What’s Wrong with This Picture?
Two articles in back-to-back issues of The New Yorker magazine captured my attention late last month. Taken together, I found them rather disorienting. The first of the two focused on so-called “superyachts” and the profligate billionaires who lust after them.
I well remember my own years living on Florida’s Gulf coast, when a secondary school buddy of mine worked in a high-end Naples marina. At that moment in time, a privately owned, custom built vessel with a price tag in the low millions might have measured a hundred feet from stem to stern, which struck us both as rather extravagant. Even the high rollers in this wealth saturated tropical enclave usually settled for less.
But the boats described by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker belong to Saudi royalty, Russian oligarchs, American corporate titans like the late Paul Allen or celebrities of Oprah Winfrey and David Geffen’s stature. These are floating mansions, some longer than a football field and requiring a full-time crew of fifty or more. At the low end, a “superyacht” (not be confused with its larger brethren, the “megayacht” and the “gigayacht”) might be had for less than $200 million. Battleship size boats, with heliports, swimming pools, banquet rooms, desalinization equipment, and any number of sumptuous extras, will carry a half-billion dollar price tag. Still, the few firms who design and build these monuments to consumer excess can hardly keep up with demand.
For the world’s growing number of billionaires, a really big boat has become the kind of possession that sets one apart, more so than a landlocked hundred-room castle or a Gulfstream G700 jet. And yet there is a certain guilt - or perhaps uneasiness - that accompanies such a purchase. As one owner put it to Osnos, “If the rest of the world learns what it’s like to live on a yacht like this, they’re gonna bring back the guillotine.”
The second New Yorker article appeared a week later, and it practically brought tears to my eyes. Writer Dhruv Khullar, an American born physician of Indian ancestry, described a recent visit to Delhi, and then on to a putrid fifty-acre landfill on its outskirts. Named Balswah, this dump reaches the height of a seventeen story building in places, and affords a meager livelihood for those who are willing to paw through it for potentially salable discards.
Thousands of people - men, women, children, infants and elders - occupy shacks on Balswah’s perimeter, competing with the pigs, dogs, and other sad creatures for whom savaging is the only viable option. This is not a situation unique to India, of course. It can be witnessed in poor countries with limited employment opportunities across the globe. What made Khullar’s reporting particularly poignant was the impact climate change has had on the already wretched conditions in which these people exist.
Heat waves in northern India have become more frequent and much more intense. It is now so hot that at times the landfill spontaneously combusts, creating an inferno that poses a significant risk to firefighters. The flames having been extinguished, Balswah still smolders for days, creating even worse breathing conditions than usual (Delhi’s poor air quality is unmatched in its severity). Between the heat, smoke and other environmental toxins, the waste-pickers suffer from unusually high levels of asthma, COPD, bronchitis, emphysema, and cancer - not to mention the fatigue, nausea and dehydration associated with prolonged heat stress.
Temperatures often exceed 110 degrees which, combined with high humidity, makes scavenging during daylight hours extremely dangerous. As a result, hordes descend on the dump after sunset and work through the night. “We are living,” one woman told the author. “But we are also dying.”
I suspect that The New Yorker’s editors made the judicious decision not to publish these vividly contrasting articles in the same issue. But for any attentive regular reader, the juxtaposition was still startling. This may be the dystopian future to which more and more of planet Earth’s inhabitants will ultimately be consigned. As Dhruv Khullar observed:
The world will become even less hospitable to poor people in the decades ahead…and the degree of danger they face depends, to a large extent, on the behavior of wealthier people who are, for now, shielded from the worst effects of climate change.
Of course. But calmly afloat on the deep blue sea, one can enjoy the luxury not only of Dom Perignon brought properly chilled to the foredeck by your yacht’s sommelier, but also the freedom from any sight that might provoke even the slightest of hiccups.
