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“When you are fleeing from violence, it means you’ve lost everything. Not only the material stuff—but the feeling of being protected.”
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Deseret Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 23, ISSN PP324, is published 10 times a year by Deseret News Publishing Co., with double issues in January/February and July/August. The Deseret News’ principal office is 55 N. 300 West, Ste 500, Salt Lake City, Utah. Subscriptions are $29 a year. To subscribe visit pages.deseret.com/subscribe.
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DESERET, PROPOSED AS A STATE IN 1849, SPANNED FROM THE SIERRAS IN CALIFORNIA TO THE ROCKIES IN COLORADO, AND FROM THE BORDER OF MEXICO NORTH TO OREGON, IDAHO AND WYOMING. INFORMED BY OUR HERITAGE AND VALUES, DESERET MAGAZINE COVERS THE PEOPLE AND CULTURE OF THAT TERRITORY AND ITS INTERSECTION WITH THE BROADER WORLD.
Every month on our masthead we list the people involved in creating each issue (page 6). From our inception, Todd Curtis has graced the masthead as copy chief, leading a team of sharp-eyed editors who save us from the embarrassment of typos, misspellings and the errant punctuation mark.
But for this issue Todd isn’t with us. He died of cancer in March.
Like so many we know who fall victim to this disease, he was too young (just 56). “My grand adventure has come to an end, albeit about two decades too early, in my honest opinion,” he wryly expressed in the obituary that he penned.
From the beginning, Todd has been instrumental in ensuring that our readers engaged with clean, clear copy. I was a burden, for sure, considering I still don’t understand the debate over the Oxford comma. On top of that, his small team edits three other Deseret News publications. And yet Todd took particular pride in poring over every story draft and page proof of the magazine. Our managing editor, Matt Brown, told me that the last time he saw Todd — at a party, where he could bid farewell to friends and colleagues while he had the strength — he asked how things were going with our March issue and apologized for not being as involved as he would have liked to.
I think Todd would have taken pride in this issue, starting with our cover story on the conservative case for climate action by Ethan Bauer (page 34). Bauer traveled to Miami and Washington, D.C., to follow Rep. John Curtis, who leads a coalition he started in Congress called the Conservative Climate Caucus. Curtis — who represents Provo, Park City, Moab and most of rural eastern Utah — said his position
on the climate changed in part during town hall meetings in his district, seeing the disappointment in young Republican voters over their party’s stance on climate change. “We can’t afford to lose the next generation of Republicans on this issue,” he told Bauer. And as longtime climate activists told Bauer, any meaningful change will require Republican cooperation and compromise.
I also think Todd would have felt as alarmed as I did reading Jean Twenge’s article on rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens and young adults (page 52). We’ve known about this problem for some time, but as recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data tell us, it’s getting even worse: 1 in 3 high school girls considered suicide in 2021, a 60 percent increase since 2011. Twenge set out to discover why teen mental health started to plummet around 2012. Her answer may surprise you.
And I wish I could’ve talked to Todd about Lee Benson’s spellbinding account of the 1983 flood here in Salt Lake City (page 60). Todd was born in Salt Lake, went to Bingham High in South Jordan and surely would have had memories of when floodwaters came gushing downtown from City Creek Canyon. Now, 40 years later, the conditions are eerily similar, which Todd surely would have pointed out as he marked up our proofs before we sent one more issue off to the printer. I speak for everyone who puts out this magazine when I say we miss Todd.
Todd’s name will remain on our masthead as a tribute and a reminder of his kindness, humility and sense of humor. His high standards kept us on our toes and made us better. His memory will continue to do so. We won’t let him down.
Our MARCH cover story (“State of the West”) was the catalyst for a Deseret Elevate gathering of education, political and business leaders in Boise, Idaho, last month to discuss smart growth and the labor market. A panel discussion focused on training a workforce for the future, regionally and nationally. Brent Orrell , an American Enterprise Institute scholar on job training and workforce development who spoke at the event, which was attended by Idaho Gov. Brad Little, College of Western Idaho President Gordon Jones and Stephanie Park, president of recruiting firm TalentSpark, said the state has challenges filling technical roles that many states and communities around the country would envy. Kyle Dunphey’s report on the Intermountain region’s reckoning with decades of unchecked growth generated an equally robust debate online. “Maintaining the quality of life for those of us who already live in Utah should not have to be sacrificed so real estate developers can build more housing for more people, more traffic, more air pollution, more congestion,” wrote Ross Blackham . Ethan Bauer profiled newly elected Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, who hopes to improve the path of the United States’ largest reservation (“Buu Nygren Leads the Nation”). Actress Piper Perabo , from the hit streaming series “Yellowstone,” shared the story with her 182,000 Twitter followers, with this upbeat assessment: “The youngest President ever, and a female VP too? Navajo nation has its eyes on the future, while still honoring its past.” Meg Walter’s profile of Utah first lady Abby Cox (“The Compassion of Abby Cox”) also received high praise from Utah Republican leaders, including, not surprisingly, Gov. Spencer Cox, who tweeted, “I’m profoundly lucky (and our state is too). I hope you get a chance to read this incredible piece about my best friend.” Natalia Galicza explored how art generated by artificial intelligence is changing humanities (“Art or Artifice”). Reader Marlowe Starling tweeted, “I admit: I haven’t fully grasped the meaning of AI or how it works. But now I better understand its impact on art. Lyrical, thought-provoking and richly reported.” A book excerpt by Rafael A. Mangual , a legal policy expert with the Manhattan Institute, about the criminal justice reform movement’s impact on families (“Both Sides of the Bars”), prompted this response from reader Mark Goodwin : “Realistically there are three dominant philosophies for dealing with criminals: retribution, incapacitation and rehabilitation. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but right now we’re overly focused on rehabilitation. … By constantly taking the edge off of punishments there isn’t tremendous motivation to change.”
“Maintaining the quality of life for those of us who already live in Utah should not have to be sacrificed so real estate developers can build more housing for more people, more traffic, more air pollution, more congestion.”
Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, whose research has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, among others. She has authored several books, including “iGen,” and “Generation Me,” and is co-author of “The Narcissism Epidemic.” An excerpt from her latest book “Generations” is on page 52.
A former United States senator, Smith is on the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation board and is a former president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. He served in the Oregon state Legislature, where he was Senate president, before serving two terms representing Oregon in Washington, D.C. Smith’s commentary defending the Senate filibuster is on page 15.
Noble is the founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute. In 2013, she received the National Association of Scholars’ Barry R. Gross Memorial Award for academic reform. She serves on the Alumni Free Speech Alliance board and her writing has appeared in National Review Online and The Wall Street Journal. Her essay about free speech in higher education is on page 68.
Runde is a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bretton Woods Committee. An excerpt from his book “The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership Through Soft Power” is on page 72.
An award-winning journalist based in Montana, Mohr is a fellow at High Country News. She has worked in national newsrooms and as a Wyoming newspaper reporter and freelancer. Her work has been published in National Geographic, Hakai Magazine and E&E News. Her story about Westerners’ relationship with wolves is on page 42.
LaRue is a graphic designer and illustrator whose iconic work on the Women’s March on Washington logo has been widely celebrated. She has authored, designed and illustrated several books, including “Girl Almighty,” “Small Mighty” and, most recently, “Ordinary Equality.” She received her bachelor of fine arts degree from Brigham Young University. Her artwork appears on page 16.
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BY GORDON H. SMITH
I’m a Republican from a blue state. For 12 years, I represented the people of Oregon in the United States Senate. Winning an election required reaching across the aisle. It required finding common ground with voters who held different views — Democrats and independents, moderates and liberals, as well as conservative Republicans.
But it was also the right thing to do. Our nation’s founders designed a government that requires broad buy-in to achieve lasting change. Power is divided between the federal and state governments, and then divided again among the three branches of government. Within each branch of the federal government there is then further division of power: House and Senate, president and cabinet agencies, Supreme Court and lower courts. The president and Supreme Court exercise a degree of control over their respective branches, while in Congress, the House and Senate are coequals.
The purpose of all these divisions and subdivisions is to ensure that no single group, or faction, is able to run roughshod over all the others. We have to work together if we want to achieve meaningful, lasting reform.
I took this lesson to heart as a member of the Senate. Most of my proudest achievements, in fact, were the result of working across the aisle. Laws to improve access to mental health care, facilitate cutting-edge medical research, and expand the availability of disability benefits were enacted because of my work with Democratic colleagues.
My most important legislative partner, in fact, was the Democrat who defeated me in my first race for the Senate, Ron Wyden. Ron and I worked tirelessly together on bills to help make life better for the people of Oregon, including — and in particular — rural Oregonians. Although we disagreed on many, many issues, we saw eye to eye on the fact that it was our responsibility as senators to work together for the people of our state, and our country.
These days, everyone seems to hate the legislative filibuster. It slows things down. It forces you to negotiate with people you don’t want to have to negotiate with. It requires you to trim your sails — to moderate, that is — to get your goals across the finish line.
Or rather, everyone seems to hate the legislative filibuster when they’re in the majority. When you’re in the minority, it’s great. It lets you stop bad bills with fewer than 50 votes. It gives you influence even though your party didn’t do so well in the last election.
Many people — too many people, in my view — see the legislative filibuster through this sort of situational lens. When it leads to outcomes you like, it’s great. When it leads to outcomes you don’t like, it’s terrible.
This is the wrong way to think about the legislative filibuster. The legislative filibuster is about the process, not the particular outcome. It’s about working together, about finding common ground. It’s about that dreaded word that today’s political class seems to hate so much but that most fair-minded people recognize is a good thing — compromise.
That’s not to say that the legislative filibuster doesn’t lead to better outcomes. It can, and it does. I have witnessed numerous times during consideration of bills that I or other colleagues were authoring — on the widest variety of topics ranging from mental health and prescription drugs, to war authorization and international treaties, energy and the environment and more — where the filibuster became the tool that moderated policy choices, compelled bipartisanship, and thereby produced durable statutes and better law.
Too often in politics we forget everything that happened more than five minutes ago. We decide whether we like something based on whether we think it’s helping or hurting our immediate objectives.
The vision the founders had when they created our Constitution was one of working together to achieve the common good. They wanted us to be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, not enemies but friends.
BY MARC NIELSEN
No legislation does more to shape how Americans eat than the Farm Bill. Every five years — including 2023 — Congress must update and renew this omnibus law that covers a range from crop insurance and agriculture subsidies to food stamps and farm labor. Lawmakers are now debating what the expected $709 billion allocation will fund when the current bill expires in September, after public hearings kicked off the process last year. It’s difficult to parse out the details of a bill this massive, but its policies reach into our everyday lives, determining what food reaches our plates and how much it costs to get there.
Soaring inflation may headline Congress’ approach to the 2023 Farm Bill. Farmers, too, have been hit hard by the same rising costs that have flowed into the aisles where Americans shop. Per the Congressional Research Service, food prices rose by 6.5 percent in 2021 — up to 12.5 percent for certain items like meat and eggs — after an annual average of 1.5 percent over the previous decade.
Americans eat more sugar than anyone else in the world, around a quarter-pound per day on average. Added sugars raise our risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. Still, sugar subsidies account for 63.5 percent of that industry’s production value.
Agricultural subsidies are meant to help farms, big and small, deal with the unpredictable nature of farming: Natural disasters and price drops can be catastrophic for any operation. But large commercial agribusinesses are receiving most of the subsidies. A 2018 study from the American Enterprise Institute found that farms in the top 2 percent of commodity sales received the highest subsidies per acre. This puts smaller farms at a disadvantage in the competition for markets and land.
Haunting images of grocery store shelves lying empty at the height of the pandemic brought attention to certain problems in our food and agriculture system, which this cycle is expected to address. For example, after outbreaks at large meat processing plants led to meat shortages and skyrocketing prices, Congress may try to diversify the industry by supporting smaller plants.
Most of the subsidies fund commodity crops like corn and soybeans that are not primarily meant for humans to eat. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most corn goes into animal feed and ethanol production, or gets processed into high fructose corn syrup. What does that look like on our dinner plates? Diets with a lot of meat and processed foods, which are linked to health problems like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
About three-quarters of the bill’s spending falls under the Nutrition chapter, largely focused on food programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Commonly known as food stamps, SNAP helps feed more than 10 percent of American households, but also — perhaps surprisingly — nourishes the economy. Every dollar invested in SNAP benefits during a downturn generates between $1.50 and $1.80 in economic activity.
While an omnibus bill has advantages, transparency isn’t one of them. A bill this complex relies on bipartisan and bicameral cooperation, and its enormity opens doors to outside influence. Lobbying from the agriculture sector spikes when this law is on the table.
The 2018 Farm Bill was the fourth-most lobbied in the 115th Congress and, according to Investigate Midwest, agribusiness spent $165 million lobbying last year, the most since 2013.
This could be the first Farm Bill to directly address climate change, a top priority for the current administration. Agriculture contributes about 11 percent of nationwide greenhouse emissions. Because farms are vulnerable to extreme weather like floods and droughts that are expected to intensify, there could be common ground based on protecting the nation’s food supply.
“It’s a nice name: the Farm Bill. And there are clearly programs that benefit farmers, but you don’t have to be a farmer to be interested in the farm bill. You can live in a rural community and be a librarian. And in the farm bill, there are programs that your small town accesses to build the library that you work in and some of the infrastructure of your town. You’re a librarian, you don’t actually grow anything.”
— DENNIS NUXOLL, VICE PRESIDENT OF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS AT WESTERN GROWERS, A FARMER ADVOCACY GROUP
THE
THE “15-MINUTE CITY” could change the way we live. This urban planning concept, introduced in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, scientific director at Panthéon Sorbonne University-IAE in Paris, puts essential resources and daily destinations within a short walk or bike ride for each resident. Cities from Barcelona, Spain, to O’Fallon, Illinois, have taken up the experiment to varying degrees, and proponents argue that it will reduce car emissions and increase quality of life. While the idea has quickly become fodder for conspiracy theorists, more reasonable critics are concerned with the social cost and administrative feasibility of rebuilding cities around pedestrians.
THE GREAT IMMIGRATION challenge of our era is not at the borders but inside them. It’s not who gets in, but what happens once they’re here. As Congress remains gridlocked, why not let states decide how the foreign-born get to belong? Consider education, abortion, health care, gun control and marijuana. States blue and red are going their own way on all these issues, often in conflict with one another and sometimes with Washington.
THE BASIC CONCEPT of the “15-minute city,” as a way to reduce pollution from cars and to increase quality of life, isn’t new. “I think you can look at most urban development that happened prewar, pre-mass expansion of personal automobile use, and you can see examples of that,” says urban designer Mallory Baches, director of strategic development at the nonprofit Congress for the New Urbanism.
But as more cities have started talking about it, it’s also spawned a backlash. In the U.K., Conservative politician Nick Fletcher called 15-minute cities an “international socialist concept” that would “take away your personal freedoms.” In reality, the idea offers more freedom, not less. “What it means is as an individual, you aren’t relegated to your automobile,” says Baches.
It is already happening, but the question is how much power over immigration will eventually devolve to the states. They can create a fragmented landscape of places that welcome immigrants and others that close their doors. And within that patchwork, we might eventually end up with a federal policy that works.
States differ in the access to health care and safety-net programs they make available to immigrants. Dreamers — unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children — are welcomed into public higher education in some states but shunned in others. Some make it easier for professionals trained abroad to get licenses; others make it harder. As states diverge further, immigrants would choose to settle in welcoming places and avoid unfriendly places.
There are multiple benefits. Less time spent driving means more free time to do things you actually enjoy (in studies, people rank commuting as one of their least favorite activities, unsurprisingly). Walking reduces your risk of diabetes or heart disease and makes you happier. A study found that if you have an hour-long commute, you’d need to earn 40 percent more to be as happy as someone who can walk to work. The list goes on.
The concept isn’t just about a particular neighborhood: Fifteen-minute zones stretch farther than single neighborhoods and overlap, and if someone wants to go to another part of the city, they obviously can.
The United States can have only one form of citizenship, but states can compete over access to the world’s best brains, to the people who will care for aging boomers and to young adults with years ahead of them to pay taxes and bear children. Americans and their marketplaces have a way of sorting these things out.
ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY ROBERTO A. SURO, A PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC POLICY AT USC ANNENBERG, SPECIALIZING IN IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO POPULATION.
Still, people balk at the idea of changes in infrastructure that could make walking biking easier. But people forget, Baches says, that top-down planning created that car dependency, including zoning that keeps housing far from stores, or wide streets with fast traffic and little shade that few people want to walk on. It’s not so much that people choose to drive, as they’ve been forced into it by bad design.
ADAPTED FROM “THE CASE FOR 15-MINUTE CITIES” BY ADELE PETERS, IN FAST COMPANY. PETERS IS A STAFF WRITER AT FAST COMPANY WHO PREVIOUSLY WORKED IN THE SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS AND SOLUTIONS PROGRAM AT UC BERKELEY.
THE GREAT IMMIGRATION challenge of our era is not at the borders but inside them. It’s not who gets in, but what happens once they’re here. As Congress remains gridlocked, why not let states decide how the foreign-born get to belong? Consider education, abortion, health care, gun control and marijuana. States blue and red are going their own way on all these issues, often in conflict with one another and sometimes with Washington.
BEHOLD, THE “15-MINUTE city.” At the most recent C40 World Mayors Summit, it’s all people could talk about. But this utopian vision comes with downsides that deserve attention. For one, it turns out the best way to implement such a plan is to discourage cars because there is no better way to convince people to cycle or walk to work. European cities are doing this by pedestrianizing large areas, taking initial steps to ban certain types of vehicles, or imposing heavy tolls for driving in city centers.
To achieve a 15-minute city, public administrations must also push private companies to set up shop where their urban planning determines. And the further the state gets its hands into the private sector, the bigger the setback for the free market.
It is already happening, but the question is how much power over immigration will eventually devolve to the states. They can create a fragmented landscape of places that welcome immigrants and others that close their doors. And within that patchwork, we might eventually end up with a federal policy that works.
Carlos Moreno himself has pushed back on the more conspiratorial criticisms of his campaign, reportedly calling them “lies.” It is possible that Moreno is sincere, but it is also reasonable to assume that the politicians who must implement his plan would feel quite comfortable imposing restrictions on citizens, as they demonstrated in the pandemic. And call me paranoid, but I don’t trust that the technocrats devising these systems will resist the urge to go Big Brother. Like utopia, the 15-minute city could only work by giving too much power to the government.
States differ in the access to health care and safety-net programs they make available to immigrants. Dreamers — unauthorized immigrants who arrived as children — are welcomed into public higher education in some states but shunned in others. Some make it easier for professionals trained abroad to get licenses; others make it harder. As states diverge further, immigrants would choose to settle in welcoming places and avoid unfriendly places.
The United States can have only one form of citizenship, but states can compete over access to the world’s best brains, to the people who will care for aging boomers and to young adults with years ahead of them to pay taxes and bear children. Americans and their marketplaces have a way of sorting these things out.
ADAPTED FROM AN OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BY ROBERTO A. SURO, A PROFESSOR OF JOURNALISM AND PUBLIC POLICY AT USC ANNENBERG, SPECIALIZING IN IMMIGRATION AND THE LATINO POPULATION.
Even without any of that, turning cities into dozens of small, self-contained ecosystems would only worsen our epidemic of alienation and make us even more insular in our habits. Most of us hate driving in city traffic, but there is a societal value in having to hop in the car a couple times a week to go run an errand, or more often than that to go to work. Mingling with others in your city — or, gasp, outside of it — enriches you and increases your sense of belonging. It expands your world. And, besides, some of us just like to drive, to give full throttle before the stoplight closes and curse each other in traffic jams as a form of release.
ADAPTED FROM “THE PROBLEM WITH THE ‘15-MINUTE CITY’ UTOPIA” BY ITXU DÍAZ, IN NATIONAL REVIEW. DIAZ IS A SPANISH JOURNALIST, POLITICAL SATIRIST, AND AUTHOR WHO PREVIOUSLY WAS AN ADVISER TO THE SPANISH MINISTRY FOR EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND SPORTS.
BY MYA JARADAT
It’s a rare moment nowadays when President Joe Biden can get both Republicans and Democrats on their feet for a standing ovation. But that’s exactly what he did when he took on Big Tech in his State of the Union address earlier this year, saying, “We must finally hold social media companies accountable for the experimenting they’re doing, running children for profit.”
Biden’s comments came just days after Utah Congressman Chris Stewart put forth new federal legislation — the Social Media Child Protection Act — which would make social media platforms off-limits to children ages 15 and younger. It’s unclear which specific social media platforms the legislation targets, or if it targets social media altogether. The bill would also allow parents to file civil suits against social media companies that don’t enforce age limits. And, in Texas, state Rep. Jared Patterson is seeking even tougher restrictions — under his proposed law, no one under the age of 18 would be able to use social media.
Both Patterson and Stewart referenced mental health concerns. “We have never, ever seen a more anxious and more
depressed (generation) and a generation that is contemplative of suicide like we’ve seen now,” says Stewart. On the heels of these two federal bills comes state legislation from Utah — the first in the nation to be signed into law — that restricts when children under age 18 can use social me-
frankly, I share them.”
“ANY LAW THAT IS GOING TO TRY TO LIMIT SPEECH ACCESS, EVEN TO PROTECT KIDS OR OTHER VULNERABLE PEOPLE, IS SUBJECT TO THE STRICTEST SCRUTINY. KIDS HAVE SPEECH RIGHTS, TOO.”
dia, requires age verification or parental consent for the use of social media and allows lawsuits to be filed against apps for harming underage users. Time will tell if these state laws will last. Tech companies are expected to sue the state when they take
effect in 2024.
It’s another example showing how intense the issue has become in the country, and just how quickly legislation is moving and shifting to find solutions. The average age a child gets a cellphone now in America is between 11 and 12, according to Stanford Medicine. Both smartphone and social media use are positively correlated with a variety of mental health issues among youth, including self-injury and suicide. While it’s difficult to tease out the exact relationship between social media use and mental health problems, researchers point to a general rise in depression, anxiety and suicide attempts during the years that coincide with the rise of smartphones and social media. This is true for both boys and girls. While compliance with the federal privacy law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act means that social media platforms restrict usage to those ages 13 and above, many say that the law isn’t enough to protect our nation’s youth.
The child privacy act is a 1998 federal law that, as the name suggests, was supposed to protect children’s privacy by limiting data collection on those 12 and under. But it has been criticized as being unenforceable,
largely because if a child lies about their age, the website or platform can’t be held accountable. In other words, it puts the onus on the users themselves. “Update: COPPA is Ineffective Legislation!” barks the title of a 2010 article in the Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy. It’s rare to find such brevity and directness in academia; even rarer to find an exclamation point in a scholarly journal. This all suggests that the law must, indeed, be really unhelpful.
This brings us to today.
But even if new efforts on the federal and state level enjoy bipartisan support and are enforceable, such legislation could run afoul of the First Amendment, legal experts say. And some observers believe that Republicans’ attempts to at once rein in Big Tech while simultaneously asserting
free speech rights in the same arena reflect the party’s increasingly fraught relationship with the First Amendment.
WHILE AT FIRST glance raising the age limit for social media access doesn’t intuitively seem to conflict with free speech, previous attempts to implement age-related restrictions to content have been struck down because they violated First Amendment protections. “Every attempt by Congress to regulate the internet to protect children has been ruled unconstitutional,” says Mark Kende, a law professor and director of Drake University’s Constitutional Law Center.
A 2022 congressional report on restricting children’s access to internet content also pointed to Brown v. Entertainment
Merchants Association, a case that took on California legislation banning the sale of violent video games to minors. That law was overturned by the Supreme Court both on First Amendment grounds and because the link between the content and harm to children wasn’t sufficiently proven. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted in the ruling that the state of California relied on psychologists “whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively.” There’s an old adage from statistics that “correlation doesn’t equal causation” — it’s safe to assume that legislation based on the argument that social media is psychologically harmful to children would be held to a similar standard and would have to prove that link as well.
Social media age limits take a slightly different tack than previous legislation because they aren’t content-based restrictions, per se, but they could come with the same pitfalls when it comes to enforcement. The age restrictions set by new legislation could be analogous to the example of teenagers seeing R-rated movies in a theater — it depends how stringent theaters enforce whether or not kids get into the screening room. But, again, it depends on the legislation. Patterson’s bill, for example, would require users to upload both their driver’s license and a second photograph. If a teenager simply lied about their age on the platform, unlike at a movie theater, it would be hard to circumvent in this case.
But whether or not such legislation will make the constitutional cut will largely depend on how the law is written, according to legal experts. “The devil is very much in the details,” says Alan Rozenshtein, an associate law professor at the University of Minnesota who was formerly affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Kende agrees. “Let’s just assume it’s done in a typical government clunky, imperfect fashion where they try to say kids under a certain age are not allowed to access social media. … The bottom line is, yes, it would
“FOR YEARS, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS SUPER FAVORABLE TOWARD CORPORATE SPEECH.
“(BUT NOW) WE FIND THE GOP PUSHING BACK HARD AND TAKING THE SPEECH LIMITING POSITION.”
be very problematic,” says Kende, explaining that not only would such a law be subject to strict scrutiny — which it would likely fail — there’s an additional obstacle: children have First Amendment rights, too.
While most parents who are concerned about what their children are exposed to on social media are thinking less about what their kids are saying and more about what they’re consuming, Kende noted that trouble would likely come from limiting children’s rights surrounding freedom of expression. “Any law that is going to try to limit speech access, even to protect kids or other vulnerable people, is subject to the strictest scrutiny,” says Kende, quoting former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. “Kids have speech rights, too.”
Kende refers to Tinker v. Des Moines, as “an example of the basic premise that kids don’t lose their speech rights just because they’re kids.” In 1965, a group of students were suspended after wearing black armbands to their public junior high school in protest of the Vietnam War. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision that the students’ First Amendment rights had been violated.
REPUBLICAN ATTEMPTS TO take on Big Tech without integrating positions on First Amendment rights are actually part of a larger pattern of switch-ups the party has presented when it comes to litigation and legislation, says Sarah Haan, a law professor at Washington and Lee University. She notes the example of the party’s take on corporate speech. “For many years, the Republican Party was super favorable toward corporate speech,” says Haan. “But then, in the last couple of years, we started to see companies like Disney take political positions that are in opposition to GOP policies and talking points. And so what do we find in that situation? We find the GOP pushing back hard and taking the speech limiting position.”
This flux on First Amendment rights indicates an about-face that Democrats and
Republicans have historically held when it comes to invoking freedom of expression. “Until very recently, it was conservatives who were most associated with, and responsible for, the deregulatory tilt of the First Amendment and its embrace of a privately-owned and operated marketplace of ideas. Progressives, meanwhile, were the primary critics of the expansive discretion granted to powerful corporate actors,” wrote legal scholars Genevieve Lakier and Evelyn Douek in “First Amendment Politics Get Weird,” published by The University of Chicago Law Review online. But now, Lakier and Douek say a backlash against the tech industry has seen these traditional alignments inverted, leaving Republicans paradoxically calling for the sorts of limits to free speech that used to be associated with liberals. That conservatives today lambast Big Tech for censoring their views, Lakier says, represents “a rich historical irony.”
Indeed, the rhetoric has become so ironic that some observers are cynical about GOP efforts around social media age limits. It’s not a stretch to believe that a politician might bring forth legislation that they “probably know is constitutionally problematic with reliance on the fact that the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) will go to court and get it declared that way,” Kende says. “So they get the benefit of both things. They get the political plus of saying, ‘Look what I did to protect our children’ and then they get to condemn the ACLU or some court (or) judge for doing something.”
But some members of the GOP are themselves cognizant of the idea that limiting social media access could be construed as a paradoxical attempt to have one’s freedom of expression cake while eating it, too.
Speaking of the federal legislation he introduced in February, Stewart notes that an attempt to pass the Social Media Child Protection Act isn’t an attempt to restrict certain views. “We’re just restricting access broadly for a group of people that we think are vulnerable and not adults,” he says. “But I understand people’s concerns and,
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WHEN IT COMES TO CHILDREN, SHOULD TRIBES GOVERN THEMSELVES?
BY MYA JARADAT
Not long after Jennifer and Chad Brackeen felt called by God to become foster parents, they got a call of another kind: this one from Texas’s Child Protective Services, saying they had a baby boy — known in legal documents as A.L.M. — who needed a home.
Because A.L.M.’s mother was a member of the Navajo Nation, the caseworker warned the Brackeens, who are white, that the child would only be with them for a few months while the agency found a Native home for him. But when the nine-month-old boy arrived “we fell in love with him right away,” Jennifer Brackeen would later say.
A.L.M., who joined the Brackeens’ two biological children in 2016, was quickly knitted into the fabric of the family’s life, celebrating birthdays and holidays together, seeing Christmas lights, taking walks in nature, playing at the beach. In the meantime, the boy’s birth mother and father voluntarily terminated their parental rights.
A year on, A.L.M. had spent more than half his life with the Brackeens and the couple decided to try to adopt the little boy. Standing in their way was the Indian Child
Welfare Act — known as ICWA — a 1978 law that endeavors to keep Native American children with their families and, if not with their families, at least with their tribes. The first judge denied the Brackeens’ request, but the couple pushed forward, eventually winning their case in federal court.
THE REMOVAL OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN FROM THEIR COMMUNITIES CREATED AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO TRIBES’ ABILITY TO CONTINUE TO GROW AND GOVERN THEMSELVES.
In 2017, the Brackeens joined a lawsuit taking the federal legislation on. As the case, now known as Brackeen v. Haaland, made its way through the judicial system, the Brackeens became foster parents to a second Native American child, the boy’s half sister, Y.R.J. And last year, their challenge to ICWA landed, finally, in the Supreme Court,
where arguments were heard in November. The Brackeens and their attorneys are challenging ICWA on multiple grounds, claiming that it constitutes racial discrimination and, thus, a violation of the equal protection clause. They also say that because ICWA is a federal law that states are being forced to implement, the legislation goes against the principle of anti-commandeering as articulated in the 10th Amendment. Standing in the Brackeens’ corner of the ring are numerous conservative think tanks, including the Cato and Goldwater Institutes. On the other side are the Native American tribes and various child welfare advocates, which would like to see the law stay in place. If ICWA is eliminated, they argue, there could be broad implications for tribal sovereignty. And one legal scholar warns that dismantling ICWA could make a profound impact on child welfare law; similarly, scrapping the legislation on anti-commandeering grounds could unintentionally lead to the challenging of seemingly unrelated laws.
CREATED IN 1978, ICWA was a direct response
to the forced removal of Native children from their homes. Before ICWA was created, “approximately 75-80 percent of Indian families living on reservations lost at least one child to the foster care system,” Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services reports. Overall, between a quarter and a third of all Native American children were being separated from their families and placed in foster care, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association. Further, of those who were removed from their homes, 85 percent ended up with nonnative families or in institutions.
And all of this was happening in the shadow of the boarding schools that Native American children were sent to throughout much of the 20th century.
The removal of Native American children from their homes and their communities “created an existential threat to the survival of tribes and their ability to continue to govern themselves,” says Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program. ICWA was supposed to be a remedy to that; the law set strict rules around adoption, stipulating that a Native child must be placed either with a member of their extended family, a member of their tribal nation, or with another Native American tribe, or in an institution that has been approved by the Native American tribe, in that order of preference.
Today, the Brackeens and their attorneys claim that ICWA uses a race-based classification that violates the equal protection clause. They also say that ICWA is actually harmful to Native American children. Even with ICWA in place, Native American children are still far more likely to end up in foster care than children from other groups. South Dakota offers a particularly dramatic example: while Native Americans there comprise less than 9 percent of the state’s population, their children make up 52 percent of those in the foster care system. “An Indian child is 11 times more likely to be placed in foster care than a white child in South Dakota,” the American Civil Liberties
Union reported in 2017, based on numbers provided by the South Dakota Department of Social Services.
“One of the things that is at stake for Indian children is the right to be treated the same as other children in foster care and adoption proceedings,” says Mark Fiddler, one of the Brackeens’ attorneys, who happens to be a tribal member himself. “We know from the data in almost every state Indian kids are in foster care longer than children of any other race. It takes longer for an Indian child to be adopted and that’s because of the placement preferences.”
“THAT STATES REGULATE DOMESTIC RELATIONS IS A BEDROCK PRINCIPLE OF AMERICAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. IN THE INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS HIJACKED STATE ADOPTION LAWS OR FOSTER CARE LAWS.”
Fiddler, who says he believed in “cultural preservation” and who started the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center in Minneapolis, an organization that was founded in 1993 in order to help enforce ICWA , says that he saw firsthand the problems the law causes. He points to the case of a child of a white mother and a Native American father. After the father disappeared, the mother died; Fiddler represented the maternal grandparents in their bid to adopt the child and faced sharp criticism from Native Americans, he says, “because I was representing white grandparents to adopt their own grandchild.”
Fiddler argues that while there was flexibility built into the 1978 law, it has become “a blunt instrument” that does “more harm than good.”
“What ICWA does is it takes a majority of the resources for the child off the table
so the child can only be placed in an Indian home for adoption,” Fiddler explains. “And so the goal here is — if ICWA is struck down and is found to be race discrimination — then Indian children would have access to non-Indian foster and adoptive homes just like children of any other race.”
BUT NATIVE AMERICANS who want to see ICWA upheld say that the “Native American” designation isn’t racial but, rather, political. And that’s one of the biggest issues at stake in this lawsuit: Is the term “Native American” a racial or political category? The answer has wide-ranging implications.
“The arguments really go to the heart of tribal sovereignty,” says Beth Wright, staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund. “If the Supreme Court rules that ICWA is a race-based law rather than a law that is rooted in a government to government relationship … then that really destroys tribal sovereignty and a lot of what’s called Title 25.” Title 25 is federal code that, broadly speaking, articulates Native Americans’ rights and spells out the U.S. government’s obligations to tribal peoples. The 50 chapters of Title 25 cover everything from education and health care to gaming and the development of tribal mineral resources.
“If the Supreme Court strikes down ICWA in significant part, indigenous families stand to lose essential protection, and we can see a return to the time when just so many children are being taken away from their families and their communities,” says Meeropol.
Those who don’t want to see ICWA overturned claim that the case is a cover, that it’s really an effort to grab Indian land and the resources attached to it, as well as an attempt to ratchet up profits for the adoption industry. All one has to do, they say, is look at who is standing on the two sides of the court and who is filing amicus briefs for the Brackeens or the other side.
“I want to distinguish a little bit between the Brackeens … and their attorneys. Matthew McGill is their lead
attorney and he has been involved in challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act for years,” says Dan Lewerenz, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota’s School of Law. Observers have also noted that McGill works for a law firm, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, that has clients in energy and gaming. In January 2022, McGill and his partners filed a lawsuit “on behalf of Maverick Gaming, an entertainment and gambling company, challenging the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act,” Bloomberg Law reported.
Proponents of ICWA also say that a strike against the law could have an impact on non-Native children, as well. The ideas expressed by ICWA — that children who can’t live with their parents should at least remain within their extended family — have become “the gold standard” for child welfare, says Wright.
Should the Supreme Court accept the plaintiffs’ argument that child welfare “is the exclusive province of the states, and that the federal government has no authority to interfere,” says Lewerenz, various statutes would be at risk: one that sets federal standards for child removal and placement in foster care, as well as the International Child Abduction Remedies and the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000.
While the challenge to ICWA on the basis of equal protection has gotten the most airtime, the Brackeens’ attorneys have a multipronged approach; among their arguments is the claim that ICWA violates the anti-commandeering doctrine enshrined in the 10th Amendment. In other words, they claim that holding states accountable for the enforcement of federal legislation amounts to an infringement of states’ rights. “The idea that states regulate domestic relations — that’s a bedrock principle of American constitutional law. And I can’t think of any other area of law where the federal government has hijacked state adoption laws or foster care laws,” says Fiddler.
But by taking on the issue of federal
versus states’ rights, the case could also become precedent to challenge a variety of other laws that are entirely unrelated to ICWA, Native Americans or child welfare, says Lewerenz. He points to the Servicemembers’ Civil Relief Act — legislation that protects those on active duty from being sued and that also shields them from litigation for a year following their service — as another piece of legislation that could eventually be impacted.
The Brackeens’ legal team is arguing that ICWA commandeers states in two ways, Lewerenz explains. First, by creating rules that apply in state courts and secondly by imposing requirements like recordkeeping upon states. The plaintiffs claim that “ICWA is unique in this regard. But … Congress has been doing both of these things ever since the (country’s) founding,” says Lewerenz, citing an amicus brief filed by the Constitutional Accountability Center in the case that provides a wealth of examples of such legislation including the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act and “laws requiring states to report missing persons to the U.S. Department of Justice, to submit information to FEMA, to document any asbestos in school buildings, and to keep an inventory of hazardous waste sites.”
So in theory, repealing ICWA could undermine the foundation of all these other laws — large and small.
Legal experts explain that a decision might not completely overturn ICWA — a ruling could dismantle some aspects of ICWA while keeping other portions of the law intact. They also say that even if ICWA is overturned on a federal level, many states have their own ICWA -like laws. The issue in that scenario, however, is that without the blanket of federal legislation, there would be “this patchwork of ICWA protections all over the country and that would be really problematic for tribes that already are underserved or under-staffed,” says Wright.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in November 2022; a ruling is expected by the end of June.
IF THE SUPREME COURT RULES THAT ICWA IS A RACEBASED LAW RATHER THAN A GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIP, THAT DESTROYS TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY
THE OTHER SIDE OF HISPANIOLA. IT MAY NOT BE THERE
BY NATALIA GALICZA
Joseline Geffrard’s thoughts were likely unremarkable as she stood in a Port-au-Prince checkout line in October 2021. She had arrived at an indoor market not far from her house through her usual route, through the Martissant neighborhood, long gripped by violence that now more or less mirrors the whole of Haiti. She had come to shop for her usual items: perfumes, lotions, soaps and other products for her cosmetics business. The experience had, by that point, proved fairly routine — even tedious. It’s possible she thought of her two children — how they’d been performing at school, whether they’d been up to any trouble. Or what she and her husband would eat for dinner once she made it back. But even when she tries hard to think, she can’t remember what ran through her mind in that line. All she remembers are the guns.
A group of men waving large rifles burst into the market before she was able to reach the register. One by one, they robbed each of the customers waiting in line to pay. Geffrard included. At that moment, face to face with the gang violence she had for years lived on the periphery of, she couldn’t register their faces or how many they were. She was too scared. But once she had gotten
away, she remembers clearly what she was thinking. That she could have been killed. That she was her parents’ only daughter. That, if she were kidnapped, her family would be unable to afford her ransom.
Now 32, Geffrard had lived in Port-au-Prince for long enough to have seen gang violence take over firsthand. In the early morning hours of July 7, 2021, a group of assassins tortured President Jo-
TENS OF THOUSANDS OF HAITIANS ARE STREAMING ACROSS THE BORDER INTO THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. BUT THE LIVES THEY FIND ON THE OTHER END OF THE ISLAND AREN’T EASY.
venel Moïse and shot him 12 times inside his home. The political vacuum created by the absence of any democratically elected leaders has flung Haiti into an abyss. Gang violence has pushed Haiti near the brink of collapse. UNICEF estimates that four million children will need humanitarian assistance this year, due to famine, disease and physical harm that comes with living in a
country under the grip of 200 gangs. The World Food Programme records as many as five million citizens — almost half the population — are food insecure, more than a third of whom face “emergency” levels of hunger. Cholera, a bacterial disease spread through contaminated water, has emerged in Haiti after more than three years without a case, killing hundreds since last year. The Caribbean nation remains the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and has all but cemented itself as a perpetual work in progress. It suffered a catastrophic earthquake in 2010 that left buildings dilapidated and hundreds of thousands dead. About a decade later, while the country struggled to rebuild, another earthquake wiped away all progress the way a lapping ocean wave erases a name written in sand.
Tens of thousands of Haitians are now fleeing, with most streaming across the border into the Dominican Republic. But the lives many migrants find on the other end of the island aren’t easy, either. Nor is the process of getting there.
In the weeks that followed Geffrard’s encounter with gang violence, she couldn’t bring herself to leave her house. The fear became so pervasive that her family encouraged her to flee the country. An uncle
ABOVE: JOSELINE GEFFRARD, 32, FLED HER HOME IN PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, AFTER EXPERIENCING GANG VIOLENCE.
LEFT: GEFFRARD IS ONE OF THOUSANDS OF HAITIANS WHO HAVE SOUGHT REFUGE IN THE AGRICULTURAL MIGRANT COMMUNITY OF BATEY LIBERTAD IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC.
lived in Batey Libertad, a housing community about two hours from the border in northwest Dominican Republic, and arranged to have her brought over from Port-au-Prince last April. Migration to the only other country on the island of Hispaniola felt more promising than any alternative — it wouldn’t mean a life-threatening drift over hundreds of miles in a sailboat. But leaving, no matter the destination, still carries the potential of forceful return. The International Organization for Migration estimates about 500 Haitians who escape to the Dominican Republic are sent back every day. Still, she took her chances.
Batey Libertad is located just north of Esperanza, a town that’s Spanish name translates to “hope.” It’s where Geffrard would find migrants with similar stories, all in search of freedom. And it’s where she’d learn that only in the rarest of cases do they find it.
PAST THE PEACH-PAINTED corner store that blasts merengue from tower speakers, past the lime green church that fills for service on Sunday mornings and the central street where vendors sell fried plantains, Geffrard and her husband live in a wooden home with a tin roof. There are no windows, there’s no air conditioning, and when the afternoon sun sets itself high above the thin metal that shields their heads, they can’t so much as nap in comfort. But it’s not the heat that bothers them. It’s the ever-present threat of military raids.
Since November 30, the neighborhood has been raided three times by Dominican Republic immigration officials, who have ramped up deportations in recent years, from nearly 200,000 last year to more than 20,000 this January alone. Those officials know that one place to find Haitians in the Dominican Republic are bateyes. The loosely structured housing communities
are located around sugarcane mills for workers and their families, often Haitians lured across the border by the promise of work. Most bateyes are without access to electricity, clean water, sanitation or health care. Today, hundreds of thousands of people live in bateyes. And though Batey Libertad no longer has ties to a functioning sugar plantation and living conditions for many remain poor, migrants still move there. That’s because it whispers of a promise that life here could be better than braving life back home.
Neighbors leave their front doors wide open. Children run around unattended, unafraid of who they encounter since they’re all familiar faces. Dozens of men gather at a time to play games of dominos so lively that cheers and smacks of tiles against tables can be heard from down the street. The batey might have walkways lined with litter, few places to roam, patches of arid dirt where there should be lush grass, but the only present threat to safety is that of raids. It’s not a place where migrants might feel like they can thrive, but it is where they are sure they can survive. The same cannot be said for Haiti.
Martissant, the Port-au-Prince neighborhood Geffrard often passed through on her way to shop, has become a hotspot where gangs recruit children. Gang presence is in fact so strong that police have chosen to abandon the neighborhood. The Martissant police station now stands deserted, charred by bandits who set fire to the building — a barely standing symbol of the brutality that has taken over the country’s systems of structure. “In Port-au-Prince, 155,000 people are displaced throughout the metropolitan area,” says Philippe Branchat, the chief of mission and head of office in Haiti for the International Organization for Migration. He estimates that 1 in 4 displaced people in the capital are found without shelter and more than 90 percent of displacements are due to violence. “When you are fleeing from violence, it means you lost everything, not only the material stuff you have at home, but also some feeling of being protected.”
Geffrard already knows how it feels to be
stripped of any semblance of safety. From almost 200 miles away, she fears it’s a feeling her children will now have to learn. On her journey to the Dominican Republic, she left behind her son and daughter, now ages 14 and eight, so the two could continue their education and live with their grandparents. But as conditions worsen in Haiti, all Geffrard can do now is wait each day by the phone for her family to call — when there’s enough power in Port-au-Prince to make a call, that is.
On the last day before Geffrard left for Batey Libertad, she remembers sitting her youngest child on her lap to pepper with motherly advice: “Be good,” and “Listen to your grandmother.” She remembers playing cards with her oldest. How they each asked for one last home-cooked meal. Rice and beans. Legim, a Haitian eggplant and meat stew. Papaya milkshakes. After what would be their final family feast for an indeterminate amount of time, Geffrard fried up some plantains to leave behind. She hoped the extra food could help them feel as though she were still there, at least as long as the leftovers lingered. But based on all the uncertainties — including whether foreign troops will intervene, let alone when — she’s realized there was no amount of plantains she could have prepared to last long enough.
IN A FLORAL tank top that reads “For the dreamers among us, love will inspire your dreams” in English — though unbeknownst to Geffrard — she sits on a plastic patio chair and waits out the final rays of daylight on a Saturday afternoon. A table in front of her supports a green bucket full of pigeon peas, a tropical legume that grows through the late summer. While not the most lucrative line of work, pigeon peas can be easily harvested and sold from the
“WHEN YOU ARE FLEEING FROM VIOLENCE, IT MEANS YOU LOST EVERYTHING, NOT ONLY THE MATERIAL STUFF YOU HAVE AT HOME, BUT ALSO SOME FEELING OF BEING PROTECTED.”
batey. Farmers use the stalks to feed cattle. Vendors use the beans for various dishes. Most residents of Batey Libertad lean on the plants for income, as well as their own resourcefulness.
Sandra Jean-Mary used to live in Saint-Marc, Haiti, two hours from its capital on the western coast of the island nation. She lived in a quiet mountainside
LEFT: SANDRA JEANMARY, 28, MIGRATED TO BATEY LIBERTAD LEGALLY, BUT HAS SINCE STRUGGLED TO BE ABLE TO AFFORD AND MAINTAIN HER VISA.
BELOW: MANY WHO LIVE IN BATEY LIBERTAD RELY ON THE HARVEST OF PIGEON PEAS FOR WORK.
home before moving to Batey Libertad in September 2021. The 28-year-old counted herself as an entrepreneur in Haiti. She took a culinary class to learn how to sell fried foods and sweets. She sold clothing at her local market when demand called for it. She prided herself on her flexibility and her ability to adapt. But when gangs took Port-au-Prince by storm, many of the millions of Haitians who lived in the capital ran to other corners of the country. Saint-Marc has shed its more quiet reputation since. Robberies and kidnappings shifted from rare to regular. Around the time Moïse was killed, Jean-Mary no longer felt safe navigating her neighborhood at night. Like her, others in the community chose to stay indoors. The cost of food and goods kept rising to the point where eating once a day had become a new normal. She couldn’t count on making any sales or earning any income. Jean-Mary saved enough money to buy herself a visa and cross the border legally. But when she arrived at Batey Libertad, the cost of renewing her documentation grew too steep. She harvested pigeon peas for Dominican pesos and began selling food in the community every evening. Fried plantains, fried chicken, sweet potatoes, pickled spicy cabbage. Still, she did not earn enough for the monthly travel by both bus and moto-taxi for more than two hours to
a checkpoint and back to pay for another stamp in her passport. Her documents expired in June. She now fears deportation, has fewer job prospects and faces a smaller chance of repurchasing another yearlong visa to regain legal status.
When Jean-Mary pits the opportunities she has in Haiti against those available to her in the Dominican Republic, she arrives at a quandary. One nation is collapsing due to violence and doesn’t have much of a job market to offer at the moment. The other has a more stable and successful economy, but does not allow her to formally take part in it. “Part of the issue is that Haitians are still needed in bottommost jobs in the Dominican Republic. Most agriculture is done by Haitians. Most construction is done by Haitians. And so we’re talking about this needed-but-unwanted syndrome,” says Bridget Wooding, director of the Caribbean Migration and Development Observatory. Jean-Mary says she still imagines a better life for herself than what she can find in
Batey Libertad. She has no idea how she’d be able to pay for one, but the hope remains just on the horizon. Though, more uncertain than cost is where that life will be — whether it will ever be back in Haiti. At least as of yet, her home country is not one she feels is worth a return.
HOURS AFTER A crowd files out of church and droves of children chase themselves home under the late morning sun dressed in their Sunday best, the street outside of Batey Libertad’s lime green chapel finds a brief moment of rest. Then, front doors open, music starts to play and Jean-Mary finds herself in front of her food stand. A wooden table lined with white cloth holds up a plastic bin filled with fried food that takes up almost the entire length of the available surface area. She’s got hot pots sitting on plastic paint buckets, a fanny pack she hopes will grow heavier and a smile on her face that would otherwise mask the reality of her whereabouts. Her neighbors line up to grab a bite.
Behind her stand is a narrow alleyway that leads into another side of the batey. There, more homes are stacked on top of one another, wood and tin blocks. Most of the migrants who have fled here, like Geffrard and Jean-Mary, left the comfort of brick-and-mortar houses and are not comfortable in their new residences. In a
neighborhood named after freedom, just north of hope, the migrants who move to Batey Libertad symbolize the story of Haiti. One of statelessness. As the country loses its sense of democracy, order and safety, it also loses its people.
Though some, like Marie Sonise Zare, are eager to go back. The 48-year-old moved to Batey Libertad last April after fearing for her life on more than one occasion. She brought her nine-year-old son with her across the border to find a better quality of life. But she’s convinced she hasn’t found it yet.
In a windowless cabin behind the narrow alleyway near Jean-Mary’s food stand, Zare lives with her son and her husband. Her nine-year-old entertains himself most days by playing soccer with the neighborhood kids, and her husband keeps himself busy by fixing everything in sight: an inverter, a car radio, a refrigerator. He’s even trying to build a bathroom for the family to use in lieu of the latrines. Zare, though, has remained restless for the entire year she’s been here.
If it weren’t for the videos she watches every day of gang murders and kidnappings in her home country, she says she would have already left. She misses her two-bedroom house and her other three kids and granddaughter whom she left back in Haiti. And she fears the raids. “You don’t know what’s
gonna happen, even if you have money you don’t feel like you can leave,” she says. “And if they decide to come and raid your house or take your house, there’s no recourse. There’s nothing that you can do.”
By her son’s mattress, Zare keeps a bag as tall as her packed with clothing. She started assembling it in January and leaves it full, untouched, for the day she works up the nerve to go back to her home country with her son. She planned to depart one week in March but was dissuaded by more news of brutality. So she keeps checking videos online for a green light, a moment of calm. And she keeps the bag packed. It’s how she maintains her hope in a healed Haiti — the same way Jean-Mary cooks food that reminds her of her homeland and Geffrard waits by the phone to hear her children’s voices. In a way, that’s all the migrants can do in Batey Libertad. Wait.
REPUBLICANS, LED BY UTAH CONGRESSMAN JOHN CURTIS, WANT TO USHER IN A NEW ERA OF CLIMATE POLICY. IS THEIR EFFORT POISED TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE — OR DISGUISE MORE INDIFFERENCE?
John Curtis can hardly believe it. The Republican congressman from Utah knows many in the crowd — some 2,500 strong, packed into Miami Beach’s New World Center in early March — remain apprehensive of his message, of his mere presence. But John Curtis is a politician, and at times even a showman, so he knows exactly what to do. “Can we just enjoy this moment?” he asks the audience with a grin. “I’m a Republican, and I’m here to talk climate.” The audience erupts. It’s exactly the reception Curtis hoped to find at this year’s Aspen Ideas: Climate conference, where people from across the world have gathered to discuss how to save the planet. And, for at least a moment, they’re cheering for a conservative.
Such a moment would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago, at an event where Vice President Kamala Harris will take the stage in the coming days. Indeed, a quick canvas of attendees reveals a man and a party whose climate reputation remains unknown at best and incendiary at worst. “Cautious,” one visitor from Michigan tells me when asked to explain Republican climate attitudes. Another guest, a Silicon Valley physicist, adds, “I’m wondering if this is going to be a conversation about the facts associated with climate change and how our Congress is going to play an active role in supporting them — or not supporting them.” Skepticism like hers abounds. Curtis is trying to change that.
The skepticism he’s met with on the left is matched on the right. How many jobs are we willing to jeopardize to achieve uncertain policy outcomes? Does going electric eventually mean mining lithium for batteries in places like Russia and Venezuela? What happens if the United States takes carbon action while our geopolitical competitors don’t and gain an economic advantage?
Curtis is having to answer skeptics on both sides while still keeping his balance. For the past several years, he’s sought to rebrand the “climate denial” party into something like the “climate realist” party, insisting that Republicans can actually do more for the planet than Democrats. It’s a risky gambit when the influence of the party’s climate skeptics remains very strong. Plus his party’s proposed climate solutions, critics argue, are just not bold enough at this critical moment. The New York Times has labeled this new Republican strategy “delay as the new denial,” contending that the party’s updated posture amounts to little more than a cosmetic change.
But combatting emissions starts with
recognizing the problem, says Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist. Now, many Republicans have. Some might still call them the “climate denial” party because of their divergence on the question of urgency, but Oppenheimer says that’s not the same as outright repudiation of the concept. The problem, he adds, “is only going to be solved with some reasonable interest from all parts of the political spectrum.”
Now that Republicans like Curtis have chosen to get involved, the question — in Miami and beyond — is whether climate advocates will still cheer when they hear conservative ideas and consider conservative critiques. The answer will help determine if Curtis and fellow conservatives can help change the course of emissions and warming — or whether they’re still just blowing smoke.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW far Republicans have come on this issue in just the past few years, consider Bob Inglis. Inglis served two six-year stints in the House of Representatives as a Republican from South Carolina, with the first stretch coinciding with the Clinton administration. “I said that climate change was nonsense,” he says of that period. “All I knew was that Al Gore was for it, and I was against it. That was the end of the inquiry.” He laughs now, admitting how much has changed.
Beginning with the administration of Ronald Reagan, the party has been known for caution on environmental issues. And to this day, that administration holds the record for the most acres leased to fossil fuel companies, outmatching the next-closest competitor three times over. Yet despite reflexive Republican backlash against Bill Clinton and Gore, climate change — in this context referring to the atmospheric buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and
the associated warming effect — still wasn’t a terribly polarizing issue heading into the new millennium. In a letter from March 2001, President George W. Bush wrote that his “administration takes the issue of global climate change very seriously.” And many Republicans in the Senate were leading efforts to curb emissions. A 2018 article in Inside Climate News cites John McCain in particular as having done “more than any other U.S. politician … to advance the conservative argument for climate action.”
But then, recognizing the substantial grassroots backlash against President Barack Obama in the form of the tea party, Republicans saw in climate policy a budding political opportunity. After all, our whole economy depends on carbon emissions to function. So Republicans developed a plan to oppose Obama’s climate agenda on the basis that it was bad for American business interests. Their strategy proved quite popular with conservatives, and any tether to nuance was quickly lost. Soon, opposing climate legislation was about outright denying that climate change was an issue at all.
Inglis, however, tried to reverse that trend.
During his second stint in Congress, from 2005 to 2011, his children asked him to reconsider his climate views. Confronted with new evidence, namely the
overwhelming consensus of American scientists, Inglis started to look at carbon emissions as a problem in need of a solution. Unfortunately for his political future, he did so at the height of anti-Obama backlash. “Usually you don’t get 29 percent of the vote if you’ve been in Congress for 12 years — unless you've been indicted or something. I was just on the wrong side of what became tea party orthodoxy,” he says of losing a primary challenge. “And the most enduring heresy that I committed at that time was just saying climate change is real, and let’s do something about it.”
Instead, Republicans’ approach was typified by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who in February 2015 brought a snowball onto the Senate floor. “We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record,” he said. “This is a snowball from outside here. It’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonal.” When Donald Trump decided to run for president, he followed Inhofe’s lead.
Despite having signed a 2009 letter urging Obama to pursue climate goals, Trump soon reversed course. By 2013, he was calling global warming “a total, and very expensive, hoax!” He later walked back the “hoax” terminology, but he continued to question whether humans were contributing to climate change — even when a federal report during his presidency warned
of devastating economic consequences if climate change is left unaddressed. “I don’t believe it,” Trump said at the time. More recently, he took a shot at climate-focused efforts in announcing his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination. “The Green New Deal and the environment, which they say may affect us in 300 years, is all that is talked about,” he said.
Trump’s insistence on undermining climate change will continue to handicap the party as long as he remains a force within it, says longtime adversary Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. “He is the front-runner for the nomination, and is by far the most likely to get the nomination. And the person who’s running for president tends to be seen as the spokesman for the party,” Romney told me. “And President Trump said that climate change was a hoax. And if that’s his posture, that’s probably what people are gonna think our party stands for. I think there’s more grassroots support for taking action on climate. But I think if he’s our nominee, we’re going to be hard-pressed to see our party change course.”
Yet that’s exactly what Curtis is uniquely situated to do — if not for moral reasons, then at least for political ones: Young conservatives are more likely than other Republicans to support pro-climate legislation, and Curtis’ 3rd Congressional District, encompassing Provo, Park City, Moab and most of rural eastern Utah, is both solidly
conservative and the youngest in the nation. “Part of what motivated me was doing town halls and looking in their eyes and seeing how disappointed they were in their party,” he says. “We can’t afford to lose the next generation of Republicans on this issue.” Count Inglis among the surprised — and impressed. “That John Curtis has been able to do this, it’s just amazing,” he says. “If you had told me in the 2010 cycle that there will be a Conservative Climate Caucus, and that John would be able to recruit that many members to it — I would have thought you were nuts.”
So just how did Curtis manage to pull his party back from complete denial? And moreover, can he keep it there?
HE’S ALWAYS CARED about the environment, at least in a general sense. “Deeply implanted in every human being is this desire to leave the Earth better than we found it,” he says. “I don’t think that’s unique to Democrats, and I don’t think it’s unique to Republicans.” He acted on those instincts during his eight years as mayor of Provo, especially regarding reducing air pollution. In 2017, the Utah Clean Air Partnership named him its “person of the year” for his efforts, with one write-up calling him a “green mayor in a red city.” But when he was first elected to Congress in 2017, he found that no one in Washington — on the left or the right — wanted to talk about air quality. They wanted to talk about carbon emissions. “I found myself very unprepared,” he says. “And I quickly found myself falling into the stereotypes of Republicans who don’t believe in climate change.”
But those stereotypes gnawed at him. They didn’t seem accurate to his experience — even if, admittedly, his party was leaning into that brand. “All we were doing was telling people what we didn’t like,” he says. “We’re really good at saying, ‘We don’t like the Green New Deal. We don’t like this.’ But we really weren’t articulating what … we would do.” Curtis wasn’t ready to provide those answers yet, but his discomfort with the party’s mainstream stance caused him to start asking questions. He quickly discovered that even among conservative think tanks and oil executives, the verdict
on climate change is absolutely clear: Of course the climate is changing. Of course man has influenced that change.
Armed with that knowledge, Curtis found that because the rest of his party was so lacking in their contributions to the climate change dialogue, a simple admission of what he learned was enough to earn him a seat at the table to discuss solutions. That realization first occurred during a Provo town hall in 2019, when a local newspaper reporter asked him if man was influencing climate change. He said yes. “Next day, front page, top fold: ‘Curtis admits to climate change,’” he remembers with a chuckle. But in the following weeks and months, he noticed a more serious difference in his perception among folks in the climate space. “I was now in the club of credibility,” he says. “And that’s when it dawned on me the mistake Republicans are making by dodging this question.”
As a result, two years ago he invited a cadre of Republican lawmakers to the Grand America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City to talk about climate policy. He figured maybe half a dozen would attend, but 24 Republican lawmakers — about 10 percent of congressional Republicans at the time — showed up from all over the country. Some said they’d only go if the press didn’t find out, but regardless, the turnout assured Curtis there was real interest among Republicans in finally having some answers on climate change. He founded the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021 to facilitate those conversations. Today, it’s one of the largest caucuses in the House at 73 members. “There’s this pent-up desire to be good on this subject,” Curtis says. “To have answers. To respond to our critics.”
But the caucus’ Twitter bio also illustrates the long road still ahead. It reads like the rhetorical equivalent of walking on eggshells: “We believe the climate is changing, and decades of a global industrial era that has brought prosperity to the world has also contributed to that change.” Even if the party’s proposed solutions are aligned with traditional conservative ideas about free markets and energy independence, caring about climate remains somewhat
John Curtis has sought to rebrand the “climate denial” party to something like the “climate realist” party, contending that Republicans can actually do more for the planet than Democrats.
taboo. Particularly certain terminology, like “climate crisis” or “existential threat,” which comes back to the central fissure between climate-conscious Republicans and Democrats: urgency. “I feel that we have time,” explains Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican who serves as vice chair of Curtis’ Conservative Climate Caucus. “I don’t feel that it’s an urgent crisis. I don’t see that urgent need to act now.”
IN A MEETING of the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee in late January, Curtis emphasized that despite debates over urgency, common ground exists between Democrats and Republicans. Permitting reform. Nuclear energy. Emerging technologies like hydrogen fusion and improved battery storage. The parties even agree, he said, that solar and wind are important, though to varying extents. This was all good news. But “we spend too much of our time,” Curtis added, “in the areas where we disagree.”
One such area: the demonization of fossil fuels and the people who produce them. Curtis challenged his “friends on the left” to substitute their anger toward fossil fuels with anger toward emissions. “If fossil fuels can compete with other energy sources in cleanliness, why do we insist that they die? Why do we demonize the very people who’ve produced these for decades and decades? Why can’t they be viewed as part of the solution, and not the problem?”
That question rests at the heart of the climate policy schism between Democrats and Republicans. “I think oil and gas is not making our country more secure. I know that (Republicans) feel that more oil and gas is the answer,” says Rep. Scott Peters, a California Democrat who has worked with Curtis and who believes further development of fossil fuel resources, whether domestic or imported, is the wrong way to secure the nation’s energy future at a time when other
sources are becoming more readily available. “That's kind of the big difference right now.” And the difference is so wide that it threatens to undermine any potential progress in areas where agreement does exist.
A six-point climate plan Republicans released last year in June echoes Democrats in calling for investment in renewable energy and emerging technologies. But it also calls for an uptick in domestic fossil fuel production. So does HR1, a Curtis-supported bill introduced in March that seeks to expedite infrastructure projects and ease government burdens on energy producers, including fossil fuel companies; the bill’s name, the “Lower Energy Costs Act,” suggests that Curtis and his Republican colleagues have the fossil industry and its consumers far more top of mind than slowing the pace of climate change.
Their thinking in general is that global energy demand is going to continue to rise in the coming decades. So even if the U.S. is able to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, fossil fuels will remain important in the developing world, and the U.S. can develop those resources in a way that’s cleaner than other countries. Plus it can continue to use those resources for now, while the clean energy transition is still in progress. “Not investing in oil and gas makes no sense, in my opinion,” Romney says. “Democrats keep on wanting to shut down our oil and gas production and our coal production, and it’s like, ‘Guys, we need these for at least the next 20 years, and the world is still gonna rely on these things.’”
Even a net-zero future reliant on electric vehicles and renewable energy will require environmental compromise. The batteries that power those technologies, for example, require vast sums of lithium, cobalt and other precious metals. We can import them from other countries with lesser environmental standards — or, many Republicans contend, we can mine them here, in places
like Utah, where the land will be affected, yes, but not as much as in many other countries where these resources are found. “The society that we’re being told is the future, with electrification of just about everything so that we have zero emissions, the critical mineral piece of that is incredibly intense, and that is mining. And the environmental community is also opposed to mining,” says Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican. “You can’t have it both ways.” Similarly, electric vehicles, which on average emit less than conventional combustion engines, draw most of their power from fossil fuels, including a large percentage from coal. That could change as renewable energy becomes more abundant and available in the coming decades, but regardless, the climate change conversation is full of paradoxes.
Curtis maintains that fossil fuels can be part of the clean energy transition if given a chance. His view is a direct consequence of who he represents: coal mining communities in places like Carbon County and oil and gas producers in the Uinta Basin. He doesn’t want them to be abandoned, and many Democrats are sympathetic to that part of his message. But Curtis’ idea that fossil fuels can become clean by using “scrubbers” to capture carbon dioxide has been around for a long time, and so far, it hasn’t proven viable. The technology does work — “but it works at a price that we can’t afford,” says Oppenheimer, the Princeton climate scientist. “Right now, the cheapest way to cut emissions is to encourage the further development of renewable energy.” Democrats by-and-large haven’t responded well to Republican climate proposals. “I welcome the efforts of anyone, regardless of party, who is willing to seriously tackle climate change,” Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer told The Washington Post in June, “but on its face this does not look like a serious proposal.” Many on the left point to United Nations climate reports warning
Curtis quickly found that even among conservative think tanks and oil executives, the verdict on climate change is absolutely clear: Of course the climate is changing. Of course man has influenced that change.
that we’re on track to irreversible damage if we don’t cut back on emissions. Specifically fossil fuels; the latest report advises rich nations to abandon them by 2040 — a much more drastic change than Republican proposals call for. So when it comes to working together on something like permitting reform, that builds roadblocks. “The problem is, are Democrats really going to be comfortable with more pipelines?” Curtis says. “Because Republicans aren’t doing permitting reform” if Democrats can’t assure the construction of more pipelines.
Some Democratic proposals, meanwhile, have already become law. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat who describes climate action as “my life’s professional goal,” helped draft the climate provisions in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act — a sprawling piece of legislation that allocated over $700 billion in spending, including almost $400 billion toward climate and energy projects. “That was not a moment for bipartisanship,” he says. “That was a moment to do what was necessary in order to save the planet.” Republicans criticized Democrats for pushing it through without fully understanding what was in it, but a recent New York Times essay notes that the IRA’s climate provisions are likely to have a disproportionately positive economic impact on red states, thus making them something of a moot point on the campaign trail — especially with Republican enthusiasm for climate legislation continuing to build.
Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who floated the Colorado River with Romney in September 2021, has been encouraged by his colleagues’ progress.
“There are many Republicans in the Senate who believe that climate change is real,” he says, “and that we ought to address it.”
And even the most hawkish climate Democrats agree with Republicans on the ultimate goals. “I suppose there are probably
ideologues or activists out there who are saying, shut it all down immediately. But that’s not realistic. And that’s not humane,” says Schatz. “We still have people who need to operate their businesses and their schools and their hospitals. So the objective should be to move as fast as we can in the direction of clean energy, but never have an interruption in service, and protect the ratepayer to make sure that this transition doesn’t cost them anything. And when you talk like that you can find a fair amount of common ground.” Yes, in theory, common ground abounds. The question is whether it will overshadow the disagreements enough to result in meaningful action. “I believe we can have it all,” Curtis told his committee colleagues in January. “I believe we can be reliable, affordable and clean. Now, if we can get together and talk, I believe my colleagues on the left believe the same thing.”
POLICY DIFFERENCES ASIDE, the fact alone that today’s Republicans can at least talk about climate in a new way is evidence of progress. “I think it’s because there are enough voices now that have a rational approach to a transition,” says Miller-Meeks, the caucus’ vice chair. “So I think that there are more voices now to be able to have that discourse and interchange.” But, with a laugh both lighthearted and ominous, she adds an important caveat about the movement’s future: “Or it could be that I’m just not talking to everybody.”
The party’s well-earned reputation, and the leaders fighting to keep it alive, could still overthrow and undermine the caucus’ progress, and many are working to make sure of it.
Marc Morano is one of the country’s best-known climate skeptics. Author of five books, including “Green Fraud” and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” he’s also published the website
and newsletter ClimateDepot.com since 2009 and served as communications director for Inhofe, of snowball notoriety. He considers himself conservative, so he’s followed the Republican evolution on climate change with great interest — and, increasingly, with great disappointment.
“My advice, when you’re confronted with the non-problem of global warming, is to have the courage to do nothing,” he says. “I just thought it was complete capitulation,” he adds, referring to the Conservative Climate Caucus’ founding. “I would be all for a Republican climate conference if it actually took the correct (path). But no, this was a capitulation conference, where the members sat around, accepted the premise and came up with basically a Green New Deal-lite, where they weren’t going to challenge it.”
Few match Morano’s ferocity on pushing back against climate change, but Curtis is still fighting an uphill battle against a whole lot of people in his party who, though they may not say so as vocally and clearly as Morano, feel more or less the same way.
A 2021 analysis by the Center for American Progress found that 139 members in both chambers of Congress are skeptical climate change is a problem, or is humanmade, including some big GOP names like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who in 2022 quote-tweeted a former Trump EPA official who said “Climate is a hoax” while adding “climate alarmists have a political ideology to promote, and facts can’t get in the way;” and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, who contends that carbon emissions and global warming are actually good for humanity. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has avoided using the term “climate change” at all and has called global warming “a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things.”
To dismiss that position’s influence on today’s Republican Party would be premature. Especially when Trump — and any
presidential hopeful with similar climate views — threatens to sabotage Curtis’ emerging vision for GOP climate policy. “To the extent that Trump is a viable candidate,” Curtis says, “I think that’s true.” But Curtis also remains hopeful that someone else will emerge who will follow his caucus’ lead. “I think there’s a high likelihood that you'll have some thoughtful discussion on a presidential level,” he says of the upcoming primary cycle. “And I think that would be very healthy for us.”
BACK IN MIAMI, in one of the American cities most susceptible to the consequences of climate change, Curtis makes sure to cover his go-to climate elevator pitch: “I believe we can have affordable, reliable, clean energy.” Again, raucous applause. The audience
seems overwhelmingly receptive to his message, at least in the absence of specifics. That’s his goal here: to convince the climate conscious — liberal and conservative alike — that he and fellow Republicans are serious about tackling emissions and should be taken seriously in these forums. That doesn’t require having all the answers or avoiding disagreements with Democrats, but it does mean acknowledging the problem and working to solve it. Whether here at Aspen Ideas or in his broader pursuit of conservative-aligned climate legislation, it’s a message that’s still a gamble.
It’s a gamble to come to a climate conference because despite its recent progress, his party still stands accused of not doing enough to move away from fossil fuels and embrace U.N. goals that call
for rich countries to go net zero by 2040 and help stave off the 2.7-degree threshold established by the Paris Agreement. And it’s a gamble to share a forum with liberal-leaning speakers and activists who are all talking about an issue that remains unpopular with Republicans regardless of recent gains. Especially when doing so could amount to nothing but electoral liability. A Brookings report from earlier this year notes that while there are new areas of bipartisan climate agreement, those areas are “less likely to motivate the ‘rapid transformation of societies’ that the 2022 U.N. Emissions Gap Report says is necessary ‘to avoid climate disaster.’”
But Curtis believes, and wants other Republicans to believe, that doing so is worth the risk. For political reasons, yes, but also for moral ones. He and like-minded believers maintain that their ideas are just better for stanching the warming of the planet. “I think our view is that our Democrat friends are focused on things that make us feel good, that are very expensive, but won’t make a hill-of-beans difference to the global environment,” Romney says. “Republicans are anxious to do things that will make a real difference.” Whether that holds true remains to be seen, and many observers certainly doubt it. But many are also starting to at least take notice.
After Curtis’ panel concludes, a group of college students approaches him in the hallway to tell him how much they loved his ideas. They even request a photo with him. These students are not from some conservative group. They attended Curtis’ panel with apprehension. “I was very skeptical, because I’m very left-wing,” says Laura Bort Martin, who’s studying in the U.K. “I think the impression most of us had was that he’s just another deep-red Republican,” adds her companion, a young man from Ohio named Jiahao Guo. “So not exactly in line with a lot of the progressive values that younger people are known for.”
Yet here they were, eager to talk to him after finally hearing him talk to them. “He takes it more seriously than I thought,” Martin admits. “It won’t be done without everyone’s support, so it’s really important to have him on board.”
WILL WE EVER BE AT PEACE WITH WOLVES?
BY KYLIE MOHR
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
SAGEBRUSH AND BRITTLE GRASS DANCED AT MY FEET AS I SQUINTED THROUGH A SPOTTING SCOPE.
From a distance, the lumps in Yellowstone National Park looked like rocks. But rocks aren’t usually all the same size, and they certainly aren’t jet-black around here. I sucked in a big breath. A pack of nine wolves huddled on the wind-scuffed ridge. All but one were curled into balls in the snow, noses to tails, blissfully unaware of the commotion their presence brings.
Reactions to these wolves, and the thousands of others in the West, vary widely. Do they imbue a sense of awe, frustration or hatred? Are they seen as part of an ecosystem worth protecting? A threat to livelihoods? Colliding perceptions exist where the wolves lay, and spiral throughout the region. How humans feel about wolves influences the species’ existence in Colorado, where a ballot initiative mandates reintroduction by early next year; the Pacific Northwest and California, where populations are growing, expanding and sometimes getting into trouble; and the Northern Rockies, where wolves are restored and hunted.
Wolves have historically been subject to the whim of strong emotions, policy pendulum swings and lines on a map. They’ve
been vilified and romanticized; illustrated as “bad” — or, at the very least, idealized as a wild thing symbolic of going it alone. The perception of wolves serves as the subject of classic literature, rock songs and fairy tales. But the reality of wolves in the U.S. today hinges on embroiled politics. Can they be a part of daily life in the West? Today, packs like this one in Yellowstone are caught in the middle of everyone trying to decide what they think is right.
ROUGHLY 500,000 WOLVES lived in what’s now the western U.S. before colonizers arrived. But decades of extermination efforts began as settlers and their livestock pushed towards the horizon where the sun sets. Newcomers to the land shot and poisoned wolves — including park managers in the newly-christened Yellowstone National Park. “They were here first,” says Wes Martel, the former chairman of the Fish & Game Committee for the Shoshone & Arapaho Tribes. “Can you imagine saying to a wolf, ‘You don’t belong here’? We try to explain it but most people don’t get it.” Other predators like bears, cougars and coyotes met a similar fate. By the middle of the 20th century, only a few pockets of wolves eked out an existence in Minnesota and a remote island chain in Michigan. Wolves were almost entirely gone from the contiguous U.S.
DOUG SMITH, A WOLF BIOLOGIST IN MONTANA, WAS HIRED TO REINTRODUCE WOLVES INTO YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK IN THE 1990S.
So what would wolf populations look like if settlers and the government had never interfered? It’s hard to say since other integral components of the West — bison, beavers, Indigenous people — were removed at the same time wolves were. The landscape and its inhabitants were permanently altered.
“To answer that question from just the wolf perspective is super hard,” says Doug Smith, a recently retired senior wolf biologist in Yellowstone National Park. “All those elements are tied in there.”
We know with more certainty what the
West would look like ecologically if there were still no wolves. Wolves eat elk, deer and bison — which, in turn, eat vegetation. Removing predators knocks that balance out of whack. “Predators control the prey, so the prey don’t eat themselves out of house and home,” Smith says. One wolf kills an estimated 16 to 22 elk a year (diets vary by season). In Yellowstone, that figure could translate to wolves eating approximately 10 to 15 percent of the elk population that summer in the park. “If we didn’t have wolves, we would be in a complete mess of
wildlife management,” says Kira Cassidy, a research associate with the Yellowstone Wolf Project. What wolf kills accomplish on a larger scale is still unknown: does killing an elk shrink the overall population, or does it make it more likely another elk will live with less competition for resources? It’s likely a little bit of both.
This understanding that wolves are keystone members of interconnected ecosystems helped shape a U-turn in the government’s approach to their presence. The Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, required the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore eliminated species if possible. Wolves in the Lower 48 were listed as endangered in all states (except Minnesota) by 1978.
But wolves have never known nor respected human-drawn boundaries on a map. Canadian wolves began slinking across the border and reestablishing breeding packs in northwestern Montana in the 1980s, and by 1994, between 50 and 60 wolves lived in the state.
Official efforts to bring the species back included the capture, relocation and release of wolves from Canada into Yellowstone and central Idaho in 1995. Author and retired wolf interpreter Rick McIntyre points out the Crystal Creek reintroduction site — tucked in a river bottom, surrounded by evergreen-dappled hills — when I join him on his daily wolf-watching excursion one morning in February. “We realized we messed up, and we fixed it,” he says of reintroduction. Packs still den in nearby cliff bands and hillsides today.
Celebration and frustration greeted the wolves’ return to the Northern Rockies. Tensions were high and further stoked with inflammatory rhetoric. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns famously warned
FOURTH-GENERATION SHEEP AND CATTLE RANCHER KIM KERNS HAS HAD MULTIPLE LIVESTOCK DEATHS DUE TO WOLF ATTACKS.
there’d be a dead child within the year. There were no dead children, but there was dispersal to neighboring private lands, which led to fears of conflict with livestock. Dean Peterson, a fourth-generation cattle rancher outside Wisdom, Montana, became aware of wolves near his property within a few months of their release elsewhere in Idaho. “I never wanted them,” Peterson says. “I knew it was going to cost me time and money to live with them.” He believes he’s lost about 20 to 30 head of cattle to wolves since then.
THE FEARS OF ranchers and livestock owners are often grounded in practicality. Fourth-generation sheep and cattle rancher Kim Kerns runs livestock east of Baker City in Oregon’s sagebrush, grasslands and forests. One April morning in 2009, her father, uncle and cousin woke to a horrific scene. “There were dead and dying sheep everywhere,” Kerns says. “Their bodies were like Jell-O … their rib cages were smashed. There
were sheep with sucking chest wounds wandering around.”
So began a stressful spring and summer at Kerns’ ranch, which became ground zero for wolves expanding their territory into the state. Wolves picked off dairy goats in front of their home, and in September, killed about 30 lambs and ewes, plus a neighbor’s calves. “It’s an incredibly emotional investment to have in that livestock,” Kerns says. “It is really, really hard to see them be in pain or dead.”
The Kerns were paid $3,000 to compensate for their losses — a common policy that states, and in this case, Defenders of Wildlife, a private nonprofit, utilize to reimburse ranchers after a confirmed wolf kill. But, Kerns explains, the payments don’t equate to the “real cost” of losing an animal, and can give the impression that losing an animal to a wolf kill is easily remedied. It’s hard to calculate the real value of an animal with generational knowledge, Kerns says
— it knows where the grass and water are and can pass that down to youngsters. “It’s not just a one-time loss,” she says. “It’s the loss of that animal’s entire life.”
Family-owned ranches are already struggling, squeezed by rising costs, development pressure and giant agribusiness. Wolves add a layer of unpredictability. Experimenting with what works and what doesn’t to keep livestock safe adds stress to an already stressful profession. Surrounding sheep at night with electric net fencing works best for Kerns, who initially got materials from the Fish and Wildlife Service but has purchased it for herself at $600 numerous times since (turns out, lambs love to chew plastic). Peterson helped bring a range rider to his watershed to monitor herds over a decade ago. Kerns and Peterson also both use livestock guardian dogs. “We spend a lot of time and money managing this one predator that we didn’t really ask for,” Kerns says.
There’s no cure-all for preventing conflict and kills, but easing conflict often happens by tapping into rural peer networks. “If they’re not socially supported, it’s not gonna get off the ground,” says Matt Collins, an associate at the Western Landowners Alliance. Maybe somewhere between harmony and hell-bent elimination, there’s a way to live with wolves. “It’s finding that hard-fought middle,” Collins says. But in the moment, the middle can seem far away. Ranchers across the West tell similar stories of wolves reclaiming areas they hadn’t been in for decades. While waiting for the sun to rise one morning in March 2005, Peterson’s dog wouldn’t shut up.
When he opened the front door to quiet it, two wolves were chasing cows nearby. “I just went to the closet, got a gun, leaned over the fence … and I shot,” Peterson says. State and federal officials determined the kill was legal; since then, Peterson’s killed other wolves harassing cattle and hunted and trapped in season on his property. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “They’re trying to survive. What I’m trying to do is protect my livestock and do it legally.”
Peterson’s approach to sharing the land with wolves today looks like getting involved in state rulemaking and management decisions. He wants to be part of the solution. “It’s an old saying,” he says. “But if you’re not at the table, you might be on the menu.”
DESCENDANTS OF THE wolves that were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995 have expanded their range tenfold. According to the International Wolf Center, packs are now known to be in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Alaska — as well as still in Wyoming and Montana. The Center also records that lone wolves have been documented in Utah, Colorado and 10 other states from Missouri to New York. Today, these wolves exist in a reality that varies by location and the agency in charge. Protections are splintered in places like Utah, where wolves are only delisted in a northern pocket, and Wyoming, where wolves are considered vermin in all but the northwest corner.
Wolves are also affected by variable regulation on tribal lands, where their range overlaps with dozens of ancestral homelands.
ONE WOLF KILLS AN ESTIMATED 16 TO 22 ELK A YEAR (DIETS VARY BY SEASON).
“THEY WERE HERE FIRST. CAN YOU IMAGINE SAYING TO A WOLF, ‘YOU DON’T BELONG HERE’?”
RETIRED WOLF INTERPRETER RICK MCINTYRE
BELIEVES THAT WOLF PRESENCE IN ITS NATURAL HABITATS, LIKE YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, HELPS RE-ESTABLISH BALANCE IN THE ECOSYSTEM.
ASSOCIATE WITH THE YELLOWSTONE WOLF PROJECT, MAINTAINS THAT WITHOUT WOLVES, WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT IN THE GREATER YELLOWSTONE ECOSYSTEM WOULD BE MORE DIFFICULT.
Some tribes are open to hunting on their reservations. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation first allowed wolf hunting in 2012; now tribal hunters can hunt unlimited wolves year-round. But numerous tribes in the West asked for more federal protections in 2021. Martel, the former chairman of the Fish & Game Committee for the Shoshone & Arapaho Tribe, helped develop and implement the Wind River Tribal Water and Game Code. It doesn’t allow wolf hunts. “We’re trying to protect our relatives,” Martel says. “With the natural law of reciprocity, if you take care of us, we take care of you.” He considers state wolf hunts to be anti-Indigenous.
Legislation in Idaho and Montana expanded wolf hunts in 2021 with the intent to drastically reduce populations. Hunters then killed more than 500 wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming last winter, “numbers not seen since the animals were driven to near extinction,” according to Science.
The controversy over changes to wolf hunting is acutely felt at the border of Montana and Yellowstone National Park, where river drainages and mountains funnel wolves and their prey into well-known
choke points just over the boundary. Yellowstone’s park border is spread across Idaho and Wyoming, but more packs exist near Montana, and the Wyoming border is remote wilderness.
As a result of the Montana legislation, formerly-strict quotas in the hunting zones just north of Yellowstone skyrocketed, and 82 wolves were killed there during the 2021-2022 hunting season. Despite a lawsuit temporarily halting the hunt, 25 Yellowstone wolves were shot or trapped when they strayed outside the park — one wolf was brought down in Montana by one of
the park’s own backcountry rangers. Quotas were lowered to six wolves this winter, with four of the dead wolves originating in Yellowstone. Smith, who lobbied for the reduction, called this the type of compromise that’s often hard to find with wolves. No one is completely happy with the outcome. Changes to Colorado’s wolf policy are also taking heat. For the first time ever, a ballot initiative, not federal action, is prompting reintroduction. Voters passed Proposition 114 on slim margins in 2020. Starting in 2024, between 30 and 50 wolves will be released over three to five years west
“THE HATRED I SEE IN PEOPLE’S EYES IS JUST AS BAD NOW AS I SAW BACK WHEN I STARTED OUT AS A YOUNG KID.”
of the Continental Divide. After more than a dozen meetings and thousands of public comments, Colorado Parks and Wildlife released a draft plan for the reintroduction, which is slated for approval this month.
But disagreements over how much the state should pay ranchers who lose livestock to wolves, recreational hunting and lethal force reveal unresolved divides. Filed and anticipated lawsuits over the wolves’ protections and classifications in the state could delay paws on the ground for years. A pair that moseyed over the Wyoming border into North Park, Colorado, last year, had pups, and then started killing cows and dogs, isn’t helping tamp down fears of what’s to come. Establishing viable packs doesn’t just mean bringing wolves into the state — it also means making sure they can survive.
RETIRED BIOLOGIST SMITH has been on the front lines of anti-wolf sentiment for over four decades. “The hatred I see in people’s eyes is just as bad now as I saw back when I started out as a young kid,” he says. Wolves are far from the West’s only predator, but they remain more controversial — a devil or an environmental poster child, depending who you ask or who’s at the podium. 2005
“Wolves are such an environmental-value laden lightning rod,” Smith says. He’s found peoples’ perceptions of wolves often come from how they’re raised, who their friends are, what their culture is — similar to other polarizing issues, often driven by social identity and emotion. “How do you feel about abortion? How do you feel about climate change? How do you feel about wolves?” he said. “All three of those things are together.”
Unpacking those feelings means going back in time. Wolves are highly mythologized creatures. They’re mentioned numerous times in the Bible: “ravenous,” “savage,” snatching sheep. They’re mainstays of villains in fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. Bears are portrayed in a different light in American culture. Think Goldilocks and the Three Bears, teddy bears and Smokey Bear. Grizzly bears and wolves both share a history of Endangered Species Act protections and court battles, and in turn, can symbolize government overreach. But while recent delisting attempts are stirring the pot, grizzlies were never put back onto the landscape by federal agencies like wolves were.
Wolves will always be subject to
“IF WE DIDN’T HAVE WOLVES, WE WOULD BE IN A COMPLETE MESS OF WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT.”
symbolism — sometimes, even two sides of the same coin. For many, they represent wildness. But which version? Something to pine for in a digital age, or something to control and dominate, the same attitude as the frontier days? In Colorado, the ballot measure to reintroduce wolves passed narrowly, with a margin of 57,000 votes. But commissioners in 39 of the state’s 64 counties voted against the reintroduction. “You just have people battling over values and their politics inflating and heating up rhetoric,” says Adrian Treves, an environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who founded the Carnivore Coexistence Lab. “It’s unfortunate because it robs us of the ability to deliberate on public policy in a calm, reasoned manner.”
BACK IN THE scrubby sagebrush of northeastern Oregon, wolves force rancher Kerns to hold dueling perspectives. She understands their ecological value and doesn’t want them gone. But they’re also a source of immense frustration: at wildlife officials, who she feels aren’t following the state plan; and at the public, who she feels don’t understand the reality of living with wolves. “I don’t have a problem with wolves being on the landscape,” Kerns says. “I do have a problem with how wolves are being managed.”
management and federal protection increases tension and continually inflames old wounds, but at the same time, an all-or-nothing approach doesn’t appear to stick in the courts or in the public eye.
It’s easier to point to what doesn’t work — like hard boundaries between protection and annihilation last year outside Yellowstone — than what does. If what doesn’t work draws outcry and indignation along entrenched lines, then what’s the opposite? Maybe the way forward involves an even bigger paradigm shift, integrating the idea of reciprocity that governs tribal wildlife management on the Wind River Reservation. “How do we protect and how do we take care of that which takes care of us?” Martel poses.
2020
Fish and Wildlife Service delists gray wolves across the lower 48 states, calling the recovery “one of our nation’s great conservation successes.”
2021
Fish and Wildlife Service begins a comprehensive status review of the gray wolf following petitions for its relisting.
So what does the “hard-fought middle” look like when it comes to these high-stakes predators? Ricocheting between state 2022
Maybe the middle is found somewhere in the hundreds of conversations about wolves taking place across the West. “When it’s gridlocked, you just stand on your side throwing hand grenades at each other,” Smith says. “If you’re actually talking … a lot of times you might not agree, but at the same time, you’re still talking.” Conversations continue as the clock ticks down in Colorado. But proof of a successful reintroduction isn’t just people with different attitudes towards wolves sitting down at the same table. It’s the chance to spot a pack of wolves curled up on a wind-whipped bluff or to hear them howl from out of sight. It’s wolves doing what wolves do, away from stories, town hall meetings and invisible boundary lines: survive.
A federal judge vacates the 2020 delisting and relists wolves as endangered species. This ruling doesn’t affect the status of the Northern Rocky Mountain population, and wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming remain under state management.
25 Yellowstone wolves shot or trapped outside park boundaries during the hunting season.
Fish and Wildlife Service intends to submit a new rule concerning the status of wolves under the Endangered Species Act.
GENERATION Z IS FACING AN UNPRECEDENTED MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS. ARE SMARTPHONES TO BLAME?
By Jean M. Twenge
was not doing well, and she knew it.
The top-ranked women’s tennis player was feeling “huge waves of anxiety” about facing the press, so she decided not to appear at a post-match press conference at the French Open in May 2021, citing the need to “exercise self-care.” Osaka was fined $15,000 and later decided to drop out of the tournament entirely.
Two months later, Simone Biles — often considered the best gymnast on the planet — stunned the world by withdrawing from the team final competition in the 2020 Summer Olympics. In the middle of a vault, she lost her sense of where she was in the air. “I have to put my pride aside,” she told reporters. “I have to do what’s right for me and focus on my mental health and not jeopardize my health and well-being.”
Gen Z is speaking up about their mental health, and they are not shy about it. The less positive news is that they are talking about it more because they are suffering more.
Every indicator of mental health and psychological well-being has become more negative among teens and young adults since 2012. My 2017 book, “iGen,” documented the first signs of these trends among teens, and they have only gotten worse since.
In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that nearly 1 in 3 high school girls considered suicide in 2021, a 60 percent increase
since 2011. More girls also now report feeling so sad and hopeless they couldn’t engage in their normal activities for at least two weeks in the last year.
“I think there’s really no question what the data is telling us,” Dr. Kathleen Ethier, head of the CDC’s adolescent and school health program, told The New York Times in response to the report. “Young people are telling us they are in crisis.”
Although much of the discussion around these statistics centered on the pandemic, teen depression started to increase more than 10 years ago, around 2012.
The trends are stunning in their consistency, breadth and size. Most involve what psychologists call internalizing disorders, such as depression or anxiety. Even when they do not rise to the level of disorders, these emotions are not pleasant — they involve feeling unhappy, dissatisfied with life and down on yourself.
One precursor to these feelings is loneliness — the sense that one is isolated from others. Feeling close social connections to others is crucial for mental health, especially for young people. Gen Z teens are markedly more lonely than previous generations at the same age.
Loneliness among teens had been slowly declining or at least stable since the early 1990s, but after 2012 it suddenly shot upward.
Teens also became less satisfied with their lives and with themselves. The number of 12th graders who were not satisfied suddenly spiked after 2012, doubling in just eight years, after four decades of not changing much at all. This is strange timing, because the U.S. economy was doing progressively better between 2012 and early 2020, so if anything, teens should be more satisfied with their lives as economic circumstances improved.
Teens also began to show signs of depression and self-doubt. Starting around 2012, they became more likely to agree with statements like “I can’t do anything right” and “My life is not useful” and less likely to agree with “I enjoy life as much as anyone,” all classic symptoms of depression and low self-esteem. These were again sudden and large changes after several decades of only small shifts.
Singer Billie Eilish, who rose to fame after posting a song to SoundCloud at age 14, has captured Gen Z’s despair in her lyrics. “I’m thinkin’ about the things that are deadly,” she sings. “Like I wanna drown, like I wanna end me.” Eilish had her finger on the pulse of the generational mood long before the rest of the culture. “At the beginning there were all these radio people that wouldn’t play me because I was too sad and no one was going to relate to it. (But) everybody has felt that,” she told Gayle King. “It’s of course really important to promote happiness and loving yourself and stuff, but a lot of people don’t love themselves.”
Olivia Rodrigo also sings about her generation’s low mood (with a twist of slow-life strategy thrown in). “I’m so insecure, I think / That I’ll die before I drink,” she intones. She doesn’t stand up for herself, she confesses, she’s anxious and no one can help, and if one more person tells her to enjoy her youth, she’s going to cry. “I’m not cool and I’m not smart,” she admits in a song. “I can’t even parallel park.”
So far, these are worrying signs of low mood, but not definitive indications of a debilitating mental illness. Perhaps Gen Z is sad but not clinically depressed. To find out,
we can tap the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a large, federally funded study that puts a premium on privacy and confidentiality. The study assesses depression using the criteria for major depressive disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold standard for diagnosing mental health issues. The criteria include experiencing depressed mood, insomnia, fatigue or markedly diminished pleasure in life every day for at least two weeks.
The result: The number of teens with clinical-level depression doubled between 2011 and 2020, with the increase in depression among young adults not far behind.
Most tragic of all, the suicide rate for young people skyrocketed after 2007, exceeding the previous highs of the early 1990s. The teen suicide rate nearly doubled between 2007 and 2019, and the suicide rate for those in their early 20s jumped 41 percent.
Perhaps even more shocking, the suicide rate of 10- to 14-year-olds — most of whom are elementary and middle school students — tripled overall, and nearly quadrupled for girls.
Let that sink in: Twice as many teens were taking their own lives in 2019 than just 12 years before, and three times as many kids in fifth to eighth grade died at their own hands.
These tragic outcomes cannot be explained by self-report issues, lessened stigma or more help-seeking. In fact, if more young people sought help for mental health issues, you’d expect the suicide rate would go down as they got the help they needed. Instead suicide rates have gone up, suggesting that more teens really are suffering from depression and other mental health issues.
The increase in mental health issues among teens and young adults is large, consistent and pervasive. Young people’s actions speak loudly: More are harming themselves, and more are dying by their own hands. Something clearly went wrong in the lives of teens around 2012, and among young adults soon after. The question is: What was it?
WHEN THESE TRENDS in youth mental health first began appearing in the early 2010s, I had no idea what might be causing them. It was difficult to think of a specific event that occurred around 2012 that reverberated throughout the decade. The economy had finally started to improve after the Great Recession. The traditional generational theory of major events would predict that depression would decline as the economy surged. Instead, it increased.
The rise in teen mental health issues was a mystery.
Then I came across a poll from Pew Research Center, and things began to fall into place. The poll graphed smartphone ownership in the U.S., which started in 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone and crossed 50 percent at the end of 2012 into the beginning of 2013. This was also around the time that social media use among teens
went from optional to virtually mandatory — in 2009, only about half of teens used social media every day, but by 2012, 3 out of 4 did.
Among all the possibilities, the rise of these new technologies seemed the most likely culprit for the rise in teen depression, self-harm and suicide. This argument was initially controversial when I first made it in 2017 in “iGen” (an excerpt in The Atlantic was headlined “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”), but in the years since, no other plausible culprit has emerged. The very large and sudden changes in mental health and behavior between millennials and Gen Z are likely not a coincidence: They arose from the fastest adoption of any technology in human history.
One important note: I am not suggesting that digital media use is responsible for all cases of teen depression. Many factors influence whether a teen is depressed, including genetic predisposition, poverty, trauma, discrimination and bullying. Nor is every heavy social media user going to be depressed; only some are. (As Derek Thompson put it in The Atlantic, “Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. It’s more like alcohol: A mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.”) People are complex and there are many causes of mental health issues.
That said, there’s no denying that teen depression and digital media use have
increased in lockstep. Internet use, social media use and smartphone ownership rose as depression rose. The pattern of change by age groups also fits. Because adolescents adopted these technologies first and most completely, we would expect a technology-fueled increase in depression to hit adolescents first, young adults second and prime-age adults next. That’s exactly what happened.
If the rise of digital media explains the increase in teen depression, similar patterns of change should appear in countries other than the U.S. that also adopted the technology of smartphones and social media around the same time. This is an argument often voiced by critics of this theory: If it’s the smartphone or social media, they asked, then where is the evidence from other countries?
The evidence has emerged, and it too is overwhelming. Self-harm, anxiety and depression have increased sharply among teens in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. Depression rates more than doubled among 13- to 16-year-olds in the United Kingdom, with the sharpest increases after 2010.
What about other countries? The World Health Organization’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study has surveyed more than 600,000 13- and 15-year-olds in 50 countries since 2002, mostly in Europe. The project included a measure of psychological distress, including feeling nervous, being irritable or having trouble sleeping.
The number of teens with significant distress was unchanged or down between 2002 and 2010, but then jumped sharply between 2010 and 2018, especially among
girls. The number of teens with high levels of distress increased in 38 out of 40 countries between 2010 and 2018.
Still, it would be better to have a broader cross section of countries from more regions of the world. That type of data is hard to come by for teen mental health, but one dataset comes close: The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) included a measure of loneliness at school since 2000. More than 1 million 15- and 16-year-olds in 37 countries were asked if they agreed with statements like “I feel lonely at school” and “I feel awkward and out of place at my school.”
The result? School loneliness among teens rose in 36 out of 37 countries around the world, with increases in loneliness in all regions. Those increases primarily appeared after 2012, exactly the same pattern as loneliness and depression among teens in the U.S.
The number of teens experiencing a high degree of loneliness doubled in Europe, Latin America, and the English-speaking countries, and increased 65 percent in Asian countries. The only country where loneliness did not increase was South Korea; teen loneliness increased in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Not only that, but the rise in loneliness across all of the countries tracked closely with the rise in teens’ smartphone access and internet time — but not with unemployment, income inequality, gross national product or family size. When smartphone access went up, particularly when 75 percent or more teens had a smartphone, more and more teens felt lonely at school.
THERE’S ANOTHER REASON why digital media is the most likely culprit for the rise in depression: It changed day-to-day life in a fundamental way. While getting together in person or talking on the phone were the only communication choices for boomers and most Gen Xers when they were young, digital communication became the norm for Gen Z. Instead of going to the movies or meeting up at parties, Gen Z was using Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. By early 2020, nearly half of eighth graders spent three hours a day or more using social media. The average teen spent more than eight and a half hours a day with screen media in total in 2021, according to Common Sense Media.
As digital communication took over, in-person gatherings waned. Beginning in the 2000s and accelerating during the 2010s, teens started spending less and less time with each other in person — whether that was just hanging out, going to the mall, driving around or going to parties. By early 2020 (before the Covid-19 pandemic hit), eighth and 10th graders were going out with friends about a day a week less often than they had in the 1990s, when that age group was Gen Xers.
These were not small changes socially. College-bound high school students reported spending an hour a day less socializing and partying with friends than Gen Xers in the 1980s. And that was not because they were spending more time studying or on extracurricular activities — time spent on those activities was roughly the same in the 1980s and the 2010s among high school seniors.
Young adults in 2019 — even before the pandemic — spent 25 minutes less a day socializing in person with others than those in 2012. That translates to three hours a week, 13 hours a month, and 152 hours a year less in the company of others.
THERE’S ANOTHER REASON WHY DIGITAL MEDIA IS THE MOST LIKELY CULPRIT FOR THE RISE IN DEPRESSION: IT CHANGED DAY-TO-DAY LIFE IN A FUNDAMENTAL WAY.
LED TO A GLOBAL
OF HUMAN SOCIAL
— WHEN MOST PEOPLE OWN SMARTPHONES AND USE SOCIAL MEDIA, EVERYONE IS IMPACTED, WHETHER THEY USE THESE TECHNOLOGIES OR NOT.
Smartphones and social media don’t just affect individuals; they affect groups. Smartphones are communication devices. Social media is social. These are not technologies that individual people use in isolation. The smartphone led to a global rewiring of human social interaction — when most people own smartphones and use social media, everyone is impacted, whether they use these technologies or not. It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder for friends to get together in person when the norm is to communicate online instead.
That’s especially true for Gen Z, where these technologies are used by the vast majority of their age-mates. Let’s say Sophia, 16, has chosen not to use social media. She thus escapes seeing Instagram influencers with flawless bodies and unattainable lives every day, doesn’t see the pictures from the parties she’s not invited to and has more time to get enough sleep. But she also feels left out because her friends and schoolmates are all on social media and she’s not. (As teens frequently tell me, they feel like they can’t win whether they’re on social media or not.) Plus, if Sophia wants to live like it’s 1988 and hang out with her friends in person, who will she get together with when her friends would rather post to social media?
This does not go away once teens head to college. “Gen Z are an incredibly isolated group of people,” wrote a Canadian college student recently. “There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see why. Often I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self-identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it.” Life with smartphones, author Sherry Turkle wrote, means “we are forever elsewhere.”
Considering group-level trends also helps answer the question of whether digital media use causes depression, or depression causes digital media use. Among
individuals, it’s probably some of both. But at the group level, it’s much more likely that digital media became popular and depression followed. To make a case for depression causing digital media use at the group level, you’d have to argue that teen depression increased for a completely unknown reason and that that led people to start buying smartphones and using social media. That seems pretty unlikely.
Many of the increases in mental health issues are larger among girls than among boys. For example, the suicide rate for 15to 19-year-old girls doubled between 2007 and 2019, while the increases for boys were about half that. Rates of clinical-level depression doubled among both teen girls and teen boys, but because the rate is higher for girls, the increase was 14 percentage points for girls and five percentage points for boys. Increases in loneliness, both in the U.S. and worldwide, were also larger for girls than for boys.
Given that the increases appear for both boys and girls but are larger for girls, the cause of the increase in depression is likely something that impacts both but has a larger impact on girls. Digital media fits that description perfectly. For example, while both boys and girls compare themselves to others on social media, girls are especially likely to compare their bodies to the perfect specimens they see online, and especially likely to receive comments about their bodies. “You can’t ever win on social media,” observed a teen girl interviewed by Facebook researchers. “If you’re curvy — you’re too busty. If you’re skinny — you’re too skinny. If you’re bigger — you’re too fat. It’s endless, and you just end up feeling worthless about yourself. I’m never going to have that body without surgery.” Instagram is, at essence, a platform where girls and young women post pictures of themselves and invite others to comment on them.
Even apart from body image, the social dynamics of girlhood — more focused on words, close friendships and popularity than boys — can be a perfect storm on social media. Popularity, which has always
been important among teen girls, is now a number: How many followers do you have? How many likes did your post get? Girls also spend more time on social media than boys do: In 2021, 35 percent of 10th grade girls spent five or more hours a day using social media, compared to 20 percent of boys.
That may be another reason why the increase in mental health issues is particularly acute among girls: They spend more time on social media, and social media is more strongly linked to unhappiness and depression than other forms of digital media.
TV time is only weakly linked to unhappiness, and gaming (which is more popular among boys) is pretty much a wash until it reaches five hours a day. But unhappiness starts to trend upward after just an hour a day of social media use for girls. Two studies of U.K. teens show the same thing, with social media and internet time the most strongly linked to depression and self-harm behaviors, especially among girls, and gaming and watching TV/videos more weakly linked.
In other words: Not all screen time is created equal. Social media and internet time are the most strongly linked to self-harm and depression, and those links are more pronounced among girls. Electronic gaming and watching TV and videos may not play as big a role in mental health. So if digital media is the cause of the large increase in mental health issues among teens and young adults, solutions focusing on social media in particular might be the most effective at reducing the unacceptably high rates of depression, self-harm and suicide.
scrolling, absorbing all of these unrealistic body standards. That down the line resulting in disordered eating,” she said. “It just became this horrific loop of going on ... Instagram, feeling worse about myself, but feeling as though I could not stop scrolling because it has this weird power over me.”
Lembke says her goal is more discussion of social media and mental health and more regulation to help make the platforms safer for teens. The organization wants teens “to be more comfortable talking about their experiences so that we can educate legislators to understand a Gen Z perspective, what we need from technology, what privacy concerns we’re having, what mental health concerns we’re having,” she said.
Not that long ago, it was common to see kids and teens playing pickup basketball at a neighborhood park, walking home from school and biking to each other’s houses. Now they are picked up in a car by their parents, and then go inside to play video games or watch videos on TikTok.
The cost of the digital age isn’t just mental — it’s physical. Around 2012, just as smartphones became common, the number of teens who said they rarely exercised increased, reaching all-time highs among both eighth graders and 12th graders by 2019. The number who rarely ate breakfast also started to trend up after two decades of declines. As we saw earlier, the number of teens who don’t sleep enough has also gone up, another unhealthy trend for both physical and mental health.
tempting to shave off a few pounds when reporting weight). This is not just a Gen Z issue, as the number of overweight and obese older adults also increased over this time. Still, it is stunning to see such a large number of the young considered overweight.
As Jonathan Haidt and I wrote in The New York Times in 2021, it’s not possible to go back in time and eliminate smartphones, and considering all the benefits of the technology, we probably wouldn’t want to. But teens are in crisis, and there are answers.
For starters, kids already have a long period each day when they are not distracted by their devices: When they’re in school. Locking up phones during the school day allows kids to practice the lost art of paying full attention, especially to their teachers.
We can also delay entry into social media, ideally keeping it entirely out of elementary and middle schools. The platforms should — at a minimum — be held legally responsible for enforcing their stated minimum age of 13 and should be required to implement age and identity verification for all new accounts, as many other industries have done. We can also be mindful that this crisis, as the data suggests, affects us all. Being more compassionate of ourselves, and others, can make a huge difference.
“As an athlete, you’re kind of told to be strong and push through everything, but I think I learned that it’s better to regroup and adjust the feelings you have in that moment and you can come back stronger.”
SO WHAT’S THE answer? Is there a solution?
Young activists like Emma Lembke, a student at Washington University, have founded movements encouraging young people to quit or limit social media (Lembke’s is called Log Off). Lembke joined Instagram when she was 12 and started spending six hours a day on it, “mindlessly
Perhaps due to lack of exercise and other unhealthy habits, the number of teens and young adults who were overweight increased sharply between 2012 and 2019. By 2016, more than 30 percent of American young adults were overweight. A full 1 out of 3 young adults in 2019 was not just overweight but clinically obese, up from 1 out of 3 as recently as 2014.
There is little doubt these figures are correct: They are from a CDC-run project that measures height and weight in a mobile lab, which produces considerably more precise and accurate data than self-reports (since it’s
When Osaka did return to the court, at the Tokyo Olympics, she said she was overwhelmed by the response from other athletes, who told her they understood and supported her.
“I do hope that people can relate and understand it’s OK to not be OK, and it’s OK to talk about it,” she wrote that month in an essay for Time magazine. “There are people who can help, and there is usually light at the end of any tunnel.” ADAPTED FROM “GENERATIONS: THE
ES
BOOMERS AND SILENTS — AND WHAT THEY MEAN FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE” BY JEAN TWENGE FROM ATRIA BOOKS, AN IMPRINT OF SIMON & SCHUSTER. COPYRIGHT 2023.
In 1983, a 100-year flood was no match for a community
By Lee Benson
A PHONE RINGS on the nightstand in the mayor’s bedroom. It can’t be good news, with a surge in warmer temperatures and record snowpack in the Wasatch mountains of northern Utah. Ted Wilson has spent enough time up there skiing and climbing and guiding others to visualize the day’s first light glimmering across the white surface, spawning droplets of water, forming rivulets that become torrents as they crash through the canyons above Salt Lake City. Nervous, he reaches for the landline.
A woman speaks, alarmed. She’s a city council member who lives in the Avenues, an older neighborhood of tree-lined streets and Craftsman-style homes on the hillside north of downtown, along the eastern rim of City Creek Canyon. Looking down on the park where that canyon ends, she describes a river gone insane, flush with snowmelt, bucking against its banks. If something isn’t done, and soon, downtown will be underwater.
City Creek is a small mountain stream, about 15 miles long, fed by runoff and natural springs, but it provided enough water to draw early settlers — members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — to this corner of a broad and arid valley. Later, as the city grew into an urban center, its importance to farming faded. By 1909, City Creek had been channeled underground and out of the way. But that conduit was not built to handle a record 26-inch snowpack liquefying at a terrifying rate.
Wilson knows the stakes. The month before, excess groundwater had cut loose the side of a mountain about 65 miles south, burying the small town of Thistle. And memories are still fresh of the 1976 failure of Teton Dam, 250 miles north in Idaho. There, after a 15-foot wall of water and rubble hit Rexburg, locals rallied together to help victims rebuild. What if Salt Lake City could mobilize them on the front end? “I need an army,” he thinks.
His first call is to Latter-day Saint church headquarters, a 28-story monolith a half-mile downstream from the park. A security guard answers. “I need to talk to the president,” Wilson tells him. It’s an odd request for the spiritual leader of more than five million souls worldwide, including most of the people living in the state of Utah at that time. “It’s Sunday,” the guard says, perplexed. “Why do you need to talk to the president?”
The mayor tells him: “Because I need him to cancel church.”
Forty years later, when I call Wilson, some Utahns are again casting nervous eyes to the mountains. Heavy snowfall across the West has interrupted a 22-year megadrought afflicting the region, and by
April, the snowpack above Salt Lake City is more than double the annual average, far beyond the same point in time in 1983. To many, it seems their prayers for water have been answered. It’s hard to remember a time when they prayed for it not to rain, but it wasn’t all that long ago.
The flood of 1983 was caused by a perfect storm. All that winter, snow had piled up in record numbers. The resort town of Alta, 4,000 feet above the valley floor, recorded 637 inches from October through April, then the third-highest total since record-keeping began in 1944. No one, least of all the powder skiers, complained. Utah is the second-driest state in the U.S., with an average annual precipitation of 11 inches. Water is always welcome.
There’s typically an order to the process. Beginning in March, temperatures start to rise as days get longer, gradually sending
snowmelt into the streams that flow into the reservoirs and water storage plants in the valley below. People who live nearby leave their windows open to hear the soothing sounds that herald the end of winter. But spring came late in 1983, and snow kept falling. Over 13 days in March and April, Alta added 12 more feet, as daily highs in the city hovered in the 50s, hitting the 60s only sporadically. But May 24 brought a hot streak, with daily highs surging into the 80s, cresting at 87 on that infamous weekend. Practically overnight, the seven major streams emptying into the Salt Lake Valley doubled, tripled or quadrupled their flow.
During a typical spring runoff, City Creek peaks at 45 cubic feet per second, with a flood stage of 90 CFS. On the morning of May 29, it was running at 230 CFS. Instead of 20,000 gallons per minute spilling into the underground conduit, the flow was at
She describes a river gone insane, flush with snowmelt, bucking against its banks. If something isn’t done, and soon, downtown will be underwater.
ABOVE: VOLUNTEERS BUILD A TEMPORARY DIKE ALONG MAIN STREET NEAR THE SALT
VOLUNTEERS FILL SANDBAGS AND LOAD THEM INTO DUMP TRUCKS TO BE PLACED ALONG BURGEONING WATERWAYS.
104,000 gallons per minute. Any objects in the way — trees, boulders, debris, chunks of highway asphalt — were carried away as the stream rumbled down the canyon. The sound was anything but soothing. The soggy spring had left the ground waterlogged, unable to soak in much more.
Anticipating the worst, Salt Lake County had purchased more than a half-million sandbags and moved 50,000 tons of dirt to erect 10-foot-tall dikes along 1300 South, an east-west corridor 2.5 miles south of the park, closing off the street so it could turn into a river if needed. “By April we were very concerned about the potential for flooding,” says Bart Barker, the Salt Lake County commissioner in charge of public works in 1983. “We knew it was going to happen at some point. We didn’t know exactly what day or how bad it would be.”
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Wilson gets on the phone with President Gordon B. Hinckley, a member of the First Presidency, the church’s governing body. “I need every member I can get,” Wilson says. Calmly, the older man asks if the mayor might have a plan B. It is the Sabbath, after all. “Can you first give it your best try?” Realizing the gravity of what he’s asking, Wilson reframes the situation. “I hate to pull this one on you, but I would worry about your computers in the basement of the Church Office Building. It’s right in the flood path.”
“Now you’ve got my attention,” Hinckley says.
Soon Wilson and his aides are on the phone calling “every other religious leader we could think of. We needed all the help we could get.” Phones ring and services are canceled all over town, some stopped practically mid-prayer. “It was so crazy,” says David Dilts, who lived in the Avenues at the time. “One minute we were in church, the next minute they said, ‘Hey, we’d rather you go down to State Street and help.’ I went
home, changed into blue jeans and a T-shirt and was there within half an hour.”
On the west side of the valley, Barker was still wearing his work shoes when he reported to church services in his neighborhood. He had been up much of the night, supervising the moving of backhoes and other equipment into flood-prone areas. He was there just long enough to hear the bishop close the meeting and send his congregants away. Soon he joined thousands filling sandbags and shoring up riverbanks along the Cottonwood creeks and other critical spots. “I don’t know where else that kind of volunteer response could have occurred in that short amount of time,” he says. “To watch it happen was soul-stirring.”
By the time Wilson arrives at Memory Grove, a thousand volunteers are already there, “some of them still in their church best,” he says. “We had guys taking their coats and ties off and jumping in to help, we had lovely Mormon women in their dresses.”
About 10,000 volunteers turn out downtown to build a makeshift riverbed. Believers, non-believers and sometime-believers — Latter-day Saints, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists — stood side by side to form something like a conga line: one person holding the burlap bag, another filling it with sand, then passing it down the chain until it’s packed in place to form a temporary levee. By midafternoon, the sandbags are positioned, the work done. The only question: Will it hold?
ON STATE STREET, Wilson’s wife sends word to her husband that the volunteers are getting impatient. “Where’s the water?” they chant. In Memory Grove, one final snag remains. The gate at the bottom of the lake is clogged and has to be fully released to divert the water in the proper direction. A brave city worker dons a bathing suit and dives in, swimming down to jimmy the gate. Freed, the water plunges south,
“One minute we were in church, the next minute they said, ‘Hey, we’d rather you go down to State Street and help.’ I went home, changed into blue jeans and a T-shirt and was there within half an hour.”
FLOODING STRUCK UP AND DOWN THE WASATCH FRONT. BELOW, VOLUNTEERS IN BOUNTIFUL CARRY BUCKETS FULL OF SLUDGE FROM A NEIGHBOR'S HOME.
ABOVE: LOCALS
CROSS A MAKESHIFT
Would Americans today pull together to save their city? Would they stand side by side to build a river? Another crisis could be the only way to find out.
rumbling past a 100-year-old building on the corner of South Temple and State to create what folks call the “Alta Club Rapids.” Realizing what they just built is actually working, the crowd exhales. Spontaneous celebrations erupt, kicking off what Wilson calls “the biggest street festival we’ve ever had.”
For 13 days, the new, improvised waterway redefined the city. Pushing past two makeshift levees, the “State Street River” eventually stretched to 1300 South, where sandbags turned its course and led it two miles west to the Jordan River. Wooden bridges spanned its shore. Locals fished from its banks or ran the rapids in their kayaks. The national press descended on the scene, capturing the moment in Norman Rockwell tones. The Washington Post called Salt Lake City “The Venice of the high desert,” and ran a photograph of a young woman in a wheelchair who joined the human chain to help pass sandbags. More importantly, it became a monument to community spirit and cooperation.
Two years later, a report in the International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disaster, funded in part by a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, found that widespread damage was greatly
averted by the community effort. “The Salt Lake pattern for volunteer response to an emergency could be replicated in other places where there is a nonpublic organization, such as a church, that has a strong pyramid organizational structure, an adequate density of its members in the community, and the will to act.”
Volunteers continued to repair and maintain the levees from May 29 until June 11, when the State Street River ran dry.
STILL, THE STRIKING memories of a city that overcame a crisis persist. Now 83, Wilson still has the sinewy frame of a mountaineering guide, but the country has changed around him. Would Americans today pull together to save their city? Would they stand side by side to build a river? Another crisis could be the only way to find out. With an easy laugh, Wilson remembers that first conversation with Hinckley, when the enormity of what they were facing sunk in — for both of them. “It turned out that having it happen on a Sunday was fortunate,” he says. “You got the feeling that by hell no flood was going to get us.”
CONSERVATIVES AT ELITE
WORRY THEY CAN’T SPEAK FREELY. BUT SO DO PROGRESSIVES
BY LAUREN NOBLE
In the world of on-campus activities, there aren’t many things that cause a news firestorm. For an organization like the Buckley Institute that focuses on intellectual diversity at Yale, news trucks only arrive when a speaker has been protested or shouted down. What brought journalists to Yale in November 2022 was the decision by federal appellate Judges James Ho of the 5th Circuit Court and Elizabeth Branch of the 11th Circuit Court to boycott future Yale Law students for prestigious clerk positions until Yale did something to address the intolerance on campus.
Earlier that March, over 100 students had protested and shouted down a panel on free speech that featured both a noted conservative and a prominent liberal. Police were called. But even after some of the disrupters left the room, they continued to shout and bang on the classroom walls, making it difficult for the event to proceed.
The previous fall, Yale Law administrators had pressured a Native American student to apologize for a party invitation, even warning it could hurt his career prospects. And who could forget how two Yale faculty ended up resigning as heads of a residential
college after students demanded they lose their jobs simply for suggesting that college students could maturely handle a Halloween costume they found offensive?
At the invitation of the Buckley Institute, Ho and Branch gave an overflow crowd a chance to hear why a boycott was necessary and how they hoped Yale would improve
THOUGH CONSERVATIVES ARE MORE WORRIED ABOUT BEING CANCELED, PROGRESSIVE STUDENTS ARE ALSO CONCERNED.
quickly. But what really stood out was a comment from one Yale undergraduate who questioned whether it was really fair for life-tenured judges with total job security to ask students to put their futures on the line to stand up for free speech. “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s better for me to just sit back, bite my tongue, and then in four years, I’ll be able to say whatever I want.”
THAT CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS at one of the world’s preeminent universities self-censor during classroom discussion is, sadly, not a surprise. Seventy years ago, William F. Buckley Jr., for whom the Buckley Institute is named, wrote “God and Man at Yale” about his own experience with the campus orthodoxy. In 2011, I founded the Buckley Institute to address the still rampant monoculture at Yale.
As an undergraduate, I observed a lack of conservative or even heterodox viewpoints on campus. Yale celebrated diversity — but not diversity of thought. In the basement of one of Yale’s residential colleges, a few friends and I launched what would become the Buckley Institute as a simple speaker series to bring intellectual diversity to campus.
One of our signature efforts, our annual college survey, shows that this problem is not unique to Yale. In 2022, 63 percent of college students surveyed nationwide said they often feel intimidated in sharing opinions different than those of their classmates; 58 percent because of their professors. Both records since we began asking this question in 2015, those two numbers represent a 13
percent and 8 percent increase from the previous years, respectively.
Tasha Dambacher, a sophomore majoring in history, feels this acutely. After all, she was the one who questioned Ho and Branch about the practicality of speaking up. She worries that sharing conservative views could negatively impact her grade in a class, graduate school applications or even future job prospects.
The pressure to self-censor can creep up in unexpected places. Aron Ravin, a junior, recalled a discussion seminar on “The Iliad” where the professor compared the violence in Homer’s epic poem to the killing of George Floyd and school shootings. Student groups had been calling for defunding the Yale Police Department, which Ravin called “one of the few things that made students on campus feel safe in New Haven.”
Sick of the oppressive campus orthodoxy, he chose to speak up in defense of the police and pointed out that Homer’s work, published almost 3,000 years ago, had nothing to do with contemporary politics. Ravin hoped that doing so would embolden similarly-minded classmates who were afraid to share their perspectives.
Though conservatives are more worried about being canceled, progressive students are also concerned. Liberals (64 percent) were only 2 percent less likely than conservative students (66 percent) to report being intimidated from sharing an opinion in class because of their fellow students. Neither age, nor race, nor public or private university enrollment brought the share of those intimidated by classmates below 53 percent.
Yale’s religious students too feel the
pressure. Though there isn’t generally a feeling of hostility toward religious individuals, Ryan Gapski, the Buckley Institute’s current student president, commented that “there’s a sense among students that religious perspectives shouldn’t be lent as much credence as secular ones.” Another religious Yale undergraduate, Marcos Barrios, expressed a similar sentiment and commented that, as a religious person, “there is a certain level of caution you have before you speak on hot button issues.”
“Yale is welcoming to religious students,” Barrios continued. “They’re just less welcoming when a person’s religion means they have different views on the values the university professes.”
Beyond expressing their views in the classroom, religious students at Yale also have trouble dealing with the administration
“IT’S BETTER FOR ME TO JUST SIT BACK, BITE MY TONGUE, AND THEN IN FOUR YEARS, I’LL BE ABLE TO SAY WHATEVER I WANT.”
regarding religious housing needs. The growing frustration even led to a recent rally. Gapski agreed that the administration was “definitely a part of the problem here.” Religious students had “significant challenges in securing religious accommodations for housing” as many dormitories have mixed-gender floors and communal bathrooms. The university did ultimately agree to offer a single-gender housing option after weeks of protest.
Some students sense that the Yale administration is more willing to accommodate the religious needs of its student body when those needs don’t conflict with progressive orthodoxy. “I believe it’s much harder,” Barrios said, “when the university doesn’t agree with the student’s reasons.”
IF IT SEEMS like shout-downs are increasingly normal on college campuses these days, it’s probably because college students are more supportive of them than before.
Our 2022 survey found 44 percent of college students, the highest percentage on record, believe it is acceptable to shout down or disrupt speakers on campus. A record 41 percent believe it is justifiable to use violence to stop hate speech.
Alarmingly, students who are afraid to speak up support the very things that make them timid in the first place. With 63 percent of students afraid of their classmates and 44 percent supporting shout-downs, there is a cross section of students who fear social cancellation but still support censorship anyway. Among students, 43 percent believe political opinions they “find offensive” should be reported to administrators. And nearly two-thirds believe new university faculty and any new employees at any company should be compelled to sign a diversity, equity and inclusion statement.
Indeed, many current college students have turned away entirely from the principles that make America so uniquely welcoming to free speech in the first place. For the first time in the eight-year history of the survey, a plurality of students don’t believe
that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. A slim plurality of college students (33 percent to 31 percent) would prefer to live under a socialist system than a capitalist one. As Milton Friedman famously argued in “Capitalism and Freedom,” a free marketplace of ideas and a free marketplace of goods go hand in hand.
THERE CAN BE social costs to speaking up, no doubt. Ravin decided early on to speak out and share his conservative perspectives: in the classroom, in the Yale Daily News and in various conservative outlets.
He related that one fellow student began harassing him over an op-ed he wrote and demanded Ravin issue an apology. The student then said Ravin would “bear his grief” unless Ravin donated to a fundraiser for “black, transgender, homeless youth.”
Dambacher told Judges Ho and Branch that she’s “seen conservative friends sniggered at” as they walk across campus. “Yale is a small community,” she explained later. “Once one person says something about you, everyone knows, so it can sometimes be safer to keep a low-profile.”
THE QUESTION THAT came to me over a decade ago was what to do about the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. During my time as an undergraduate, this was clearly an issue with regard to the faculty. Ten years later, Yale hasn’t changed much.
A 2017 survey by the Yale Daily News found that 75 percent of Yale faculty identified as liberal versus 8 percent who identified as conservative. In 2020, the Yale Daily News reported that less than 3 percent of faculty political donations went to Republicans.
The administration isn’t much help either. Ostensibly, Yale supports free speech and expression on campus. Yale President Peter Salovey focused his second freshman address in August 2014 on “free speech at Yale” and stressed in his most recent freshman address that “faculty and students — must be open to engaging with diverse ideas, whether conventional or unconventional, of the left or of the right.” The
Woodward Report — which calls for “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable and challenge the unchallengeable” — remains the university’s official free speech policy.
Yet, for all Salovey’s words, Yale administrators seem unwilling to enforce the university’s own policies or take substantive steps to improve free speech on campus. No students were punished after the free speech panel was disrupted last March. And to add insult to injury, Yale gave graduation awards to two students who took leading roles in bullying a Yale professor during the Halloween costume controversy. Dambacher, the sophomore, commented that Yale administrators are a “part of the problem. They are often willing to humor attempts from other students attempting to censor speech, and will not affirm the importance of intellectual diversity or free speech.”
Indeed, an overweening bureaucracy is often the source of the free speech problems. The Halloween costume debacle began with an email from a paternalistic administrator. And it was a diversity director and an associate dean who warned the Native American law student of consequences over a party invite.
To be fair to Yale and the many university and college administrators around the country, they are in a tough position with regards to cancel culture in their own right. As Ravin put it, “most of the administration wants to be supportive. … The problem is that the administration also wants to support the DEI (diversity equality and inclusion)-driven progressives, the very people who shut down speech.”
This is where organizations like the Buckley Institute can make a difference. By providing a counterweight in favor of free speech, the Buckley Institute gives supportive university administrators breathing space to do the right thing. If only the cancellers speak up, administrators who support free speech can do little to oppose them.
The most important work is directly with the students, though. The Buckley Institute brings diverse perspectives to campus on
an almost weekly basis through our speaker series, Firing Line debates and seminars. Our annual Disinvitation Dinner introduces individuals who have been disinvited from other campuses to an audience that isn’t too afraid to hear them. Last fall, we distributed 1,600 copies of Yale’s free speech principles to every incoming freshman, better equipping them to support free speech on campus.
But most important of all, what the Buckley Institute and similar organizations on other campuses provide is an environment where undergraduates can freely challenge ideas and be challenged. At Buckley, students learn that there are perspectives outside of the campus orthodoxy, even if they won’t be exposed to them in the classroom.
THERE ARE MANY proposals about what to do to rescue the increasingly illiberal college campus. Some focus on tackling the DEI bureaucracies that have chilled speech for faculty and student alike. And Yale’s bureaucracy, which has at times included more than one administrator for every undergraduate, could definitely use reform.
But, if America’s undergraduates want censorship, then these efforts will have little meaningful effect. If America’s undergraduates aren’t taught the value of free speech, all the legislation in the world will have little impact on the problems American universities are facing.
Educating the next generation about the importance of free speech is essential. Bringing speakers with diverse viewpoints, as the Buckley Institute does, is the only way to build a caucus in favor of a robust free speech culture on campus. Demonstrating that diverse viewpoints aren’t dangerous viewpoints will create a student body welcoming to ideas that challenge rather than conform.
As our polling shows, students at Yale and across the country are afraid to speak up in class. Unless we do something, the problem will only get worse.
LAUREN NOBLE IS FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE BUCKLEY INSTITUTE.
“THERE’S A SENSE AMONG STUDENTS THAT RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES SHOULDN’T BE LENT AS MUCH CREDENCE AS SECULAR ONES.”
IS IT TOO LATE TO STOP MOSCOW AND BEIJING’S NEW WORLD ORDER?
BY DANIEL F. RUNDE
In 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published “The End of History and the Last Man.” This seminal work of political philosophy argued that civilization had reached “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” The world was experiencing a wave of democratization, not just in the former Soviet states in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Fukuyama believed, as I do, that market democracies are the best foundation for moral, social and economic progress, and that the “liberal world order” that had come into being after the Second World War — which I believe has kept humanity free from global conflagration for 75 years — would be cemented as the fundamental organizing principle of geopolitics.
Three decades later, Fukuyama’s prediction could most generously be described as optimistic. After several years spent observing with concern the “democracy recession” around the world, the U.S. and its partner nations saw the liberal world order come under all-out attack in 2022 with Russia’s barbaric, catastrophic invasion of Ukraine. What had been a sleepy multilateral system roared back to life, brandishing the weapons of diplomatic, economic and cultural connections.
I fervently hope that we are not at the beginning of a second Cold War, but without
question, the great-power competition facing the United States has become more complex and more urgent. Russia and China are going to be challenges for the next 20 or 30 years, but they are not one and the same. Each has its own intentions and motivations, and the response of the U.S. and its partners will have to be multifaceted and draw on every tool at our disposal. Our long-term goal for U.S. leadership is a world based on broadly shared liberal values and ideals, not those of China or Rus-
THE GREAT-POWER COMPETITION IS NOT GOING TO PLAY OUT IN BEIJING OR MOSCOW, BUT IN PLACES LIKE KYIV AND ACROSS THE DEVELOPING WORLD.
sia, and we should work to pull as many countries as possible toward that liberal international order, assuming those countries want to join.
The world is, for the moment, distracted by Moscow’s aggression, but we need to be careful not to take our eye off the ball.
Russia may be a local bully, reasserting its presence in the former Soviet space, but it has neither the economic might nor the ability to set global standards that China has achieved.
Yes, Russia insists on being recognized
as a global force. The great-power competition currently taking shape is not going to play out in Beijing or Moscow, though, but rather in places like Kyiv and across the developing world from Central Asia to Africa and Latin America. Before the Ukraine invasion, we assumed this competition would not be fought with armies, but rather with ideas and economic engagement. In the words of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “If we can avoid war with Russia and China, our rivalry with them will be waged using nonmilitary instruments of power — the same kind of instruments that played a significant role in winning the Cold War: diplomacy, development assistance, strategic communications, science and technology, ideology, nationalism and more.”
I think about the United States’ relationship with the world as being supported by a tripod of three Ds: diplomacy, defense and development. My field is development, which is linked inextricably to the other two elements as a critical component of statecraft. A great deal of attention is going to be paid to military and security issues, with many already arguing for a revitalized, technologically advanced military. I don’t believe, though, that global leadership is going to be asserted primarily on the battlefield, but rather through economic and other soft-power tools. The international response to Putin’s assault on Ukraine has been a testament to the importance of diplomacy, as democracies have reinvigorated their commitment to liberal principles and have made
“IF WE CAN AVOID WAR WITH RUSSIA AND CHINA, OUR RIVALRY WITH THEM WILL BE WAGED USING NONMILITARY INSTRUMENTS OF POWER — THE SAME KIND OF INSTRUMENTS THAT PLAYED A SIGNIFICANT ROLE IN WINNING THE COLD WAR.”
clear their united opposition to Russian aggression. At the same time, the human tragedy in Ukraine should make us reflect on our assumptions about how we engage with the world — and how we apply various forms of power in concert with our allies.
In Ukraine, the tools of soft-power and development will be needed to help restore the functionality of institutions and respond to the humanitarian crisis — and later to help a war-torn country rebuild and have deep long-term political, economic and people-to-people relationships with the West. Every American — from elected policymakers in Washington to informed citizens everywhere — needs to understand the full array of tools and opportunities available to us to exercise American leadership in these international undertakings.
WHILE RUSSIA LICKED its wounds for 30 years, the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical force was so swift that the governments that traditionally dominated the world stage were essentially caught napping. The end of the Cold War seemed to offer a lull — a “peace dividend” — that allowed the West to reorder its priorities, which meant relaxing its guard. China rushed in to fill the empty spaces created during that time of transition. Before the United States and its allies opened their eyes, the once insular China had reached out and established its presence on every continent, and it had begun systematically building its own future with the world’s resources.
Twenty years ago, many observers viewed China as a developing nation, culturally and politically isolated and opaque. By the early 2020s, however, China could boast of being the leading trading partner for 124 countries, while the United States could claim only 76. Chinese companies have built infrastructure and invested in energy projects throughout the developing world while also setting up new multilateral development banks and actively competing with the U.S. and the West for influence and authority in global organizations.
I’ve watched this taking shape over my 20 years in development work. Now I feel I must raise the alarm. The discussion of soft-power and how we use it needs a major refresh, and we also need a reset of all our assumptions for this new post-post-Cold War landscape.
This is an entirely new kind of superpower competition.
Russia may be hoping to reclaim past glory, but China isn’t looking to export ideology or gather military allies into its camp. Rather, Beijing has engaged in the multilateral system and is seeking to reshape it according to its needs. It is an exaggeration to say that Chinese leadership has set a goal of upending the liberal world order, but both China and Russia have been working to revise it in ways we are not going to like — unless you’re a fan of rigged plebiscites, systemic corruption, unfettered pollution and religious persecution as state policy. Should the current world order become obsolete, it won’t be the result of some nefarious Chinese plan to sabotage the West; it will be due to the West’s, and particularly the United States’, inattention, complacency and lack of deep examination into what motivates the next great superpower and its Russian partner.
WITH CHINA ASCENDANT in the 21st century, I believe that there is now one great, overarching goal of American soft power: to enable a better alternative to all that China is offering to the developing world as a means of preserving the multilateral system that sustains prosperity. This will not happen overnight, and it cannot be addressed by short-term thinking, planning or budgeting. I expect a 30-to-40-year marathon, which will involve reinvigorating global alliances and promoting the strengthening of economies and governance in more and more countries so that they will have broadly shared interests and values and also be able to share the burdens of meeting global challenges. I envision a prosperous world that is increasingly democratic, in which people can achieve their individual dreams and
societies can achieve their deepest hopes and aspirations. In that world, the United States should lead an updated liberal international order. While this order will need to include some burden-sharing shifts among our friends and allies, it also requires that the U.S. continue to play a leadership role and accept the costs and responsibilities of maintaining global leadership.
Our response to the current Russia challenge could offer a roadmap for our approach to China. Even though Russia offers no compelling economic vision, the United States and its allies can offer a meaningful development alternative based on freedom and prosperity. That vision has suffered some setbacks in recent years, after our problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, the widespread democracy recession, and troubles at home.
But warts and all, we must continue to stand up for these ideals. That’s going to require efforts across multiple fronts: democracy, human rights and governance; continued reform of the state sector; market-based economic reforms; continued reform of the energy and power sectors; and many other forms of soft-power engagement. Additionally, we must remember that our rivalries are with government regimes, not with civil populations — it is with Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party and not with the Russian or Chinese people. The U.S. should also find ways to support civil society and human rights in Russia and China. Our policy should not be regime change, despite Putin’s deeply inhumane policies, but rather to support and give voice to the millions of Russians and Chinese who wish for a better future based on openness and fundamental freedoms.
If the keys to enduring peace and prosperity are political and social stability, economic vigor and self-sufficiency for a continually increasing number of countries, development offers the best path forward. Foreign assistance is only one small piece of the puzzle, but it is critical in that it catalyzes progress in what I believe are
the two most important factors in development: a strong private sector — often working in partnership with public institutions — and effective governance operating in a context of democracy.
IF WE HAVE learned anything in 2022, it’s that the United States cannot afford to turn its gaze inward. The mechanisms of the multilateral system may operate outside the realm of most people’s consciousness, but there is no overstating the extent to which we all rely on that system and, therefore, need to ensure that it functions well. We will likely need to go back to the drawing board, not only on our use of multilateral financial institutions, but on energy policy and commercial diplomacy as well. The rules of the game may not yet be perfect, but one thing is certain: we would not like the rules as China would rewrite them. It is time to reconsider our international relationships, with our traditional allies as well as with countries with which we’ve had fraught relations.
The challenges ahead are substantial and require both immediate attention and persistence over the coming decades. Meeting those challenges will require committed leadership. But who will lead? I believe that will be the United States, which has demonstrated its positive impact repeatedly in the past and is uniquely capable of carrying out that responsibility. No other nation has the clout and commitment to do so. Our efforts in foreign affairs, our use of soft power and our engagement in the multilateral system should seek to ensure that the United States continues to lead through the rest of the 21st century. The United States must move swiftly and boldly, but wisely, efficiently and with international support, to build the global future based on common security, shared democratic values, sound economic principles and broadly inclusive opportunities.
RUNDE. PUBLISHED BY BOMBARDIER BOOKS, AN IMPRINT OF POST HILL PRESS. COPYRIGHT 2023.
SHOULD THE CURRENT WORLD ORDER BECOME OBSOLETE, IT WON’T BE THE RESULT OF SOME NEFARIOUS CHINESE PLAN TO SABOTAGE THE WEST; IT WILL BE DUE TO THE WEST’S, AND PARTICULARLY THE UNITED STATES’, INATTENTION AND COMPLACENCY.
BY PAISLEY REKDAL
This morning I called my father in Seattle to talk about the fox squirrels I found tearing the meat off the one peach our sapling managed to grow. I got so mad, I told him, that I took my shoe off and threw it. The squirrels exploded off the tree’s fragile branches, snapping off limbs in the process. My father grunted. “I didn’t think they ate peaches,” he said.
“They don’t,” I replied. “They just eat the pits.”
These same fox squirrels — I did not tell my father — almost caused a small accident an hour later, when my husband swerved so hard to avoid two of them tumbling down our drive that he barely missed another car parked by our house. My father would not like to hear about this accident, no matter how minor. At 83, he worries constantly; it’s his cardio. He sits by his kitchen window all day, watching the hummingbirds he feeds, afraid to go outside. He has a heart condition — hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, to be exact — and now he gasps for air after walking a few feet. If he falls, he can’t get up, even with my mother’s help. Last week he fell in the kitchen and stayed on the floor for eight hours, begging my mother not to
call 911 because he didn’t want to pay for an ambulance. I call every day now from my home in Salt Lake City to check in, but mostly to beg him and my mom to move into a retirement community.
“But what about my hummingbirds?” he asks.
For my father, watching nature from a window is his only connection to the out-
FOR MY FATHER, WATCHING
NATURE FROM A WINDOW IS HIS ONLY CONNECTION TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD, AND NOW MY OBSERVATIONS ABOUT NATURE FEEL LIKE MY ONLY CONNECTION TO HIM.
side world, and now my observations about nature here in Utah feel like my only connection to him. My father and I, in our separate cities, have turned into amateur naturalists. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home, my exercise had been going to my local dog park with my biologist
neighbor who taught me to wonder at our city’s burgeoning population of raptors. I live in a hilly university district whose elm-lined streets and yards packed with fruit trees are a haven for urban wildlife. Cut off from my normal distractions, I began to gather at dusk in the park with birdwatchers to watch fledgling Cooper’s hawks learn to hunt. The dog park itself abuts a wooded cemetery, and so I also learned from a group of amateur photographers that a family of five great horned owls had taken up residence in the cemetery’s pines. I began tracking those, too, and mourned with the rest of my neighborhood when one, at first, then all five of the owls perished from avian influenza.
But the real story behind our neighborhood’s raptor explosion, I learned from my biologist friend, was a sudden, if not quite visible ground war between different species of squirrel, both of which are raptor food sources. Every day, it seems, a pitched battle is waged here between invasive eastern fox squirrels — as bushy and autumn-colored as their canid namesakes — and Utah’s native American red squirrels. The fox squirrels were first
spotted here 12 years ago along the Jordan River, either deliberately introduced there or arriving by accident, and they have reproduced at an exponential rate. Unlike our pine-loving red squirrels, which thrive on cones and seeds, the eastern fox squirrels eat everything: tubers, insects, bulbs, pine nuts, bird’s eggs. They are insatiable and rapacious. They chew through wires and house siding and wood fences. They are also extremely dumb. They seem determined to kill themselves in elaborate ways involving street scooters and house pets, running alongside bicycles like frat boys among the bulls in Pamplona. Once, the biologist and I actually watched one fall off a tree branch right into the waiting, open mouth of a pit bull at the dog park. The dog still hasn’t gotten over it.
My father barked with laughter when I called to tell him that story. “Do you remember,” he asked me, “those squirrels I used to trap to keep them from eating our house?” My parents’ home in Seattle is a 100-year-old reconverted barn whose shaggy cedarwood exterior must taste like gingerbread to rodents. My father would set out metal traps each week, driving his catch off to a park to release them until the squirrels finally became too plentiful and persistent. Then he began filling up our garbage can with water and dropping the cages — animals and all — into the water. I remember catching him once when I was eight, how I sat by the garbage can and screamed and screamed that I wouldn’t leave it till he pulled out the traps. “You stop that right now and go inside!” my father yelled.
“Make me!” I screamed back. And he picked me up by the back of my shirt and hauled me into the house.
My father is a different man now. He loves all animals, no matter how small. Age and illness have gentled him — or weakened him, depending on how you look at it. My father has lived his whole life in Seattle, more than half of it in the same house, whose gutters are now torn and hanging off, whose roof tiles and porch are slick with
mosses, each room so stuffed with books and knickknacks and furniture that he and my mother once discovered a cat they didn’t own living in their pantry, eating butter. He loves this house: he’d do anything to keep it. I, on the other hand, don’t love the house at all. It’s an anvil, a mortgaged death sentence. “This place is too much for you,” I tell him each time I call. “Please, please move out.” But he can’t. The only people who talk to my father more than me now are Seattle real estate developers, whom he’s also fighting off. He wants to stay and I want him to be safe, and these two desires are mutually exclusive. One wish will eventually cancel out the other. And when I call to beg them to move — or nag, depending on how you look at it — I know it makes him miserable. I can’t help but see myself as he must:
MY FATHER IS A DIFFERENT MAN NOW. HE LOVES ALL ANIMALS, NO MATTER HOW SMALL. AGE AND ILLNESS HAVE GENTLED HIM — OR WEAKENED HIM, DEPENDING ON HOW YOU LOOK AT IT.
a nuisance, stubbornly nattering on about safety and helplessness, invading his peace of mind.
Maybe this is why I can’t help hating these fox squirrels. I see something of my own insistence in them; their manic, pushy energy makes me thrum with self-disgust. I burn at the chaos they sow in my garden, the way they seem to have taken over everything. We can’t get rid of them, though they’ve gnawed a hole in our fence. They keep spiraling around the yard, freaking out our dog. I find myself rooting for the older red squirrels, with their defensive eyes and scrappy attitudes. I watch for them now the way I once watched for raptors. I recognize them by their white-ringed eyes and creamy undersides, by the fact they don’t budge when first confronted. Make me, their hunched backs seem to sneer.
The fox squirrels haven’t entirely driven them off yet, but they are competing for territory up and down the city, and the red squirrel population is shrinking here. They’re doomed and only we know it. They’ll coexist a few more years here but the red squirrels will eventually be overwhelmed. You get rid of one fox squirrel and two more take their place. If nature abhors a vacuum, fox squirrels annihilate it; they drop two litters a year, four kits at a time. No one will ever know who introduced the first fox squirrels to Salt Lake but it doesn’t matter. This is their home now. Eventually, we’ll forget they never even belonged to this place.
“What makes a pest,” I wonder tonight on my drive home, as a woman with California plates and a new ski rack cuts me off, blithely waving a middle finger in her rear view when I honk. Anything that isn’t native, I guess. I was born and raised in Seattle; now I’ve lived for 20 years in Salt Lake, my presence here having driven other people out of their jobs and neighborhoods. I’m trying to push my father into a home at the same time I’m building a cabin near Capitol Reef, and tech migrants to Utah have raised my property taxes to something close to unlivable. What, finally, is native when one population erases another, and communities continually change and get replaced? What does a home mean when — whether out of fear or need or just out of a desire to find something new — you eventually have to leave it?
At home, I sit by my kitchen window, checking voicemail. I hear a sudden chirr from the garden, the thrashing of a fox squirrel, and then I see a hummingbird rise up. The bird flits toward the glass, hovering so precisely at head-height that it looks, for a moment, as if it’s paused to observe me. I jut my head to take a better look. There’s the green back and iridescent, jeweled throat my father taught me to look for. It hovers and sways, refusing to move. I look and look, but when I reach for my phone to take a picture for him, it startles, rears back and vanishes.
In Cambodia, infant mortality is high, but students from Brigham Young University are saving infants’ lives by partnering with local doctors and Neonatal Rescue to deliver a low-cost ventilator. What began as a student project is now helping newborns breathe, and the spirit of service is at the heart of it all.
Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.
LISA GABLE
BY LOIS M. COLLINS
Change can be difficult and painful, even for large institutions. In corporate America, restructuring often means tearing down and rebuilding, which always hurts, says Lisa Gable. She knows; she’s been the architect of more than a few layoffs and redesigns, charged with turning struggling organizations around. She calls herself the “Hail Mary pass,” the last-ditch effort to salvage a company or program after things go terribly wrong. But she’s unwilling to sacrifice humanity, whether it’s yours or her own. A distressing process needn’t be vicious, she says, lamenting the coldness that has become a norm when workers are let go.
Her father, Pierre Guillermin, co-founder of Liberty University, taught her that bad news demands kindness. So she will sit across the table from the soon-to-be terminated and acknowledge individual value and goodness, as well as the hurt the process causes. She writes recommendations because being let go does not mean the one departing caused the company’s woes or deserved to get laid off.
Her own faith is “very simplistic,” she says. “I am guided by remembering everyone that Christ was willing to treat like an equal: the Samaritan woman, Mary
Magdalene, Nicodemus. All three were rejected by their society and yet he sat down with them as an equal.”
She describes her opportunities, mentors and even timing as “incredibly fortunate.” She worked in the Reagan administration during the fall of the Soviet Union. She was with Intel as the American technology giant was wresting 73 percent of the global semiconductor market from Japan. George
I TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHY SOMEBODY STARTED THIS ORGANIZATION IN THE FIRST PLACE: WHAT WAS ITS PURPOSE? THEN THE KEY IS TO DETERMINE IF THAT PURPOSE IS STILL RELEVANT.
W. Bush put her in charge of the U.S. delegation to the 2005 World Expo in Japan, bestowing the title and rank of ambassador. Federal money couldn’t be used for the exhibit, so she had to raise millions of dollars while negotiating tricky political terrain. A friend told Deseret she was a “human bridge that would project America’s best face to the world.” She’s also been a United
Nations delegate.
Married and a mother, Gable still found time to write books that made Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestsellers lists, including “Turnaround: How to Change Course When Things Are Going South.” Deseret asked her about hard choices, leadership and compassion.
YOU OFTEN REFER TO “HUMANITY.” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN TO YOU?
No matter how we evolve as a society, every situation comes down to people. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions for financial or political reasons. You also must be willing to recognize how those choices impact someone’s life. How you treat that person during the time of change, the respect that you show them, being willing to sit down and talk with them and acknowledge the pain that you’re about to inflict is so important. I learned that from my father. He was a humble and gracious leader, and he built an organization from scratch. But he never, ever failed to recognize the people who were impacted by his decisions.
WHAT SHAPED YOUR CAREER PATH?
As a little girl I knew I wanted to go into national security and foreign policy.
In fact, my bedding and my curtains were decorated with military weaponry — right next to my go-go boots. I was a girl’s girl. My father and I shared a strong interest in history. He would take me to battlefields. We’d watch those war movies that were so prominent at that time. But studying history is also how I learned about the human side. When I was 13, our family went on a (Protestant) Reformation tour of Europe with students from Liberty. That was a transformational moment in religious history. I was well-educated in what causes various inflection points in history. At the same time, my father was always reaching across the aisle to figure out how to work together to solve complex problems. So partnerships are a fundamental part of how I manage. I don’t believe in silos.
WHERE DID YOU LEARN HOW TO TURN AROUND AN ORGANIZATION?
As I started at Intel, the U.S. had lost market share in the semiconductor industry. Our national security and technological superpower position were at risk unless we gained it back. I followed this pattern of taking the knowledge that I learned, and then putting it to work with the skills I was trained in. I’d already completed my master’s in national security studies at Georgetown, but Craig Barrett, the CEO at the time, taught me how to use manufacturing processes to solve complex problems. He taught me how to take in methodology and use it to analyze something and then identify a path forward that was cost-effective and met the goals of the organization.
TO SAVE A COMPANY, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE?
I do an audit — not only financial. I look
at all their communications, I look at the original charters and their bylaws. I try to understand why somebody started this organization in the first place: What was its purpose? Then the key is to determine if that purpose is still relevant. I go back a long way because we have to identify the underlying cause of the organization’s disease. I meet with people at their desks and ask them about problems in the organization. What pain points are they facing? It might be a customer, an employee, a business partner. It could be a philanthropic partner. Along with the analytical part, that enables me to build decision trees.
Every time, I have a very short window to figure it all out. An organization may be headed south because financially it’s in the hole, that’s usually the case. Or because of large-scale political opposition.
Hubris — when an individual forgets that their job is to serve the interests of the organization. What they also fail to recognize is that we are here for a temporary period of time. There are people who went before us and there are going to be people who go after us. Unless you remember that you are a temporary steward of the institution you serve, that’s the leaping-off point for when things go very, very wrong.
WHAT IS THE PRICE OF CHANGE?
That depends on how you do it. There are winners and losers in every situation. When I can, I write personal letters of recommendation for people negatively impacted by a downsize. My assumption
is that people make bad decisions. It’s not everybody’s fault this thing went sideways. They’re good people, and they deserve to get a job. On a personal level, the cost doesn’t need to be as high as we make it. Sometimes the way that we treat people has a negative effect on their life. Treat people well. You may end up working for that person, or seeing them socially, or even having a relative marry into their family. You may end up wanting to hire them again. This is one moment in time, and we shouldn't extract a price that destroys people.
WHAT RESPONSIBILITY DOES A BOSS HAVE?
The way we’ve taken human resource laws today makes it difficult for companies to be humane. It’s unfortunate that we’ve come to a place where you walk people out of the building and don’t let them go back to their desk. You need to be respectful and acknowledge the good things about them, but also what you’re doing to them. I’ve had people hug me as they were walking out.
DO LAWS SAY YOU CAN’T BE KIND?
You can. But companies are stringent — their lawyers are — on what you can say and what you can’t say. I also tell people that when someone has been laid off, and they’re a colleague of yours, please talk to them. It isn’t as if they died.
WHAT’S YOUR LAST WORD?
Each of us can have a positive impact every single day on someone else. What we build is the steps that we take, the things we do; that’s our legacy, right? So treat them with humility, kindness and graciousness.
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