PART V
Journeys

THOM HARTMANN’S TRAVELS ALONE COULD FILL A VOLUME. HE has circled the globe many times over on humanitarian missions, journalism assignments, or doing research for a book. An inventory of the countries he’s visited, and the timing of his visits, invites the observation that he should consider traveling with a bulletproof vest: He was in the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country, in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot, and in Germany when the Berlin wall came down. He was on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down, in Venezuela during one of the 1992 coup attempts, and in Beijing during the first student demonstrations. And that’s just the beginning of a long list linking Hartmann’s name to revolution and general mayhem around the world. In one sense the timing is coincidental, but in another it gets to the core of what drives Hartmann. He is drawn to turbulence, to “places fermenting with change”—those edges, again—because that’s where the action is, that’s where one has the opportunity to confront reality, whether it’s a shining beacon or an intolerable glare.

In 1980, following the ouster of dictator Idi Amin, Hartmann went to Uganda with Gottfried Müller to negotiate with the provisional government for land to build a Salem refugee center. Uganda during that era was in violent confusion, and Hartmann said the experience, related here in “Uganda Sojourn,” was both “shattering and strengthening.” “I’d been in the slums of America and much of the developing world but had never experienced children dying in my arms or people starving to death as I watched.” He realized he had to accept the reality of Uganda as it was and do the best he could. The refugee center he helped start on the site of a former prison farm evolved into a comprehensive community center that today provides health and social welfare services and conservation education to scores of people in eastern Uganda. It confirms Hartmann’s philosophy that even when something seems impossible, one must still “Do what’s right, without regard for the seemingly overwhelming odds.”

Russia in 1991 was also a country in turmoil, though for different reasons and with different results. Notebook in hand, Hartmann confronts the ineptitude, lack of motivation, and learned helplessness that was so pervasive in post-communist Russia, and the resulting essay, “Russia: A New Seed Planted among Thorns,” is an almost surreal portrait of a society in the midst of a painful yet extraordinary transition.

In 2009 Hartmann went on a very different sort of expedition—a research trip to the excavation of an ancient city, as told in “Caral, Peru: A Thousand Years of Peace.” He’d been contemplating questions stirred up by his travels. A year earlier he’d gone to Darfur, where he found the same kinds of crises he’d seen in Uganda nearly three decades earlier: starvation, disease, and ethnic violence. What was driving all this human wretchedness? What causes such breakdowns? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes again and again? In the ancient city of Caral, Hartmann found his answers. Caral is a “mother city,” the remnant of a stable civilization that existed peacefully for a thousand years with no evidence of warfare or conflict. It defies conventional wisdom that cities are really citadels, meant to defend their residents from attack from other societies. Hartmann shows how the lessons of Caral can help nurture our own young democracy.

The last piece in this section, “After the Crash,” is a journey not of miles but of imagination, as Hartmann invites us to share his dramatic vision of one possible future after the world’s oil runs dry. Take this journey if you want to see how an American community might look if we were to abandon our addiction to oil, bring corporations to heel, and reconnect to our families, our communities, nature, and ourselves. This essay puts a human face on some of Hartmann’s most closely held beliefs and theories, depicting a way of life that some may find idealistic but which he proves is actually utterly practical.