George Packer’s cover story offers a sweeping and kaleidoscopic look at the rise and possible fall of Phoenix, Arizona, and what it means for the future of American civilization.
For its July/August issue, The Atlantic has made climate change its focus, leading with today’s cover story by staff writer George Packer on the rise and possible fall of Phoenix, Arizona. Packer’s piece will be followed by features from staff writers Ross Andersen, who reports from Greenland, and Katherine J. Wu, who reports from Australia, along with senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II, who writes on the need for climate reparations. In an editor’s note for the issue, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes: “Loyal readers of this magazine know that we are preoccupied with matters of climate change, and that we worry about the future of our home planet … We have a long history of interest here. The great conservationist John Muir more or less invented the national-parks system in The Atlantic. John Burroughs defended Charles Darwin in our pages. Rachel Carson wrote her earliest essays, about the sea, for us. And, of course, The Atlantic published much of Thoreau’s finest and most enduring writing.”
In his cover story, “The Valley”—the second-longest that The Atlantic has published in the past 40 years—Packer provides a sweeping, kaleidoscopic look at the precarious political and physical ecology of Phoenix, demonstrating that the country’s fastest-growing and most dynamic region contains, in microcosm, all of America’s most contentious and dangerous issues: climate change and election denialism, education and immigration, homelessness and zoning, the future of the working class and of a multiethnic democracy. Phoenix’s contradictions are so great—explosive population and economic growth paired with existential political and environmental challenges—they raise questions about the city’s sustainability, and about the sustainability of the American political project. Phoenix, Packer argues, makes you keenly aware of human artifice—its ingenuity and its fragility; growth keeps coming at a furious pace, despite decades of drought, and despite political extremism that makes every election a crisis threatening violence.
“Democracy is also a fragile artifice,” Packer concludes, after spending eight months reporting in Phoenix. “It depends less on tradition and law than on the shifting contents of individual skulls—belief, virtue, restraint. Its durability under natural and human stress is being put to an intense test in the Valley. And because a vision of vanishing now haunts the whole country, Phoenix is a guide to our future.”
Additional stories in the issue will address climate change from a variety of perspectives and regions of the globe. In a piece publishing on June 11, Newkirk argues that America owes a debt to other nations for its role in accelerating climate change, and that paying this debt may be the best way for the world to save itself. Coming June 12 is the feature by Andersen, who traveled to Greenland to report on new technological interventions that could save otherwise-doomed glaciers. In her piece publishing on June 17, Wu reports from Australia on the difficulties the country faces in protecting its most prized and adorable species, the koala, as these animals fight to survive not just climate change but other outside threats, such as chlamydia.
George Packer’s “The Valley” is published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Packer or any of the issue’s contributors.
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