26 October 20
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How to Steal an Election
Jon Grinspan, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Understanding past swindles can shed light on what we should worry about in 2020."
round supper time on Election Day, 1880, the poll workers in Bolivar County, Miss., were getting hungry. Someone ran out for sardines and crackers. The officials noshed and counted votes until the “violent laxative” that had been added to the Republicans’ sardines started to take effect. Then they ran for the outhouses while the remaining Democrats counted a suspiciously large majority.
As a historian of American democracy, I used to collect anecdotes like this from the mid-to-late 1800s. They dramatized, with outlandish gall, just how different America’s past was from the square politics I grew up with in the late 20th century. But on the eve of an election the president of the United States has declared might be stolen from him, a fear he promises to counter with an “army” of partisan poll watchers, dirty tricks don’t feel so distant. As our politics have darkened, I’ve shifted away from studying spiked sardines, wondering instead how Americans ever stopped stealing elections.
Such thefts are not cute. They robbed thousands of people of their rights, helped kill Reconstruction, and forestalled political reform. We still suffer from these crimes, over a century later. But in a striving nation dominated by what Charles Dickens called “the love of smart dealings,” crooked politicians often chuckled about their cunning. “Instead of wrath” at stolen elections, the humorist James Russell Lowell complained upon returning from abroad, “I found banter.” When the journalist Lincoln Steffens mentioned a St. Louis trick to a party boss in Philadelphia, the two began excitedly talking shop, “as one artist to another.” Although most elections were (relatively) clean, “majority manufacturers” in teeming Northern cities, racially tense Southern districts and new Western settlements laid out two paths for stealing elections — steal the cast or steal the count.
Lesley Stahl, a '60 Minutes' correspondent since 1991, calmly and firmly asked the president about the coronavirus and other topics, and he grew increasingly irritated. (photo: CBS News)
Trump's 'Epic Meltdown' on 60 Minutes Revealed as CBS Releases Full Interview
Stuti Mishra, The Independent
Mishra writes: "CBS News aired its full pre-election interview with Donald Trump on Sunday evening, showing the moment the president abruptly walked out after a heated exchange."
EXCERPT:
Stahl reminded Mr Trump that he was the president and not Mr Biden, when a producer then interrupted to inform the pair of the time remaining.
At this point, Mr Trump responds that he "thinks we have enough of an interview here”, before getting up and walking away from the set.
A single clip of the final exchange shared on Twitter by political columnist Sarah Reese Jones has been viewed more than five million times. Reese Jones called it an “epic meltdown” on Mr Trump’s part.
Long before the segment was aired by CBS, Mr Trump in a series of tweets accused Stahl and the network of being “FAKE AND BIASED”. His campaign eventually posted a video of the interview to his Facebook page.
In a statement, the channel called it an “unprecedented decision to disregard their (the Trump campaign’s) agreement with CBS", and defended Stahl’s record as “one of the premier correspondents in America”.
Mr Trump also posted a few pictures from the set, one of which was of Stahl talking to a group of people, where the president pointed she wasn’t wearing a mask.
The aftermath of a Trump rally. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Rajan Menon | So Trump Loses, What Happens Then?
Rajan Menon, TomDispatch
Menon writes: "Donald Trump isn't just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he's long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November."
READ MORE
Vladimir Putin. (photo: Sergey Guneev/Sputnik/AP)
Putin Rejects Donald Trump's Criticism of Biden Family Business
Andrew Osborn, Reuters
Osborn writes: "Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that he saw nothing criminal in Hunter Biden's past business ties with Ukraine or Russia, marking out his disagreement with one of Donald Trump's attack lines in the U.S. presidential election."
READ MORE
Police use of tear gas during protests in Portland. (photo: AP)
Portland Reckons With Police Attacks on Protesters After Months of Unrest
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Witness testimony and a video reconstruction detail deliberate violence by police against peaceful protesters."
Witness testimony and a video reconstruction detail deliberate violence by police against peaceful protesters.
ays into the nationwide protest movement sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, the Black-led, police accountability group Don’t Shoot Portland sued the city of Portland, Oregon, over use of tear gas against protesters. The lawsuit led to a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Portland Police Bureau from using tear gas, except in narrow circumstances. But officers quickly switched gears, and in response to growing protests, they ramped up the deployment of OC spray, rubber bullets, pepper balls, flash bangs, and other impact munitions known as “nonlethal” or “less-lethal” weapons. Don’t Shoot Portland again sought and obtained a court order to limit police’s use of those weapons.
Then on June 30, just four days after a federal judge had sided with protesters and issued a restraining order on the use by police of less-lethal weapons, Portland officers meeting protesters outside the local police union building again fired smoke grenades, rubber bullets, and other impact munitions into the crowd, injuring several people. They then declared the protest a riot and deployed tear gas despite the court order restricting its use.
“They blatantly ignored the order,” Tai Carpenter, Don’t Shoot Portland’s board president, told The Intercept. “What happened on June 30 was just an all-out attack on civilians. That night just really stands out for the vast amount of violence that was being inflicted on the street.”
In August, as protests in Portland continued uninterrupted for a third month, Don’t Shoot Portland filed a new motion, asking the federal judge in the case to hold the city in contempt of court over police use of “less-lethal” munitions that night. In a court hearing this week, protesters testified in graphic detail about what they described as an unprovoked, violent response to a protest that had been largely peaceful.
A spokesperson for the city of Portland declined to comment on pending litigation. Attorneys for the city said in court that police response “was based on good faith and reasonable interpretations of the less-lethal order.” They argued that police were responding to protesters throwing bottles, rocks, and cans and shining green lasers at them, and that officers feared that protesters would set the police union’s building on fire. In court filings, they wrote that plaintiffs had offered “vague descriptions of uses of force such that it is not possible to begin to evaluate whether the uses violate the Less Lethal Order.”
The implication that a confrontation between protesters and police was too chaotic to discern, and that police were justified in their outsize response by some individuals’ actions toward them, is one that’s been regularly invoked following violent repression of protests. Often the official narrative established by police is hard to challenge in a court setting, because evidence is usually messy or incomplete, or the chain of events gets obscured in the fog of war surrounding many protests.
But the June 30 incidents were not only among the most violent in Portland’s summer of protest, they were also some of the best documented, captured in several long videos shot from different angles by protesters and bystanders. “It was one of the most heavily visualized nights of the protests,” said Carpenter. “There were a lot of livestreamers there, there were people on their balconies, because it was in a residential neighborhood.”
In fact, the number and quality of videos has allowed attorneys for Don’t Shoot Portland, working with the applied-research group SITU, to produce an unusually detailed reconstruction of that night’s events, a granular analysis of a number of incidents of police violence over a 90-minute period of time that clearly shows the circumstances, and lack of justification, that preceded each deployment of force. The reconstruction, which was shown in court, offered a forensic analysis of a protest with a level of detail that is usually reserved for criminal investigations. It provided a rare piece of evidence of abuse by officers that is much harder to dismiss than many witness accounts of police violence, opening the door for an equally rare moment of accountability.
“What these protests have exposed is the utter contempt that the police bureau has for criticism or even the idea that anybody should question what they do at any time,” Jesse Merrithew, one of the attorneys representing Don’t Shoot Portland, told The Intercept.
“You can watch it on video what actually happened,” he added.“What we’re hopeful of is that this helps the court impose the accountability that the city has been unwilling or unable to impose on the police bureau.”
The Night of June 30
On the evening of June 30, protesters who had previously stayed mostly downtown for the first time moved to the more suburban area where the Portland Police Association has its headquarters. By then, a growing number of people in Portland had begun to protest not only to demand justice for Floyd, but also large cuts to the police bureau’s budget and accountability for violence carried out by local police. In court documents, Don’t Shoot Portland called the police union “the chief obstacle to police accountability in this city.”
Protesters met a line of officers before reaching the union’s building and stopped at a distance, chanting or listening to speakers. Witnesses described seeing a couple plastic bottles hurled toward the officers, but no further criminal conduct and “nothing shocking or riotous.” But within minutes of protesters’ arrival, officers in full riot gear filled the street. Using a loudspeaker on an LRAD truck, a type of sonic weapon sometimes deployed at protests, they announced that the assembly had been declared unlawful and threatened to deploy force to arrest protesters. Then, as the crowd complied with orders to move back, police, unprovoked, begun pushing and beating people back with batons. Almost immediately, and responding to no visible provocation, they fired the first impact munitions and pepper-sprayed people at close range.
The reconstruction of the following hour and a half that was presented in court zeroed in on four moments that evening during which police deployed multiple types of less-lethal weapons, as well as a moment when they “bull-rushed” into the crowd. It ends showing police as they declared a riot and deployed tear gas.
In the first incident, police can be seen shoving and beating people with batons and pepper-spraying them in the face, before shooting munitions at them at close range, even as protesters are moving back as directed. Police are also shown grabbing a protester holding a banner, ripping it, and preventing people from dispersing despite ordering them to do so. In the second incident, a protester can be seen throwing a bottle on the ground in front of police — in response to which police fire impact munitions at the protester multiple times before rolling a smoke grenade into the receding crowd. Officers are then seen firing at a different protester who kicked away a smoke canister. In the third incident, police are seen shooting impact munitions at a crowd that was posing no threat, from 120 feet away, and then doing so again at a closer distance during a fourth incident.
In court, James Comstock, a lead investigator in the case, walked a judge through SITU’s reconstruction, which he explained was built using a laser scan of the area to reproduce a three-dimensional model of the street where the protest took place. Visual evidence of each incident was then mapped onto the model and replayed in real time. Each incident was presented from multiple viewpoints, including side views and aerial views captured by a bystander filming from his balcony. And each deployment of force was shown in the context of the 30 seconds that preceded it, in order to paint as accurate a picture as possible of any action that might have justified it.
“I don’t know that anybody has used a reconstruction like this in a protest case,” Merrithew told The Intercept. “We use them all the time in criminal cases and we’ve used similar reconstructions for police shooting cases.”
“It gives a really good overview for people to understand what’s going on, the movement of the police and the protesters, and the violence, and it’s in real-time so you can actually see what’s happening,” echoed Carpenter. “It will show a lot of people what we’ve been saying, that it was all unprovoked.”
In court, the judge also heard firsthand accounts from protest participants, including Pedro Anglada Cordero, the protester who was shot with a rubber bullet after kicking a smoke canister away, and Eric Greatwood, a livestreamer and a regular presence at Portland protests who recorded most of the evening with a video action camera placed on top of a 20-foot pole, and who was shot in the groin with a FN303 round, a type of impact munition that has caused fatal injuries in the past.
Anglada Cordero, who was at the protest with his wife, was retreating from police along with most others in the crowd when a smoke canister was tossed toward him. Anglada Cordero, who noted that his wife had already been coughing because of the chemical agents in the air, said that he instinctively moved to kick the can away. When the can barely moved, he took a few more steps and kicked it further away, the video shows. Police immediately shot him with rubber bullets, hitting him once behind the knee and once in the thigh, and leaving tennis ball-sized bruises later documented in court filings.
“My first, spontaneous reaction was to get it away from us,” he told The Intercept, referring to the canister. “It was in my interest to keep our immediate group safe from being exposed to more agents.”
But police took the gesture as an attack on them, and right after he kicked the canister, things escalated quickly, Anglada Cordero said. Moments later someone who tried to grab and toss a can was tackled to the ground. In court, city attorneys sought to describe the incidents as evidence of protesters’ violent conduct. Anglada Cordero said he was just trying to protect his wife, himself, and those in his immediate vicinity.
“The moment they toss a smoke canister our way and the moment someone kicks it back, that constitutes a reason for them to escalate and retaliate,” he told The Intercept. “So suddenly they are in the right to use ammunition against the crowd, but the crowd has no right to defend themselves.”
Eric Greatwood, an independent livestreamer who has filmed dozens of protests, captured much of the evening on video, providing footage that was used for the reconstruction presented in court. At one point, officers recognized him and called him by name, ordering him to move back. “That just sent the hairs of my arm up, just to call me by my name like that,” Greatwood told The Intercept. He complied but kept filming from the sidelines as police arrested protesters. Then moments later, as Greatwood crouched down to look at an unexploded smoke grenade, police fired an impact munition at him, hitting him in the groin.
“I know for a fact that they did it intentionally because there have been other people who have been fired on in that area,” said Greatwood, who can be heard moaning in the video as his camera kept rolling. “They have sights on those things, they know exactly how to fire them, they are supposed to bounce them off the ground. They fired directly at me.”
A U.S. Air Force veteran, Greatwood said that anyone in the military caught doing what police did to him would be in prison. “I don’t know how a man can actually hit another man in the groin, that just completely baffles me, he totally aimed for it.” The officer who shot him, Brent Taylor, said in court that had had not intended to target Greatwood’s groin. “I’m shooting at a moving target,” he testified. “I’m aiming at his lower legs but how quickly he changes his position, I cannot control.”
Greatwood, who has filed notice of his intent to sue the city for using excessive force, said that he was in pain for weeks after being shot and had difficulty using the bathroom. But he was back the next day to livestream another protest, and many more since then. “I just couldn’t not film what was happening.”
Competing Narratives
In court, attorneys for the city pushed back against the reconstruction presented on behalf of Don’t Shoot Portland. “It wasn’t an effort to provide an objective presentation from both police perspective and demonstrator perspective, right?” an attorney for the city asked Comstock in cross-examination, noting that the reconstruction focused for instance on the actions of Portland police, and not of Oregon State Police who were also on the scene. “The purpose of this video is giving context around the video that we’ve collected,” Comstock replied.
In fact, the legal team representing protesters said that they chose to reconstruct the June 30 incidents over other episodes during which police may also have violated court orders in part because of the volume of evidence available about them. “It’s important for the case to be able to give the court the best possible, quality evidence so the court can determine whether or not they violated the order,” said Merrithew.
But as Portlanders reckon with the historic wave of protests that has gripped the city for months, leading to two deaths and hundreds of arrests, and as the upcoming mayoral race is likely to be determined in large part by officials’ response to the protests, the broader public also has a right to see evidence of what happened, Merrithew argued.
“Probably a very small percentage of the public is looking at these things every night and actually paying attention to what’s going on; they’re hearing it from a 10,000-foot view, which allows them to sort of be naive in whatever camp they’re predisposed to be in,” he said. “We’re trying to bring the same quality of evidence to the public as we are to the court, because the public needs to understand that the justifications that are being made by the bureau are false. The public needs to understand what these public employees are doing in their name.”
The impulse to discern and record what was happening is also what drove Greatwood to start livestreaming the protests in Portland. “I’ve seen a lot of footage that was basically just the backs of people’s heads, and there was a lot of chaos, but you couldn’t exactly see anything,” he said, adding that his video camera, placed on top of a pole or sometimes on a drone, offers a bird’s eye view of the protests. “I wanted to figure out if protesters were causing the police’s actions or if the police were just being a little bit heavy-handed.”
Greatwood said that he has always been respectful toward officers at protests, getting out of their way when asked and limiting himself to documenting what was happening, including on June 30. But he felt he had been targeted that night because he was there with a camera. “They are probably upset because they know that they have been acting out of line, and they don’t like it being broadcast,” he said. “If you are doing things that are proper, you shouldn’t be afraid of a camera and the truth.”
That night, he said, he had seen “barely anything happening” before police unleashed on protesters. “I saw more things that seemed blown out of proportion when it came to the police providing footage or photos to the press,” he added. “I felt like there was a lot of gaslighting from the police, and that there was not a whole lot that the protesters were doing to get them egged on.”
Others who testified last week also said that regardless of the outcome in court, it was important for Portland residents to document and address the harm and trauma inflicted on countless protesters over the last months. “There are so many people that have gone through something so similar to what I went through that night,” said Anglada Cordero, who after being shot helped other protesters who were maced at close range and couldn’t breathe. “When you go through such an experience, and you see others hurt, then you feel compelled to come out and be in solidarity with others. And that’s what happens every night, when people are getting hurt, more people come out and help each other.”
The judge in the case is expected to rule on whether to hold the city in contempt of court in the coming days.
“It’s hard to have faith in the court system when it’s been proven all your life that your civil liberties don’t matter,” said Carpenter of Don’t Shoot Portland. “But the trauma and the violence have been clearly documented on the record; they’re facts that can’t be ignored. Even with the way that our justice system works, there has to be accountability.”
Protesters from various parts of Iraq started making their way to the capital last night for Sunday's protests. (photo: Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)
'Demands Not Met': Anti-Government Protests Resume in Iraq
Arwa Ibrahim, Al Jazeera
Ibrahim writes: "Protesters have gathered in Baghdad's Tahrir Square to mark one year since a second wave of anti-government protests erupted and gripped Iraq."
Hundreds of protesters gathered in Baghdad, southern provinces, demanding reforms and end to corruption.
rotesters have gathered in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square to mark one year since a second wave of anti-government protests erupted and gripped Iraq.
Iraqi security forces fired water cannon and tear gas at the protesters during Sunday’s demonstrations to prevent them crossing fences on a bridge leading towards government buildings.
The rallies renewed calls from early October last year, which saw the start of Iraq’s biggest anti-government protest movement since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, with demonstrations in the capital Baghdad and Iraq’s mainly Shia south demanding basic services, employment opportunities and an end to corruption.
“Our blood, our souls, we sacrifice for you Iraq,” chanted hundreds of protesters as they marched through the capital’s Tahrir Square, epicentre of the protest movement.
The demonstrations became a nationwide, decentralised movement that called a complete overhaul of the political system and slammed a political class protesters saw as more loyal to Iran and the US than to Iraqi citizens.
“Today’s an important day as it marks a year since October 25, 2019 and our revolution for which we gave our blood and sacrificed many martyrs,” Muntather Mahdi, a 24-year-old protester, told Al Jazeera.
“On the top of our demands is holding the killers and kidnappers accountable. Justice must be achieved and we’ll keep coming until we see that,” said Mahdi, who came from the province of Dhi Qar.
Large groups of protesters also gathered in other southern provinces including Nasiriya, Babylon, Wasit, and Basra, holding posters and chanting anti-government slogans.
Protesters from various parts of Iraq started making their way to the capital last night for Sunday’s protests.
While many managed to enter Baghdad and reach Tahrir Square, some riding cars and other vehicles were prevented by security forces, according to activists and journalists.
Some planned to stay in Tahrir Square, while others assembled at the entrances of the heavily fortified Green Zone – where the seat of Iraq’s government and the US embassy are located – where security forces had been deployed since Saturday night.
Speaking from Allawi Square near the Green Zone, Ali Shimmari, a 26-year-old protester who made his way from the eastern governorate of Wasit in the morning, said he was determined to enter in spite of tensions between protesters and security forces being on the rise.
“Today is a continuation of what we started last year,” Shimmari told Al Jazeera.
“Our demands have not been met. We will continue our protests until we see the change we want,” he added, referring to demands including wholesale changes to the political class and holding accountable those who had attacked protesters in the demonstrations that erupted last year.
Earlier, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi had given strict orders to security forces to avoid the use of live ammunition and called on demonstrations to remain peaceful.
A year on
Last year, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand the removal of Iraq’s political elite, who they accused of incompetence, corruption and loyalty to Iran.
Some 600 protesters were killed and thousands of other wounded in clashes before the movement lost momentum and came to halt amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The protests forced the resignation of then-Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi. He was succeeded by al-Kadhimi, who promised to integrate protesters’ demands into his government’s plans.
But on the ground, little has been achieved. The new government has yet to deliver major reforms for country, including new elections, economic development, basic services and employment opportunities. The World Bank says one in three young people is unemployed.
Iraq has also witnessed a string of assassinations and forced disappearances of journalists and political activists since October last year.
Al-Kadhimi promised to investigate the killings, but no one has been held accountable yet.
“The fact that protests have continued for over a year and are being renewed today shows the pressure is still on the ruling elite and that no significant reforms have yet been achieved which could placate demonstrators,” said independent Iraqi analyst Sajad Jiyad.
“The size of protests has not reached the numbers from a year ago but given that the economic situation has detoriorated and trust in the political system continues to fall, it will be very likely that protests will gain momentum.”
Independent Iraqi analyst Zeidon Alkinani agreed: “There was a lot of concerns with the momentum not being as significant. The numbers and resilience today reflected the opposite.”
“Protesters across Baghdad and the southern provinces revived their uprising with the same unmet demand,” he told Al Jazeera.
Arial view of a forest. (photo: Hakan Burak Altunoz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Natural Debate: Do Forests Grow Better Without Our Help?
Fred Pearce, Grist
Pearce writes: "Planting is widely seen as a vital 'nature-based solution' to climate change - a way of moderating climate change in the next three decades as the world works to achieve a zero-carbon economy. But there is pushback."
hen Susan Cook-Patton was doing a postdoc in forest restoration at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland seven years ago, she says she helped plant 20,000 trees along Chesapeake Bay. It was a salutary lesson. “The ones that grew best were mostly ones we didn’t plant,” she remembers. “They just grew naturally on the ground we had set aside for planting. Lots popped up all around. It was a good reminder that nature knows what it is doing.”
What is true for Chesapeake Bay is probably true in many other places, says Cook-Patton, now at the Nature Conservancy. Sometimes, we just need to give nature room to grow back naturally. Her conclusion follows a new global study that finds the potential for natural forest regrowth to absorb atmospheric carbon and fight climate change has been seriously underestimated.
Tree planting is all the rage right now. This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, called for the world to plant a trillion trees. In one of its few actions to address climate concerns, the Trump administration — with support from businesses and nonprofits such as American Forests — last month promised to contribute close to a billion of them — 855 million, to be precise — across an estimated 2.8 million acres.
The European Union this year promised 3 billion more trees as part of a Green Deal; and existing worldwide pledges under the 2011 Bonn Challenge and the 2015 Paris Climate Accord set targets to restore more than 850 million acres of forests, mostly through planting. That is an area slightly larger than India, and provides room for roughly a quarter-trillion trees.
The study found that natural regeneration can capture more carbon more quickly and securely than tree plantations.
Planting is widely seen as a vital “nature-based solution” to climate change — a way of moderating climate change in the next three decades as the world works to achieve a zero-carbon economy. But there is pushback.
Nobody condemns trees. But some critics argue that an aggressive drive to achieve planting targets will provide environmental cover for land grabs to blanket hundreds of millions of acres with monoculture plantations of a handful of fast-growing and often non-native commercial species such as acacia, eucalyptus, and pine. Others ask: Why plant at all, when we can often simply leave the land for nearby forests to seed and recolonize? Nature knows what to grow, and does it best.
Cook-Patton’s new study, published in Nature and co-authored by researchers from 17 academic and environmental organizations, says estimates of the rate of carbon accumulation by natural forest regrowth, endorsed last year by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are on average 32 percent too low, a figures that rises to 53 percent for tropical forests.
The study is the most detailed attempt yet to map where forests could grow back naturally, and to assess the potential of those forests to accumulate carbon. “We looked at almost 11,000 measurements of carbon uptake from regrowing forests, measured in around 250 studies around the world,” Cook-Patton told Yale Environment 360.
She found that current carbon accumulation rates vary by a factor of a hundred, depending on climate, soils, altitude, and terrain. This is much greater than previously assessed. “Even within countries there were huge differences.” But overall, besides being better for biodiversity, the study showed, natural regeneration can capture more carbon more quickly and more securely than plantations.
Cook-Patton agrees that as climate change gathers pace in the coming decades, rates of carbon accumulation will change. But while some forests will grow more slowly or even die, others will probably grow faster due to the fertilization effect of more carbon dioxide in the air, an existing phenomenon sometimes called global greening.
The study identified up to 1.67 billion acres that could be set aside to allow trees to regrow. This excludes land under cultivation or built on, along with existing valuable ecosystems such as grasslands and boreal regions, where the warming effects of dark forest canopy outweigh the cooling benefits of carbon take-up.
Combining the mapping and carbon accumulation data, Cook-Patton estimates that natural forest regrowth could capture in biomass and soils 73 billion tons of carbon between now and 2050. That is equal to around seven years of current industrial emissions, making it “the single largest natural climate solution.”
Cook-Patton said the study’s local estimates of carbon accumulation fill an important data gap. Many countries intent on growing forests to store carbon have data for what can be achieved by planting, but lack equivalent data for natural regeneration. “I kept getting emails from people asking me what carbon they would get from [natural] reforesting projects,” she says. “I had to keep saying: ‘It depends.’ Now we have data that allow people to estimate what happens if you put up a fence and let forest regrow.”
The new local estimates also allow comparisons between the potential of natural regrowth and planting. “I think planting has its place, for instance where soils are degraded and trees won’t grow,” she said. “But I do think natural regrowth is hugely underappreciated.”
The great thing about natural restoration of forests is that it often requires nothing more than human inaction. Nature is constantly at work restoring forests piecemeal and often unseen on the edges of fields, on abandoned pastures, in scrubby bush, and wherever forests lie degraded or former forest land is abandoned.
But because it requires no policy initiatives, investments, or oversight, data on its extent is badly lacking. Satellites such as Landsat are good at identifying deforestation, which is sudden and visible; but the extent of subsequent recovery is slower, harder to spot, and rarely assessed. Headline grabbing statistics on the loss of the world’s forests generally ignore it.
In a rare study, Philip Curtis of the University of Arkansas recently attempted to get around the problem by devising a model that could predict from satellite imagery what had caused the deforestation, and hence the potential for forest recovery. He found that only about a quarter of lost forests are permanently taken over for human activities such as buildings, infrastructure, or farming. The remaining three-quarters suffered from forest fires, shifting cultivation, temporary grazing, or logging, and at least had the potential for natural recovery.
Another study published this year found that such recovery was widespread and rapid even in an epicenter of deforestation such as the Amazon. When Yunxia Wang of the University of Leeds in England analyzed recently-released Brazilian data from the Amazon, she found that 72 percent of the forest being burned by ranchers to create new cattle pasture is not pristine forest, as widely assumed, but is actually recent regrowth. The forest had been cleared, converted to cattle pasture, and then abandoned, whereupon the forest returned so fast that it was typically only six years before it was cleared again. Such was the confusion caused by this rapid forest turnover that regular land-use assessments frequently wrongly categorized this new growth as degraded old-growth forest.
Wang noted that if Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, wanted to fulfill a promise made by his predecessor Dilma Rousseff at the 2015 Paris climate summit to restore 30 million acres of forest by 2030, then he need not plant at all. He could just allow regrowth to proceed in the Amazon without further clearing.
Brazil’s other great forest, the Atlantic forest, is already on that path, recovering slowly after more than a century of clearance for coffee and cattle. The government has an Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact that subsidizes landowners to replant, often with trees intended to supply the paper industry. Yet Camila Rezende of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro says most of the forest regrowth is not from planting but from “spontaneous” regrowth, as forest remnants colonize neighboring abandoned farmland. She estimates that some 6.7 million acres of Atlantic Forest has naturally regenerated in this way since 1996. It now makes up about a tenth of the forest.
Much the same has been happening in Europe, where forest cover is now up to 43 percent, often from naturally recolonizing farmland rather than planting. Italy, for instance, has grown its forest cover by 2.5 million acres. In the former communist nations of central Europe, 16 percent of farmland in the Carpathian Mountains was abandoned in the 1990s, much of it reclaimed by the region’s famed beech forests. Across Russia, an area of former farmland about twice the size of Spain has been recolonized by forests. Irina Kurganova of the Russian Academy of Sciences calls this retreat of the plow “the most widespread and abrupt land-use change in the 20th century in the Northern Hemisphere.”
The United States has also seen natural forests regenerate as arable farmland has declined by almost a fifth in the past 30 years. “The entire eastern United States was deforested 200 years ago,” says Karen Holl of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “Much of that has come back without actively planting trees.” According to the U.S. Forest Service, over the past three decades the country’s regrowing forests have soaked up about 11 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions.
With nature on the march, a major concern is whether a push for planting might grab land for plantations that natural forests might otherwise recolonize. The result would be less wildlife, less amenity for humans, and often less carbon stored.
Ecologists have traditionally dismissed the ecological gains from natural restoration of what is often called “secondary” forest. Such regrowth is often regarded as ephemeral, rarely sought out by wildlife, and prone to being cleared again. This has led many to regard planting to mimic natural forests as preferable.
Thomas Crowther, co-author of a widely-publicized study last year calling for a “global restoration” of a trillion trees to soak up carbon dioxide, emphasizes that, while nature could do the job in places, “people need to help out by spreading seeds and planting saplings.”
But a reappraisal is going on. J. Leighton Reid, director of Restoration Ecology at Virginia Tech, who recently warned against bias in studies comparing natural regeneration with planting, nonetheless told e360, “Natural regeneration is an excellent restoration strategy for many landscapes, but actively reintroducing native plants will still be a better option in highly degraded sites and in places where invasive species dominate.”
Others make the case that most of the time, natural restoration of secondary forests is a better option than planting. In her book, Second Growth, Robin Chazdon, a forest ecologist formerly at the University of Connecticut, says that secondary forests “continue to be misunderstood, understudied, and unappreciated for what they really are — young self-organizing forest ecosystems that are undergoing construction.”
Yes, she agrees, they are work in progress. But they generally recover “remarkably fast.” Recent research shows that regrowing tropical forests recover 80 percent of their species richness within 20 years, and frequently 100 percent within 50 years. That seems to be better than what human foresters achieve when trying to replant forest ecosystems.
Tree planting can worsen outcomes for everything from the number of bird and insect species to canopy cover.
A review of more than 100 tropical forest restoration projects by Renato Crouzeilles of the International Institute for Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, with Chazdon as a co-author, found that success rates were higher for secondary forests allowed to regenerate naturally than for those subjected to the “active restoration” techniques of foresters. In other words, planting can often worsen outcomes for everything from the number of bird, insect, and plant species, to measures of canopy cover, tree density, and forest structure. Nature knows best.
Now, Cook-Patton has extended the reappraisal to the carbon-accumulating potential of natural forest regeneration. It too may often be superior.
This scientific rethink requires a policy rethink, says Holl. “Business leaders and politicians have jumped on the tree-planting bandwagon, and numerous nonprofit organizations and governments worldwide have started initiatives to plant billions or even trillions of trees for a host of social, ecological, and aesthetic reasons”.
She concedes that on some damaged lands, “we will need to plant trees, but that should be the last option, since it is the most expensive and often is not successful.”
Planting a trillion trees over the next three decades would be a huge logistical challenge. A trillion is a big number. That target would require a thousand new trees in the ground every second, and then for all of them to survive and grow. Once the cost of nurseries, soil preparation, seeding, and thinning are accounted for, says Crouzeilles, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. If natural forest growth is cheaper and better, does that make sense?
