Chris Smith’s blog

I’ve got a short piece in the current San Francisco magazine, a Q&A with Susan Freinkel, who’s just written a masterful new book on the yin and yang of plastics.

As symbols of our modern age go, you can’t do better than plastic. It has given us conveniences like the sandwich bag and innovations like the iPhone, but it has also exacerbated global warming and created that garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean (and might be messing with our kids’ hormones to boot). In Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), due out in time for Earth Day, San Francisco journalist Susan Freinkel charts our century-long love-hate relationship with petroleum products …

(From the upcoming 4xAfrica show at Rayko SF. Click on the image for a larger version.)

Kitwe, Zambia, 2010.

You can buy a lot of stuff on the side of the road: newspapers, cellphone chargers, occasionally auto parts. When I was last in South Africa, hawkers kept handing me flyers for “Dr. Mamba,” a traditional healer who promises cures for all ailments–monetary, psychic, or sexual. In Zambia, I came across this outdoor furniture market on the outskirts of Kitwe, a rough mining town near the Congo border. Rows of couches stretched to the horizon.

I’ve got close to 20 images in “4xAfrica,” an exhibition showing at Rayko photo gallery in San Francisco from January 27 - February 27. My photos span a decade of work, from Cairo to Cape Town. The opening is Thursday, January 27, from 6-8 pm, so if you’re in the Bay Area, please stop by and say hello.

The accompanying essay is below. For those who can’t make it to the gallery, I’ve put the photos into a set on Flickr. In the days to come, I’ll post a few of the photos, along with the mini-stories that go along with them.

First we buy the meat, a pile of spicy red sausage, at a strip-mall butcher shop. Then we get the beer, lugging it past an armed guard at the door who zealously tears our receipt. Then the grilling commences, at a public fire-pit on the grassy verge separating the mall parking lot and the main road, which cuts through northern Soweto in a roar of honking minibuses. Hip hop and local house music blare from one of our cars. We eat and drink under the highveld sun.

As the beer flows, we talk about the world-beating incompetence of the national soccer team; about the perils of jealous neighbors paying witchdoctors to curse you; and about the merits of Facebook. A group of girls wanders by, and a few of the guys chat them up.

My friend Tumi turns to me. “The first time you came here, were you expecting lions and tigers?” he jokes.

Mention Africa, and most people think of savannas and deserts, game parks and thatched-roof huts. It is a dizzyingly varied place–with so many countries and cultures, how could it fail to be?–and resists easy generalization. Like the rest of the world, however, Africa is rapidly urbanizing: by 2015, close to half of the continent’s population will live in cities.

Take Soweto, the largest of South Africa’s black townships, 20 miles south of Johannesburg and home to some 4 million people. It is a geography of extremes. Some neighborhoods are filled with tin-roofed squatter shacks, where people get their water from communal standpipes and filch electricity from the main grid. But it is also a place of crisp, modern housing complexes bristling with satellite dishes and monolithic new fieldstone-and-glass shopping malls. There are banks, luxury shops, and cafes where young professionals peck away on Macbooks.

Indeed, what used to be an undifferentiated grey mass on apartheid-era maps, a warehouse to store Johannesburg’s black labor between working hours, has become a city in its own right. And Soweto is now part of a nearly unbroken strip of office towers, low-rise suburbs, and shantytowns stretching from southern Johannesburg to Pretoria, 30 miles away. Maybe 9 million people live here now, and more arrive every day in search of opportunities the countryside can’t provide. They call it Egoli, or City of Gold.

Places like Soweto are increasingly the story of how Africans live, from Mali’s low-slung cities, which unfurl across the land in dusty folds of cement and rebar, to Zambia’s Copperbelt, an archipelago of sleepy, seedy mining towns running along the Congo border, studded by precious minerals and checkpoints.

My friends come from these places. Zé was working for a rental car company in Maputo, Mozambique, when I met him, and living in a decrepit Chinese-built skyscraper in the capital. The elevator hadn’t worked for years, so he trudged up and down the 14 floors to his apartment in the subtropical heat. Dale, a 32-year-old political organizer and jack-of-all trades, grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, part of the first generation of Zambians to be born in cities in large numbers. He sometimes goes out to his father’s small wildcat mine “in the bush,” as he calls it, and I get the sense that it’s almost as much an adventure for him as it would be for me.

Urbanization, of course, brings with it a loss of tradition. Many of us have seen the news reports about Masai warriors working as night watchmen in Nairobi. But some of the old ways endure. There’s an African concept called ubuntu, meaning that one’s identity is bound to that of the family and the neighborhood. More or less, ubuntu enjoins people to look out for one another. In South Africa, it staved off the collapse of black society under apartheid. What the concept means nowadays for my friends is responsibility. These guys hold up the sky for everyone around them. Thami, a 30-year-old activist in Soweto, supports his son, his girlfriend, his mother, and her two teenage daughters by another father. Plus, because he has a job, every corner kid hits him up for cash. They call him a “cheeseboy,” and sometimes threaten him if he doesn’t cough up beer money.

Years ago, Thami’s elders marched in the streets, firebombed buildings, and at great cost won political freedom. Unlike their fathers and grandfathers, whose lives were largely defined by the anti-apartheid struggle, guys like Thami face different challenges. Unemployment in Soweto is estimated at 40 percent, so everybody has to hustle. Most everyone is an entrepreneur of some sort: door-to-door salesman, restaurateur, even car thief.

Back at the barbecue, the bottles are piling up. Thami proposes a toast of sorts. “Sometimes when it gets too hard I think of how far I’ve come,” he says. “Just staying alive until now is something to celebrate.” He raises his beer.

The sun turns red, dropping behind the mall and, beyond it, the manmade mountains separating Soweto from Johannesburg. These hills, flat-topped heaps of castoff dirt and rock, are the byproduct of the gold mines that made Jo’burg the richest city on the continent. In the waning light, even these mine dumps look like bars of gold.

My new piece in San Francisco magazine is out, on the scramble to be the next mayor if Gavin Newsom wins the race for Lt. Governor next week–and even if he doesn’t, actually. There are roughly a million ways it could all play out, and City Hall watchers (myself included) are plotting the possibilities like courtiers in a comedy of manners. So serpentine are the routes to power that we decided to go easy on the text (one page) and instead serve up a four (4!)-page flow chart. If you’re local, pick up a copy of the mag–it’s worth it, graphically speaking. If not, check out the digital version. The story begins on pg. 48.

I’ll be reading some of my stuff at Litquake Saturday night, at one of the stops on the (apparently notorious) Lit Crawl. The event is called Where Travel Can Take You, sponsored by Afar magazine–they published my South Africa piece earlier this year–and it’s at The Marsh Cafe, on Valencia. Details here. So if you’re in SF, stop by and say hello.

First there was Al Gore. Then there was Tony Blair. Next it’ll be … Kim Jong Il?

My new piece for San Francisco magazine plays off the mini-trend of world leaders teaming up with Silicon Valley venture capitalists to save the world and (ahem) make some money along the way. Herein, I imagine some more potential partnerships between the titans of tech and various heads of state:

In this month’s San Francisco magazine, I review California Crackup, Joe Matthews’ and Mark Paul’s excellent new diagnosis of what ails California.

When it comes to the Golden State’s ills, the depth of our despair is matched only by the dysfunction of our system. And while a pox-on-both-houses purge of our leaders might be satisfying, it wouldn’t fix anything. Now Joe Mathews, a journalist and a fellow at the New America Foundation, and Mark Paul, a UC Berkeley visiting scholar and a former deputy state treasurer, have charted the disastrous reform efforts that left us with a polity “both unintended and unworkable.” The trouble began with our constitution, which was inadequate even in 1850 and was thereafter amended into incoherence by piecemeal changes. The ballot initiative process that brought us 1978’s Proposition 13, among other civic afflictions, only made things worse. The authors advocate major structural changes: Replace our winner-takes-all electoral system with proportional representation, end supermajority requirements, and modify the initiative process. Their lucid analysis is spiked with wit and appealing turns of phrase (”Political reform is what we do in California to break our hearts”) that lift it above mere wonkery. Mathews and Paul know that their advice will probably go unheeded. All the more reason, then, for them to think big: “When defeat is likely, why not try what works?”

If you follow the political game, you’ve probably heard of “dog-whistle politics.” That’s when politicians speak in code to their supporters–all of whom get the meaning even if outsiders don’t. Sarah Palin’s speech at CSU Stanislaus last week put me in mind of the dog whistle. Apparently, she discussed “the topic of teaching the next generation the civic lessons of protecting freedom and defending the American idea of liberty.” Sounds like conservative boilerplate, basically, and it is. But there’s a lot in that statement if you care to look. What her supporters hear is an affirmation of their worldview: of an America explicitly founded by Christians for Christians, of a low-tax, corporate-friendly, homogeneous nation that is free to do as it wishes on the world stage.

I mention all this because the subject of my new piece in California magazine had a keen ear for the dog whistle. Eugene Burdick was a Cal political scientist and a Hollywood screenwriter, a Navy man and a surfer, a public intellectual who hobnobbed with both Marlon Brando and JFK’s Whiz Kids. (His astonishingly varied resume suggested the title of the piece.) Burdick, who died in 1965, is mostly remembered today for his Cold War polemic, The Ugly American, which urged the US to adopt counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam long before COIN was cool (COIN’s vogue over the last few years is in many ways a retread of 1960s-era thinking; so far, its lackluster results also echo that era.) Like so many liberals back then, Burdick was an ardent Cold Warrior, a “better dead than red” guy, and his writing reflects a mindset (one that’s admittedly difficult to conjure today) in which the Soviet Union posed an existential threat to our existence.

He was also, however, a preternaturally gifted political analyst, and his most interesting book wasn’t about foreign policy but about domestic politics. Published in 1956, The Ninth Wave combined surfing and California politics in what might you might call a dystopian potboiler. In some ways, the book is sort of a mess. It’s filled with clunky writing and reams of needless detail (apparently, he dictated his prose into a tape recorder, sans editing.) But the ideas–he was one of the first to see the ways in which opinion polling could be used to manipulate fearful voters–are eerily up-to-date.

Burdick’s main character, an amoral political consultant (and surfer) from L.A. named Mike Freesmith, cracks the code of the modern election campaign. Using the nascent science of computer-aided opinion polling, he slices-and-dices the electorate into easily manipulated blocs, then jacks up the fear and hate quotient to put his demagogic candidate on the road to the governor’s office. When asked what his secret is, Freesmith sounds depressingly au courant: “You scare them into voting for your man.”

You can read the whole thing here.

I’ve got a couple of small pieces in the current issues of California and San Francisco magazines. One is on climate change, the other on health care. Wonky? Sure. But contentiously wonky.

The first, a short profile (.pdf) of former SF environment department director Jared Blumenfeld (who decamped to the EPA last month), is about climate change policy:

While most leaders who confront the climate crisis choose to accentuate the positive aspects of global warming–the “win-win” business opportunities, all the new green jobs and game-changing technologies on the horizon–Blumenfeld spikes the cheerleading with straight talk. He called carbon offsets a “con” when many environmentalists were hyping them as an environmental cure-all, and he is equally dismissive of the magical thinking at the heart of many green-jobs programs. And despite the strides we’ve made in greening our lives, he says, there’s almost no way we’ll be able to change course before the cataclysm hits.

(I went biking with Blumenfeld last year, too. That piece is here.)

The second is a review of Thomas Goetz’ new book, The Decision Tree, which posits a brighter future for our health care–not through legislative reform but through technology. Color me unconvinced.

Given the circuslike debate on Capitol Hill, you might have abandoned all hope of seeing our dysfunctional healthcare system improved. Thomas Goetz hasn’t. The executive editor of Wired (he also has a master’s in public health from UC Berke­ley) posits a hopeful future, one that combines “the lessons of technology and the rigor of public health” to person­alize and improve our health­care: Online tracking software and social networking will help us take advantage of an ever expanding stream of health data, DNA testing will offer snapshots of our genetic pre­dis­positions, and doctors will be able to detect disease before it strikes–or at least manage it better once it does. Goetz lays out the benefits of this more engaged approach in clear, commonsensical prose. But many of his fixes depend on Herculean efforts by tech-savvy patients, and it’s hard to see how they translate to the unwired bulk of our citizenry. Moreover, he barely mentions the pernicious “fee for service” model that rewards doctors not for fostering good health but for ordering expensive tests and procedures–a widespread practice that stands in the way of many of his preventive-care prescriptions. “Change is hard,” Goetz notes. That’s an understatement. While laudable, the sol­­utions he offers here feel less like revolutions than like workarounds.

This month’s San Francisco magazine runs my small contribution to the debate over geoengineering. Despite the complicated name, geoengineering is at bottom a simple idea: it attempts to right our climate wrongs not by cutting carbon emissions but by manipulating the earth’s atmosphere via technological fixes. Long a favorite of green-hating rightwingers who didn’t want to modify their lifestyles, the field has edged into the mainstream as it’s become increasingly clear that the world isn’t likely to change its carbon-heavy ways anytime soon (witness the squabbling in Copenhagen). Researchers have proposed a welter of different approaches, ranging from the merely implausible-sounding (planting farmland with carbon-sucking minerals) to the downright Strangeloveian (launching fleets of tiny mirrors into space to block solar rays).

I write about a San Francisco startup, Climos, that wants to seed the Southern Ocean with iron, which is supposed to help pull carbon from the air. There’s plenty of promise, but the questions are legion. A few of them: Can it work? Is it safe? And even if we can cut carbon by messing with the atmosphere, should we? After all, messing with the atmosphere is how we got into this situation in the first place. As you’ll see in the piece, though, it seems worth trying to me. And as the years pass without any real global emissions cuts, geoengineering’s appeal is only likely to grow.

“You never want to be a company that succeeds because things are going terribly,” Dan Whaley says of his South Park startup’s apocalypse-ready product. “But here we are.” Whaley’s company, Climos, is peddling an idea that is elegantly simple in its outline, fiendishly complex in its details, and, at least at first blush, batshit crazy: It aims to fight global warming by seeding the ocean with iron.