Muggles in the Ozone Bill McKibben March/April 2000

With the exception of some of the union activists, most of the people in Seattle didn't show up on their own behalf: They weren't angry about how they were being treated. (Chances are, many of them had benefited from America's long economic boom; Seattle, anyway, is full of people who can afford to take the day off.) The protesters were exercised on behalf of someone or something else, be it sweatshops or sea turtles, and mad about the pervasive McDonaldization of the planet.

What drove the press to distraction was that logic didn't seem to work with this crowd. Michael Kinsley, in Time magazine, wrote the calmest and most sensible argu-ment for the World Trade Organization. True, he said, free trade sometimes robs textile workers of jobs. But it makes sweaters cheaper for everyone. "On average, free trade benefits us all," he wrote. "Do the math."

For a decade, math has been all that's mattered. Bill Clinton told us it was the economy, stupid. The Dow Jones mesmerized us. Wired magazine and the e-ristocrats promised an endless boom. And so far it has all come true. These protesters, though, weren't doing the math: They were laying down their bodies for the proposition that there's more to life than money. In the roughest outline, they were demanding a world where growth doesn't always come first where human rights, environmental protection, and a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth count too. They weren't ideologues: If anything, they shared only their distrust of the ideology of laissez-faire expansion. In the truest sense of the word, they were sympathizers with other humans, other creatures. More...

Libby's Deadly Grace Maryanne Vollers & Andrea Barnett May/June 2000

Every day after work, the men would come home covered with a fine white powder. Their wives inhaled it as they scrubbed clothing and curtains and floors. Their children breathed it in as they played on the carpet. The miners were told it was just "nuisance dust," nothing to worry about even though W.R. Grace knew well that the dust they were breathing was loaded with microscopic asbestos fibers that could kill them and their families.

Until the mid-1970s, the vermiculite mined in Libby [Montana] was processed in the "dry mill," a place so dusty that workers often couldn't see their hands on their brooms. The mill workers suffered the worst exposure, but the rest of the miners and the townspeople got their share of dust as well. What wasn't swept out of the dry mill and dumped down the mountainside was spewed out a ventilation stack and into the air. By W.R. Grace's own estimates, some 5,000 pounds or more of asbestos was released each day. On still days, some of it settled back on the mine site. When the wind blew from the east, a film of white dust covered the town. More...

Good Bill? Michael Kazin September/October 2000