Live on the homepage now!
We boarded a chartered bus in Rockland County, NY early that morning for what would be a five hour ride to a day of protesting. I remember rolling along through New Jersey and Pennsylvania thinking that this was going to be a good civics lesson. That turned out to be true, on steroids. We were about to find out very quickly how volatile a Vietnam protest could be. As the bus pulled into its parking space we began to disembark, we had a welcoming committee. I remember coming down the steps of the bus, looking up and seeing about a dozen young men, all white with close-cropped hair, all wearing blue jeans and white teeshirts and all brandishing clubs fashioned from tapered two by fours. They were shouting epithets and presenting themselves in as menacing a manner as possible. Looking back on it now I suspect they were likely enlisted men from a local military base, but I’ll never know for sure. My first thought was that they were going to kill us, they didn’t and we fled the area in the direction of the Capital as quickly as we could. That confrontation did however focus our minds on a very fundamental question, what are we doing here? Roughly a year earlier the Vietnam war had landed on the kitchen table. First with the publication of Ron Haeberle’s horrifying photographs of the massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers at Mi Lai on November 20, 1969 in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and about three weeks later on December 5, 1969 in Life Magazine. Four months later the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed student protesters at Kent State University in Ohio killing four of them. We were two of millions of obedient Americans propelled into civil disobedience by what was rapidly becoming the inescapable reality of the Vietnam War. We protested what we then understood to be the horror of war and its human ramifications. As the director of Truthout I led an entire team in dedicated opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. We understood that invasion to be illegal, unjustified, predicated on blatant lies and yes, a crime against humanity. We were proud to be in the forefront of the opposition to the US and to that war. Did the US have a rationale? Sure the attacks of September 11, 2001 were still fresh in the minds of all Americans. There was real pain, real suffering, real fear and a very real need for justice. But that’s not what Americans and the rest of the world got. What the US invasion of Iraq produced was imperial slaughter and the rise of the Islamic State. That’s war. That’s what war does. That’s what we opposed then and what we oppose now. Putin and Russia are doing today what the US did in Vietnam and Iraq. That doesn’t make the US innocent it makes Russia guilty, now. We oppose Russia’s horrific imperialist war for the same reason we oppose every brutal unjustified military assault. Peace is justice. Yes we oppose war and this war specifically. No this war is not likely to be productive of anything useful to life on earth. That said the innocent people of Ukraine have every right to defend themselves and their homeland. As did the Vietnamese people, as did the Iraqi people. As do the other European nations Putin and his subordinates threaten on a daily basis. No to genocide, no to ethnic cleansing, no to crimes against humanity, no to rape, no to child abduction. Sure absolutely keep an eye on the US, always, but at this moment Russia is actively engaged in the commission of massive war crimes. It must stop. Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
ALSO SEE: Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Program
Biden had announced last year that certain eligible borrowers could have up to $20,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven. It was an attempt to keep a campaign promise to address the national student debt crisis. About 1 in 6 adults in America holds federal student loan debt. A typical undergraduate finishes school with nearly $25,000 of debt, which takes an average of 20 years to pay back. While loan forgiveness could provide relief to borrowers, it leaves many of the root causes of the student debt crisis unaddressed. Tuition fees have nearly tripled since 1980, outpacing inflation and wage growth—but despite that, the federal government hasn’t put any rules or restrictions on its student loan program that could push colleges and universities to rein in tuition costs. So far, the White House has only committed to publishing an annual watchlist of programs with the highest debt levels in the country. “The Biden administration was doing what they could to intervene in a broken system, but the reality is there are a lot of things they can’t touch with executive actions, and legislation is going to be needed for a lot of fixes here,” said Kevin Miller, associate director of higher education at the Bipartisan Policy Center. That said, student loan forgiveness could still make a big impact, especially helping those borrowers who are low-income or didn’t finish college and are stuck paying off a loan. Millions of borrowers have already been approved for loan forgiveness, but the government is powerless to act because two federal courts issued nationwide injunctions prohibiting any debt relief under the plan. Most legal analysts expect the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to side against the administration, preventing the government from forgiving a cent of student loan debt. There is a real chance, however, that a majority may instead find that the plaintiffs—a group of red states and two disgruntled borrowers—lack standing to sue, which would allow the program to move forward. Before oral arguments Tuesday, I spoke to borrowers who qualified for forgiveness about what it could mean for them. Name: Richelle Brooks Richelle Brooks immediately applied for debt forgiveness when the application was released by the Education Department late last year, and her application was accepted. She’s held federal student loans since about 2014, starting from her undergraduate degree and now including graduate school. She said her balance has grown substantially, and she’s accumulated about $35,000 in interest. Even if the president’s loan forgiveness plan is left in place by the Supreme Court and $20,000 of her balance is forgiven, Brooks told me she’ll be right back to where she started within a few years. “It was kind of infuriating that [Biden] decided to go the route that he went,” said Brooks. She felt Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan was a political move rather than an attempt to genuinely help Americans who are overburdened by the federal student loan system. Brooks said she didn’t have a support system to help her out financially as she was going to college, and then she went on to pursue a master’s degree, so her loan balance ballooned. When the federal government implemented a pause on student loan repayments, interest, and collections because of the pandemic—started by former President Donald Trump and renewed by the Biden administration—Brooks said it helped tremendously. It offered her peace of mind that translated to spending more time with her children and worrying less. “There’s never a moment that you’re not thinking about money in this country—because it’s directly tied to our livelihood.” Brooks’ kids are preparing for their own college journeys now. “We’re planning for their next steps—and what a terrible feeling it is to plan for it without any idea of how you’re going to be able to fund it.” Brooks is working three jobs to try to save up whatever she can for her kids’ college expenses, even considering joining the military so their education could be paid for. She’s juggling rent, a car payment, and basic living expenses, and she’s dreading the moment when her loan payments restart. “I just can’t afford $800 a month in addition to what I’m already paying,” she said. Name: Erin Day As soon as the forgiveness application landed in her inbox, Erin Day said, she began to calculate what her new loan balance would be, how it would impact her monthly payments, and what else she could use that money on. Since the federal government’s moratorium on loan payments began, Day said she has been able to more easily cover food, gas, and other bills for herself and her family. Her student loans have been a consistent stressor. “It’s certainly always looming in the background, a looming bill that feels like no matter how hard you may try to chip away at it, it just seems insurmountable,” she said. Having worked hard to put herself through college and raise her daughter as a single mother, Day said she would love to buy her own home and pursue bigger life goals, but that it’s harder and harder to achieve those milestones. She can’t help but compare her experience to that of previous generations. Her mother was easily able to buy a home by the time she reached her early 30s, Day said. Day also has a daughter who is a junior in high school, gearing up for college. She said they’ve had to have some tough conversations, including about how her daughter will most likely need to take out loans of her own because Day can’t afford to pay tuition out of pocket. “I think that education should be something that all folks have the ability to access, if they so choose. And it should be equitable, right?” Name: Bryan Harnsberger When the White House first implemented a moratorium on federal student loan payments, Bryan Harnsberger was ecstatic. “When the freeze happened, it was literally the best thing that’s ever happened to me financially.” He and his wife both have student loan debt, and with the money both of them were able to save over the past two years, they put a down payment on a house and launched their own private counseling practice. Harnsberger and his wife applied for debt forgiveness when applications came out late last year, and both were accepted. But even if Biden’s plan holds up, Harnsberger told me it will only be “a drop in the bucket” in terms of lowering their balances. He also wishes the president’s forgiveness plan had gone further—that we’d be seeing blanket student loan debt forgiveness and serious higher education reform. Harnsberger also expressed frustration that the president took so long to announce his plan and continually extended the repayment moratorium at the eleventh hour. “I don’t know whether or not I should start saving money to put toward my payments, or [if] I have enough money to sink back into the business,” he said. As a psychologist, Harnsberger is intimately familiar with the psychological stress created by a looming debt balance. He told me that many of his clients are postgraduates worried about their money situation, and a large debt balance is “a dark cloud that always follows you.” He also noted that financial insecurity is the No. 1 stressor in America, and that impacts public health, too. Name: Kiara Palmer Kiara Palmer graduated with a master’s degree in communication in 2019, right before the pandemic hit and federal loan payments were paused. She continued to make thousands of dollars in payments on her loan, and since interest rates were set to zero percent as part of the moratorium, Palmer managed to pay off all of the accrued interest on her loan and get her balance down to $53,000. After that point, she began putting the money she would have spent paying off her loans into a high-yield savings account. “My goal was always to be debt-free,” Palmer said. “My mom carried student loans and I just didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want it to hinder me from buying a house, getting married, traveling.” By December 2021, Palmer had enough saved to buy a house. She said she’s grateful that the government continued to extend the moratorium on loan payments. “It gave me a lifeline to say, ‘I want to get these things done, and this is the opportunity to do it.’ ” She said that the $20,000 in loan forgiveness she would have received under Biden’s plan, combined with her savings, could lower her balance to $13,000—but only if the Supreme Court decides in favor of the forgiveness plan. Palmer has watched her mother, who is now in her 60s, struggle to pay her own student loans: “I’m frustrated for people like my mom who should be looking forward to retirement.” Instead, Palmer said, her mother will have to think about using part of her Social Security to pay off her $130,000 loan balance. Palmer expressed frustration at how easy lenders make it all seem while you’re signing up for loans. “You know how predatory student loans are—they just give us the money and they don’t really explain to us the ins and outs … until after we’ve made the mistake and we have the money.” She also takes issue with the way some loans are structured—for instance, some begin accruing interest before you’ve graduated. “For people who are working below minimum wage, think about how challenging it is for them.”
“Good morning,” Levin replied. “How are you?” “I passed out last night. How about you, kitten? Did you sleep?” “Yeah, same.” Stelmakh had made Levin promise to check in every three hours whenever he was on assignment. Using an app on her phone and a tracking device installed in Levin’s Ford Maverick, she monitored his coördinates in real time. “Heading out,” Levin texted. “I’ll be out of network.” “Stay safe ♡.” Several days earlier, Levin had lost a camera drone in a pine forest north of Kyiv. Before the battery died, the drone had sent some low-resolution footage that appeared to show surface-to-air missile systems. He was certain the drone had picked up Russian positions. Levin was a journalist through and through, but he was a Ukrainian first and had no scruples about sharing strategically useful images with the soldiers whose lives he had been documenting. “You should not forget that you are a human being,” he once told a room full of professional journalists at a media symposium. “If there is a need, then help.” A soldier named Oleksiy Chernyshov agreed to accompany Levin into the forest to recover the device. They had known each other since 2013, when Chernyshov was a photographer shooting protests on Maidan alongside Levin. Dressed in military fatigues and cradling an AK-74, Chernyshov took the passenger seat. Levin fastened a blue armband to his black jacket, signalling to any Ukrainian soldiers they might encounter that he was a “friendly.” He also packed a Swiss Army knife, a helmet, a bulletproof vest, and a headlamp; in the car, he kept a jerrican of gasoline. At 12:51 P.M., Stelmakh could see Levin and Chernyshov travelling west on a country road through the forest. They were driving at just under twenty miles per hour when the car came to a halt. Over the next six hours, Stelmakh sent Levin a flurry of texts. At 6:55 P.M., night was beginning to fall, and Levin’s G.P.S. tracker indicated that he was in the same spot in the forest—near Moshchun, a village on the banks of the Irpin River. “Kitten,” Stelmakh wrote. At eleven, she sent another heart emoji. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, had referred to Moshchun as a “gate for the enemy on the way to the capital.” Around the time that Levin went missing, Russian forces surrounded the village, subjecting it to intense bombing and shelling from the air. Two out of every three homes were destroyed. Almost all of its residents had fled; the few who remained were living out of their root cellars, coming up to ground level only to scavenge for food. The commander of the brigade tasked with defending Moshchun, Oleksandr Vdovychenko, informed Zaluzhnyi that he didn’t have the “strength and means” to hold the village. One of his subordinates later told the Washington Post that in a single day “I felt like I got hit with a hammer on my head at least eight times, because everything was falling right next to us. . . . Many men couldn’t cope mentally.” Stelmakh continued texting Levin every few hours. “Please be alive,” she wrote on March 15th. “Please don’t leave me.” The next day, Levin’s phone picked up a signal in Moshchun. The G.P.S. indicated that his car was still in the forest. In the late nineteen-seventies, Levin’s parents, Yevgeny and Valentina, moved from a city in southern Russia to a suburb of Kyiv. They already had a two-year-old son, Alexander, and after three years in Ukraine welcomed their second child, Maksym. “We were on the way to the hospital, and my parents still hadn’t decided on a name,” Alexander, now forty-six, told me recently. “I said, ‘Let’s call him ‘Maks.’ ” The family spoke Russian at home and visited the country often to see relatives, many of whom are still there. When Levin was five years old, Yevgeny, an engineer, was transferred to Vietnam. The family lived in a Russian community there for two years before returning to Ukraine. Yevgeny often travelled for work. Several years later, on a trip to Poland, he bought Levin a rangefinder camera called the “Kyiv.” Levin had a friend whose father, a sports photographer, was always bringing home souvenirs from exotic places: Tokyo, Toronto. “I never wanted to be a war photographer,” Levin told the online magazine LensCulture, years later. “Travel the world, meet new people . . . that was the whole idea.” In his late teens, Levin enrolled in a university program in computer science, “to please my father.” After graduating, he pivoted back to photography, “probably more out of vanity than for the sake of peace in the world.” In 2014, Russian forces invaded Crimea and the Donbas, and Levin wanted to document the conflict there. Vanity seems to have remained his primary motivation. An old friend, the filmmaker Petro Tsymbal, told me, “When I asked him at the time why he was going to the front, he said ‘to become famous.’ ” But when Levin went to Luhansk and embedded with Ukrainian troops fighting Russia-backed separatists, he came to identify with the soldiers whose lives he was capturing. “It turns out I’m a sentimental person,” he later said. He contemplated enlisting in the army. “I am preparing for the possible escalation of the conflict,” he told an interviewer for Radio Liberty. He took courses in field combat and tactical medicine, before deciding that his comparative advantage lay in his ability to make a record of the war through photography. “I want to show that these are the people who protect all of us,” he said. He also wanted “to show other people that there’s war happening and it’s real.” Levin and Tsymbal would go on to collaborate on a documentary series called “Eighteen,” about eighteen-year-olds who died in the Donbas. Five months after Russia annexed Crimea, Levin and three colleagues travelled to Ilovaisk, a town in Russian-occupied Donetsk. Along with some twelve hundred Ukrainian troops, they found themselves encircled by twice as many combatants from the Russian armed forces and the Donbas People’s Militia. “We believed that the presence of journalists would help the fighters in Ilovaisk,” Levin said, on a Ukrainian podcast, two years later. It didn’t. Nearly four hundred Ukrainian soldiers were slaughtered in the Ilovaisk “mousetrap,” as a battalion commander called it. “There were moments where I couldn’t take a picture,” Levin recalled. “I put down my camera and helped carry the wounded and the dead.” Driving out of the city, through what was supposed to be a humanitarian corridor, Levin and his colleagues came under heavy fire. “Maks was driving very well,” Markiian Lyseiko, a friend and photojournalist, who had been in the passenger seat during the escape, told me. “He didn’t stop, because stopping the car meant death.” Levin caught up with a Ukrainian tank and tailgated it for protection. A few minutes later, a projectile hit the tank’s turret, sending debris hurling backward into Levin’s windshield. Shattered glass lacerated Levin’s right arm. “His eyes never left the road,” Lyseiko said. “He didn’t even know that he was injured, and I didn’t tell him, because he was driving.” After they made it to safety, Levin looked down and saw that his right pant leg was splattered in his own blood. In an essay published days after their escape, Levin wrote, “I am ashamed that we got out of that hell and our friends didn’t. For the last two days, I can’t find a place for myself: I wonder if it could have been different, or if we could have taken someone else in the car with us and saved him. . . . My conscience is tormenting me for this.” Two months later, a close friend of Levin’s named Viktor Hurniak, a twenty-seven-year-old former freelance photojournalist who had enlisted, was killed by a Russian mortar. “When I realized that he was gone, that I will no longer cross paths with him, neither in Kyiv nor at the front, that’s when it got personal for me,” Levin told Ukraine’s Channel 24. Together with Lyseiko and Tsymbal, Levin produced an oral history of the battle, “After Ilovaisk,” based on testimonies from dozens of participants. By his late thirties, Levin had been married and divorced twice. He had four sons, aged one to eleven. His first wife, Valentyna Kuzyk, told me, “Maks’s mother was always saying, ‘Why don’t you say something to Maks so he stops going to the front line? You have kids—you have to stop him somehow.’ ” As a journalist, Kuzyk said, “Maks never stopped, never said, ‘Well, that’s good enough.’ I didn’t expect my husband to just sit at home all the time, taking care of kids. If you marry a fireman, you don’t expect him to be with you every evening.” Their marriage collapsed in dramatic fashion, and Levin and Kuzyk were embroiled in a drawn-out custody battle for their three children. In his frustration, Levin started a men’s-rights organization to campaign against what he perceived as a bias against men in Ukrainian family courts. Levin’s second wife, Inna Varenytsia, a freelancer for the Associated Press who had covered the Mosul offensive, in Iraq, told me, “Maks was always working and working, and if he wasn’t, he felt guilty.” He was also principled in the extreme. The couple never exchanged wedding rings. “He believed it was a safety measure, because the reflection could compromise a military position,” Varenytsia said. “But, also, he was just against fancy jewelry.” Petro Tsymbal, the documentary filmmaker, said, “Maks was a non-compromising person. He could never close his mouth, and the words he used were very strong, like a blade.” Levin’s brother Alexander told me, “You couldn’t persuade him of anything once he had his mind made up.” The brothers scrupulously avoided certain subjects. “He’d come around, show his photographs, but we never talked politics,” Alexander said. Their father, Yevgeny, who had lived in Ukraine for four decades, still held a deep affinity for his native Russia. Levin recalled in an interview that his father had repeatedly denied the presence of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine: “He’d say, ‘Putin is a great guy,’ and I’d tell him, ‘Listen, the Russians shot our soldiers in the back in Ilovaisk. I was there.’ ” (Yevgeny told me that he didn’t remember this exchange, but said that he and Levin had their disagreements: “He had his point of view and I had mine.”) Levin eventually regained joint custody of his children from his first marriage. When he wasn’t travelling, he spent almost every morning with them. He’d wake up early, drive from his home in Kyiv to the suburbs, make the kids breakfast, and walk them to school. Between assignments, he was building a treehouse. A couple of weeks before the war, he and Stelmakh took the boys on a three-day snowboarding trip in the Carpathian Mountains. “I think his children were the most important motivation for him,” Tsymbal told me. “They’re the reason he kept returning to the front.” For the entire second week of the war, Alexander hadn’t been able to get through to his brother. Finally, Levin picked up. “Maks, where did you disappear to?” “I didn’t disappear. I’m where I’m supposed to be.” “Where are you supposed to be?” “I’m with the guys.” “What guys? Where are you?” “I can’t say where I am.” On April 1st, three Ukrainian police officers discovered Levin’s body in the forest. He’d been shot in the chest and the head. A bullet was lodged six inches in the dirt beneath him; he was likely already on the ground when his assailant pulled the trigger, at close range. The car, some fifty feet away, had fourteen bullet impacts and was completely burned out. A gasoline jerrican lay beside it, along with the charred remains of Oleksiy Chernyshov. The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office issued a statement, finding that Levin had been “fatally shot twice with small-arms fire, by servicemen” of the Russian armed forces. According to an investigation by Reporters Without Borders, the men were “undoubtedly executed in cold blood, possibly after being tortured.” At the site of the killing, the Russians shared a meal, leaving behind packaging from their food rations, plastic spoons, cigarette packs, and instructions for firing rockets. Levin’s cell phone, helmet, flak jacket, and shoes were never found. In my conversations with Levin’s family and friends, I kept hearing the same aphorism attributed to Levin, some version of “Every photographer dreams of making a photo that will stop a war.” He had said something to this effect in an interview with Radio Liberty, in 2015, and, in the circles he ran in, it took on the dimensions of myth, much like the apocryphal Zelensky quote “I need ammunition, not a ride.” In another interview, several years later, Levin had changed his tune: “If you think your photos will change the world—don’t be naïve.” He continued to shoot simply because he should. “It’s a kind of duty and responsibility,” he said. Then he added, “To be fully honest . . . I don’t know what it is for.” He seemed less interested in interrogating motives than in doing the work. Levin had once attended a Reuters training on mental health for war correspondents. He later recalled, “Of course, the therapist told us that as professionals, we couldn’t take it personally. If we did, we just wouldn’t be able to survive for that long.” That didn’t make any sense to Levin. “I have biases, I have empathy for my heroes,” he said. “I am very connected with all those people. . . . War is a very personal thing.” In 2019, in a television interview, Levin referred to the soldiers he embedded with as his “friends.” He recalled being woken one night in the Donbas by munitions bursting outside their windows. “After a night like that, they understood that we did not just come to make money off them,” he said. “We shared their risks, their lives—everything. We were with them through it all. Many friends we met died there.” Christopher Miller, a longtime American Ukraine correspondent who knew Levin, told me, “I could just see that the soldiers immediately opened up to him. He knew the lingo. He knew how to carry himself better than any of us. Just being with him signalled to the soldiers that you were somebody worth talking to.” Not long before the war, Levin reconciled with his father. They had been planning a trip together to Uzbekistan, where the family has relatives. “I can’t say anything bad about my son,” Yevgeny told me. “He was a protector of Ukraine.” He had tried for years to persuade Levin to stay out of the war, not for reasons of ideology so much as personal safety. Levin’s brother said, “Our father still thinks it’s his fault. I tell him, ‘You can’t blame yourself—he was a grown man.’ ” Recently, Alexander was helping his mother around the house when he found a dust-coated plastic bin that looked like it hadn’t been opened in decades. Inside, he found Levin’s rangefinder, the one his dad brought back from Poland. His eyes welled up. “It’s the most precious thing I own,” he said. Last April, President Volodymyr Zelensky honored Levin with a posthumous Order for Courage. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, he was one of at least ten journalists killed in the first month of the war. Stelmakh collected twenty-five of Levin’s final photographs, from the Battle of Kyiv, and sent them to the Ukrainian Museum in New York City, where they are on view through March 5th. Levin’s funeral was held at St. Michael’s Cathedral, the golden-domed monastery that President Biden toured with Zelensky earlier this week. He was buried in a vyshyvanka, a traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, which Stelmakh had got him as a gift a few months before he died. “Is this for our wedding?” he had asked. Metropolitan Epiphanius, the head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, presided over the service. Standing before Levin’s open casket, he said, “One of the best photographers of modern Ukraine, Maksym Levin did not just work as a journalist. He really served, served something that is higher than the present, that concerns eternity. He served the truth, so in his own way, because of the talent given to him, he served God.” Eight years earlier, in the essay he published days after escaping the Battle of Ilovaisk, Levin had written, “You know, I don’t believe in God. Because if he existed, he would have saved the best. And the best ones remained there, in the fields.” READ MORE But inside the church, a parade of pastors and organizers addressing the crowd railed against another threat they described as dire to the city’s future: their state legislature. Republican state lawmakers are pushing “a takeover of the city of Jackson and disenfranchising local voters,” declared Danyelle Holmes, a local activist. “They’re banking on us to be quiet. They’re banking on us to back down.” The T-shirt she wore underscored the political mood of the event – and the siege mentality that city leaders say they’re feeling: JACKSON VS. EVERYBODY. A proposal in the Mississippi legislature to reshape Jackson’s criminal justice system has erupted into a high-stakes battle between the Republican-dominated state government and the Blackest big city in the US over some of the most incendiary flashpoints of American politics: voting rights, public safety and race. The fight comes at a time when the legislature is debating other bills that would also narrow the city’s authority, including over its broken water system. And around the country, other Republican-controlled state legislatures are also clashing with big-city leaders over power struggles and purse strings. The Mississippi criminal justice bill, which passed the state House of Representatives earlier this month, would create a new, separate court system in a district that includes Jackson’s downtown and a third of its residents. Judges and prosecutors in the district would be appointed by state government officials, encroaching on the power of locally elected judges to hear some cases. A modified version of the bill stripped of some of its most controversial provisions passed a state Senate committee Thursday – although they could be added back in as the two legislative houses come to an agreement. Both versions of the legislation would greatly expand the jurisdiction of the Capitol Police, a state government-controlled police force that has been criticized by local leaders for aggressive tactics and multiple shootings by officers. Taken together, the changes in the House bill would put White, conservative state officials in control of much of the criminal justice system across a significant swathe of Jackson. That prospect has mobilized opposition in a city where more than eight in 10 residents are Black. “It is taking us back in time and it puts us on the wrong side of history,” Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba said in an interview. “It’s colonization, it’s apartheid, it’s the worst of what Mississippi can be.” The GOP lawmakers pushing the bill say it’s needed to address huge court backlogs and stem violence that spiked in the city in recent years. Jackson reached a record number of homicides in 2021, with one of the highest murder rates in the US, although the number fell last year. “The bill is totally racially neutral,” its sponsor, Rep. Trey Lamar, told CNN this month. “I hate that the other side used race as much as they did.” Cliff Johnson, a University of Mississippi law professor and the director of the university’s MacArthur Justice Center, said the House version of the bill stood out for its audacity. “You’d have a police department and judges and prosecutors who aren’t accountable to local voters, all of whom are appointed by White officials in a city that’s 82% Black,” he said. The bill, he added, is “the most radical piece of legislation I’ve seen in 30 years of practicing law in Mississippi.” A radical bill One of the few things that state and local leaders in Jackson agree on is that the city is facing steep challenges – from the breakdown in water infrastructure, to the spike in murders, to a dramatic drop in population that has sapped the city’s tax base. As White residents moved out to the suburbs, Jackson’s population fell nearly 25% from 1990 to today. At the same time, the city went from about 56% Black then to about 83% Black now – the highest percentage of any major city in the US. In 2017, state legislators aiming to help support the city created the “Capitol Complex Improvement District” to fund street repairs and infrastructure projects in the neighborhood surrounding the state Capitol, where government office buildings sit near empty storefronts. Last year, with bipartisan support, the legislature added funds for policing in that district with an expansion of the state Capitol Police. Formerly a sleepy department patrolling state buildings, the force has significantly increased in officers since the middle of last year, and its shiny SUVs are a ubiquitous presence downtown. Now, Republican leaders say more changes are needed, pointing to a significant backlog of criminal cases in the county courts, which leave some defendants waiting months or longer for trials. The House version of the controversial bill, known as HB 1020, would expand the Capitol Complex district to cover about a third of Jackson’s population, and create a new judicial district with state government-appointed judges who could hear cases in the district. The judges would be appointed by the state Supreme Court chief justice, and prosecutors would be appointed by the state Attorney General, both of whom are conservative White elected officials. The newly expanded district would stretch from the museums and Capitol building downtown, to the northeast city limits of Jackson, encompassing much of the city’s business district as well as key institutions such as Jackson State University and the University of Mississippi Medical Center. According to CNN’s analysis of US Census data and the bill text, about 55% of people living in the district are Black, compared with 83% of Jackson as a whole. The district includes most of the densest White neighborhoods in the city, which are also some of Jackson’s most affluent areas. The proposed district “looks like a redlining map from the ’60s,” Johnson said, referring to the decades-old discriminatory practice of denying loans in minority neighborhoods. Lamar, the bill’s sponsor, has framed the measure as a way to help Jackson by increasing security and addressing the court backlog. “There are too few law enforcement officers, too few prosecutors, too few public defenders, and too few judges to effectively administer justice,” Lamar, who represents a rural community two and a half hours north of Jackson, wrote in a recent op-ed. But local leaders argue that the legislature should increase the number of judges who are elected locally in Jackson’s Hinds County – not bring in appointed judges. “If they’re really concerned about helping speed along how cases are handled, why not add additional elected judges, as we do in every other district in the state?” asked Winston Kidd, the county’s senior elected judge, in an interview last week. The version of the bill approved by a Senate committee on Thursday responds to some of that criticism by dropping the expansion of the Capitol Complex district and the new court system. Instead, it would add five new temporary judges in Hinds County, appointed by the State Supreme Court chief justice. Those judges would be replaced by a single new locally elected judge starting in 2027. But the amended bill would expand the Capitol Police jurisdiction citywide, instead of just in the Capitol district. Any dispute over policing between the state-run department and the city-run Jackson Police Department would be resolved in favor of the state, according to the bill – unless the two departments sign a memorandum of understanding by July, which the mayor has declared he will not do. Assuming the amended bill passes the full Senate, the two legislative houses would have to iron out the differences in a conference committee in the coming weeks. A coalition of activists and faith leaders have organized against the bill, holding rallies on the Capitol steps and at churches around the city, and are planning to fight it out in court if it becomes law. Supporters say the bill is on solid legal ground because the new court in the House version would be under the supervision of the elected judges, and the court’s decisions could be appealed to them. But Jarvis Dortch, the executive director of the ACLU of Mississippi, argued that proposal would violate the state constitution by diluting the authority of elected judges, and go against Voting Rights Act provisions protecting representation for minority groups. “You’re going to have a city within a city where Black folks are going to be second-class citizens and have no say over their policing or their judicial system,” Dortch said. “It’s blatantly unconstitutional.” Concerns over expanding state-run police force Some locals say they’re also concerned about how both versions of the bill would lead to a dramatic expansion in the jurisdiction of the state-run Capitol Police. Since the department expanded last summer, some residents have complained of officers unnecessarily escalating interactions with suspects – especially in a series of high-speed car chases around the city that have left civilians injured or ended in shootings. In the span of three months last year, officers shot at least five people, one fatally, according to local news reports. On September 25, Capitol Police officers fatally shot 25-year-old Jaylen Lewis, a father of two. In a heavily redacted incident report obtained by CNN through a public records request, officers reported that before the shooting, they saw Lewis run a red light and tried to conduct a traffic stop. The department says that the shooting is still under review by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, and it can’t release more details until that investigation is complete. The other four incidents were also reportedly investigated by the MBI, but the department didn’t respond to a request seeking details about them. Arkela Lewis, Lewis’ mother, said she hadn’t received any explanation or a phone call from any state official, leaving her family outraged. If the Capitol Police territory is expanded, “it’s going to be a horrible thing for the city of Jackson, for people of color in Jackson,” she said in an interview. According to the redacted report, the officers who shot Lewis were part of the department’s “Flex Unit,” a plainclothes street crime unit that drives unmarked cars. Capitol Police Chief Bo Luckey told a local paper last year that the purpose of the unit was “having boots on the ground and proactively policing.” But critics say the plainclothes unit’s aggressive tactics make it similar to the notorious Scorpion Unit of the Memphis Police Department, which was disbanded last month amid national anger over the beating death of Tyre Nichols. A friend of Lewis’ who was in the car with him during the shooting told the family that they had realized they were being followed but didn’t realize the car behind them was a police vehicle, Arkela Lewis and her daughter Alexus Lewis said. The string of shootings has sapped support for Capitol Police in Jackson’s Black community – even among some residents who say that, in general, they’d like to see a stronger police presence in their neighborhoods. In December, a Capitol Police traffic stop of a stolen vehicle led to a high-speed chase across the city that ended in gunshots. A bullet punched through the wall of Latasha Smith’s apartment in northwest Jackson, sailed over her 13-year-old daughter asleep in bed, and then hit Smith in the arm as she slept. Two bullet holes still adorn Smith’s wall – and a bullet remains in her forearm. A brief statement by the Capitol Police at the time said that an “officer-involved shooting” had taken place that night and “shots were fired” next to Smith’s apartment. The department said that the MBI would investigate the shooting, but has not released further details. Smith, who lives a few blocks from the home where civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated six decades ago, believes Capitol Police officers shot the bullet that hit her. That night, after she ran outside shouting “I’ve been shot,” she said she saw a Capitol Police officer holding a gun. She said she wants her neighborhood to be safe, but that the department’s aggressive tactics run counter to that. “Capitol Police are supposed to protect and serve, but who are going to protect us from them?” Smith asked in an interview. If the department’s jurisdiction is expanded citywide, she said, “I’m leaving – we Black folks can hang it up in Jackson then.” The city-run Jackson Police Department has also faced allegations of excessive force in recent years, and has suffered from understaffing and long 911 response times. But residents say that at least the department is accountable to their local elected officials – unlike the state-run Capitol Police. More broadly, there’s a significant divide in how some White and Black residents of Jackson see the Capitol Police. Johnson, the University of Mississippi professor, said many of his White friends viewed the department as “a much-welcomed presence, an answer to a pressing problem, that they wish everyone in Jackson could have.” But some Black friends, he said, have told him they were “scared to death for their Black sons to even drive through” the department’s jurisdiction. Dwayne Pickett, a local pastor at a Black church, said he’s had parishioners call him and ask him to stay on the line with them when they see a Capitol Police cruiser pull up behind them on the road. “There’s enormous amounts of fear in the community,” he said. A spokesperson for the Capitol Police did not respond to requests for comment about the criticism. At a community meeting shortly after Lewis’ shooting, state Public Safety Commissioner Sean Tindell, who oversees the department, said that “anytime there is a loss of life, it’s tragic,” but defended the Capitol Police’s practices as “doing policing the way it’s supposed to be done.” Power struggles pitting legislatures against city halls In Jackson, the fight over the criminal justice system is the latest power struggle between the city and state governments in recent years. The city, which has experienced a water quality crisis that has forced residents to rely on neighborhood distributions of bottled water, received about $800 million in federal funding for water infrastructure upgrades, most from a spending bill that passed Congress last year. But another bill currently being debated in the state legislature would create a new regional board to take control of Jackson’s water and sewer system, with a majority of board members being appointed by the governor and lieutenant governor. That has raised the alarm of the federal monitor appointed to oversee the system. Meanwhile, around the country, similar power struggles have been taking place between GOP-dominated state legislatures and Democratic big city governments in recent years, both over public safety and other issues. In Missouri, a new bill would let the governor strip locally elected prosecutors of the power to handle violent crime cases. The move comes as the state attorney general is trying to oust the Democratic St. Louis prosecutor from office over allegations of neglect, which she denies. In North Carolina, GOP legislative leaders have signaled that they may block Charlotte, the state’s largest city, from issuing a sales tax that would pay for a major expansion of its public transit system. The state house speaker has called the plan impractical. And in Tennessee, the state legislature is moving forward with bills that would effectively cut Nashville’s city council in half and take state control over the city’s airport and stadiums – after the city council killed a bid for the 2024 GOP convention. At the same time, local leaders in conservative corners of blue states have also clashed with their state governments – from California sheriffs who refused to enforce mask mandates during the pandemic to New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general suing local towns that have passed restrictions on abortion. While tension between city halls and state capitols has long been a fixture of American government, experts say the fights are becoming more frequent – and more high-stakes – as the nation’s politics become more polarized and acrimonious. One 2021 study found that GOP legislators were more likely than their Democratic colleagues to vote for proposals to limit local governments’ authority, and that those efforts were most common over “hot button” issues like guns and LGBTQ rights. In some cases, rural legislators target liberal cities as “a way to score political points” and “pour a little more gas on the culture wars,” said Keith Boeckelman, a political science professor at Western Illinois University, who co-authored the paper. In Jackson, some locals say that the bad blood over the criminal justice bill will remain even if the farthest-reaching proposals don’t make it through the legislative process in the coming weeks. After she finished leading chants of “kill the bills!” at the church rally last week, Holmes, the activist in the “JACKSON VS. EVERYBODY” shirt, sat in the front pew and took stock of the situation. “It feels like some of our leaders want a piece of Jackson for themselves,” she said. “So, it’s very important that we continue to say that Jackson is not for the taking.”
The awards ceremony this month for Pueblo County Sheriff's Deputy Charles McWhorter came just days before the family of the man he shot and killed in the very same incident filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court. The Purple Heart award for McWhorter was first reported by The Pueblo Chieftain. Darold Killmer, an attorney for the family of Richard Ward, said in an emailed statement to NPR that Ward's family didn't know about the award before filing the suit, but that it was a "truly a brazen act which mocks the very purpose of a Purple Heart." "Pueblo's cynical efforts to somehow make McWhorter a hero under these circumstances is disgusting," Killmer said. The Pueblo County Sheriff's Department did not immediately respond to NPR's request for a comment. On Feb. 22, 2022, authorities said Pueblo County Sheriff's Deputies were called to a local middle school to investigate a "report of a man knocking on windows of vehicles." Newly released body camera footage shows McWhorter talking to Ward, who is sitting in the back of his mother's car. Ward's mother and her boyfriend are in the front seats, and the three of them were waiting to pick up Ward's younger brother from Liberty Point International Middle School. Ward had gone for a brief walk while they waited, his family said. In the video footage, Ward explains to McWhorter that when he returned from the walk he mistakenly got into a different car that looked similar to his mother's. Ward says he apologized to the driver and left. McWhorter asks Ward if he has an ID or any weapons, and Ward says he might have a pocket knife but doesn't produce one. Ward instead finds an anti-anxiety pill and takes it. McWhorter loudly asks Ward what he put in his mouth before he and Deputy Cassandra Gonzales pull Ward from the car and wrestle him to the ground. After a brief scuffle, McWhorter shoots Ward — who was unarmed — three times. McWhorter tells Gonzales: "He headbutted my nose and then tried grabbing at my stuff." According to the wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family, Ward suffered from anxiety around police and took an anti-anxiety tablet in the back seat of the car. The suit — which names McWhorter and Gonzales, other officers and Pueblo County as defendants — claims McWhorter had "no legitimate law enforcement purpose" to fire his gun and that he violated Ward's constitutional rights. In October, Colorado's 10th Judicial District Attorney J.E. Chostner concluded that the use of force by McWhorter and Gonzales was justified and that no criminal charges would be filed against them.
Paxton’s claims in Texas v. Garland, which turn on the fact that many of the lawmakers who voted for the bill voted by proxy, should fail. They are at odds with the Constitution’s explicit text. And a bipartisan panel of a powerful federal appeals court in Washington, DC, already rejected a similar lawsuit in 2021. Realistically, this lawsuit is unlikely to prevail even in the current, highly conservative Supreme Court. Declaring a law that funds most of the federal government unconstitutional would be an extraordinary act, especially given the very strong legal arguments against Paxton’s position. But the case is a window into Paxton’s broader litigation strategy, where he frequently raises weak legal arguments undercutting federal policies before right-wing judges that he has personally chosen because of their ideology. And these judges often do sow chaos throughout the government, which can last months or longer, before a higher court steps in. Texas’s federal courts give plaintiffs an unusual amount of leeway to choose which judge will hear their case, an odd feature of these courts that Paxton often takes advantage of to ensure that his lawsuits will be heard by judges who are likely to toe the Republican line. These decisions, moreover, appeal to the deeply conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Paxton filed the Garland case in Lubbock, Texas, where 100 percent of all federal lawsuits are heard by a Republican appointee. Two-thirds of such cases are automatically assigned to Judge James Wesley Hendrix, who will hear this suit. Hendrix, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, is a bit of an unknown quantity. In his brief time on the bench, Hendrix did hand down one poorly reasoned decision undercutting a federal statute that requires most hospitals to perform medically necessary abortions. But Hendrix’s thin record does not tell us enough to know whether he’d actually be so aggressive as to declare most of the United States government unconstitutional. The Texas federal bench is also riddled with judges — Matthew Kacsmaryk, Drew Tipton, and Reed O’Connor are probably the best known among them — who’ve largely behaved as rubber stamps for any right-leaning litigant who appears before them. It’s notable that Paxton chose to bring this case in Lubbock, where he was likely to draw Hendrix as his judge, rather than bringing this suit before Kacsmaryk or Tipton (Kacsmaryk hears 100 percent of federal cases filed in Amarillo, Texas. Tipton hears all cases filed in Victoria, Texas). But it remains to be seen whether Hendrix will show the same contempt for the rule of law as a Kacsmaryk or a Tipton. So, while this case probably isn’t an immediate cause for alarm, it is a reminder that no lawsuit filed in Texas’s federal courts can safely be ignored. Paxton’s lawsuit claims that the law funding the federal government is unconstitutional because it was passed using proxy voting In 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US House of Representatives voted to permit its members to cast votes by proxy for as long as the public health emergency arising out of that pandemic was in effect. Under this rule, a member of the House who is present in the Capitol may cast proxy votes on behalf of up to 10 colleagues, provided that those colleagues give the member written authorization to act as their proxy, and provided that those colleagues give the member instructions on how to vote. At the time it was enacted, the constitutionality of this rules change was uncertain because no court had ever ruled on whether proxy voting is permissible. Indeed, shortly after the proxy voting rule took effect, 21 House Republicans — most likely emboldened by the fact that the federal judiciary is dominated by Republican appointees — filed a lawsuit claiming that the new House rule was unconstitutional. But that case, known as McCarthy v. Pelosi, was rejected by a bipartisan panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Supreme Court decided not to review that decision in January of 2022. Armed with this bipartisan ruling that proxy voting is constitutional, the House continued to use it until this year, when the new Republican majority eliminated the rule permitting proxy voting. When Congress met in late December to fund the government for most of 2023, many House members voted by proxy. According to Paxton’s lawsuit, a majority of the House — 226 members — did not physically attend the session when this funding bill received its final vote, voting by proxy instead. Paxton’s lawsuit rests on a provision of the Constitution which states that “a Majority of each [House of Congress] shall constitute a Quorum to do Business.” He argues that members of the House must actually be physically present in the US Capitol to count toward this quorum. As the DC Circuit’s decision in McCarthy suggests, there are serious legal problems with this argument. Three legal reasons why Paxton’s lawsuit should fail The most glaring flaw in Paxton’s argument is that, while the Constitution does state that a majority of the House “shall constitute a quorum,” it is silent regarding what process Congress must use to determine if a quorum is present. Nor does it state that members must actually be physically present at a particular location in order to count toward a quorum. Very much to the contrary, the Constitution provides that “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings.” That indicates that the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives alone, gets to decide what the rules are governing whether a particular member is able to contribute to a quorum. Can a member contribute to a quorum if they are present only by proxy? The Constitution’s text indicates that the House alone will decide this question. Paxton relies on two older Supreme Court decisions, United States v. Ballin (1892) and Christoffel v. United States (1949), which he cites for the proposition that members must be “actually and physically present” to contribute to a quorum. But the Ballin and Christoffel decisions, when read in full, actually undermine his arguments. Ballin asked whether a bill was lawfully enacted if it passed the House while a majority was physically present, but where only a minority of the House’s members actually voted on the bill. Paxton quotes a single line in Ballin, which states that “all that the constitution requires is the presence of a majority, and when that majority are present the power of the house arises,” to support the proposition that a majority of the House must actually be physically present for a quorum to exist. But the very next line of the opinion undercuts Paxton’s argument. “But how shall the presence of a majority be determined?” Ballin asks, before answering that this question should be answered by the House itself. “The constitution has prescribed no method of making this determination, and it is therefore within the competency of the house to prescribe any method which shall be reasonably certain to ascertain the fact.” Paxton’s reading of Christoffel is similarly misguided, as that decision also emphasized “what rules the House has established and whether they have been followed.” So both precedents suggest that the House of Representatives alone gets to decide what its rules are for establishing a quorum — and not the federal judiciary. Meanwhile, another provision of the Constitution, which says that members of Congress “shall not be questioned in any other place” for “any speech or debate in either House” also cuts against Paxton’s argument in Garland. Indeed, the DC Circuit ruled in McCarthy that this, often called the speech and debate clause, prohibits courts from interfering with how the House conducts votes on legislation. Although that clause refers explicitly to only speech or debate on the House floor, the Supreme Court has long read it broadly. The Court held in Doe v. McMillan (1973) that this clause “includes within its protections anything ‘generally done in a session of the House by one of its members in relation to the business before it.’” Under Doe, that includes “voting by Members” on legislation. Similarly, in Gravel v. United States (1972), the Court established that the speech and debate clause protects against lawsuits challenging legislative actions that make up “an integral part of the deliberative and communicative processes by which Members participate in committee and House proceedings with respect to the consideration and passage or rejection of proposed legislation.” A House rule permitting members who are not physically present in the Capitol to vote by proxy involves the very sort of “House proceedings with respect to the consideration and passage or rejection of proposed legislation” that the Court discussed in Gravel. Finally, there’s a third reason why Paxton’s suit should fail. The Supreme Court has long recognized that certain disputes involve “political questions” that are beyond the reach of an unelected judiciary, and must be decided by the two elected branches of government. In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Court laid out several categories of cases that involve these sorts of political questions, including a case that involves an “unusual need for unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made; or the potentiality of embarrassment from multifarious pronouncements by various departments on one question.” The Court, in other words, recognized that there are some decisions by the political branches of government that, once made, cannot be unmade by the judiciary because doing so would do too much harm or cause too much embarrassment to the nation. The decision to fund the federal government for nearly an entire year is just such a decision. Republicans had a fair chance to litigate the constitutionality of proxy voting in the McCarthy case. They lost that lawsuit before a bipartisan panel of judges, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees had an opportunity to consider the McCarthy case and decided not to hear it. Congress then relied on the judiciary’s decision in McCarthy to enact legislation funding most of the federal government’s operations for nearly an entire year. The funding legislation, moreover, was bipartisan. And it was the product of months of negotiations over the 2023 federal budget. Sixty-eight senators voted for this law, including 18 Republicans. And, if this law were declared unconstitutional, that would mean that the entire 2023 budget for most Cabinet departments is unlawful. It would also mean that every paycheck received by a member of the United States military since the law took effect is unconstitutional. It’s hard to imagine a case that involves a greater need for “unquestioning adherence to a political decision already made.” So what is likely to happen in the Garland case? Given the weight of these legal authorities, it is unlikely that even the current Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican supermajority, would order a government shutdown. But even if the Supreme Court eventually reverses a lower court decision striking down the spending law, Hendrix — and the far right Fifth Circuit, which will hear any appeal of Hendrix’s decision — could create a considerable amount of chaos in the interim. Hendrix, who became a federal judge in 2019, has a fairly thin record. So it is tough to determine whether he is the sort of ideologue who might order a government shutdown from the bench. Again, Hendrix did hand down one anti-abortion decision that is genuinely alarming, in part because it is doubtful that he even had jurisdiction to hear that case in the first place. But he otherwise has not distinguished himself in his brief time on the bench. This does not necessarily mean that he will do Paxton’s bidding in a lawsuit claiming that most of the federal government is unconstitutional. But the fact remains that, given the opportunity to effectively choose his own judge in the Garland case, Paxton chose to file his lawsuit in a location where he was likely to draw Judge Hendrix. That suggests Paxton, at least, believes that he has a real chance of obtaining a disruptive decision from Hendrix in Garland.
That early exposure helped foster Soga’s appreciation for nature, he says, and today Soga is an ecologist at the University of Tokyo. Soga specializes in the psychological benefits of nature. He studies how people’s interactions with nature affect their attitude toward it, and his research contributes to the growing body of scientific literature showing how spending time outside has a positive effect on people’s well-being. Within Soga’s field, research on biophilia—which explores the consequences of humans’ affinity for the natural world—is more extensive than studies of biophobia, the fear of nature. But in a new opinion paper, Soga and a team of researchers argue that biophobia is a growing phenomenon that seems to be increasing with urban development. They go a step further, positing that biophobia is being reinforced and proliferated through society, which can have harmful consequences for people’s physical and mental health. Existing research already suggests that people who are biophobic are less likely to support conservation efforts, meaning growing biophobia could hurt wild ecosystems as well. To prevent or even reverse biophobia, it’s important to understand how it begins. The researchers’ concept of a “vicious cycle of biophobia” is based on the premise that humans tend to fear pain and seek to avoid it. Negative reactions like disgust can also lead to avoidance behavior. When a person begins to view nature as something to be avoided—because of direct experience, family or friends, or the media—it sets the stage for biophobia, write Soga and his colleagues. Over time, this may cause someone to avoid nature or, worse, try to eliminate it. The person’s progressively infrequent experiences with nature can lead to a feeling of disconnection. And because people are generally afraid of the unknown, this can feed into the phobia. Even just one person’s phobia has worrisome implications, the researchers say. If a person lacks the knowledge to interact with wildlife safely, or never learns to tell the difference between approachable and potentially dangerous species, aside from avoiding nature, they become ignorant of the natural world. This ignorance often leads to sharing sensationalist stories and spreading misinformation. The result is growing biophobia at the societal level and fewer people interacting with nature. And, because people are unlikely to protect something they fear, the end result is environmental degradation. To reverse the cycle, the researchers say, education is essential. Children are especially impressionable, and early exposure to nature in a safe environment, such as with a schoolteacher or parent, could change their attitude. Parents’ behaviors have a big influence on kids too, Soga says. Outside school, educational-outreach programs at places like museums and parks can boost people’s knowledge about nature. Naturalist-guided walks or activities like gardening can provide firsthand positive interactions. In places where it’s not easy to access nature, Soga suggests that virtual reality can play a role. Creative solutions will be necessary because as cities grow bigger and denser, accessing green space is becoming difficult for many, especially those in low-income communities, says Linda Powers Tomasso, an environmental-health researcher specializing in human-nature interactions at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston, who was not involved with the study. What used to be routine daily interactions with nature are disappearing, which is negatively affecting people’s attention span, physical-activity level, and resilience to stress, she says—not to mention the spiritual benefits of connecting with something larger than themselves. While Powers Tomasso “absolutely agrees” with the researchers’ ideas, she notes another mindset between biophilia and biophobia that leads to the same consequences as biophobia: indifference. “If you don’t care about something, you’re not going to take that next step to protect it,” she says. That’s why education, nature mentorship, and making natural places and urban green spaces welcoming and accessible are so important for conservation and human well-being, she says. “We only protect and care for what we know, what we love,” Powers Tomasso says. “If we don’t have an opportunity to get to know something, we will never develop that sense of love.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter! PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611 |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.