Ecocide and Cormac McCarthy’s words

Kakhovka dam disaster: ‘hydroptic…sweeping waste…counterspectacle’

Welcome to the second instalment of This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s news and developments. (The first post on ‘dictator chic’ is here.)

Ecocide is the word of a week in which international legal experts said it was “highly likely” the June 6 collapse of the the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine was caused by explosives planted by Russians.

The Kakhovka dam breach is an unfolding humanitarian, economic and environmental catastrophe. Photographs and news reports from the region tell a heartbreaking story – thousands of acres of flooded farmland and homes, fish gasping on mud flats, drowned birds’ nests, trees and plants, tens of thousands of people with nowhere to go, nothing to eat, no reliable sources of water to drink, no source of livelihood. Experts say the long-term consequences will be generational and the fields of southern Ukraine may become deserts by next year when the soil becomes parched. (One of the best reported p…