12 May 22
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America is calling us
This is an age of deep and warranted anxiety. Threats to the stability upon which many of us have constructed our lives — and perhaps even more troubling, our expectations — are crescendoing with a cacophony of distress.
There will always be the challenges that upend our hopes and dreams at the individual level: the illnesses, accidents, and myriad other personal and professional disappointments. But this is something different. This is a chaotic world that feels like it is flooding in from multiple fissures in the foundation of our society. It can be measured in pandemic deaths, rising global temperatures, persistent injustice, and here in the United States, a country unmoored from what many of us saw as a fitful but ultimately reliable path toward progress. There was once widespread belief that an entrenched commitment to American democracy, as imperfect as that may have been, was nonetheless a system capable of rejuvenation. That now feels like a bet on the future that is no longer assured.
Any cataloging of our present challenges must not be built on a misreading of the past. Our country's story contains countless chapters of pain, particularly for the most marginalized and afflicted among us. To yearn for a simpler time or some mythical history is to minimize the struggle and sacrifice that have always undergirded our national journey. For much of this struggle, the structural impediments to progress lay in the majority, and certainly in the majority of who was allowed to vote.
What I feel is so different this time is that we seem to be at a point when there is majority consensus in America on broad issues from abortion rights, to recognition of racial injustice, to LGBTQ+ rights, to a more equitable tax system, to even many contentious subjects like gun control and our climate crisis. In a more narrow political framing, this majority viewpoint is illustrated in the remarkable fact that Democratic candidates for president have won the popular vote in every election but one since 1988! And yet the courts — especially the Supreme Court — are stacked with far-right activist judges hellbent on blowing up a social order upon which most Americans have come to rely. Imbalances in our federal system give undue influence to red states in the Senate. And partisan gerrymandering has turned states and congressional districts that should be competitive into a pale shadow of a healthy democracy. Add to all this the immutable truth that it is always easier to destruct or obstruct than to construct, and you can see that reactionary forces have hijacked many of the functions of government — using lies and the privileges of power — to embolden their crusade against progress.
None of this is a surprise to most of you who could fill out the broad outline of dysfunction I have sketched above with the distressing details that litter our news cycles. Identifying our problems is not the problem. They probably play in some form of a loop in your thoughts, are echoed in what you read and see, and dominate your discussions with others. What you are thinking, feeling, and seeing is real. And it is felt by millions of Americans and millions more around the world.
In the face of all of this, one cannot help but wonder whether there is any reason for hope. I wish I could tell you that everything will certainly turn out fine. But to do so would be an insult to your intelligence. We should not be Pollyannaish about the depths or severity of the challenges. We should not take anything for granted. Solving problems has never been a passive activity.
And yet...
We should not forget that throughout the course of human history, including in recent times, seemingly insurmountable challenges have been conquered. Long odds have been overcome. The human experience is full of not only tragedy but inspiration. There have been many instances in which the prospects of success were far more daunting than they are now.
In our current times, one cannot help but find hope in the fierce fight for democracy being waged by Ukraine and their heroic stand against the Russian military. Almost no one outside of the country itself expected that their nation would survive the onslaught from one of the world’s most vaunted militaries. But there have been incredible resolve and bravery and no capitulation. Their fight has inspired support from the countries of Europe and beyond. Yet the battle for freedom has also come at a horrific cost to the Ukrainian people — soldier and civilian alike.
While we use the language of warfare to describe our political battles in the United States, thankfully we are not facing anywhere near this level of bloodshed — although the evidence of the insurrection and the heated rhetoric of our political discourse do portend the possibility of further violence. What also makes our situation different is that we are at odds with ourselves. We are fighting not for the survival of the United States in the face of foreign aggression but the survival of a concept of what this country means to those of us who inhabit it. The unity of Ukraine stands in stark contrast to the severed bonds of our national community.
As I noted above, what makes America’s struggles so frustrating is that there is a fundamental structural imbalance between majority viewpoints (what should hold sway in a democracy) and minority power. If Congress and the courts truly represented the will of the American people, we would be a different country. In the end, however, I just don’t believe that this dynamic is sustainable over the long term. Just think about it: No major corporation would publicly take the culture war stances of the modern Republican Party. Look at the example of Disney in Florida. At some point, all this performative outrage is so out of step with the necessities of running a nation that it cannot endure. The fundamental imbalance of our country will cause ever greater strain.
As the lesson in Ukraine makes all too clear, the battle against the forces of autocracy will be difficult. We know that if Roe is overturned, people will die, and lives will be upended. We can see a rise in state laws driven by bigotry. The damage will fall more fully on marginalized members of our society, and that will also cause great pain. These are outcomes the immediate future holds in store.
But ultimately, I think that the chances of victory for progress outweigh the chances of defeat. Those who are trying to push this nation backward are not only on the wrong side — they’re on the wrong side of the future. Look at the beliefs of the younger generations of Americans on all these issues. Look at how young people think around the world. Look at where the dominant cultural forces are. We should not underestimate the strength we have to push back against this march of destruction. The forces who want to upend the world order and our own democracy weaponize despair. Hopelessness fuels their ends.
When we created this Steady publication, we had no way of knowing the specifics of the challenges we would face. I chose the name Steady because it has been a mantra of mine since childhood. I hold onto the word and notion so dearly because I know that steadiness can be elusive. I feel that keenly as well, especially now. But I also know that it can yield the strength that is needed to not quit, to keep going, to understand that the future will unfold in ways that are completely unpredictable. And yet in that uncertainty lies an opportunity — I would call it a duty — to step into the fight and do our part to shape our destiny along a framework of hope.
America is calling us. Do we have the courage, will we take the time and make the effort to answer?
Russia's regime critical punk music group Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina attends a band rehearsal after she escaped a house arrest in Russia, in Berlin, Germany, May 11, 2022. (photo: Annegret Hilse/Reuters)
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At a rehearsal for a concert on Thursday in the German capital, Maria Alyokhina said Russians needed to think carefully about the war.
"I have no idea what will be the end of this reflection but without that, the country doesn't have a right to exist – like Germany after the Second World War. It’s Russia where we should have a de-Nazification, not Ukraine," she told Reuters Television.
There should also be a tribunal against Russian President Vladimir Putin and army generals and leaders, she said.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation" to disarm the country and protect it from fascists. It denies targeting civilians.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on her remark that de-Nazification was needed in Russia, not Ukraine, and that Putin and his generals should go on trial.
To aid her escape from house arrest, Alyokhina wore a delivery uniform, which her girlfriend had bought online, and slipped out of a back door of the building she was staying in, eluding Russian police outside, she said.
"I went to another flat, which was like a conspiratorial flat, without my mobile phone," she told Reuters Television.
Alyokhina said her compatriots wanted change but that many were scared of being thrown behind bars for speaking out.
"A lot of people are really afraid because you can now go to prison up to 10 years just for posting photos from Bucha, just for making this post," she said.
Russian officials have said the new law to stop the intentional spread of "fake" news is needed because to protect its military and combat misinformation about its military campaign in Ukraine.
Pussy Riot was rehearsing a new song about the war, said Alyokhina.
"We wrote it two weeks ago. It's against the war, against the war which Putin started against Ukraine. It's our statement and it will be performed as a part of the concert," she said.
A woman and her daughter leave an elementary school after picking up breakfast and lunch in Revere, Massachusetts, in 2020. (photo: Suzanne Kreiter/Getty)
How “pro-life” states are failing new parents and babies.
The precise effect on new births from the 22 states set to enact broad abortion bans if Roe v. Wade is overturned is impossible to predict. But public health experts like Diana Greene Foster — the lead researcher on the Turnaway Study, an enormous survey project that tracked the long-term effects of receiving or being denied an abortion — expect a meaningful increase in the number of women with an unwanted pregnancy who nevertheless give birth. Middlebury College economics professor Caitlin Knowles Myers anticipates as many as 75,000 people who want an abortion but can’t get one will end up giving birth in the first year after Roe is overturned.
Those births will predominately be in the states with the most draconian post-Roe abortion restrictions. And with a few exceptions, those 22 states rank in the bottom half of states in the comprehensive support they provide to children and their families, according to the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset compiled by Brown University’s Margot Jackson and her colleagues. The disparities can be enormous: Vermont spends three times as much money on education, health care, and other economic support for children as Utah.
Should the Supreme Court remove federal abortion protections, “there’s really no reason to think those patterns would change,” Jackson told me. “The potential consequences, the very likely consequences, would be a pretty substantial widening of the stark and striking inequalities that already exist in social support available to mothers and children.”
Families will be adding a new child in states that have made it harder for them to afford food and housing. More children could end up living in poverty, their households struggling to pay for bare necessities. Research suggests their parents will be less likely to purchase items that help with the child’s development, and they may struggle to hit early milestones compared to their peers in other states.
The children born in these circumstances will start life a few steps behind, all because their political leaders strove to ban abortion without offering support to the children who would be born if their aims were achieved.
People often get abortions because they worry about the economics
Ultimately, abortion bans may mean more babies are born to people uncertain of their ability to take care of them, in states that refuse to provide for them. As documented in the Turnaway Study, women often cite their finances or wanting to take care of the children they already have when explaining why they’d want an abortion.
“Most women seeking abortions are already experiencing financial hardships,” Foster writes in her 2020 book. Specifically, about half of the 1,000 women who participated in the Turnaway Study were living in poverty, a number consistent with national averages of women terminating a pregnancy. Three-fourths of the women in the study said they already didn’t have enough money for food, housing, and transportation.
According to the Turnaway Study’s surveys, 40 percent of women who were seeking an abortion said they were not financially prepared, and 29 percent said they needed to focus on the children they already have. Another 20 percent said that having a baby would interfere with their own future opportunities, and 12 percent said they could not provide the kind of life that they would want for their baby. (The participants could give more than one answer and most did.)
A parent’s ability to provide for their child is, in part, dependent on where they live. The State Spending on Kids Dataset has collected state fiscal records on everything from K-12 education and higher ed to child tax credits to food stamps and cash assistance. Urban Institute scholars took that information and found these enormous disparities in how much different states spend in total to support a child and their family.
Some of these disparities likely reflect the differences in cost of living; generally, it costs more money to subsist in a blue state on the coast than in a red state in the interior. But some of it is a matter of ideology, with the correlation between a less generous welfare state and more abortion restrictions being strong.
In a 2018 essay, Yale law professor Reva Siegel laid out a number of ways in which that pattern held. For example, none of the 10 most anti-abortion states have passed their own family leave policies; eight of the 10 most permissive states had. Only one of the 10 most restrictive states had enacted protections for pregnant workers. Most did not require that contraception be covered by private health insurance.
“States with the most abortion restrictions tend to have implemented fewer policies known to support women’s and children’s well-being,” concludes a 2017 overview from the Center for Reproductive Rights and Ibis Reproductive Health. Siegel argues in her review that this discord reveals that these states are more interested in restricting a woman’s reproductive choices than in protecting children’s well-being.
It’s not just how much money a state spends on a family’s welfare but how the money is spent that matters, Jackson told me. Broadly speaking, more progressive states tend to put their spending to direct assistance — “sending families a check” — while more conservative states expend their dollars for specific services, such as pregnancy prevention or marriage promotion. The first is more effective in keeping families out of poverty than the second. One 2019 paper published in Socio-Economic Review by Columbia University’s Zachary Parolin found that states instituting policies that prioritize discouraging lone motherhood over providing cash assistance had impoverished about 250,000 Black children yearly.
Republican-led states are also more likely to close off access to welfare by restricting eligibility, such as through so-called family caps, which deny families that are already enrolled in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program any additional assistance if they have another child. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 12 states, largely concentrated in the South, still have such laws on the books.
A weak safety net can hurt a family’s finances and a child’s development
When people denied an abortion end up giving birth, their fears about their financial ability to raise a child tend to come true. “We find that the reasons women give for wanting an abortion strongly predict the consequences they experience when they are denied that abortion,” Foster wrote.
The Turnaway Study looked at women’s economic well-being six months after they either received an abortion or were denied one. Researchers found that 61 percent of those who were turned away were living in poverty compared to 45 percent of those who received an abortion. The first group was significantly more likely to be poor over the next four years.
The welfare the women unable to access abortions did receive helped ameliorate the loss of income and educational opportunities; the study found no meaningful difference in income for the women who got an abortion versus the women who gave birth. But because the latter was raising at least one more child than the former, they were still more likely to be living in poverty.
Being denied abortion led to a $1,750 increase in past-due bills, the study found. The incidences of bad financial events — evictions, bankruptcies, court judgments on unpaid bills — increased by 81 percent for the women who were turned away.
The children of a mother who was denied abortion were more likely to live in poverty, more likely to live in a household that receives public assistance, and more likely to live with adults who say they can not afford food, housing, and transportation.
Those are national trends, across more than 30 states. But other research suggests that children born in states with less generous safety nets will face disadvantages compared to their peers in more generous states, when you look at the benefits conferred by stronger financial and social support.
One study co-authored by Jackson found that lower-income families in states with generous public assistance spend more money on things that are likely to help improve their child’s development, such as clothing, toys, games, arts and crafts, and books. A forthcoming study utilizing the same state-level data showed that more social spending — on both health care and non-health care programs — is associated with fewer babies being born with low birth weights and fewer preterm births among mothers with less than a high school education.
Is banning abortion really about protecting children’s well-being?
It’s common for anti-abortion advocates to argue that eliminating abortion protects the lives of children. But without increases in their welfare spending, many states set to revoke abortion rights will create harmful conditions for children, limiting their access to necessities like food, and the opportunities created by education.
And that puts the real motivations of the anti-abortion crusade in doubt.
“It is conventional to assume that states restrict women’s access to abortion out of an interest in protecting new life,” Siegel points out in her 2018 law review. “If this is in fact the concern that animates abortion restrictions, these values ought to guide policies outside as well as inside the abortion context.”
If states want to protect young lives, Siegel notes, they could have enacted policies such as family leave or could even expand contraception access, limiting the number of abortions without also limiting a person’s reproductive choices.
But that’s not what these states do. Instead, they restrict abortion access and limit the public assistance available to new parents and babies. In an amicus brief for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case that now threatens Roe v. Woe, Siegel and her co-authors Serena Mayeri and Melissa Murray argue states’ legal arguments in favor of their abortion bans should only hold weight if they are willing to support a child who is born out of an unwanted pregnancy that can’t be terminated:
Mississippi could provide care and support for individuals who wish: to avoid pregnancy, to bear children who will not languish in poverty, to preserve their own or their children’s health, or to safeguard their ability to provide for existing children. Instead, Mississippi chooses to prevent women from making the most intimate, consequential decisions for themselves and to coerce women into giving birth under dangerous, demeaning conditions.
The state’s abortion ban, Siegel and her co-authors argued, “thus functions more as a tool of control than as an expression of care for Mississippi’s women and children.” But such arguments appear to have no purchase at the Supreme Court if last week’s leak proves to be accurate.
Instead, the US seems on the brink of revoking the federal right to abortion, outlawing abortions in the states that are least capable of supporting any uptick in births. Families and children will pay the price.
Crystal Mason with Beto O'Rourke at a rally in Fort Worth in March. Mason has been appealing a five-year prison sentence for voting a provisional ballot in the 2016. (photo: LM Otero/AP)
Tyson Foods installed plastic barriers between worker stations at its meat and poultry plants to protect against transmission of the coronavirus. (photo: Tyson Foods)
A House panel alleges that Tyson and other meat processors heavily influenced Trump’s executive order that compelled plants to keep operating
In a report released Thursday, the committee alleges that Tyson Foods’s legal team prepared a draft with input from other companies that became the basis for an executive order to keep the plants open that the Trump administration issued in April 2020, making it difficult for workers to stay home.
“Meatpacking companies knew the risk posed by the coronavirus to their workers and knew it wasn’t a risk that the country needed them to take,” according to the report by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis. “They nonetheless lobbied aggressively — successfully enlisting [the U.S. Agriculture Department] as a close collaborator in their efforts — to keep workers on the job in unsafe conditions, to ensure state and local health authorities were powerless to mandate otherwise, and to be protected against legal liability for the harms that would result.”
The report alleges the nation’s largest meatpackers and industry trade groups repeatedly misled the public when they warned that a slowdown in their operations posed an imminent threat to the nation’s meat supplies. But “these fears were baseless,” investigators wrote.
The report from the bipartisan House select subcommittee is based on review of 151,000 pages of documents, more than a dozen survey calls with meatpacking workers union representatives, former Agriculture Department and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials, and state and local health authorities. The subcommittee also held a staff briefing with OSHA and USDA.
Internal industry documents showed that “despite awareness of the high risks of coronavirus spread in their plants, meatpacking companies engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight, to force workers to continue working in dangerous conditions, and to shield themselves from legal liability for any resulting worker illness or death,” the report states.
In the run-up to the publication of the executive order, executives from Smithfield and Tyson held calls with members of President Donald Trump’s White House, including then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short.
Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, said that the company has worked with government officials at many levels in both the Trump and Biden administrations as it navigated the pandemic.
“This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” Mickelson said in a statement. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the U.S. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”
Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs, said that the company has invested more than $900 million to support worker safety, including paying workers to stay home, and have exceeded Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and OSHA guidelines.
“The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch,” Monroe said in a statement. “That is the challenge we faced as restaurants closed, consumption patterns changed and hogs backed-up on farms with nowhere to go. The concerns we expressed were very real and we are thankful that a true food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal.”
An estimated 334,000 coronavirus cases nationwide have been tied to meatpacking plants, resulting in more than $11 billion in economic damage, according to research from the University of California at Davis. Researchers found that per capita infection rates in counties that were home to beef- and pork-processing facilities were twice as high. In counties with chicken-processing facilities, the transmission rate was 20 percent higher.
Publicly, meat industry lobbyists and executives raised alarms about the threat closing plants would present to the nation’s food supply chain. The concerns about worker absenteeism hampering production came as the virus first swept across the country, and the central bank unleashed an unprecedented flood of unemployment benefits to support workers.
“The food supply chain is breaking,” John H. Tyson, chairman of Tyson’s board, wrote in a full-page newspaper ad that ran in The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April 2020.
“We have a responsibility to feed our country,” the ad said. “It is as essential as health care. This is a challenge that should not be ignored. Our plants must remain operational so that we can supply food to our families in America.”
But that same month, U.S. pork exports were at a three-year high, the report found. In the first three quarters of 2020, JBS exported 370 percent more pork to China than it had in the same period of 2017; Smithfield exported 90 percent more pork during the same window.
“These employers must be held accountable for the consequences of their blatant disregard of the safety and lives of their employees,” Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, said Thursday in a statement. “Today’s report is just one step towards accountability, but much more must be done to prevent corporations from putting profits over people’s lives in the industry.”
At least 59,000 workers at Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill and National Beef — companies that control most of the U.S. meat market — were infected with the coronavirus in the pandemic’s first year, the subcommittee previously found. At least 269 workers across these companies died of covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021.
“In 2020, as the world faced the challenge of navigating COVID-19, many lessons were learned and the health and safety of our team members guided all our actions and decisions,” Nikki Richardson, head of communications for JBS USA, told The Post. “During that critical time, we did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running.”
Cargill told The Post it has worked hard to maintain “safe and consistent operations” throughout the pandemic.
“At the same time, we have not hesitated to temporarily idle or reduce capacity at processing plants when we determined it necessary to do so,” Cargill said in a statement. “The well-being of our plant employees is integral to our business and to the continuity of the food supply chain.”
National Beef did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
To keep production humming while business activity around the world ground to a halt, meatpacking companies and the USDA “jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting,” the report found.
The USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
In April 2020, chief executives from Tyson, JBS USA, Smithfield Foods other meatpacking companies had a call with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, in which they asked him to “elevate the need for messaging about the importance of our workforce staying at work to the [president] or [vice president] level,” and separately stressed the need to make clear that “being afraid of COVID-19 is not a reason to quit your job and you are not eligible for unemployment compensation if you do.”
Soon after, in a news conference, Pence issued a “direct message to meatpacking workers” that “we need you to continue … to show up and do your job,” admonishing recent “incidents of worker absenteeism,” the report states.
Tyson’s legal team drafted the proposal for the executive order that companies used as justification for keeping plants open, the investigation found, and the final version “adopted the themes and statutory directive laid out in Tyson’s draft, invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants “continue operations.”
“In the days leading up to President Trump’s issuance of the Executive Order, meatpacking industry representatives and companies — Smithfield and Tyson in particular — engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House,” the report notes, including “calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White; a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump.”
Short and Perdue declined to comment on the report. Meadows and Pence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The following day, after the order was issued, the Trump White House allegedly “requested” that the companies “issue positive statements and social media about the President’s action on behalf of the industry, about the Order itself and about how it will help ensure the food supply chain remains strong,” according to the report.
Shatha Hanaysha stands outside Jenin's Ibn Sina Hospital after the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. (photo: Twitter)
Palestinian journalist Shatha Hanaysha was with Abu Akleh when they came under fire in Jenin. She describes the joy at working with the veteran and her fear when Israeli troops began shooting
I knew this meant a possible raid on the refugee camp, as has been the case in recent months. I left my phone in general mode so any alerts would come through, and decided to get a few hours of sleep to be ready in the morning.
And just before six am, I received the call I knew was coming.
"There’s a raid in the camp, do you want to cover it?" my colleague Mujahed al-Saadi asked.
''Of course," I replied. I got ready and headed to Jenin from my home in Qabatya town, a 10-minute car ride away.
When I arrived near the Return Roundabout, a major monument in the city that leads to the camp, I put on my press helmet and body armour, as did the other journalists with me.
Outside the camp, Jenin was a serene city. It was a normal morning, with people walking and driving to work peacefully.
“There’s nothing to fear,” one passerby who came from the camp told us as we put on our vests. “Barely anything is happening in there, it’s calm.”
Israeli forces had stormed the camp and surrounded the house of Abdallah al-Hosari, who they killed on 1 March, to arrest his brother.
Before we advanced on foot towards the camp to cover the raid and a subsequent gunfire exchange between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters, we had stopped to wait for Al Jazeera journalists.
A scene of chaos
Moments later, Shireen Abu Akleh arrived with her crew.
Here was the journalist whose reports I grew up imitating, from voice tone to hand gestures, and I dreamt of doing what she was always so good at doing. Here she was, going on the same missions as I was.
“Good morning,” Abu Akleh said, as she, myself, two more reporters, and two cameramen got ready.
I felt a strange aura around her at that moment. I can’t find the right word to describe what I felt. She was floating. She was happy.
We made ourselves visible to the soldiers who were stationed hundreds of metres away from us. We remained still for around 10 minutes to make sure they knew we were there as journalists.
When no warning shots were fired at us, we moved uphill towards the camp.
Out of nowhere, we heard the first gunshot.
I turned around and saw my colleague Ali al-Sammoudi on the floor. A bullet hit him in the back but his wound was not serious and he managed to move away from the fire.
A scene of chaos followed.
My colleague Mujahed jumped over a small fence nearby to stay away from the bullets.
“Come over here,” he told me and Shireen, but we were on the other side of the street and couldn’t risk crossing.
“Al-Sammoudi is hit,” Shireen shouted, standing right behind me, as we both stood with our backs to a wall to take cover.
Right then, another bullet pierced Shireen’s neck, and she fell to the ground right next to me.
I called her name but she didn’t move. When I tried to extend my arm to reach her, another bullet was fired, and I had to stay hiding behind a tree.
That tree saved my life, as it was the only thing obstructing the soldiers' view of me.
“Stay back, stay back!” my colleagues shouted, as bullets flew every time I tried to check Shireen’s pulse.
Out of nowhere a camp resident managed to get to us with a car from an alleyway out of range from the Israeli soldiers. He quickly pulled me and Shireen’s body in and drove us to the hospital.
'They aimed to kill'
I am still in shock.
What happened was a deliberate attempt to kill us. Whoever shot at us aimed to kill.
And it was an Israeli sniper that shot at us. We were not caught up in crossfire with Palestinian fighters like the Israeli army claimed.
There was no fighting at the time. The location of the incident was in a relatively open area, away from the camp where Palestinian fighters can't operate because they would be at a disadvantage there.
The type of gunfire is another indication. Palestinian fighters normally use semi-automatic rifles that spray bullets continuously.
These bullets were different. They were sporadic and precise. They were only shot when one of us moved. One bullet at a time.
I did not know this would be how my day unfolded but I had been preparing myself to die for some time.
Jenin has come under intensified Israeli raids in recent months. With each raid I went out to cover, I felt I would be killed.
Israel does not differentiate between the old and the young, men and women, civilian journalists and combatants. Everyone is a target.
'Our jobs are more important than ever'
In the hospital we were all shocked. Journalists, medics, and Jenin residents.
Like many other reporters, I was torn. Every time I put my phone up to film my arm failed me. I wanted to do my job and document the scene but I also wanted to pay respects to Shireen.
I remembered myself as a child watching her reporting on the TV during the Second Intifada.
I was about seven years old at the time, and ever since then I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: I wanted to be like Shireen.
I recall when my parents and grandparents would sit around in the living room and say: “Shatha, go on, give us a Shireen-style report.”
When I told her this, and that she was my idol, in our first meeting a few years back, she smiled and joked with me.
She was humble with me, kind, and sweet.
She came to Jenin a few weeks ago after years of not reporting from the city. I went to greet her, not expecting she would recognise me, as she met countless other young journalists in her career.
“How are you Shatha?” she said when she saw me, remembering my name, both to my surprise and joy.
Stories like these are what most of us were probably remembering as her body was carried around Jenin to be commemorated.
We finally arrived at the small monastery in the city and the church bells began ringing for Shireen, who is from a Christian family from Bethlehem.
Around Shireen's corpse, we all stood as Muslims and Christians, listening to the priest's prayer in silence.
When I looked around I saw multiple cameras filming. Behind each one was a Palestinian journalist sobbing, knowing that Shireen will never be on the other end of those lenses again.
As Palestinians and journalists, our loss is indescribable. But now more than ever, our jobs are important.
To document the violations of this occupation, for our journalistic values, for the truth, and for Shireen.
A ghost forest along the shore of East Lake in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. (photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
As sea levels rise and storms become more intense, scientists are racing to study the rapid loss of trees and marshland along the Outer Banks
“The forest is just retreating,” says Lanier, manager of this 160,000-acre federal wildlife refuge near North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Lanier first came here to work for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the mid-1980s and stayed several years before heading to postings around the Southeast. When he returned in 2006, a singular question reverberated in his mind as he drove around:
“What happened to the trees?”
The startling transformation he witnessed then has only accelerated in recent years. “It has changed dramatically,” he says, “and it has changed very quickly.”
Few examples of climate change are as unmistakable and arresting as the “ghost forests” proliferating along parts of the East Coast — and particularly throughout the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula of North Carolina.
Places where Lanier once stood on dry ground are now in waist-deep water. Forests populated by towering pines, red maple, sweet gum and bald cypress have transitioned to shrub land. Stretches of shrub habitat have given way to marsh. And what once was marsh has succumbed to the encroaching sea.
As sea levels rise, droughts deepen and storms become more intense, saltier water makes its way into these woodlands more readily from surrounding water bodies, as well as deeper into the sprawling network of drainage ditches and irrigation canals created long ago to support the expansion of agriculture.
Persistently wet conditions can weaken existing trees. And episodes of saltwater intrusion can push already stressed forests to the breaking point, poisoning the freshwater on which they depend and hastening the death of trees not only at the water’s edge, but in some cases far inland. The result are expanses of dead or dying trees, known as “snags,” that stand as grim monuments to a shifting ecosystem.
“This has happened over and over before in geologic time,” says Marcelo Ardón, an ecologist at North Carolina State University. “But now it is happening faster.”
Ghost forests have existed for decades. But as they proliferate, scientists are racing to better understand the factors driving the changes, what humans might do to slow the demise of such forests and what consequences lie ahead if the trend continues.
They are investigating what the profound changes to coastal systems might mean for the migrating birds, mammals, reptiles and plants that call them home.
And they worry about what will come of the massive stores of carbon these landscapes hold, huge amounts of which could be released back into the atmosphere as forests die and the land retreats — a shift that could further complicate efforts to slow the warming of the planet.
“I still feel like we are just scratching the surface and trying to figure out how much of an impact this is,” Ardón says, “and how big of an area is being affected.”
‘Something’s not right’
Emily Ury was haunted by what she saw when she began to travel the coastal stretches of North Carolina, where in certain spots the ashen skeletons of trees spread as far as she could see.
“You just know looking at it that something’s not right,” said Ury, who at the time was a doctoral student at Duke University, studying the ecology of wetlands. “The most fundamental questions haven’t been answered,” she added. “Where is this happening? Why is this happening? To what extent is it happening?”
To help answer that last question, Ury and other researchers turned to Google Earth, where they examined visible changes over the past 35 years to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.
In a paper published last year, they found that despite its protected status nearly a third of the refuge — or more than 47,000 acres — had transformed from forest habitat to shrub land or marsh over that period. Nearly 3,000 more acres were “lost to the sea.” And as much as 11 percent of the refuge became ghost forest, dominated by dead trees and fallen trunks.
While the greatest forest losses occurred where the refuge met the Croatan and Pamlico sounds, the researchers noted, tree deaths “also occurred much further inland in low-elevation areas and alongside major canals.”
Specific events have clearly played a role. For instance, researchers observed a spike in deaths after Hurricane Irene in 2011 forced enormous amounts of salty water into forests already strained by years of drought. But the problem continued in the years that followed.
In their findings, Ury and her colleagues saw a glimpse of what lies ahead for areas beyond this corner of North Carolina, where sea levels have risen roughly a foot over the past century. The eerie phenomenon has unfolded along the Atlantic seaboard, from the swamps of Louisiana to the Chesapeake Bay, from the white cedar forests of New Jersey to the St. Lawrence estuary in Canada.
“These unprecedented rates of deforestation and land cover change due to climate change may become the status quo for coastal regions worldwide,” they wrote, “with implications for wetland function, wildlife habitat, and global carbon cycling.”
Ury knows that many people might not grasp the long-term threats posed by their transformation, even as the sight of stricken trees is difficult to miss. Saltwater intrusion has inflicted damage in more immediate and visceral ways, such as contaminating aquifers and tainting once fertile farm land in the region.
But even less obvious changes are significant.
“People just don’t really care about swamp forests. They are not really populated,” said Ury, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “But they are experiencing this massive shift, and it’s a loss of an ecosystem that’s underappreciated but still has a lot of value for water quality and wildlife habitat and storing carbon.”
“And it’s definitely a canary in the coal mine for coastal change.”
Bad math
On a sun-splashed spring morning, Ardón, the ecologist, stands knee deep in the cold water of the Albemarle Sound.
“It’s happening right here,” he says of climate change. He nods toward the stumps of fallen trees poking out of the water, some of them 50 feet or more from the shoreline. “That was probably land 20 years ago.”
After a short hike inland, Ardón reaches one of many testing sites he and colleagues maintain inside the Palmetto-Peartree Preserve. Year after year, they track whether the soil is accumulating or subsiding.
In this spot, as in others, the forest floor is adding mass a millimeter at a time, but at a much slower pace than the local rate of sea level rise.
“Bad math,” Ardón calls it. “Over time, these forests are going to get swallowed by the sound.”
Scientists say that transition from forested wetlands to marsh and eventually to open water raises daunting questions about what will happen to the habitat for a range of species, including red-cockaded woodpeckers and many other birds, black bears, river otters and critically endangered red wolves.
It also has serious implications for climate change.
Researchers have found that an estimated 27 million tons of carbon are stored in the trees and other biomass along the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula.
A 2020 study detailed how ghost forests had crept across roughly 15 percent of the area’s unmanaged public land from 2001 to 2014. During that time, the authors calculated, the changes allowed an estimated 130,000 tons of carbon to escape into the atmosphere that otherwise would have remained sequestered. Those emissions further fuel the planet’s warming and make it harder to avoid future disasters.
A separate study last year found that the “amount of carbon lost from forest mortality is far greater than that gained by the growing marsh soils.” The time it would take for wetlands to make up for the carbon-related impact of dying trees, the authors wrote, “is at the scale of centuries, which is approximately the same amount of time predicted for marshes to drown from rising sea levels.”
In other words, more evidence of bad math.
“If you were to lose this forest and all this carbon above ground, how long would it take for the marsh to recover the carbon that is lost? It’s on the order of 200 to 600 years,” Ardón says.
Neither marshes nor humans have that kind of time to stave off climate change, he said, as he surveyed the forest and the creeping shoreline beyond.
“In that time, this is going to be underwater.”
Trying to slow the inevitable
Researchers from Florida to New Jersey and from Louisiana to Maryland are busy trying to learn more about the causes and consequences of ghost forests — from their impact on wildlife and water quality to whether dead trees emit greenhouse gases through their strawlike trunks.
Meanwhile, state and federal wildlife officials, along with groups such as the Nature Conservancy, are trying to slow down the rapid transition, even as they know the land probably will never be what it once was.
In North Carolina, that has meant an array of efforts such as sowing oyster reefs to combat erosion, planting more saltwater-tolerant plants and trees, and engineering specialized ditch-draining structures meant to prevent saltwater from penetrating deep into the forests and vegetation that remain.
“If we do nothing, the forest could collapse rapidly and go from being forested to being open water,” said Brian Boutin, director of the Albemarle-Pamlico Sounds Program at the Nature Conservancy. “We’re buying time to allow it to transition to something that’s still going to be functional and still provide habitat for a wide variety of species.”
But the future is perilous for this landscape and others like it, as researchers wrote in one study last summer: “At the current rate of deforestation, in the absence of widespread protection or restoration efforts, coastal forested wetlands may not persist into the next century.”
Emily Bernhardt, a Duke ecologist and professor and co-author of that study and others on ghost forests, says even as scientists continue to study the problem, they must help policymakers, farmers and other residents consider how to make the best out of the decades to come.
Scientists have documented the changes that have already happened and those that are likely to come. “The question is, can we go there in an intelligent, intentional way that’s protective of livelihoods and biodiversity? Or are we going to go there in a very catastrophic way?”
They are questions Lanier ponders often as he nears the home stretch of his career.
As the manager of the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, the vast majority of which lies barely two feet above sea level, he knows the person in his job could face “a very different thing” in only a handful of decades. If current trends continue, he said, the majority of the refuge could be underwater within a century.
“It’s sobering to see a landscape you are trying to manage for wildlife die out,” he said.
But Lanier and others who care about this place are not content to sit idle. There is wildlife that depends on this habitat, humans who rely on its water filtration benefits and a planet that relies in part on its ability to store carbon.
“We’re trying to find out what we can do to make sure the place is as resilient as we can,” he said. “To try to slow down the change as long as it’s possible.”
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