Failed State by Christopher Brown

Author:Christopher Brown [Brown, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062859105
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

22

When the treaty negotiators let the rebels keep the territory they had occupied in New Orleans, it was damaged goods. A big chunk of the eastern part of the city—the property whose remediation Lecker had funded—was a toxic site that had been cleared out for as long as most folks could remember. The north and the middle were underwater much of the year. And the rest of it had been emptied by hurricane, uprising, and occupation, a cycle that repeated until most of the infrastructure was shot and the buildings abandoned.

The new owners would be so busy trying to get the city functioning again that they couldn’t cause any more trouble for their neighbors. That was the idea.

For the rebels, it was everything they had fought for. Real autonomy. A chance to prove their ideas in action.

They invited Donny to help the working group that would develop the new legal code. It was a volunteer gig, but one he was happy to take.

They all liked the idea of starting their own truth and reconciliation tribunal, but they were bound by the general amnesty. El Presidente was the only one of the domestic war criminals who would face real justice. So they got creative.

Donny told them about the work he had done representing the nutria of Houston. About the smattering of cases over the years that had flirted with the idea that animals, plants, and even entire ecosystems might have rights under the law. Others on the committee had similar ideas, informed by their own work helping build the fresh constitutions of other newly liberated territories elsewhere in the hemisphere. As it took shape on a big blackboard in the old church where they met, the Tributary looked more like a tree, with elaborate branches of sources and outputs at both ends. In action, it would be a different kind of truth and reconciliation commission. One where the genocide was not of a people, but of a place. An entire ecology of diverse lifeforms that had been extinguished by human appetite.

The committee couldn’t agree on what penalties their new court should impose. In the beginning, that didn’t matter.

This was the third Tributary to be held. The first was right after the uprising, and did not garner much attention. Donny had watched it. It was more like a lecture than an actual trial, because the accused were tried in absentia. The second had not gathered much more attention, until the deals were announced. By seizing property, including drilling platforms in the area under its government’s control, which extended from New Orleans out into the Gulf, the Tributary managed to extract substantial sums from the companies that owned the property. That had helped generate some funds—almost $20 million, which helped pay for much-needed solar cells and other infrastructure on the list. But it didn’t produce much of a sense of justice, let alone authentic reconciliation. And they soon ran out of property to seize inside their territory, and with it, the means to enforce their judgments.

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