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First and foremost do not lose sight of Western motivations. NATO countries are not aiding the Ukrainian war effort because they are inspired by the valiant Ukrainian effort. NATO countries are aiding Ukraine because they are genuinely terrified by the threat posed by Russian military aggression.
More importantly Ukraine is, in a material sense already a vital part of NATO. Arguably from a strategic perspective the most important member of the NATO alliance, who is not even a member. What happens in Ukraine has not stayed in Ukraine. The effects are felt far beyond the battlefield, reverberating through western nations and compelling their participation. Ukraine is tasked with absorbing the direct impacts.
What Is the US Doing?
There is a debate within the Western defense community about what the strategy of the Biden administration is with regard to the situation in Ukraine. The concern among veteran defense strategists is that while on paper the US is providing more support to the Ukrainian defense effort than any other nation, they continue to withhold the key weapons components that would turn the tide of Ukrainian victory.
Former Commanding General US Army Europe, Ben Hodges commenting on a Washington Post report titled, “U.S. Doubts Ukraine Counteroffensive Will Yield Big Gains, Leaked Document Says” put it this way:
“If this leak is legit, then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy by the US Admin which won't say Ukraine must win, resulting in incremental delivery of capability to actually win.”
Hodges frustration is emblematic of a wide swath of US defense experts, mostly retired with senior military experience. There is growing frustration on Capitol hill as well. Democrats and Republicans are voicing increasing concern about the lack of US weapons capable of producing a Ukrainian victory. To date there are still no US fighter aircraft and no US battle tanks in the hands of the Ukrainian defenders.
The Kyiv Independent reports that, Some Western officials asked Ukraine not to liberate Crimea. That could perhaps provide some context in this regard.
The Coming Ukrainian Offensive
For the Ukrainians there is much to fight for. Liberation is about far more than territorial reclamation or converting red patches on a map to blue. In those red patches are homes, farms, families and lives being torn apart under a brutal occupation, by an occupier using genocidal methods. To liberate is to end suffering. It is the pain that drives the determination. For the Ukrainians this war is not about some vague political objective. It is about their homeland.
The Ukrainians are standing on a wall not just for Ukraine but for all of Europe. If the US can’t feel that urgency, the nations on NATO’s eastern flank certainly do. The support for Ukraine by countries closest to the conflict is not likely to be fickle or fleeting. When Putin and his deputies say their war is against NATO the nations that border the conflict are well convinced that the Russians are serious.
The weapons come from far and wide but the blood, with the exception of a few courageous Foreign Legionnaires is mostly Ukrainian blood. Accordingly decisions will be made as to how to conduct future offensive operations. Look for the Ukrainians to be far more concerned about the safety of their forces than the Russians have been. While offensive operations tend to be inherently riskier than defensive ones, look for the Ukrainians to avoid suicide missions. Bear in mind that in the past year the Ukrainians have liberated more of their land than all of New England combined. They know how to do it.
Speaking directly to strategic preparations for coming offensive operations Czech president, Petr Pavel, also a military general and former senior NATO advisor offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainian commanders some recent advice, go slow, don’t underestimate the Russians and don’t strike until fully prepared.
Article 5 of the NATO charter is the most often discussed and consequential element of the alliance. It is said that Article 5 was invoked for the first time in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on the US. However the scope of support now being provided for the defense of Ukraine dwarfs anything that has come before. NATO understands the urgency of the threat and they see Ukraine as a vital extension of the alliance.
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Bernard-Henri Lévy in 'Slava Ukraini.' (photo: Marc Roussel/NYT)
The French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy travels to different parts of Ukraine in this dispatch-documentary, shot in the second half of 2022.
For better and worse, that is how it plays. Lévy’s second documentary on the war in Ukraine (the first, “Why Ukraine,” aired on television in Europe) follows his travels to cities around the battered country in the second half of 2022. He meets with soldiers and civilians to capture the human stakes of the fight, with the goal of rallying the world against complacency in the face of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.
Lévy’s effort demands respect. Public intellectuals in the United States seldom travel through war zones with a camera running. (For that, we have Sean Penn.) They do not head into the center of a still-smoldering Bakhmut as the rumble of combat echoes in the background. Nor do they stand across the Dnipro River from an active Russian military position, in apparent view of a sniper. “For the time being, there is only sporadic fire,” Lévy explains over footage of himself hastening back to a car.
It is also facile to dismiss Lévy, as some have, as a conflict-chasing opportunist. He’s been at this long enough. Lévy first wrote as a war correspondent in the early 1970s. His documentary “Peshmerga,” on Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraqi Kurdistan, and its follow-up, “The Battle of Mosul,” were released here in 2020.
Yet Lévy does not make especially cohesive documentaries, and “Slava Ukraini” consists, like the Iraq films, of a disjointed, often insufficiently contextualized collection of interviews and interactions from his travels. It is hard not to wish for a version of “Slava Ukraini” in which Lévy played a less central onscreen role, or at least one without so much obtrusive scoring or voice-over.
Occasionally his commentary is poetic. A breathtaking hand-held shot shows him trudging through a trench with soldiers as he reflects in narration “on this archaic habit of men burying themselves so not to die.” Yet more often, at least as subtitled, his words are so florid (“And we walk, under an insolently blue sky, looking for miraculous survivors”) that they risk trivializing his encounters. The camera says a lot without him.
But artistic values aren’t really the point, which is to meet Ukrainians and to see different corners of the bombarded country, where residents, Lévy suggests, have in many cases become inured to the sight of a bombed office building or to the sound of warning sirens. “If there’s an evacuation, where will I go?” says a woman making borscht outdoors. Lévy visits a synagogue that sheltered outsiders, an act that he says serves as “a magnificent rebuttal to Putin’s propaganda about the inexpiable war between Ukraine and its Jews.” Survivors in liberated Kherson gather around generators to charge their phones, preparing to call people who may have been killed.
Maybe Lévy didn’t need to be the one to put them in a movie. But he’s the one who did.
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Rescuers work at the site of a residential area heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine May 3, 2023. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
The head of the U.N.'s nuclear power watchdog warned on Saturday that the situation around the plant has become "potentially dangerous" as Moscow-installed officials began evacuating people from nearby areas.
Ukraine is expected to start soon a much-anticipated counteroffensive to retake Russian-held territory, including in the Zaporizhzhia region.
"(The evacuees) have already been placed in the temporary accommodation centre for residents of the front-line territories of the Zaporizhzhia region in Berdiansk," Yevgeny Balitsky, Russian-installed governor of the Russia-controlled part of Zaporizhzhia region, said on his Telegram messaging channel.
Berdiansk is a south-eastern Ukrainian port city on the coast of the Sea of Azov, which has been occupied by Russia since the early days of Moscow's invasion on Ukraine in February 2022.
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Attorney Joe Tacopina, a lawyer representing former president Donald Trump, arrives at federal court. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Joe Tacopina’s outdated tactics have won freedom for accused killers and rapists, but will they work in E Jean Carroll case?
Twelve years ago, he successfully defended an on-duty police officer charged with escorting a drunk woman to her home and then raping her. He won an acquittal for one of the New York cops accused of the notorious beating and sodomising of a Haitian American, Abner Louima, while others involved went to prison.
Perhaps most notoriously Tacopina was able to extract Joran van der Sloot from jail in Aruba where he was accused of murdering a teenage American tourist, Natalee Holloway. Van der Sloot went on to murder another woman in Peru.
As a law student, Tacopina even worked on the team representing the mafia boss John Gotti, although he has since sworn off acting for the mob in part because it extorted protection money from the family’s store. Tacopina maintains the link with his roots as the owner and chair of an Italian league football club, Spal. He also has a stake in a top-flight team, Roma, and previously served on its board.
Whether Tacopina has been as effective in defending Trump as some of his other clients will be decided next week by the New York jury hearing the advice columnist E Jean Carroll’s civil claim that the former president raped her in 1996. She is also seeking damages for defamation after the former president called her a liar and claimed her accusation was politically motivated.
But Tacopina’s approach has raised more than a few eyebrows in the legal community and left some spectators in court aghast at outdated tactics that look to have bolstered Carroll’s case. The judge, Lewis Kaplan, has certainly done little to hide his irritation at Tacopina at times, including over convoluted questions eliciting confusing answers.
The jury may yet hand Tacopina, and Trump, the last laugh. But it remains to be seen if the former public defender and prosecutor has persuaded its six men and three women of the claims he made in his opening statement.
Tacopina said he would not be calling defence witnesses because Carroll’s own words would destroy her claim to have been raped in a changing room of New York’s high-end Bergdorf Goodman department store 27 years ago. He said he would then show that Carroll is at the heart of a political conspiracy to destroy the reputation of a man who has, arguably, already blitzed it himself.
The first part did not go well when Carroll gave evidence for three days at the beginning of the trial. The former Elle magazine advice columnist proved to be a formidable witness who turned Tacopina’s attempts to portray inconsistencies in her story to her advantage.
Yes, Carroll said, she had offered four different reasons over the years for why she didn’t scream while Trump was allegedly attacking her. But her inability to settle on one reason was not evidence that she was lying.
“You can’t beat up on me for not screaming,” Carroll pushed back.
“One of the reasons women don’t come forward is because they’re always asked: ‘Why didn’t you scream?’ Some women scream. Some women don’t. It keeps women silent.”
Besides, she said, if she was going to lie, then the easiest thing would have been to say she did scream.
That single answer rocked Tacopina’s case not least because it exposed the pugilistic lawyer’s often brutal style in challenging women who allege they have been sexually assaulted. In 2011, he won acquittal for a police officer accused of raping a drunk woman by portraying her as grasping for money and mentally unstable. Tacopina claimed her sexual history supported the police officer’s claim that she had tried to seduce him after he delivered her to her home.
It’s an approach that sits even less well today than it did back then, and is made visible by the line of men at the defence lawyers’ table in contrast to the women leading the case for Carroll.
Still, Tacopina pressed on with the strategy. He asked Carroll so many times why she hadn’t called the police that the judge eventually told him that was enough and to “move on”. By then, Carroll had confidently made the case that she was too “ashamed” of having been assaulted to go running to the police even if that’s what she advised women who have been attacked to do in her agony aunt column in Elle.
“I was born in 1943. I’m a member of the silent generation. Women like me were taught to keep our chins up and to not complain,” she said. “I would never call the police about something I am ashamed of.”
If Carroll’s own words had destroyed her case, as Tacopina promised they would, it was not immediately evident.
Perhaps out of desperation, Tacopina then asked Kaplan to declare a mistrial over what he described as the judge’s “unfair and prejudicial rulings”, the mischaracterising of evidence in Carroll’s favour, and permitting evidence from another woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse. The judge rejected the demand without comment.
That left the second part of Tacopina’s strategy as other witnesses gave evidence.
In his opening statement, Trump’s lawyer said Carroll conspired with two of her friends to falsely accuse the former president of rape because they “hate” him for winning the 2016 election. Those two friends, Lisa Birnbach and Carol Martin, have told the court they were the only people Carroll told about the alleged attack when it occurred.
The pair told the jury that the advice columnist then swore them to secrecy and they respected her wishes, never mentioning the alleged rape again, until Carroll went public with her accusations against Trump in 2019.
Tacopina argues that the three of them have cooked up a gigantic lie.
“They schemed to hurt Donald Trump politically,” he said.
Tacopina’s cross-examination of Martin, a retired television anchor, was a key plank of this strategy. By the time it was over, it looked to have defeated its own purpose.
Martin testified that Carroll had told her about the alleged rape during a conversation in the television anchor’s kitchen within a day or two of the attack. Tacopina then confronted Martin with a string of emails in which she calls Trump the “enemy” and says he “needs to be put away”.
“I hate this man who is ruining the world, putting his stank all over it,” she wrote in one message. In another, Martin said she “despised” the former president.
Tacopina’s aim was clear – to show that Martin so disliked Trump she was prepared to conspire against him and lie about it in court. There was even an email from September 2017 that skirted close to conspiratorial language.
“This has to stop. As soon as we’re both well enuf [sic] to scheme, we must do our patriotic duty again,” Martin wrote to Carroll.
The advice columnist replied: “TOTALLY!!! I have something special for you when we meet.”
Could this be the smoking gun? Was the “something special” Carroll’s plan to falsely accuse Trump of rape?
Martin told the court she thought Carroll was talking about a present, a squirrel the advice columnist gave her grandson.
“Not a live one,” she hastened to add, prompting a rare burst of laughter in court.
Still, Tacopina had successfully painted Martin as deeply hostile to Trump in the hope of sowing doubt about her reliability as a witness. The jury heard that Carroll even had a party to celebrate the filing of her lawsuit against the former president.
But Tacopina did not stop when he was ahead.
To Martin’s considerable embarrassment, Trump’s lawyer began reading messages in which she was critical of Carroll behind her back after the Elle columnist went public with her accusations against the former president 23 years later.
Martin sent texts to her daughter complaining that Carroll was turning the pursuit of Trump “into a lifestyle” while enjoying the “adulation” it brought. She also said Carroll was “in too deep” when she sued Trump.
Martin had another concern – that Carroll going public had exposed her too, with implications for her safety and members of her family.
“It was difficult because people in my family were concerned about identification,” Martin told the court.
Martin admitted she was “venting frustrations” with Carroll.
But as embarrassing as it might have been for Martin, the text messages sabotaged Tacopina’s attempt to portray the women as conspiring. If Martin was part of the conspiracy to make up a claim of rape, why would she be so critical of publicising it?
Tacopina’s position was further undermined when Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, pushed the point by asking Martin about a text commenting that she had been dragged into this by “a simple chat 25 years ago”.
Was that not evidence that Carroll had indeed told Martin about the alleged attack?
At the beginning of the trial, Tacopina painted Carroll’s story as “an affront to justice”, wildly implausible and short of evidence. He accused her of pursuing the case for money, status and political reasons.
“It all comes down to: do you believe the unbelievable?” he said.
The jury will decide in the coming days.
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President Biden at the White House this month. (photo: Demetrius Freeman/WP)
Luckily for Biden, none of these policy victories were especially polarizing. Barack Obama lost a large House majority after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Thanks, in part, to the demise of Roe v. Wade, Democrats avoided the typical backlash in the midterms, buoying Biden further. Even at age 80, he has united the party behind him. There are no formidable primary challengers. His campaign team can increasingly look forward to a rematch with Donald Trump, who maintains comfortable leads in Republican primary polls. As alienating as ever and facing down the possibility of indictments in two different states, he is just the opponent Biden craves.
And Biden longs for Trump, in part, because he’s yet to offer a compelling vision for a second term.
The president has no new policy agenda, and he very well may need one. “It’s time to finish the job,” Biden declared, as if his presidency were a home-repair project. His campaign-announcement video, running three minutes, was an encapsulation of the kind of campaign messaging that paid off for Biden during the midterms and certainly proved effective in 2020, when Trump was the incumbent and COVID was the primary terror. Grainy footage opens on the January 6 riot and then quickly cuts to a protest sign outside the Supreme Court that announces, “Abortion Is Healthcare.” The Biden campaign, again, cloaks the president in patriotic imagery and warns of “MAGA extremists” unraveling democracy. His 2020 argument — a “battle for the soul of America” against Trumpism — has been resuscitated in full.
In 2024, with the pandemic faded and even the end of Roe being a two-year-old issue, Biden may have to craft a new approach. He will be 81 going on 82. Democrats are unlikely to retain the Senate, but Biden can’t campaign that way — he needs to offer hope and a concrete rationale for another four years as president that will take him to his 86th birthday. He could argue, forcefully, for a federal codification of abortion rights, but he seems unwilling to take up that fight in a visceral way. If he’s serious about finishing the job, as he maintains, he could revive a cause he spoke about in his last campaign and mostly abandoned when he became president: universal health care.
It’s strange, historically speaking, that the aim to provide free or cheap health care to every American has fallen off the Democratic radar. For decades, it was a leading campaign issue; it became a large part of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s portfolio in the White House and would end up consuming most of Obama’s first term. In 2016, Bernie Sanders rose to prominence promising the passage of Medicare for All, his far-reaching version of single-payer health care. Clinton, then running for president herself, was dismissive of the idea, but even the moderate wing of the Democratic Party was vowing to, at the very minimum, fulfill Obama’s original promise of the ACA and create a public option to compete with private insurers in the marketplace. (Joe Lieberman killed it.) The 2020 Democratic primary was, at points, a battle of ambitious health-care proposals, with progressives lashing out at Pete Buttigieg for offering a “Medicare for All who want it” plan that would have preserved private insurance while creating a government-funded option for anyone who desired that sort of coverage.
Biden himself, a past supporter of the public option, has been mum on the idea of late. The logistical rationale is reasonable enough: Democrats don’t control the House anymore and only had a 50-50 majority in the Senate in 2021 and 2022. But it was notable Biden, in his willingness to pitch various very expensive spending plans, never stumped on the public option. For all the accomplishments of those two years, there was a large degree of unfocused spending, with few tangible policy programs left behind that voters can immediately benefit from. Green industrial policy will only excite you so much if you’ve got a health-care bill running close to $1,000 a month, or you’ve racked up tremendous debt after an extended hospital stay.
Biden could build a presidential campaign around implementing the public option and dare Trump or any Republican to oppose him. Much of the wariness around health-care reform has receded. Republicans spent a decade trying and failing to repeal the ACA. In the last few years, they’ve ignored it. Trump himself doesn’t talk about Obamacare anymore. Even Republican-run states have expanded Medicaid coverage. Health care is a broad and winning issue, and a government option on the state marketplaces would be overwhelmingly popular, since members of labor unions or those granted stronger private plans won’t have to fear giving their coverage up. Momentum, on the state level, has slowly built around the concept, with Minnesota moving closer to implementing one.
Democrats, come 2025, may lack the votes in Congress to pass a public option on the federal level. Indeed, if Republicans control the House or the Senate and Biden wins a second term, he will be blocked on almost every domestic front. But a campaign is about striving to avoid that outcome or forcing the opposition, at the very minimum, to adopt an unpopular stance, like denying the public the choice of cheap health insurance. Biden has the ability to put Republicans on the defensive — if he chooses to do so.
Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by framing the election as one that would determine the future of American democracy. Trump tried to overturn the results and has lied about the outcome since, insisting he somehow won. Election-denying acolytes ran everywhere in the 2022 midterms and came, in certain states, very close to winning. Democrats are terrified of the Republican far right, and fear can always push up turnout from the base.
Will it all be enough? Lost in the din of Fox’s firing of Tucker Carlson and the liberal punditocracy’s supreme confidence that MAGA is on the wane is the reality that Trump, in 2023, may be running the most disciplined campaign of his life. He remains deeply alienating, but his approval ratings are no more dismal than Biden’s. In the GOP primary, Trump’s team has effectively dismantled Ron DeSantis, his top rival, before the Florida governor has even become an official candidate. Some of Trump’s attacks on DeSantis have come, ironically enough, from the left, and it will be much harder to credibly accuse Biden of wanting to slash Social Security or Medicare. But Trump’s dominance of the primary is evidence, in part, that he is going to be formidable — that any kind of landslide scenario, like the one alluded to by recent Biden endorser Bernie Sanders, is not plausible. Trump, as the Republican nominee, is a sizable threat to win the Electoral College.
To win in 2024, Biden may not be able to replicate the conditions of 2020 — or even 2022. Three years ago, Trump’s shambolic response to the pandemic was an overriding campaign issue, as were his destabilizing public utterances and tweets. Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee with a simple argument: He was the safest candidate to take on Trump because he was the most likely to win. Many Democrats and independents believed eight consecutive years of Trump could terminally weaken the American republic. It may have been a chaotic and confusing time, but the campaigns themselves were stark and extraordinarily direct. Few voters wanted to really know Biden’s plan for anything. They wanted to know if Biden could make Trump go away. Now Biden will hope that’s all voters really want again: yet another bulwark against Trump and his movement. If voters are demanding more, Democrats may come to regret consolidating so quickly around an elderly incumbent, especially with their growing bench of national contenders.
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Emergency personnel respond to a fatal collision in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday. Several people were killed after they were struck by a vehicle while waiting at a bus stop near Ozanam Center, a migrant, and homeless shelter. (photo: Michael Gonzalez/AP)
The crash occurred at about 8:30 a.m. on Sunday at a bus stop near the Ozanam Center, a shelter for migrants, Brownsville Police investigator Lt. Martin Sandoval said in a video posted to the department's Facebook page.
Brownsville police said earlier that seven people had died but on Sunday night said that number had increased to eight. Sandoval told ABC affiliate KRGV that an unknown number of immigrants were among the victims.
Ozanam Center shelter director Victor Maldonado said he reviewed the shelter's surveillance footage after receiving a call about the crash, The Associated Press reported.
People waiting at an unmarked city bus stop had been sitting on the curb, Maldonado told the news agency. He said most of the victims were Venezuelan men.
Video shows a Range Rover SUV running a red light about 100 feet away from the bus stop before plowing into the group of people sitting on the curb, Maldonado said. The SUV flipped after running over the curb and continued moving for another 200 feet.
Some people who were walking on the sidewalk about 30 feet away from the main group were also hit, Maldonado told the AP.
The driver, identified as a man from Brownsville, has been charged with reckless driving, Sandoval told KRGV. He said authorities are investigating whether the crash was intentional or accidental. They are also testing the driver for intoxication.
"It is looking more and more like an intentional act," Sandoval told the station.
The driver was being treated at the hospital before he is taken to jail, he said.
A group of people were waiting for a bus to take them to the airport, where, from there, they would take another bus or a flight, Sandoval said.
Luis Herrera told local station ValleyCentral that he and his friends were waiting to go to the airport when they were struck by a gray Range Rover.
"It happened unexpectedly because a woman in a car passed by and advised us to separate and moments later the killer was coming in the car gesturing and insulting us," Herrera said.
The Ozanam Center shelter sits just five miles from the migrant encampments in Matamoros, Mexico, where thousands of migrants are waiting for Title 42 to expire. The pandemic-era public health order, set to be lifted this week, allows the U.S. to expel migrants without considering asylum.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has been briefed on the situation, a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. The FBI is assisting the Brownville police investigation, the spokesperson said.
"I cannot describe the heartache I feel at hearing the news from this morning, not just as an advocate for the rights of migrants, but as a resident of Brownsville," Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement.
Garza called for state officials to invest "in a humanitarian response that might have helped the people who were impacted by this morning's tragedy."
La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), a immigrant rights advocacy group, plans to hold a vigil for the victims on Monday at 10 a.m. at the Ozanam Center.
"While officials investigate and we wait to learn more details, we are alarmed that this happened near a shelter that provides aid to immigrants in Brownsville," the group said in a statement.
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A forest near drought-shrunken Horseshoe Lake by Mammoth Lakes, California on July 28, 2022. (photo: David McNew/EcoWatch)
A recent study by researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the United States Forest Service have uncovered warning signs that forests in the Western U.S. are struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.
“If you’re concerned about forest health then one thing you want to observe is whether the rate at which forest composition changes is roughly equivalent to the rate at which the climate changes,” said lead author of the study Kyle Rosenblad, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, in a press release from the Rausser College of Natural Resources. “We found that climate change is outpacing the ability of forests and tree biomass to keep up, which is a potential concern for forest managers.”
The study, “Climate change, tree demography, and thermophilization in western U.S. forests,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the study, in the past ten years, forests in the West have become more and more dominated by trees better equipped to survive climate conditions that are drier and hotter — a process called “thermophilization.”
The precise factors affecting the thermophilization process can differ in individual forests, but on the whole, the changing composition of forests is failing to keep up with climate change.
“In many ecosystems, water is often limited, and higher temperatures can cause trees to lose water more quickly. When a tree’s access to water gets dangerously low — in other words, the tree becomes highly drought-stressed — its vascular system (akin to our veins and arteries) is under so much tension that air bubbles can develop and destroy sections of the vascular system,” Rosenblad told EcoWatch in an email. “Some trees protect themselves against these dangers by building special vascular structures that make it more difficult for bubbles to form and spread. Trees’ leaves can also wilt under drought stress, and some trees defend against this danger by closing the pores on their leaves to minimize evaporation, or by stockpiling solutes in their leaf cells so it becomes physically more difficult for water to leave.”
Each decade, scientists from the Forest Service conduct a “tree census” by measuring plots of trees and collecting data all over the U.S. This survey gives the scientists an idea of the condition and health of the millions of acres of forest across the country. It also allows them to track temporal changes.
“Our study included the roughly 100 tree species that live in the western half of the continental United States. Common examples include quaking aspen, ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir,” Rosenblad told EcoWatch. “Every tree species has its own geographic range, and one of the trends reflected in our study is that species have tended to struggle most with climate change in the warmest, driest parts of their geographic ranges, where just a little bit of warming might be enough to push them beyond their physiological limits. Quaking aspen is a good example of a species struggling heavily with climate change, although other factors like disease play a role as well.”
The research team from UC Berkeley looked at almost 45,000 subplots of forest that had been measured in the most recent tree census, the press release said. Their analysis found that the temperature in Western forests had increased an average of 0.57 degrees Fahrenheit from 2011 to 2020.
During this same time period, forest thermophilization rates were 10 times slower than the mean temperature increase.
According to the findings of the study, the most dramatic changes in forest composition occurred in plots that were on hillsides facing north, those that experienced the most extreme warming and drought and those that were subjected to insect attacks.
“[W]hen heat causes trees to become drought stressed, the trees also become more susceptible to insects like bark beetles, which can decimate large swaths of forest in a short time. Some trees can defend themselves by pushing sap into the holes formed by the beetles before the beetles can lay eggs,” Rosenblad said. “Lastly, high heat and dry vegetation can make wildfires burn hotter and spread more widely, thus making tree death more likely. Some trees defend themselves against wildfire by developing thick bark and frequent self-pruning — i.e., dropping of low branches that are no longer growing well and might otherwise help a fire climb to the canopy. Other trees embrace wildfire as a new growth opportunity, either by resprouting from a stump after the fire, or by producing seeds that germinate post-fire.”
Senior author of the study David Ackerly, who is dean of Rausser College of Natural Resources and a professor in the departments of Integrative Biology and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, said trees that are able to tolerate the warming temperatures are not replacing those that can’t at a rapid enough pace to keep forests healthy.
“This research shows that tree species with low temperature tolerances are dying, and new trees are not growing fast enough to compensate for these changes,” Ackerly said in the press release. “These trends are an early warning that changes in the forest are lagging behind the pace of climate change, which may make them more vulnerable to warmer and drier conditions in the future.”
Rosenblad said that if the West continues to experience extreme heat and drought, the divide between the transition of forests and their changing climate will become more pronounced. This will result in successive cycles of tree death that interfere with essential ecosystem functions and allow carbon that had been stored in the trees and soil to be released back into the atmosphere.
“Healthy forests provide human society with many important services, like food, clean drinking water, wood, wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities, spiritual and mental health benefits, and — ironically — defense against climate change. Not only do healthy forests provide shade from the sun, they also pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock the carbon into the forest ecosystem, where it cannot contribute to the greenhouse effect until it very slowly cycles back into the atmosphere again. If we cannot maintain healthy forests, then all of these benefits will be compromised,” Rosenblad told EcoWatch.
In some areas of the country, the effects may be so pronounced that landscapes change entirely.
“In some parts of the western U.S., it’s likely that forests are going to disappear and be replaced by other ecosystems like grassland or shrubland. In these places, like some low-elevation parts of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, the best thing to do is start preparing to have fundamentally different relationships with our local ecosystems,” Rosenblad said. “In other places, healthy forests might persist, but they would likely be populated by different types of trees than those that live there today. However, one of the key findings from our study is that tree species are not filling in new parts of the map quickly enough to keep up with climate change. We may be able to help hasten their arrival through carefully planned and monitored tree planting projects. Some work like this has already begun in some parts of the country, and it is an active area of research.”
Rosenblad told EcoWatch that building sustainable forests in the face of climate change should involve looking to Indigenous peoples and their forest management practices for guidance.
“We can also help forests respond to climate change and other environmental threats by restoring land rights and sovereignty to Indigenous people. Most importantly, restoring Indigenous sovereignty is a moral obligation, but an additional benefit is that Indigenous people have built relationships with their local ecosystems over thousands of years and often have a wealth of knowledge about how to interact with these ecosystems sustainably,” Rosenblad said. “For example, before European colonization, many Indigenous groups practiced carefully planned cultural fire, which brought numerous benefits like increased food production and thinning of thick vegetation that could otherwise have fueled dangerous high-severity megafires. When European colonists forced Indigenous people to stop practicing cultural fire, vegetation density increased, and high-severity megafires became increasingly frequent and destructive.”
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