have an earth-shifting effect, well, maybe that would be the more audacious optimism. —Brendan Mackie