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Even in moderate places like Ohio, gerrymandering has let unchecked Republicans pass extremist laws that could never make it through Congress.
Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling.” When he was governor, he recalled, the two parties worked reasonably well together, but politics in Ohio “has changed.” The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress.
Ohio’s law prohibits abortion after six weeks—or even earlier, if doctors can detect fetal cardiac activity—unless the mother is at risk of death or serious permanent injury. Dr. Bernard noted that the bill’s opponents had warned about the proposed restrictions’ potential effect on underage rape victims. “It was literally a hypothetical that was discussed,” she told me. Indeed, at a hearing on April 27th, a Democrat in the Ohio House, Richard Brown, declared that if a thirteen-year-old girl “was raped by a serial rapist . . . this bill would require this thirteen-year-old to carry this felon’s fetus.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, State Representative Jean Schmidt, is an archconservative Republican who represents a district east of Cincinnati. At the hearing, she responded to Brown by arguing that the birth of a rapist’s baby would be “an opportunity.” She explained, “If a baby is created, it is a human life. . . . It is a shame that it happens. But there’s an opportunity for that woman, no matter how young or old she is, to make a determination about what she’s going to do to help that life be a productive human being.” The rapist’s offspring, she suggested, could grow up to “cure cancer.” Her remarks were deemed so outlandish that they were denounced everywhere from the Guardian to the New York Post.
According to David Niven, a political-science professor at the University of Cincinnati, a 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest. And a 2019 Quinnipiac University poll showed that only thirty-nine per cent of Ohio voters supported the kind of “heartbeat” law that the legislature passed. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers. The Democratic state representative Beth Liston, a pediatrician and an internist in Ohio, who voted against the bill, told me, “Doctors are going to be afraid of providing ordinary care. Women are going to die.”
In a referendum on August 2nd, Kansas voters strongly rejected an abortion ban, indicating that even voters in deep-red states—when given the chance to express themselves—oppose radical curtailments of reproductive rights. Yet Ohio voters have had no such recourse, and the General Assembly is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions on abortion when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click—a pastor at the Fremont Baptist Temple and a Republican who serves the Sandusky area—has proposed a “Personhood Act,” which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization. In an e-mail, Click told me that “the ultimate question that needs to be answered” is “When does life begin?” He added, “I believe the answer to that question is self-evident.” Click is a graduate of an unaccredited Christian school in Michigan, Midwestern Baptist College, whose Web site says that “civil government is of divine appointment” and must be obeyed “except in things opposed to ‘the will of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”
Click acknowledged that the story of the ten-year-old rape victim is discomfiting, adding that “we all have a visceral reaction” to such a scenario, “regardless of one’s political leaning.” But the news had not made him question his position; rather, he questioned the girl’s story, calling it “suspicious,” and noting that the incident “fit too neatly” with the pro-choice agenda. (According to law-enforcement authorities, a twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man confessed to twice raping the girl when she was nine. He has since pleaded not guilty.) Click also echoed an argument made by Ohio’s Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, who claimed that the ten-year-old—“if she exists”—would have qualified for the new statute’s medical-emergency exception. This assertion, however, has been disputed by various doctors, including State Representative Liston. “I don’t know the child’s health condition,” she acknowledged to me. “But it’s hard to say that simply because she is young she would meet the requirement of risk as defined by the new law.” Mortality rates are generally higher for pregnant girls who are younger than fifteen, but, Liston said, “there’s nothing in the law that states that age is a sufficient exception.”
Click, who is a close ally of the Republican congressman Jim Jordan, is one of Ohio’s most extreme legislators, but he’s hardly out of place among the General Assembly’s increasingly radical Republican majority. Niven, the University of Cincinnati professor, told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio’s statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? “It’s all about gerrymandering,” Niven told me. The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries—and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right. The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. “Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country,” Niven told me. “It doesn’t have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that’s a likely outcome.” He concluded, “Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy.”
Three days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, I went to a luncheonette in Columbus, Ohio, to meet with David Pepper, an election-law professor, a novelist, a onetime Cincinnati city councilman, and a former chairman of the state’s Democratic Party. Pepper, who is fifty-one, looked boyish and preppy in a polo shirt. He had recently become a small phenomenon on Twitter, having posted videos in which he delivered impassioned short lectures, punctuated with frantic scribbles on a whiteboard, about the growing crisis of democracy in America’s state legislatures. When he attended Yale Law School, in the nineties, his geniality and Buckeye boosterism had led his classmates to name him the Most Likely to Be President of the Cincinnati Board of Tourism, but he spoke to me with an almost desperate alarmism.
Last year, Pepper wrote a book, “Laboratories of Autocracy,” whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America’s state legislatures “laboratories of democracy.” The subtitle of Pepper’s book, “A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines,” is a bit more hopeful. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races (say, the current Senate race in Ohio between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance) and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.
Pepper understands that few Americans share his obsession. “No one knows anything about statehouses,” he said. “They can’t even name their state representatives. And it’s getting worse every year, since the local media’s dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out.” Columbus has an unusually strong press corps, but it is an exception. And it is precisely because so few Americans pay attention to state politics that the legislatures have become ideal arenas for manipulation by extremists and special interests—who often work in tandem. “I’m banging my head against the wall,” Pepper told me. With a nod to the political consultant James Carville, he added, “My God, Democrats, don’t you see it? It’s the statehouse, stupid! That’s where the attack is happening!”
Pepper scoffed at recent claims, made by conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the state legislatures are more suited than the judiciary to adjudicate the divisive issue of abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, Brett Kavanaugh issued a concurring opinion in which he argued that the Court was merely restoring “the people’s authority to address the issue of abortion through the processes of democratic self-government.” Pepper said of Kavanaugh’s concurrence, “It’s so disingenuous—total gaslighting. Many statehouses no longer have representative democracy. Because they’ve been gerrymandered, they don’t reflect the will of the people.”
With Trump, he believes, the situation became a lot worse—the former President “made people a little more willing to be lawless, and he gave oxygen to white supremacy.” But Pepper thinks that “people make a huge mistake when they equate the attack on democracy entirely with him.” In his view, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, who have portrayed Trump as a singular aberration are failing to see that “the Republican attack on democracy preceded him”—and that “if Trump was locked up tomorrow it would continue.”
The shift began, Pepper believes, with the shock of Obama’s 2008 victory. The election of the country’s first Black President provoked a racial and cultural backlash, and many Republican officials panicked that their party, which was overwhelmingly white, was facing a demographic demise. Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party’s smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census—a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party’s policies were unpopular.
In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funnelled thirty million dollars into the Republicans’ redistricting project, called redmap, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats.
Gerrymandering the shapes of districts to create safe seats is an old trick that has been used by both sides in American politics. I recently spoke with Jonathan Jakubowski, the chairman of the Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio, and the author of “Bellwether Blues: A Conservative Awakening of the Millennial Soul,” and he emphasized that, in the nineteen-eighties, it was the Democrats who gerrymandered the state’s districts. “We’re all equal-opportunity offenders,” he said. But the redmap project—powered by advances in digital mapping and by billionaire donors such as the fossil-fuel magnates Charles and David Koch—took electoral distortion to a new level. And Ohio, which had become one of the most fiercely fought battleground states in Presidential politics, was subjected to an especially tortured dissection.
The journalist David Daley tells the story of redmap in his 2016 book, “Ratf **ked.” By 2012, he writes, the Republicans’ plan had already begun to pay off handsomely: even though Obama was reëlected in Ohio that year, by three percentage points, and Sherrod Brown, a progressive Democrat, was easily reëlected to the Senate, Republicans had a resounding triumph in the state legislature. They won a 60–39 super-majority in the House.
The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64–35 advantage in the House and a 25–8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state—and they proved it when they undermined Governor Mike DeWine’s initial public-health-minded approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. DeWine is a Republican, yet he was a leader in imposing such emergency health orders as mask mandates and the closing of schools and businesses. Ohio voters had widely supported these measures. But anti-vaccine and anti-mask extremists in the statehouse passed a law stripping the Governor and his health director of the authority to issue such orders. (One Republican lawmaker, a doctor, suggested that “the colored population” was more vulnerable to COVID-19 because “they do not wash their hands as well as other groups.” The lawmaker was subsequently named the chairman of the Ohio Senate’s health committee.) Since the legislature’s rebellion, DeWine—once regarded as a centrist conservative—has increasingly capitulated to his party’s radical base, on public-health policy and much else. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Governor said that “we disagree with that sentiment.”) Daley told me that the redmap campaign “took a state that was slightly red and gave it a hue more like Elizabeth Taylor’s lipstick,” adding, “The upshot has been some of the most far-right, noxious, pay-for-play politics we’ve seen over the last decade. That’s what gerrymandering enables. When voters lose the ability to throw the rascals out, the rascals do whatever they please.”
Matt Huffman, the influential president of the Ohio Senate, recently said as much himself. Speaking in May to the Columbus Dispatch about the Republicans’ super-majority, he said, “We can kind of do what we want.”
For Pepper, the state’s transformation has been crushing. He has watched the reputation of Ohio’s public-school system slide as Republicans have siphoned off public funding to support failing, politically connected charter schools. In 2010, Education Week ranked the state’s schooling as the fifth best in the country; in 2021, U.S. News & World Report ranked it thirty-first. Last year, F.B.I. agents told USA Today that public-corruption cases in Ohio were the most egregious in the country. In the past five years, the state has had five speakers of the House, because two were forced out as a result of the biggest bribery scandals in Ohio’s history. Larry Householder, who was removed from office in July, 2020, is scheduled to be tried on federal racketeering charges this coming January.
This wasn’t the path that Pepper had foreseen for his state. A native of Cincinnati, he grew up in a relatively apolitical, upwardly mobile household: his father climbed the ranks at one of Ohio’s largest companies, Procter & Gamble, ultimately becoming its chairman. After Pepper graduated from Yale Law School, he returned to Cincinnati and clerked for Nathaniel R. Jones, a Black federal judge, who ignited in him an interest in public service. In 2001, Pepper ran for the city council, and to everyone’s surprise he won, partly owing to a catchy slogan: “Just Add Pepper.” After two terms in office, he moved up to the county commission, eventually presiding over it, and in 2010 he was recruited by the state’s Democratic governor, Strickland, to run for auditor, a statewide office. At the time, the auditor was one of five state officials on a commission overseeing the redistricting process, and could therefore act as an effective curb against gerrymandering. On the campaign trail, Pepper recalls, “I was running around, talking about gerrymandering, and no one knew what the hell I was talking about.” Meanwhile, his opponent was getting a torrent of suspicious contributions from people who worked for out-of-state energy companies—many of which, Pepper deduced, had ties to the controversial coal baron Bob Murray, the chief executive officer of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based company. Such donations initially made little sense to Pepper—the auditor’s role had nothing to do with coal mines—until he discovered that redmap had targeted his state, and that his candidacy stood in the project’s way. He lost the race. In 2014, he made a second bid for statewide office, running this time for Ohio attorney general. Again, he was defeated. In 2015, he became the chairman of the state’s Democratic Party, a position that he stepped down from at the end of 2020.
Pepper had become consumed by the problem of gerrymandering, but the subject drew only blank stares from Democratic Party officials. To counter this apathy, he told me, he decided “to write a novel about gerrymandering—which, of course, is a horrible idea.” In the book, “The People’s House,” a Russian oligarch modelled on Vladimir Putin rigs an American election after figuring out that, thanks to gerrymandering, he needs only to flip a few dozen swing districts. The book appeared in the summer of 2016, when Putin’s clandestine efforts on behalf of Trump were making headlines; Politico called the book “the thriller that predicted the Russia scandal.” Pepper was pleased about the media attention, but he was disappointed that more people didn’t focus on the novel’s message: “how bad gerrymandering is.” With evident frustration, he told me that media and political insiders prefer “to talk about politics in terms of personalities.”
A recent study by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonpartisan nonprofit, documents how deeply right-wing extremism has infiltrated U.S. statehouses. Of the 7,383 people who served in state legislatures in the 2021-22 session, eight hundred and seventy-five had joined far-right Facebook groups. (All but three were Republicans.) The study describes the fringe beliefs that many of these members shared, including “the idea that Christians constitute a core of the American citizenry and/or that government and public policies should be reshaped to reflect that.” A group promoting this view, the Ohio Christian Alliance, counts eleven Ohio state legislators among its Facebook members, including Gary Click. Last year, the organization helped block a bill, the Ohio Fairness Act, that would have barred housing and employment discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community.
State Representative Casey Weinstein, a second-term Democrat from a suburban swing district between Akron and Cleveland, and one of the General Assembly’s two Jewish members, told me that he’s recently become “really concerned” about a new level of extremism. On January 23, 2022, a protest outside his house shattered a peaceful Sunday afternoon with his wife and young children. Some thirty vehicles blocked the entrance to his driveway; one had a flag bearing the message “Kneel for the Cross.” Weinstein told me, “I thought it was a Trump group, but it turned out to be a church, Liberty Valley, near Macedonia, Ohio. Some of these churches are militant, and some are basically militias operating under the guise of religion. They’re weaponizing religion into a power grab.” He went on, “So, I’m the Jew, and they came to my house to try to intimidate me and my family. That’s what’s happening, and where this is going.”
Weinstein became further alarmed this past March, when Republicans in the statehouse pushed legislation prohibiting public-school teachers from teaching “divisive concepts.” The bill, aimed at censoring class discussions of critical race theory—which was never part of the Ohio public-school curriculum to begin with—threatened teachers with suspension unless they neutrally instructed students about “both sides of a political or ideological belief.” When Morgan Trau, an enterprising statehouse reporter for a television station in Cleveland, pressed one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sarah Fowler Arthur, for details, the lawmaker provoked an uproar by offering the Holocaust as an example of a topic that required a “both sides” approach. “You should talk about these atrocities that have happened in history, but you also do have an obligation to point out the value that each individual brings to the table,” Fowler Arthur said, adding that students should consider the Holocaust “from the perspective of a German soldier.” As Fowler Arthur went on, she seemed to misunderstand both the scope and the nature of the Holocaust, referring to it as an event in which “hundreds of thousands,” rather than six million, Jews were killed, and suggesting that victims were murdered “for having a different color of skin.” Weinstein and other Jewish leaders in Ohio vociferously denounced what came to be known as the Both Sides of the Holocaust Bill. “That was enough for me,” Weinstein told me. “What unique value did the German Nazis bring to the table?” He noted that Fowler Arthur, who sits on the Ohio House’s Primary and Secondary Education Committee, “was homeschooled her entire life, has never set foot in a public school, and elected not to go to college.” Weinstein added, “There’s nothing wrong with that, until she starts censoring what can and cannot be taught in public schools.” (Fowler Arthur declined to comment.)
The real intent behind attacking public-school curricula, Weinstein believes, was to “fire up the Republican base” about the teaching of slavery, the Civil War, and the civil-rights movement—in other words, to get out the conservative vote by inflaming the racial grievances of white Ohioans. The “divisive concepts” bill championed by Fowler Arthur opposes teaching any reading of American history suggesting that “the United States and its institutions are systemically racist.”
Pepper noted that the efforts to control the curriculum in Ohio are “very similar to the meltdown in democracy in other places.” Like Russia’s attempts to censor what is taught to students about Ukraine, he said, the legislation promoted by Fowler Arthur represents an attempt to put forth a sanitized view of history—in this case, “to ban teaching parts of our history that cast a bad light on white America.” Pepper asked me, “If this was happening in another country, what would you say? You’d say, ‘Oh, my gosh—your democracy is under attack!’ Well, it’s happening in Columbus.” Indeed, he warned, it’s happening in state capitols across the country.
Ohio Republicans put the “divisive concepts” bill on hold after the idea of teaching neutrally about the Holocaust provoked national condemnation. But Ohio’s General Assembly otherwise proceeded at a breakneck pace this past spring—debating a bill enabling the inspection of the genitals of transgender student athletes, and passing a raft of legislation about guns. Many of these new laws were so extreme that they inspired fierce protests from Ohio residents.
A 2018 poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio, showed that Ohioans, by clear majorities ranging from sixty-one to seventy-five per cent, wanted the state legislature to enact new gun-control laws: banning high-powered semi-automatic rifles, including the AR-15; banning extended ammunition magazines; banning bump stocks that, in effect, make semi-automatic rifles automatic; enacting a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases; raising the minimum age to buy semi-automatic rifles from eighteen to twenty-one. But no such measures were passed. Instead, the state legislature has turned Ohio into a so-called “stand your ground” state, where it is legal for residents to kill a trespasser without first attempting to de-escalate the situation. Lawmakers also passed a bill that allows Ohioans aged twenty-one or older to carry concealed handguns virtually anywhere, without first obtaining a permit or undergoing a background check and firearms training. In response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Ohio General Assembly rushed through a law that enables any school board to arm teachers and other staff—including cafeteria workers and bus drivers—after only minimal gun training. The legislation was written by a lawmaker who owns a business in tactical-firearms training, and the lawmaker’s business partner gave testimony in the Ohio Senate in support of the bill, which specified that armed school personnel needed only twenty-four hours of firearms training. (Law-enforcement officers in Ohio must undergo some seven hundred hours of training.) The bill was so extreme that it was denounced in hearings by more than three hundred and fifty speakers—including representatives of the Ohio Federation of Teachers and of the state’s largest police organization, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio.
In an interview, Michael Weinman, the head of government affairs for the Ohio chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents some twenty-four thousand law-enforcement officers, described the new gun laws as “dangerous” and “insane.” Thanks to the legislation, he explained, “anyone can come into Ohio and carry a concealed firearm,” and need not mention having the gun if stopped by law enforcement. Weinman pointed out that the law about arming school employees contains no provision requiring that lethal weapons be locked safely, adding, “Can you imagine a kindergarten student sitting down to be read to, and there’s a gun in the kid’s face?” He noted that, other than teachers, most employees of a school “haven’t been taught how to discipline people—and most school shooters are students.” Melissa Cropper, the president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, told me, “It’s unbelievable. The more guns you have in schools, the more accidents and deaths can happen, especially with such minimal training.” She added, “We are every bit as bad as Texas and Florida when it comes to these laws. We are becoming more and more extreme.”
Weinman said that the rightward turn on guns in Ohio has been driven, in no small part, by “very aggressive gun groups,” some of which profit from extremism by stoking fear. This helps to sell memberships and to expand valuable mailing lists. “These groups are very confrontational,” Weinman said. He recently testified in the Ohio General Assembly against loosening state gun laws; afterward, he told me, Chris Dorr, the head of a particularly militant group called Ohio Gun Owners, chased him out of the room and down a hallway, demanding that he be fired. In an online post, Dorr, who maintains that the National Rifle Association is too soft in its defense of gun rights, posted a closeup shot of Weinman with the caption “remember this face,” adding in another post that Weinman is “the most aggressive gun-rights hater in Ohio.” Dorr and his two brothers, Ben and Aaron, operate affiliated gun groups around the country, which share the slogan “No Compromise.” During the pandemic, the Dorrs’ groups expanded into other vehemently anti-government causes, and helped lead anti-mask and anti-vax protests. Niven, the political scientist, said that the Dorrs “cultivate relationships with the hardest-right members of the state legislature, and can get their bills heard.” Ninety per cent of Ohio voters favor universal background checks for people trying to buy guns, Niven noted, “but the Democrats can’t get a hearing.”
Teresa Fedor, a Democratic state senator who has served in the General Assembly for twenty-two years, described Ohio’s new gun and abortion laws as the worst legislation that she has ever witnessed being passed. She told me, “It feels like Gilead”—the fictional theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Fedor added, “We’ve got state-mandated pregnancies, even of a ten-year-old.”
The issue is personal to her. Fedor, a grandmother, is a former teacher; in her twenties, when she was serving in the military, she was raped. She had an abortion. Fedor was a divorced single mother at the time, trying to earn a teaching degree. “I thought my life was going to be over,” she said. “But abortion was accessible, and it was a way back. To me, that choice meant I’d be able to have a future. I feel like I made it to the other side, and have the life I dreamed of as a little girl, because I had that choice.” Without the freedom to have an abortion, she said, “I wouldn’t be a state senator today.”
In 2015, during a floor debate over abortion policy, Fedor testified about her experience. As she was speaking, she was enraged to notice that another lawmaker, who opposed her view, was chuckling. She said that Republicans who serve in districts that have been engineered to be impervious to voters are “just not listening to the public, period—there’s no need to.” Many of the most extreme bills, Fedor believes, have been written not by the legislators themselves but by local and national right-wing pressure groups, which can raise dark money and turn out primary voters in force. Nationally, the most influential such group is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that essentially outsources the drafting of laws to self-interested businesses. In Ohio, Fedor told me, it is often extreme religious groups that exert undue influence. She then noted that one such organization is about to have “an office right across from the statehouse chamber.”
Facing Ohio’s Greek Revival statehouse is a vacant six-story building that is slated to become the new headquarters of the Center for Christian Virtue, a once obscure nonprofit that an anti-pornography advocate founded four decades ago, in the basement of a Cincinnati church. In 2015 and 2016, the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center classified the organization as a hate group, citing homophobic statements on its Web site that described “homosexual behavior” as “unhealthy and destructive to the individual” and “to society as a whole.” The group subsequently deleted the offending statements, and, according to the Columbus Dispatch, it has recently evolved into “the state’s premier lobbying force on Christian conservative issues.” In the past five years, its full-time staff has expanded from two to thirteen, and its annual budget has risen from four hundred thousand dollars to $1.2 million. The group’s president, Aaron Baer, told me that the new headquarters—the group bought the building for $1.25 million last year, and plans to spend an additional $3.75 million renovating it—is very much meant to send a signal. “The message is that we’re going to be in this for the long haul,” Baer said. “We’re going to have a voice on the direction of the state—and the nation, God willing.”
The center already commands unusual influence. E-mails obtained by a watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, show that Baer has been in regular contact with Governor DeWine’s office about an array of policies. The center’s board of directors includes two of the state’s biggest Republican donors, one of whom, the corporate lobbyist David Myhal, previously served as DeWine’s chief fund-raiser. A third director, Tom Minnery, who has served as the center’s board chair, is a chairman emeritus of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a powerful national legal organization that was created as the religious right’s answer to the American Civil Liberties Union. And, until earlier this year, a fourth director at the center was Seth Morgan, who is currently the vice-chairman of the A.D.F.
The most recently available I.R.S. records show that the center and the A.D.F. share several funding sources—notably, the huge, opaque National Christian Foundation—and have amplified each other’s messages. In April, the center celebrated the A.D.F.’s legal defense of an Ohio college professor who refused to use a student’s preferred pronouns. In addition, the center works in concert with about a hundred and thirty Catholic and evangelical schools, twenty-two hundred churches, and what it calls a Christian Chamber of Commerce of aligned businesses. Jake Grumbach, a political scientist specializing in state government who teaches at the University of Washington, told me that the center illustrates what political scientists are calling the “nationalization of local politics.”
The Center for Christian Virtue appears to be the true sponsor of some of Ohio’s most extreme right-wing bills. Gary Click, the Sandusky-area pastor serving in the Ohio House, acknowledged to me that the group had prompted him to introduce a bill opposing gender-affirming care for transgender youths, regardless of parental consent. The center, in essence, handed Click the wording for the legislation. Click confirmed to me that the center “is very proactive on Cap Square”—the Ohio capitol—adding, “All legislators are aware of their presence.” Click’s transgender bill isn’t yet law, but a related bill, also promoted by the center, has passed in the Ohio House. It stipulates that any student on a girls’ sports team participating in interscholastic conferences must have been born with female genitals. The legislation also calls for genital inspections. Niven observed that “many anti-trans sports bills were percolating” in Republican-ruled statehouses, but “leave it to Ohio to pass a provision for mandatory genital inspection if anyone questions their gender.” He went on, “That’s gerrymandering. You can’t say ‘Show me your daughter’ and stay in office unless you have unlosable districts.”
In a phone interview, Baer told me that his mother and father, who divorced, were Jewish Democrats. But his father converted to Christianity, and became a Baptist pastor. After a rocky adolescence, Baer himself converted to a more conservative form of evangelical Christianity. He told me that the only “real hope for our nation is in Jesus, but we need safeguards in the law.” He described gender-confirming health care for transgender patients as “mutilation.” Baer believes that the Supreme Court should overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage, and he opposes the use of surrogate pregnancy, which he called “renting a womb,” because it “permanently separates the children from their biological mothers.” He supports the Personhood Act—State Representative Click’s proposal to ban abortions at conception. As for Ohio’s much publicized ten-year-old rape victim, Baer told me that the girl would have been better off having her rapist’s baby and raising it, too, because a “child will always do best with the biological mother.”
“Even if the mother is in grade school?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
Baer is untroubled by the notion that gerrymandering has enabled minority rule. “I think the polls that matter are the polls of the folks turning out to vote,” he said.
The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state’s gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority—seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters—passed a similar resolution for the state’s congressional districts.
Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters’ will has thus far been ignored. Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, who is one of two Democratic members of the seven-person redistricting commission, told me, “I was optimistic at the beginning.” But, she explained, the Republican members drafted a new districting map in secret, and earlier this year they presented it to her and the other Democrat just hours before a deadline. The proposed districts were nowhere near proportional to the state’s political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.
This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, “If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn’t happen.”
The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. “They contrived a crisis,” Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again.” He continued, “Now I know it’s been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost.”
Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”
Russo likens the Republicans’ stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: “People are saying, ‘Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?’ Because that’s what’s happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example.”
Pepper has resorted to giving nightly Zoom lectures to small groups of Democratic activists and donors from across the country, in the hope of opening their eyes to what’s happening at the ground level in the statehouses. Meanwhile, he recently co-founded a group called Blue Ohio to fund even seemingly doomed races in deep-red local districts. Even if these Democratic candidates lose in 2022, he says, they will at least be making arguments that voters in many districts would never otherwise hear. “You can’t just abandon half the country to extremism,” he warns.
As Pepper sees it, Republicans understand clearly that, “if it were a level playing field, their positions would be too unpopular to win.” But “this is not a democracy to them anymore.”
He told me, “There are two sides in America, but they’re fighting different battles. The blue side thinks their views are largely popular and democracy is relatively stable—and that they just need better outcomes in federal elections. The focus is on winning swing states in national elections. The other side, though, knows that our democracy isn’t stable—that it can be subverted through the statehouses. Blue America needs to reshape everything it does for that much deeper battle. It’s not about one cycle. It’s a long game.”
Pro-choice demonstrators march on Capitol Hill in July. (photo: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock)
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After Indiana Approves Abortion Ban
The state, national leaders and activists on both sides are gearing up for long slog over abortion laws
The Indiana law, which the Republican-controlled state legislature passed late Friday night and Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) signed moments later, was the first state ban passed since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June and was celebrated as a major victory by abortion foes.
It also came just three days after voters in traditionally conservative Kansas surprised the political world by taking a very different tack, rejecting a ballot measure that would have stripped abortion rights protections from that state’s constitution.
The vote in Indiana capped weeks of fraught debate in Indianapolis, where activists demonstrated at the Statehouse and waged intense lobbying campaigns as Republican lawmakers debated how far the law should go in restricting abortion. Some abortion foes hailed the law’s passage as a road map for conservatives in other states pushing similar bans in the aftermath of the high court’s decision on Roe, which had guaranteed for the past 50 years the right to abortion care.
The Indiana ban, which goes into effect Sept. 15, allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormality, or when the procedure is necessary to prevent severe health risks or death. Indiana joins nine other states that have abortion bans starting at conception.
The new law represents a victory for antiabortion forces, who have been working for decades to halt the procedure. But passage occurred after disagreements among some abortion foes, some of whom thought the bill did not go far enough in stopping the procedure.
After the legislation was signed into law, Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant and one of the state’s largest employers, warned that such laws would hurt its employee recruiting efforts and said the company would look elsewhere for its expansion plans.
“We are concerned that this law will hinder Lilly’s — and Indiana’s — ability to attract diverse scientific engineering and business talent from around the world,” the company said in a statement issued Saturday. “Given this new law, we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state.”
Salesforce, the tech giant with 2,300 employees in Indiana, had previously offered to relocate employees in states with abortion restrictions, though it didn’t respond on Saturday to a request for comment on the Indiana law.
The Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce also warned the ban was passed too quickly and without regard for how it will affect the state’s tourism industry.
“Such an expedited legislative process — rushing to advance state policy on broad, complex issues — is, at best, detrimental to Hoosiers, and at worst, reckless,” the chamber said in a statement, asking, “Will the Indy region continue to attract tourism and convention investments?”
Indiana lost out on 12 conventions and an estimated $60 million of business after it passed a religious freedom law in 2015, according to one local tourism group’s estimate.
Indiana is the first state to ban abortion by legislature since the Supreme Court decision in June overturning Roe v. Wade. Other states enacted “trigger laws” that went into effect with the fall of Roe.
Indiana may be just the beginning. Abortion rights advocates estimate that abortion could be severely restricted or banned in as many as half of the 50 states.
An official at Indiana Right to Life, an antiabortion group, said the new law will end 95 percent of abortions in Indiana and will close all abortion clinics in the state on Sept. 15, the date the legislation takes effect, unless abortion activists go to court and get an injunction beforehand.
Indiana has considered abortion restrictions for years, though it remained a state where many in the region traveled for abortion care. Now, as many nearby states — including Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia — also push for abortion bans, patients may have to travel hundreds of miles in some cases for care, said Elizabeth Nash, a policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights. “Patients in Ohio won’t be able to go to Indiana for access. They’ll have to get to, perhaps, Illinois or Michigan,” she said.
Passage of the Indiana measure occurred just weeks after national attention was focused on a 10-year-old girl who was raped in Ohio, where abortion is banned after six weeks, and traveled to Indiana to terminate the pregnancy.
Caitlin Bernard, the doctor who performed that abortion in Indianapolis, tweeted Saturday that she was “devastated” by the legislature’s action. “How many girls and women will be hurt before they realize this must be reversed? I will continue to fight for them with every fiber of my being,” she wrote.
The Indiana measure drew swift condemnation from national Democrats, who sought to cast Republicans as extreme on abortion — citing the vote earlier this week in Kansas, where even rural, conservative parts of the state rejected changing the state’s constitutional right to an abortion.
The law is “another radical step by Republican legislators to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedom,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
Democrats are hopeful, though, that they can use what happened in Indiana to cast the entire Republican Party as extreme on abortion.
“This has nothing to do with being ‘pro-life,’” tweeted California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). “It’s about power and control.”
In Washington, Republican leaders have been largely silent on Republican-led states’ push to ban abortion, with a few exceptions.
“It will be an issue in November if we’re not moderating ourselves," Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, referencing being raped at 16, which she first revealed about three years ago. “'Handmaid’s Tale’ is not supposed to be a roadmap."
The outcome of the vote in Kansas to preserve abortion rights has also increased momentum for a ballot initiative in South Dakota, another Republican-controlled Great Plains state, to preserve the right to an abortion in the first trimester.
When asked about the potential South Dakota ballot initiative, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he believes the state legislature should first debate and discuss abortion and come to a consensus. If lawmakers don’t reach a solution, then there’s “always the possibility” of a referendum or ballot initiative.
Polls consistently show that near-total abortion bans like the one in Indiana are unpopular with the general public.
So when Indiana Republicans ban abortion for an entire state, “they are effectively speaking for all Republicans,” said Martha McKenna, a Democratic political strategist, “and that’s why I have hope it’s a good issue for Democrats in November.”
Another political strategist, Jonathan Levy, who worked on the Kansans For Constitutional Freedom campaign, which is opposed to limiting abortion rights, said the Kansas vote showed that extreme antiabortion positions are “going to be rejected by Americans across the political spectrum. The American people want legislators to focus on how to keep food on the table, keep the economy afloat. They think the legislature’s priorities are out of whack,” he said.
Alongside the near-total abortion ban, Indiana Republicans passed legislation they said was intended to support pregnant women and mothers, but critics pointed out much of the money was directed at propping up pregnancy crisis centers run by antiabortion groups.
Health providers and abortion counseling agencies were struggling to figure out the full impact of the legislation.
Indiana University Health, a major health-care provider in the state, issued a statement saying it was trying to determine what the ban meant for its doctors and patients.
“We will take the next few weeks to fully understand the terms of the new law and how to incorporate changes into our medical practice to protect our providers and care for people seeking reproductive health,” the health provider said in a statement.
Meanwhile, activists began discussing plans to raise funds and provide transportation for those seeking abortion access after the ban goes into effect, said Carol McCord, a former employee at Planned Parenthood.
“Since this is soon to be illegal in Indiana, we are looking for ways to help women travel to get services that they need,” she said. Indiana law was already considered restrictive compared with other states, so about 35 percent of women seeking abortions traveled out of state already, said Jessica Marchbank, who serves as the state programs manager for the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center in Bloomington, Ind.
Democratic state legislators began strategizing Saturday about how to respond, including considering repeal measures and organizing voters to elect legislators who favor abortion rights.
“This is a dark time for Indiana,” said state Sen. Shelli Yoder, an assistant Democratic caucus chair. “The plan going forward is to be sure we come out in November and vote out the individuals who supported something that only a tiny minority of Hoosiers wanted.”
Yoder said in an interview that she and like-minded state legislators are contemplating action in the near term that could undo the impact of the new law, noting that the legislature has not been formally adjourned.
“We can come back and fix this,” she said, adding that legislators are at the early stage of planning how to do that.
Katie Blair, the advocacy and public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Indiana, said Saturday that her organization will examine legal action.
“You can guarantee that our legal team will be working with partners to evaluate every legal avenue available to defend abortion access here in Indiana,” Blair said in a statement.
In signing the legislation, Holcomb applauded the work of the lawmakers he had called into special session this summer to find a way to restrict abortion, acknowledging disagreements among those opposed to abortion.
“These actions followed long days of hearings filled with sobering and personal testimony from citizens and elected representatives on this emotional and complex topic,” the governor said in a statement. “Ultimately, those voices shaped and informed the final contents of the legislation and its carefully negotiated exceptions to address some of the unthinkable circumstances a woman or unborn child might face.”
Republican controlled states that rushed to ban abortions already had poor public health records, performing poorly in response to COVID, with high maternal & infant deaths rates.
This does not bode well for public health care in those states.
Demonstrators outside the White House on Feb. 24 protest Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (photo: Kent Nishimura/LA Times)
Four more ships carrying grain and sunflower oil have left Ukraine ports via a safe maritime corridor.
But last week the first ship left Ukraine's ports since February.
The latest ships to set sail are bound for Turkey where they'll be inspected as part of a deal reached with Russia and the United Nations.
They left on Sunday from the ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk, and will all travel through the Bosphorus strait.
After the inspections, two are then scheduled to dock in Turkey, while the others are headed for Italy and China.
Another empty ship arrived in Chornomorsk on Sunday afternoon, ready to be loaded with grain for export.
Under a deal brokered by Turkey and the UN last month, Russia agreed not to target ships which were in transit, while Ukraine said it would guide vessels through mined waters.
The deal, set to last 120 days, can be renewed if both sides agree.
The complex arrangement seems to be working, at least for now.
The success of this deal, a rare diplomatic breakthrough in this five-month-old conflict, is vital for Ukraine - and the rest of the world.
Twenty million tonnes of grain are stuck in the country, as a result of the blockade imposed by Russia on Ukrainian ports. If the deal holds, Ukraine expects to export up to three million tonnes of grain per month.
Ukrainian authorities say there are good signs that the grain exports are safe, and have urged companies to return to the country's ports. The hope is that the exports will help ease the global food crisis while bringing in much needed foreign currency.
But fears persist. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the resumption of exports, but said security concerns remained.
The first ship to leave Ukraine last week - the Razoni - departed Odesa carrying 27,000 tonnes of corn bound for the Lebanese port of Tripoli.
However officials have said it will not dock in Tripoli on Sunday as planned.
The Ukrainian embassy in Lebanon told Reuters news agency on Sunday that the ship was "delayed", with no details on the cause or an updated arrival date.
A Joint Coordination Centre which was set up to oversee the exports said the Razoni's voyage would be a trial run, with its experience used to fine-tune procedures for the following voyages.
People steer a 'trajiner'’, or gondola, at dawn past one of the the artificial islands, known as ‘chinampas,’ on a canal at Lake Xochimilco. (photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images)
The future of an endangered salamander rests on an ecosystem long in demise.
The farmer, Dionisio Eslava, expected a good harvest of the mix of crops he’d planted earlier that year. He showed the agricultural scientist, Carlos Sumano, the sowing cubes he’d created with mud scooped up from the bottom of canals in a Mesoamerican farming technique. “They’re just about ready for transplanting,” Eslava said, carefully pulling a single cube from the ground and, after a closer look, returning it to its place with other chili-pepper plants.
Eslava and Sumano are working together to preserve the region’s chinampas, remnants of the branch-and-reed platforms that Mesoamerican farmers covered in nutrient-rich lake mud to grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers. They are part of a conservation partnership that is tapping Indigenous agricultural knowledge and scientific expertise to prevent the demise of Xochimilco (pronounced so-chee-meel-koh)—an ecosystem of more than 6,000 acres of protected wetlands that provides multiple environmental benefits, including food production, groundwater recharge, and carbon sequestration.
The traditional farmers, known as chinamperos, and scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (also known by its Spanish acronym, UNAM) are seeking to encourage sustainable and pesticide-free ancient farming to restore areas degraded by rampant development, pollution, and overexploitation of groundwater. Although they haven’t always seen eye to eye over the years, the farmers and scientists agree that a healthier ecosystem will ensure not only continued food production but also the survival of the remarkable salamander called the axolotl, or ajolote, which is on the brink of extinction.
So far, the project involves some 30 farmers, including Eslava, who rely on ancient agricultural methods that include extracting a mix of rich soil and decaying vegetation from the marshy lake bed to grow crops. Among other things, they are digging narrow canals adjacent to chinampas to act as a refuge for the critically endangered axolotl and other threatened species. Rustic filters made from aquatic plants are placed in the canals to absorb contaminants and increase water transparency.
Chinamperos maintain the canals, irrigate crops with cleaner water from restored waterways, and replace pesticides with organic fertilizers. Scientists evaluate species development and changes in water quality. They collect samples of water and soil to test in the laboratory for the presence of bacteria, heavy metals, and other pollutants. When the canals are free of contaminants and have reduced salinity, the water quality is better prepared to sustain the axolotl and other native species. Sumano and his colleagues also hold workshops on organic fertilizers and water and soil quality.
The farmers, meanwhile, provide the project with a wealth of knowledge that has been passed down through generations, Sumano says. “We’re working with people who know how to get results on their chinampas,” he says. “It’s not like the institution is here to tell them what needs to be done.”
Eslava views the exchange of knowledge as a boon for one of the last vestiges of a centuries-old lake culture facing major threats to its survival. For years, he’s worked on his own and with other chinamperos to clean up garbage from the shallow waterways he has navigated in wooden canoes since he was a youngster. “We contribute what our ancestors taught us about the richness of the chinampas,” he says. “Scientists bring resources; they monitor the quality of the water and the nutrients in the soil.”
Still, some farmers remain wary of scientists because, over the decades, researchers from various institutions have studied Xochimilco in isolation, neglecting to tap the deep local understanding of chinamperos. “They didn’t want to hear what we had to say, just like the authorities didn’t want to hear what we had to say, because we are farmers,” Eslava says.
When he accepted Sumano’s invitation to join the project in 2020, Eslava was already relying on traditional farming methods without pesticides. But he hoped that scientific expertise and resources could help expand Xochimilco’s sustainable agriculture and improve the habitat for the axolotl and other native species, such as the freshwater crayfish acocil and the minnow-size charal.
Eslava says he believes that more farmers, as well as more people in the region, are coming to realize the importance of preserving Xochimilco and its biodiversity. “If we all do our part,” he adds, “we can leave something much better here for future generations.”
Despite the environmental pressures, the ecosystem remains a striking green space on the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco. Although it’s technically part of a metropolitan area of more than 20 million people, it retains a tranquil atmosphere. Rows of its most emblematic tree—the ahuejote, or “willow”—border chinampas in a showy formation, the intertwined roots anchoring the plots. Xochimilco’s meaning in the Nahuatl language, “field of flowers,” is reflected in a landscape bursting with flowers such as purple bougainvilleas and yellow floripondios (or angel’s trumpets) and rich with birds such as white pelicans and egrets.
Xochimilco, which UNESCO recognized as a World Heritage Site in 1987, was once part of a vast network of lakes and canals that stretched through the Valley of Mexico, where various Nahuatl-speaking Indigenous communities thrived long before Spanish colonizers arrived in the 16th century. The Spanish eventually drained the waterways as a new city replaced the conquered Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, and urbanization over the centuries has further degraded the chinampas, despite multiple efforts to protect the area.
As the deterioration has worsened, concern has grown over the fate of the axolotl—“water monster” in Nahuatl—which has profound cultural significance in Mexico as a symbol of the country’s pre-Hispanic history. A grinning image of the creature, with its unusual flat head and crownlike gills, graces Mexico’s new 50-peso bill.
Luis Zambrano, a biologist at UNAM who oversees the chinampas project with the farmers, arrived in Xochimilco in the early 2000s to research the axolotl. Researchers have long studied the small salamander’s extraordinary regenerative abilities in hopes of uncovering biological secrets that could one day help renew human tissue. The axolotl, which retains its juvenile characteristics into adulthood, can grow new limbs and other missing organs.
When Zambrano began studying the animal, it was under siege in the canals, where it had lived for centuries, as a result of poor water quality and invasive carp and tilapia, which were introduced in the 1970s and ’80s to promote fishing and which devour axolotl eggs and feed on the insects, small fish, and crustaceans that are crucial for the salamander’s survival.
Wild-axolotl sightings are rare, but Zambrano says that a survey of the population is pending. The last count conducted by the university, in 2014, estimated the presence of axolotls to be 36 per square kilometer (or about 0.386 square miles). A survey conducted in 1998 put that number at 6,000 per square kilometer.
Zambrano’s initial research has gradually expanded to include exploring the mutually beneficial union of salamander and chinampa. In 2017, his team received about 7 million pesos (or more than $370,000) for the project. The federal funding, made available for UNESCO-designated sites, kicked the project into high gear. In later years, Zambrano says, the funds decreased to 5 million pesos—including a portion provided by the local government.
The waterways of Mexico are the only natural habitat of the axolotl, although the amphibian is abundant in captivity and a popular pet in various corners of the world. But Zambrano says that differences between wild and captive-bred creatures are considerable because captive axolotls experience losses in physiological and behavioral capabilities.
While Zambrano’s original idea was for surviving axolotls to wiggle on their own into the restored canals or refuges, researchers are also looking into the possibility of introducing captive-bred creatures to these spaces. Before that can be done, however, Zambrano says that they need more information about the salamanders’ genetics and reproductive capabilities, among other things. It’s known that farmers sometimes release axolotls into canals after raising them in aquariums, but the researchers say that this is generally frowned upon due to environmental regulations.
If the axolotl goes extinct in the wild, it will be a tremendous loss to Mexico and the world, Zambrano says: “It’s not only one of the most researched species in terms of genetics, but it’s an animal that’s closely connected to our Mexican culture.”
In Aztec mythology, the creature is the last incarnation of Xólotl, the god of fire, who transformed himself several times after refusing to die in sacrifice for the launch of a fifth cycle of creation. It’s a story passed down among generations, and Eslava knows it well. “When Xólotl was discovered, he was condemned to stay a salamander forever and was told that when his body of water was no longer useful, he and the human race would disappear,” he explains.
The ancient tale seems particularly relevant nowadays, Eslava maintains: “We are experiencing enormous pollution worldwide, and many species are becoming extinct. Here in Xochimilco, we are putting a lot of pressure on the axolotl area and the water that’s so important to us.”
On another spring day, Eslava paddles in the shallow waters of Xochimilco toward the chinampa where he grows his crops. Although he was away for years when he worked for the government and when he retired, he returned to his childhood home some years ago to find another Xochimilco. Houses had replaced vegetables in chinampas, plastic bags of trash piled high in the waterways, and treated water flowed in canals once awash with natural spring water.
As Mexico City’s population has grown, intensive water pumping has depleted much of the underground sources that used to feed the maze of canals. They now get treated wastewater from nearby plants, which has contributed to the decay of waterways and chinampas. “Things were different when I was growing up,” Eslava says. “It was cleaner; there was no plastic at all. The scent of flowers was intense in the morning, and there were still many beautiful chinampas and canals.”
Read: ‘Archaeology can cover the totality of the human story’
Many farmers have abandoned their chinampas, either because they’re not interested in farming or because they can’t make a living out of it. Some rent out their plots, and instead of growing crops, tenants build houses or turn them into soccer fields or other unauthorized sites.
Meanwhile, crowds of visitors roam the waters of Xochimilco in colorful flat-bottomed boats called trajineras, injecting money into the local economy but also straining the ecosystem.
Eslava had already been involved in cleanup projects and restoration efforts with other Xochimilco residents when Carlos Sumano came calling in 2020. Eslava relished the idea of the project because the university’s sponsorship would help provide funding and resources to assist chinamperos in reactivating dormant chinampa agriculture.
“All the fertilizer we need is down there in the water,” he says. “All the vegetation that disintegrates there is a very rich material; it’s what our ancestors used. That’s why chinampa farming was so rich. There was an enormous diversity of crops, and everything was done using traditional methods like mud and native seeds.”
Those traditions gradually succumbed to new agricultural practices that were ushered in starting in the 1940s with the promise of greater yields. “The ‘green revolution’ was this vision of increasing agricultural productivity as fast as possible, as best as possible, and that’s when the use of pesticides and fertilizers started to grow,” Zambrano says. “But the quality of the water is reduced a lot when you put in pesticides and fertilizers, because they kill everything, including the axolotl.”
Narciso Alvarado is another chinampero who has stopped using pesticides and is participating in the project. He spends most of his days tending to such crops as cauliflower, onions, and radishes in his chinampa. The idea of being able to sell his crops at a fair price with validation from the university, while helping to restore the ecosystem, appealed to him. “I’ve been farming for a long time, and I want to keep doing it here in Xochimilco,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t want chinampas to disappear.”
Neither does Eslava, who spends much of his time improving plots. He and Sumano recently brought six very young axolotls bred in aquariums to a narrow, restored canal. The minuscule creatures, which resembled tadpoles, wiggled out of a bucket and into the water. Sumano explains that the axolotls were placed there to be monitored for a few days, after which Eslava took them back out.
Zambrano believes that the project has already started to reap benefits, such as healthy species in some canals and growing interest in reactivating abandoned chinampas. He notes that ambitious restoration projects such as this one take time and effort. But “reactivating chinampas, restoring Xochimilco, implies improvement of biodiversity, improvement of the city’s water management, improvement of microhabitat changes,” he says. “It implies more resiliency in terms of climate change and conservation of an iconic species like the axolotl, as well as a significant increase in local food production.”
Mary L. Johnson is photographed at the wall of names installation at the Remaking the Exceptional exhibit. (photo: Alice Kim/InTheseTimes)
There was a saying among the mothers: “We’re there for every mother’s son.”
Louva was one of the pioneering mothers, along with Costella Cannon and Jeanette Johnson, who helped their sons organize the Death Row Ten campaign. JoAnn Patterson was another trailblazer in Chicago’s anti-death penalty movement. She worked with her son, who was also tortured by Burge and sentenced to death, to form the Aaron Patterson Defense Committee, arguably the first prisoner defense committee to gain public attention since the Pontiac 17 were charged with inciting a riot at Pontiac Correctional Center on July 22, 1978. Mary L. Johnson, whose son Michael had escaped the death penalty but was serving a life sentence, was one of the first people to file a complaint against Burge. An outspoken activist and leader of the police watchdog group Citizens Alert, she was also a fierce warrior in the anti-death penalty movement. As an organizer with CEDP, I worked closely with the Death Row Ten mothers, who were so different and yet so similar to my Korean mother, and they became dear to me as we attended chapter meetings, made signs with pictures of their sons that the mothers carried around with them, went to protests, had meals together, traveled to demonstrations (sometimes across the country) and visited their sons on death row.
Uncovering and surfacing their central role in the movement is crucial to understanding the on-the-ground forces that ultimately led to the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois. CEDP embraced an inside-outside organizing strategy in which we saw ourselves as co-strugglers who fought alongside people on death row. This meant that I was in frequent communication with Ronnie. We talked by phone every week and wrote to each other regularly, and I tried to visit once a month, so I became particularly close to his mother. When I met Louva, she was working two jobs as a home healthcare aid and lived in a small apartment on 87th Street. We got to know each other as we raced around the city and on the two-and-a-half-hour drive to and from the prison. On our first visit to Pontiac together, I learned a crucial lesson — one that has stayed with me all these years — about love and sacrifice, and creating the bonds of chosen family across the prison wall.
When we got to the visitor’s center, a misleading name since it was essentially a security checkpoint run by prison officers, I told the officer we were there to visit Ronald Kitchen and gave his prison number, B09130. I was surprised when Louva quickly said that she would be visiting Renaldo Hudson instead. Since Ronnie was getting a visit from me, she explained, she would call out Renaldo because he did not get many visits. Louva had become a surrogate mother to Renaldo after she started visiting him years back when Ronnie was getting a lot of visits from family.
“She was a mother who was hurting from a deep wound, knowing her son was innocent,” Renaldo told me. “She was fighting for her innocent son, and she chose to love a guilty one.” He said that the love Louva had for him is one of the reasons he was able to stay sane. While he was missing love from his biological family, he got it from his surrogate family.
There was a saying among the mothers: “We’re there for every mother’s son.” For Louva, that meant “adopting” Renaldo as her son. For Mary L., it meant visiting death row at Pontiac and Menard, the two Illinois prisons with condemned units, multiple times a year, in addition to going to see her son, who was serving a life sentence. Walking the galleries of death row talking to the men through the bars in their cells, Mary L. said, “When they saw me, they said I reminded them of the mother they hadn’t seen in years. I remind them of the sister they left behind.” Mary L.’s actions are a reminder that everyone behind bars is someone’s child who we can choose to embrace and see fully in all their humanity, not one-dimensionally.
Discussing the dangers of a single story, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, “The consequence of the single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult and it emphasizes that we are different rather than how we are similar.” The mothers rejected the single story that was being told about their sons and used their voices to put a human face on the death penalty, at a time when an execution was taking place every week somewhere in the nation, and the majority of Americans supported the death penalty.
Wherever they went, the mothers told their sons’ stories, reclaiming their dignity and their sons’. Louva described how the police had arrested Ronnie when he was on the way to the store to buy cookie dough for his son, how they beat him with a telephone book, forcing him to confess to something he did not do. She would also talk about how playful and charming her son could be. This was so true — even on death row, his smile could make you forget you were visiting him in one of the most sterile, inhumane places on the planet.
Even as the carceral system extends its reach into our everyday lives through surveillance cameras on our blocks and police on our campuses and in our schools, it is easy to think of prisons, and those caged in them, as disconnected from our own lives, as Angela Davis wrote, “This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.” Consequently, we think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others. This othering is one of the ideological impacts of mass incarceration.
bell hooks described the margins as a space of radical openness where “resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination.” While “we come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle,” hooks asserted that “we are transformed individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity.” The Death Row Ten and the mothers of the movement transformed the prison into a site of radical possibility and resistance.
The mothers stood by their sons and one another’s sons in the face of a hostile and racist legal system where they and their children were considered disposable. They pushed back against the tough-on-crime hysteria that dominated national politics and created the conditions that allowed Burge and his officers to torture Black people in their custody with impunity. And they pushed back against a death penalty system that was intent on legally lynching their sons. They testified before the Illinois legislature, marched on Washington, D.C., and in the streets of Chicago, visited death row with Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition — and did the mundane organizing of making phone calls and stuffing envelopes.
Their activism laid the groundwork for a critical meeting with then-Gov. George Ryan at a pivotal political moment prior to his decision to issue blanket commutations of Illinois’s death sentences in 2003. In the fall of 2002, a yearlong campaign urging the governor to issue commutations before he left office, which had been gaining traction, was met by an intense backlash in the media. Working with local anti-death penalty groups, they sought a meeting with the governor, too. When Ryan announced his decision to issue blanket commutations, he noted the meeting “with a group of people who are less often heard from, and who are not as popular with the media.”
As the primary lifelines for their sons, the mothers bore the brunt of the hardships that came with having a loved one condemned to death by the state. The stigma and isolation they experienced because their child had been convicted and sentenced to death were intense. Their strength and compassion — alongside their pain — were palpable to me. Black mothers have often been praised for their resilience, but for me, while it is important to acknowledge the resilience of the mothers as they steadfastly resisted the state, it is equally important not to gloss over the trauma that they experienced. While the mothers endured and showed incredible tenacity, they suffered immeasurably, too.
The mothers found strength in one another and the community of activists they helped to create. As mothers of the movement, they were powerful truth tellers, strategic organizers, and critical thinkers with deep reservoirs of knowledge about the criminalization of Black communities and the violence of the state. These undaunted mothers built a culture of meaningful solidarity in the anti-torture and anti-death penalty movements. Their connection and entanglements with one another and one another’s sons — their involvement and relationships with one another and their unwanted but courageous adventure together — became an instrument of refusal and resistance that inspired a movement and built a beloved community.
Taysir al-Jabari, a senior Islamic Jihad official, was the latest Palestinian to be targeted by Israel. (photo: Abed Zagout/Anadolu Agency)
The latest Israeli killing fits a pattern of targeted assassinations of Islamic Jihad and Hamas commanders and other prominent Palestinians.
The killing was one of many assassinations carried out by Israel that targeted not only Islamic Jihad members, but also individuals affiliated to other groups including Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Fatah – the ruling party in the occupied West Bank.
Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, has been accused of several high-profile killings involving Palestinians around the world dating back to the 1950s, although Israel has consistently denied the accusations.
One of a handful of failed attempts targeted Khaled Meshaal, a Palestinian political leader who was the former head of Hamas’ political bureau.
Here is a timeline of key assassinations targeting Palestinian military commanders and individuals.
Taysir al-Jabari, killed on August 5, 2022:
A commander of the Al-Quds Brigades, Taysir al-Jabari died in an air strike on an apartment in the Palestine Tower in the centre of Gaza City.
Smoke poured out of the seventh floor of the building as civil defence teams rushed to the scene to evacuate people and put out a fire caused by the attack.
In a statement, the Islamic Jihad said: “The enemy has begun a war targeting our people, and we all have the duty to defend ourselves and our people, and not allow the enemy to get away with its actions which are aimed at undermining the resistance and national steadfastness.”
Shireen Abu Akleh, killed May 11, 2022:
Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier as she covered raids by its forces in the occupied West Bank.
The killing of Abu Akleh sparked international outrage and calls for accountability for attacks on journalists. The slain journalist covered events and Israeli attacks in the occupied Palestinian territory for 25 years, becoming a familiar face across the Arab world.
She was killed while in full protective press gear clearly identifying her as a journalist in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Fadi al-Batsh, killed on April 21, 2018:
A Palestinian scholar and scientist, Fadi al-Batsh was shot dead by two assailants in a drive-by shooting in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
The 35-year-old, a Hamas member originally from Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, died on April 21, 2018, and was a relative of a senior official in the Gaza branch of the Islamic Jihad movement. His family accused Mossad of carrying out the killing.
Mazen Fuqaha, killed on March 24, 2017:
Mazen Fuqaha, originally from Tubas in the West Bank, was a senior commander in the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. He was shot in the head and chest in his car on March 24, 2017, near his home in Gaza.
The gunmen who carried out the killing were believed to have arrived in Gaza by sea, according to local reports. Following his death, Hamas handed down death sentences to three Palestinians it ruled had taken part in what it described as an Israeli-led assassination.
Mohammed al-Zawari, killed on December 15, 2016:
Mohammed al-Zawari, a 49-year-old aviation engineer who Hamas said was a member of its drone team, was shot dead in a hail of bullets at the wheel of his car outside his home in Sfax, Tunisia on December 15, 2016, by two Bosnian nationals.
Hamas credited him with developing the Ababeel drones used against the last Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014. Al-Zawari’s family and Hamas both accused Mossad of being behind the assassination.
Mohamed Abo Shamaleh, Raed al-Attar and Mohamed Barhoum, killed on August 21, 2014:
The three high-ranking Hamas commanders were killed in a round of Israeli air raids on August 21, 2014, days after an attempt to kill the al-Qassam Brigades’ military chief, Mohammed Deif, failed.
While Shamaleh and Barhoum served as top commanders in southern Gaza, al-Attar headed the construction of the Gaza tunnels, and reportedly oversaw the inflow of weaponry into the strip.
Ahmed Jaabari, killed on November 14, 2012:
A top-level operational commander in the al-Qassam Brigades, Ahmed Jaabari was killed on November 14, 2012, in an Israeli air raid during an operation targeting armed groups.
Jabari, who survived four previous assassination attempts, co-ordinated much of Hamas’s military capability, its military strategy, and the transformation of the military wing. The 52-year-old was credited developing Hamas’s military arsenal and its networks in Iran, Sudan and Lebanon.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, killed on January 19, 2010:
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh served as the chief logistics and weapons procurement for the al-Qassam Brigades, was killed on January 19, 2010, in Dubai. Originally from Jabalia in Gaza, al-Mabhouh was a longtime Israeli target, according to Hamas, for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers. Both Hamas and Dubai pinned the killing on Mossad.
On August 3, 2014, Israel’s Shin Bet – the secret police agency – killed his nephew Ahmed al-Mabhouh, who oversaw the launching of rockets from the strip.
Nizar Rayyan, killed on January 1, 2009:
One of Hamas’ most senior figures, Nizar Rayyan was killed on January 1, 2009. Hailing from Jabalia, the 50-year-old PhD holder served as a preacher. He was also engaged in Hamas’s negotiations with the Palestinian factions and served as one of the main political leaders of the movement.
In 2004, Rayyan became Hamas’s highest religious leader after Israeli forces killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Ahmed Yassin, killed on March 22, 2004:
Ahmed Yassin, 67, was an imam who founded the Hamas movement in 1987 after spending time in Egypt as a student. Yassin spent several years in Israeli prisons for allegedly forming an underground organisation and possessing weapons.
At the time, the Israeli government had openly called for his assassination, before killing him on March 22, 2014, while on his way out of a Gaza mosque.
The US has remained silent against ISRAEL'S GENOCIDE and vetoed Global condemnation by the UN.
How many times has ISRAEL killed UNARMED CIVILIANS simply because they're PALESTINIANS?
ISRAEL does not want PEACE.
ISRAEL has never worked toward PEACE.
The Allies plunked the Jews onto land that belonged to PALESTINIANS and made no adequate provisions for re-settlement among numerous other things.
That the US & Allies are not condemning ISRAEL is their SHAME!
In the US, NONE DARE SPEAK ILL OF ISRAEL!
We've seen the aggressive atacks by AIPAC & their allies to defeat candidates who speak the truth and offer solutions.
ISRAEL doesn't want PEACE and they never have.
The truth is available if one looks.
74th Anniversary of the Nakba at the Lincoln Memorial
https://countercurrents.org/2022/05/74th-anniversary-of-the-nakba-at-the-lincoln-memorial/
Another Palestinian Journalist Killed by the IDF
https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/another-palestinian-journalist-killed-by-the-idf/
UN report declares “perpetual occupation” as “the underlying root cause” of Israeli-Palestinian conflict
https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/un-report-declares-perpetual-occupation-as-the-underlying-root-cause-of-israeli-palestinian-conflict/
Worth reading in its entirety:
excerpt:
In the Zionist Megiddo prison
(This is part of my memoir I published successively on the pages of Countercurrents on the Zionist invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp and the jail experience in the Zionist jails.)
https://countercurrents.org/2022/08/in-the-zionist-megiddo-prison/
The Road to Megiddo
https://countercurrents.org/2022/05/the-road-to-megiddo/
The long road to Palestine, A prisoner in my home!
https://countercurrents.org/2022/05/the-long-road-to-palestine-a-prisoner-in-my-home/
The second wave of the Zionist arrests
https://countercurrents.org/2022/05/the-second-wave-of-the-zionist-arrests/
From Countercurrents:
Israel’s bombardment of the occupied Gaza Strip entered its second day on Saturday with no sign of de-escalation as the United States, European Union and other Western countries gave Tel Aviv a green light to continue its campaign of killing and destruction.
By late evening on Saturday, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza had killed at least five more people.
The health ministry in Gaza said that 24 had been killed in the territory, including six children, since Israel launched the surprise attack on Friday afternoon by assassinating a senior leader of the Islamic Jihad resistance group.
More than 200 Palestinians have been injured.
Israel claimed an air strike in Rafah on Saturday evening killed Khalid Mansour, the commander of Islamic Jihad in southern Gaza. But the group did not immediately confirm that.
There were reports of at least five people killed in an explosion near a mosque in Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on Saturday night, among them several children.
But Israel denied bombing the area and claimed the deaths were caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
Throughout the day, Israeli warplanes continued to strike densely populated residential areas, targeting civilians and their property. And an Israeli military spokesperson warned the assault could last a week.
Islamic Jihad fired 350 rockets into Gaza by Saturday afternoon, including towards Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion airport.
While Hamas, which controls Gaza’s internal affairs, has backed Islamic Jihad’s response, it has yet to launch a single rocket at Israel since Israel launched its assault on Friday.
Hamas said on Friday that resistance factions were coordinating their responses. Its restraint so far may be an indication that the resistance groups are trying to contain the flare-up before it erupts into a full-blown confrontation with Israel.
This may change on Sunday as Israelis plan to ascend to the al-Aqsa mosque compound for the first day of the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, which in Jewish belief commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.
Many of these Jewish extremists want to see the al-Aqsa mosque replaced with a new Jewish temple.
The Israeli police is permitting them to do so, with the expected participation of extreme-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Similar provocations led to Israel’s May 2021 assault, when Hamas responded to Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem with barrages of rockets into Israel.
Toll rises
A missile fired by Israeli warplanes struck a group of people east of Khan Younis early Saturday, killing 24-year-old Tamim Ghassan Abdullah Hijazi and 27-year-old Osama Abdulrahman Hussein al-Suri, according to the Gaza-based human rights group Al-Mezan.
Hours later, Israeli warplanes fired three missiles at the three-story home of a family of 40 southwest of Gaza City, where mostly women and children lived, destroying the building completely and damaging other houses nearby.
On Saturday afternoon, Israeli warplanes destroyed another home occupied by four families and caused severe damage to nearby residences.
In the northern Jabaliya area, Israeli warplanes struck a group of Palestinians, killing 28-year-old Hasan Muhammad Yousef Mansour and severely injuring another.
Israeli warplanes also hit a group of Palestinians, mainly women and children, who were getting in a car to go to a family wedding.
Al-Mezan said the attack killed the groom’s mother, Naamah Talbat Muhammad Abu Qaidah.
Five children were injured.
Power outages
Greatly exacerbating the situation for Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants, the territory’s only power plant said that it would shut down on Saturday due to Israel’s continued closure of external crossings, blocking fuel imports.
Gaza has just a quarter of the power it needs during the summer, according to Gisha, an Israeli human rights group. This means residents may now receive only four hours of electricity per day, followed by an outage of 12 hours.
This is a particularly dire threat to Gaza’s healthcare system, which has already been battered by successive Israeli assaults and 15 years of an ongoing siege.
Pharmaceutical supplies in Gaza are at their “worst in years,” the Palestinian health ministry stated.
There are also severe shortages of supplies for labs and blood banks and other medical consumables.
Power outages pose a “serious threat” to vital hospital departments, including emergency rooms, intensive care units and dialysis clinics, the ministry said.
Desalination plants, sewage pumps and water supplies to homes will also be disrupted, “which may cause a severe health and humanitarian disaster,” the health ministry warned.
Israeli authorities continue to block the entry of two dozen x-ray machines and spare parts to repair medical devices in essential emergency departments.
All scheduled surgeries are being postponed to help hospitals cope with those injured in the ongoing Israeli attacks.
Meanwhile, Israel’s continued closure of the Erez checkpoint is preventing hundreds of Palestinian patients from leaving Gaza for medical treatment, putting their lives at risk, according to Al-Mezan.
The health ministry announced that a shutdown of the power plant would start a 72-hour countdown to health services coming to a standstill.
Lynn Hastings, the UN humanitarian coordinator in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, called for “an immediate de-escalation and halt to the violence” on Saturday.
Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada.
Originally published in The Electronic Intifada.
https://countercurrents.org/2022/08/israels-killing-campaign-continues-in-gaza/
A truck drives along flooded Wolverine Road in Breathitt County, Ky., on July 28. Heavy rains caused flash flooding and mudslides in parts of central Appalachia. (photo: Ryan C. Hermens/AP)
‘The infrastructure we have is really built for a climate we are not living in anymore,’ said one scientist who studies extreme precipitation
Places around the nation are facing more frequent, more extreme precipitation over time — a reality laid bare once again by the record-shattering rains and catastrophic flooding in eastern Kentucky and St. Louis last week.
The warming atmosphere is supercharging any number of weather-related disasters — wildfires, hurricanes, crippling heat waves. But as it also fuels once-unthinkable amounts of rain in single bursts, the problem of so much water arriving so quickly is posing serious challenges in a nation where the built environment is not only outdated but increasingly outmatched.
“The infrastructure we have is really built for a climate we are not living in anymore,” said Andreas Prein, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) who studies extreme precipitation.
From populated cities to rural outposts, the United States has long struggled with antiquated sewage and wastewater networks, outdated bridges and crumbling roads and culverts. But as more water falls from the sky more quickly in many places, those challenges have become only more urgent.
“What happened was way more than the system — any system — can handle,” Sean Hadley, spokesman for the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District, said of the recent storms that dumped more than 9 inches of rain there in a matter of hours, shattering the previous daily record from 1915.
The record-crushing rain in St. Louis inundated storm drains and creeks. Sewage backed up into homes. The River des Peres swelled beyond its banks. The area’s sprawling drainage systems, parts of which date to the 19th century, were quickly overwhelmed.
“It was just too much water,” Hadley said.
An analysis of weather data by the nonprofit group Climate Central found that nearly three-quarters of locations the group examined around the country have experienced an increase in the amount of rain falling on their annual wettest day since 1950 — particularly along the Gulf Coast and Mid-Atlantic. The numbers show that 2021 was a record-setting year for extreme rainfall events, with dozens of places logging their wettest day in generations.
A separate Climate Central report this spring found that of 150 locations the group analyzed, 90 percent now experience more average rainfall per hour, compared with 1970. Those increasing bursts of extreme precipitation carry profound economic and human health risks, the likes of which have been on display most recently in eastern Kentucky.
Jen Brady, a data analyst for Climate Central, said many places around the country are getting roughly the same, or in some cases, less rain annually than in the past. But it is the sudden, relentless rainfalls that are contributing to flash floods and other problems.
“The damage that’s happening doesn’t show up when you just look at [annual] precipitation records. It matters if you get 2 inches a day, versus 2 inches an hour,” Brady said. “Our infrastructure is not designed to hold that much water in that much time.”
Scientists say there is little doubt about what is driving the shift toward more frequent, more devastating rains: climate change.
“Individual events happen all the time and have happened all the time in our historical record. We need to be aware that just because we have an event doesn’t mean it represents something unusual,” said Kenneth Kunkel, an atmospheric sciences professor at North Carolina State University.
But while it remains difficult for researchers to outline the precise climate fingerprint on specific summer thunderstorms and other heavy-rain events, they are increasingly able to detail the climate impact on massive tropical cyclones such as Hurricane Harvey. What’s more, after decades of observing and analyzing precipitation metrics around the country, Kunkel says the numbers tell a clear story of change.
“There’s no doubt that the frequency and intensity of the extreme rainfall events is increasing,” Kunkel said, adding that the trend is especially strong in the eastern and central United States.
“When I started 30 years ago, a [climate] signal was emerging,” he said. “That signal has gotten stronger and stronger. … The data are pretty definitive in showing that.”
The explanation boils down to what Kunkel calls “basic physics.” For every degree Fahrenheit that the air temperature increases, the atmosphere can hold about 4 percent more water.
The world already has warmed more than 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since preindustrial times. That increased heat means more moisture in the air — in the United States, much of which comes off the Gulf of Mexico — and more fuel for more intense rainstorms.
“We’ve had an increase in the amount of atmospheric water vapor, … so we are seeing more of these heavy rainfall events,” said David Easterling, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “This is all very consistent with the notion of a warming atmosphere.”
It’s not that St. Louis, for instance, hasn’t had heavy rainstorms in the past. But these days, Easterling said, that same storm likely has access to a lot more moisture that can become torrential rain.
“What was really highly unusual 100 years ago is not that unusual anymore,” he said.
More heavy rains alone don’t automatically translate to more flooding. It matters whether the soil where rain falls is dry or already saturated, how populated the area is and whether the water has someplace to go.
In an urban area like St. Louis, the sheer amount of paved surfaces contributed to runoff that overwhelmed drainage systems. In eastern Kentucky, the steep terrain funneled cataclysmic amounts of water to flatter areas below, where most homes and people are.
No matter the geography, the more intense rains are posing a major planning, engineering and adaptation challenge on the ground.
One problem is that the country’s flood mapping and its collection of precipitation data are underfunded and outdated, and have long relied on “a very patchwork approach,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director for the Association of State Floodplain Managers.
That means engineers, planners and public works officials don’t always have access to the most accurate and up-to-date data about current risks — and those probably on the horizon.
Berginnis said some local governments with more resources — places such as Milwaukee, Nashville and Charlotte — have undertaken research to understand and plan for the water-related challenges they face. New York City also has invested in its own studies and in measures to better gird itself against heavier rains and rising seas.
“They are going to see less damage going forward,” Berginnis said. But not every place is so fortunate.
“In rural areas or places that have less capacity, they are stuck with the data that is nationally available, and it’s just not that good,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s kind of the haves and the have-nots in a lot of cases.”
The problem of more frequent and extreme precipitation is not only national but also global. Europe saw deadly flooding after severe rains last summer. Parts of Australia have endured tremendous rainfall in recent days, putting Sydney on track for its wettest year on record. Parts of China have experienced devastating floods this summer, fueled by rainfall that, at least in one area, dumped 3.3 inches in a single hour.
Across the globe, the torrents show few signs of slowing.
The federal government’s most recent National Climate Assessment found that, over the coming century, “observed increases in the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events in most parts of the United States are projected to continue.” The largest increases in intense precipitation events have occurred — and are expected to continue — in the Northeast and Midwest.
“These trends are consistent with what would be expected in a warmer world, as increased evaporation rates lead to higher levels of water vapor in the atmosphere, which in turn lead to more frequent and intense precipitation extremes,” scientists wrote.
That same assessment found that the nation’s water systems “face considerable risk even without anticipated future climate changes.” But with the changes, the risk will rise for dams and levees at risk of failure, for landslides and erosion on the West Coast, for more flooding in low-lying areas of the Midwest and Southeast, and more strain on old and overtaxed infrastructure in the Northeast.
For now, extreme precipitation events are likely to get only more extreme and more common unless the world makes rapid and drastic cuts in planet-heating emissions — something that has yet to materialize.
Prein, the NCAR scientist, said that even if the world halts warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond preindustrial levels — a core aim of the Paris climate accord — rain and flood events are still likely to get worse in the near term.
“We cannot just shut down our greenhouse gas emissions immediately,” he said. “We will see these events become more intense in the next couple of decades, and there is very little we can do about that.”
That’s why investing in effective adaptation efforts and early warning systems is essential, he said. So is being more cautious about where and how humans build new developments and manage existing infrastructure. Because the heavy rains will come.
“It’s sad but true,” he said, “these kinds of events are our new normal.”
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