Afghanistan’s Music School Falls Silent, Its Future Is Uncertain Under The Taliban
Students practice the cello during class at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music on Sept. 26, 2010 in Kabul. Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
The doors of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul are closed. The music school’s young students, teachers and faculty are staying home — they have reason to fear. According to founder and director Ahmad Sarmast, “armed people entered school property” recently. He says they tried to steal cars the school uses for transportation and destroyed musical instruments. Under the Taliban in the 1990s, music was strictly forbidden. Performing, selling or even listening to music at home could get you in trouble.
Now ANIM’s future is uncertain. With the disorder caused by the Taliban’s takeover of the city, “The situation is very unpredictable,” says Sarmast. “Things are changing very fast in Kabul nowadays.”
Sarmast, who spoke to NPR from Australia where he’s visiting family, is in constant contact with the school’s faculty. He says some students did not bring their instruments home, “because of the fear that if Taliban will be searching door to door, if the instruments will be found in the house, it might cause them some trouble.” When he reported the recent break-in, he says a policeman in the area, “blamed our security people for failure that they opened the gates of the school.”
Eden MacAdam Somer of the New England Conservatory performs at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul on Jan. 9, 2013. Musadeq Sadeq/AP
It’s Afghanistan’s leading music school
With help from donors including the World Bank and the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), ANIM opened in Kabul in 2010. Boys and girls study music and academics in the same classrooms. Students learn to play instruments from both the Afghanistan and Western classical traditions.
The school has been held up as a great success story in the effort to renew cultural life and the arts in Afghanistan. Ensembles from the school, including the all-female Zohra orchestra, have performed around the world. From Carnegie Hall in New York to the World Economic Forum in Davos, these young musicians, many from impoverished communities, have shown audiences a side of Afghanistan that often gets lost in news accounts.
Making music can have deadly consequences
Making music has long been a risky endeavor in Afghanistan. Over the years, musicians have reportedly been threatened, kidnapped or killed. During one of ANIM’s concerts in 2014, a suicide bomber sitting behind Sarmast exploded. Two people were killed and several others were injured. Sarmast lost his hearing for a time and had an operation to remove shrapnel from his head and body. “Luckily, no students have been injured or killed,” he says, “But of course, the trauma that they received during this bombing probably would have stayed with them all their life.”
Students play the xylophone and drums during class at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul on July 30, 2016. Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images
While the Taliban have presented themselves to the media as less violent than they were in the 1990s, Sarmast is skeptical. “Today the Taliban are promising that they would be respecting human rights and they will be having respect for diversity,” he says, “But … the video footage emerging with the social media is not very encouraging.”
Music entertains, strengthens and heals
Sarmast is concerned about the future of the school’s students. He says 10 of its graduates have received scholarships to study music in the U.S., including pianist Elham Fanoos who attended Hunter College in New York and recently got his master’s from the Manhattan School of Music. Speaking from his home in New York, Fanoos credits ANIM as, “the reason I am here.” He, too, is worried for the safety of everyone involved with the school and hopes Afghans can continue making music.
“I think a culture makes the country and give the country the strength that it needs to have and to represent the country,” says Fanoos. “Without … cultural activities, a country is completely incomplete.”
Young Afghan musicians perform in Kabul on Feb. 2, 2012. Shah Marai/AFP via Getty Images
Sarmast seems determined not to let the Taliban get in the way of the progress ANIM has made. The school had recently expanded to a larger building to accommodate more programs and ensembles. “Music is not just a type of entertainment. It’s not just an art,” he says. It’s a “powerful force” to help Afghans heal “from the years of civil war.”
Sarmast plans to reopen the Afghanistan National Institute of Music because, he says, “the nation needs it.” He hopes the international community will “keep an eye” to make sure the Taliban keep its promises to respect human rights, “to make sure that the musical rights of the Afghan people [are] not toppled again.”
Former NC lawmaker got off easy. No wonder people are losing faith in democracy.
Staff
Rep. David Lewis
Is anyone else upset that former N.C. Rep. David Lewis got a $1,000 slap on the wrist and avoided prison for taking nearly $400,000 for his personal use? (Aug. 17)
He had raised these funds for his campaign and to support other Republican politicians. He admitted guilt under a plea bargain and has to pay back $365,000. But Lewis once chaired the House Rules Committee and was a leader on election law, voter ID and redistricting and restricting others’ rights to vote.
No wonder people are losing faith in our democracy. We have one set of rules for the powerful and well-connected, another set for everyone else. What a travesty. It’s disgusting! Our democratic fabric is fraying.
James D. Joslin, Raleigh
Redistricting
Wake County was excluded from the list of 10 proposed public hearing sites for the upcoming round of redistricting. In addition, hearings have only been scheduled prior to maps being released, which prevents the public from providing meaningful feedback on maps once they have been drawn.
Wake is now the largest county in the state and its citizens should have an opportunity to provide public testimony before and after new voting maps are drawn. If the General Assembly is committed to and open and transparent redistricting process, then opportunities for public participation must be broadened to provide more opportunities for citizen participation.
Laurel Voelker,
Redistricting Chair, League of Women Voters of Wake County
Afghan war
In his “United States of Incompetence” (Aug 22 Opinion) Jay Ambrose makes his case for President Biden’s incompetent leadership around the tragic conclusion to the Afghanistan war.
This conclusion seems to be the nature of war in our lifetime. Even WWII had its refugees, reprisals, devastated civilians, unintended consequences and political turmoils — and we “won” that one.
We act as if war, especially one thousands of miles from our shores in a place few people can find on a map, can be used for geopolitical purposes that leave us feeling proud, honorable and secure.
Our veterans deserve respect, compassion and appreciation for their sacrifices. But, we should not act as if recent U.S. miscalculations, incompetence or malice are responsible for the mess that is Afghanistan. We chose war in 2001. Now we must live with the natural, sad and tragic results of that choice.
Doug Jennette, Raleigh
Child care
Our elected leaders must do everything in their power to end America’s child care crisis. If we look at current policies, it’s obvious that child care is not a priority. Families are left to figure it out on their own, which, in the past 18 months has led women to leave the workforce, causing businesses to suffer.
My brother and sister-in-law have two small children. He works for a nonprofit. She is a nurse at Duke. The pandemic has been hellish for them as they struggle with $3,000 a month in child care costs and the constant pivots required each time one of their kids has a runny nose.
It has caused my sister-in-law to wonder whether she should quit nursing. The last thing we need in this country right now is fewer nurses.
I know that when America decides something is a common good, we find the funding. We need a child care system that meets the needs of children, families, communities and child care providers.
Kristin Baker, Durham
Invest in people
As a Raleigh resident I’ve seen firsthand how the state budget affects my community.
I want N.C. lawmakers to commit to expanding Medicaid so my neighbors feel safe and can care for their families and themselves.
I want all children in my community to receive a sound, basic education. I want all in N.C. to have access to affordable housing. I want our leaders to listen to constituents, not just the powerful few and rich corporations that benefit from tax breaks.
There is much uncertainty and fear right now, particularly as students and teachers return to school and the health of our communities and economy remain in jeopardy. By building a budget that work for all, state leaders can make a huge difference in easing those fears and the very real suffering.
Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook
Rebecca Solnit
Photograph: Salvatore Cavalli/AP
Personal virtue is an eternally seductive goal in progressive movements, and the climate movement is no exception. People pop up all the time to boast of their domestic arrangements or chastise others for what they eat or how they get around. The very short counterargument is that individual acts of thrift and abstinence won’t get us the huge distance we need to go in this decade. We need to exit the age of fossil fuels, reinvent our energy landscape, rethink how we do almost everything. We need collective action at every scale from local to global – and the good people already at work on all those levels need help in getting a city to commit to clean power or a state to stop fracking or a nation to end fossil-fuel subsidies. The revolution won’t happen by people staying home and being good.
But the oil companies would like you to think that’s how it works. It turns out that the concept of the “carbon footprint”, that popular measure of personal impact, was the brainchild of an advertising firm working for BP. As Mark Kaufman wrote this summer:
British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals. It’s here that British Petroleum, or BP, first promoted and soon successfully popularized the term “carbon footprint” in the early aughts. The company unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so one could assess how their normal daily life – going to work, buying food, and (gasp) traveling – is largely responsible for heating the globe.
The main reason to defeat the fossil fuel corporations is that their product is destroying the planet, but their insidious propaganda, from spreading climate-change denial to pushing this climate footprint business, makes this goal even more worthwhile.
Carbon footprints caught on, and I routinely see people on social media zooming in on individual consumption habits when climate chaos is under discussion. Bill McKibben made the case against them in 2008:
Say you have a certain amount of time and money with which to make change – call it x, since that is what we mathematicians call things. The trick is to increase that x by multiplication, not addition. The trick is to take that 5 percent of people who really care and make them count for far more than 5 percent. And the trick to that is democracy.
That is, private individual actions don’t increase at a rate sufficient to affect the problem in a timely fashion; collective action seeking changes in policy and law can.
Too, the goal of personal virtue is merely not to be part of the problem. It’s not good enough for a bystander to say “I personally am not murdering this person” when someone is being stabbed to death before them (and those of us in the global north have countless ties to systems that are murdering the climate, so we are not exactly bystanders). The goal for those of us with any kind of resources of time, rights and a voice, must be being part of the solution, pushing for system change. To stop the murder.
Underlying this is a conflict in how we imagine ourselves, as consumers or as citizens. Consumers define themselves by what they buy, own, watch – or don’t. Citizens see themselves as part of civil society, as actors in the political system (and by citizen I don’t mean people who hold citizenship status, but those who participate, as noncitizens often do quite powerfully). Too, even personal virtue is made more or less possible by the systems that surround us. If you have solar panels on your roof, it’s because there’s a market and manufacturers for solar and installers and maybe an arrangement with your power company to compensate you for energy you’re putting into the grid.
In my own case, some of what I could tout as personal virtue is only possible because of collective action. I have 100% clean electricity at home because people organized to make that option and the solar and wind power behind it available. I do some of my errands by bicycle because the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition worked for decades to put bicycle paths across the city and otherwise make it safer to get about on two wheels. I can take public transit because there is public transit. Across the Bay, the city of Berkeley led the way in making all-electric houses the standard for the future; more than fifty California cities and counties have followed suit. Paired with the clean electricity California has committed to, this mandate matters. Having an all-electric house or driving an electric car fueled by renewables won’t be a virtuous choice in the future; it’ll just be the norm.
But individual and collective action don’t have to be pitted against each other. Individual choices do add up (they just don’t, in McKibben’s terms, multiply). That vegan options are available at a lot of fast-food chains is because enough consumers have created a profitable market for them. We do influence others through our visible choices. Ideas spread, values spread, habits spread; we are social animals and both good and bad behaviors are contagious. (For the bad, just look at the contagiousness of specious anti-vaccination arguments.)
Vegetarian and vegan diets (and low-meat or no-red-meat diets) have become far more common, creating markets for new products and different menus. But they have not made the beef industry go away or reformed its devastating climate impact. Climate chaos demands we recognize how everything is connected. Seeing yourself as a citizen means seeing yourself as connected to social and political systems. As citizens we must go after the climate footprint of the fossil-fuel corporations, the beef industry, the power companies, the transportation system, plastics, and so much more.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence
‘We’re peons to them’: Nabisco factory workers on why they’re striking
Michael Sainato
Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
The pandemic drove many people to the cookie jar and helped Nabisco, maker of Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Fig Newtons and other sweet treats weather the worst of the outbreak. But as the company’s profits continue to recover, workers at its US plants are striking over the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and concessions demanded by their employer in new union contract negotiations.
On 10 August, about 200 workers in Portland, Oregon, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) went on strike. Union workers in Aurora, Colorado, began their strike on 12 August, followed by those in Richmond, Virginia, on 16 August and Chicago, Illinois on 19 August.
Through the pandemic, Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International, has recorded billions in profits; in the second quarter of 2021, the company reported more than $5.5bn in profits and spent $1.5bn on stock buybacks in the first half of 2021. The CEO of Mondelez International received $16.8m in total compensation in 2020, 544 times the company’s median employee annual compensation of $31,000.
“It’s greed. They don’t have any respect for their workers that gave them the opportunity to make that kind of money. We’re peons to them, and everyone is at the point where enough is enough,” said Darlene Carpenter, business agent of BCTGM local 358 in Richmond and a former employee at the plant. “We’re at the point where we’re saying this is how the cookie is going to crumble now because we can’t do this.”
According to Keith Bragg, president of BCTGM local 358 who has worked at the Nabisco plant in Richmond for 45 years, during a discussion about contract negotiations with management, the company said that when the company does well, employees do well.
He took offence to this notion, citing his concerns about the treatment of workers over the past few years and the recent concessions being asked of them. During the pandemic, many workers had to work 12-hour shifts, six to seven days a week for several months and were praised as “heroes” for their roles as essential workers. But now workers are being asked to give up overtime pay and concede to a two-tier healthcare system, Bragg said, which would downgrade benefits for new employees and cut overall wages.
“They’re doing well, we’re losing all the way around,” said Bragg. “They shut down two plants this year, they’re cutting overtime, they’re making profits, but we lost half of our union membership. How is it that we’re doing well?”
In 2012, Kraft Foods split into two companies, with Mondelēz International formed as the parent company of Nabisco. Since the split, the union has been pressed to accept concessions during drawn-out contract negotiations, such as eliminating union pension contributions in May 2018 and switching to 401 retirement plans.
“A lot of folks were very close to retirement, and were able to do so under the old plan, but when the company pulled out that basically meant that they had to continue working, they were no longer eligible to retire,” said Mike Burlingham, who has worked at the Nabisco plant in Portland since 2007 and serves as vice-president of local 364. “It impacted all of us in a way that we can no longer count on this as being a place we can retire comfortably from.”
Mondelēz International has shuttered several Nabisco plants in the US over the past several years, offshoring much of the work to Mexico. The plight of its workers briefly became a campaign issue during the 2016 election cycle, with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump attacking plans to shift jobs overseas. “I’m not eating Oreos any more,” Trump told voters in New Hampshire.
But despite the political heat the trend has continued. In 2021, Nabisco plants in Fairlawn, New Jersey, and Atlanta were closed, resulting in the loss of about 1,000 jobs. Mondelēz International denied that jobs from the two plants shut down in 2021 were offshored to Mexico, but a petition for trade adjustment assistance alleging outsourcing by the union at one of the plants is under review by the Department of Labor. In 2016, hundreds of workers were laid off at the Nabisco plant in Chicago and a plant in Philadelphia was shut down in 2015.
“We can’t compete with the Mexican workers,” said Cameron Taylor, business agent at Local 364 in Portland. “They just want to exploit cheap labor. If we were to accept all of what they want us to, accept all the working conditions and the two- tiered system of healthcare, this job would turn into a job not even worth fighting for.”
In 2016, the union launched a “check the label” boycott campaign that was endorsed by the AFL-CIO, asking consumers to refuse to buy Nabisco products that are made in Mexico. Workers have frequently reported finding Nabisco products for sale near their plants that were produced in Mexico.
“We are disappointed by the decision of the local BCTGM unions in Portland (OR), Richmond (VA) and Aurora (CO) to go on strike,” said a spokesperson for Mondelēz International, noting the company has a continuity plan in place at the facilities where workers are on strike. “Our goal has been – and continues to be – to bargain in good faith with the BCTGM leadership across our US bakeries and sales distribution facilities to reach new contracts that continue to provide our employees with good wages and competitive benefits, including quality, affordable healthcare, and company-sponsored Enhanced Thrift Investment 401(k) Plan, while also taking steps to modernize some contract aspects which were written several decades ago.”
I served in Afghanistan as a US Marine, twice. Here’s the truth in two sentences
Lucas Kunce
What we are seeing in Afghanistan right now shouldn’t shock you. It only seems that way because our institutions are steeped in systematic dishonesty. It doesn’t require a dissertation to explain what you’re seeing. Just two sentences.
Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.
I know because I was there. Twice. On special operations task forces. I learned Pashto as a U.S. Marine captain and spoke to everyone I could there: everyday people, elites, allies and yes, even the Taliban.
The truth is that the Afghan National Security Forces was a jobs program for Afghans, propped up by U.S. taxpayer dollars — a military jobs program populated by nonmilitary people or “paper” forces (that didn’t really exist) and a bevy of elites grabbing what they could when they could.
You probably didn’t know that. That’s the point.
And it wasn’t just in Afghanistan. They also lied about Iraq.
I led a team of Marines training Iraqi security forces to defend their country. When I arrived I received a “stoplight” chart on their supposed capabilities in dozens of missions and responsibilities. Green meant they were good. Yellow was needed improvement; red said they couldn’t do it at all.
I was delighted to see how far along they were on paper — until I actually began working with them. I attempted to adjust the charts to reflect reality and was quickly shut down. The ratings could not go down. That was the deal. It was the kind of lie that kept the war going.
So when people ask me if we made the right call getting out of Afghanistan in 2021, I answer truthfully: Absolutely not. The right call was getting out in 2002. 2003. Every year we didn’t get out was another year the Taliban used to refine their skills and tactics against us — the best fighting force in the world. After two decades, $2 trillion and nearly 2,500 American lives lost, 2021 was way too late to make the right call.
You’d think when it all came crumbling down around them, they’d accept the truth. Think again.
War-hungry hawks are suggesting our soldiers weren’t in harm’s way. Well, when I was there, two incredible Marines in my unit were killed.
Elitist hacks are even blaming the American people for what happened this week. The same American people that they spent years lying to about Afghanistan. Are you kidding me?
We deserve better. Instead of politicians spending $6.4 trillion to “nation build” in the Middle East, we should start nation building right here at home.
I can’t believe that would be a controversial proposal, but already in Washington, we see some of the same architects of these Middle Eastern disasters balking at the idea of investing a fraction of that amount to build up our own country.
The lies about Afghanistan matter not just because of the money spent or the lives lost, but because they are representative of a systematic dishonesty that is destroying our country from the inside out.
Remember when they told us the economy was back? Another lie.
Our state of Missouri was home to the worst economic recovery from the Great Recession in this part of the country. I see the boarded-up stores and the vacant lots — one of which used to be my family’s home. When our country’s elites were preaching about how they had solved the financial crisis and the housing market was booming, I watched the house I joined the Marine Corps out of sit on the market for two years. My dad finally got $43,000 for it. He owed $78,000.
The only way out is to level with the American people. I’ll start. With the two-sentence truth about what we are seeing in Afghanistan right now:
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger rips into Trump and Mike Pompeo for ‘getting rolled’ by the Taliban
Oma Seddiq
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images
Rep. Adam Kinzinger slammed Trump and Pompeo for their negotiations with the Taliban last year.
“They set this up to fail,” Kinzinger told CNN.
Kinzinger also blamed Biden over the current failure in Afghanistan.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger slammed the former Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, saying on Sunday that it set the stage for the current failure in Afghanistan.
The Illinois Republican said former President Donald Trump and his then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are at fault for America’s “disastrous” withdrawal from the country.
“Donald Trump was publicly saying, ‘We have to get out of Afghanistan at all costs. It’s not worth it.’ Mike Pompeo meets with the Taliban and tries to ‘negotiate’ something,” Kinzinger said during an appearance on CNN.
“They ended up getting rolled almost as bad as Neville Chamberlain,” he continued, referring to the British prime minister who negotiated the 1938 Munich Agreement, which was widely panned as enabling the Nazi invasion of Poland.
“They set this up to fail,” Kinzinger said.
GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming on Sunday also blasted Trump’s deal, calling it a “surrender” to the Taliban.
“We sat down and negotiated with terrorists,” Cheney told NBC News. “We gave credibility to the Taliban … We completely undercut the Afghan national government. We absolutely emboldened the Taliban.”
While president, Trump was eager to remove American troops from Afghanistan and end the US’ longest-running war. But he took an unprecedented step to try and fulfill that aim: negotiate directly with the Taliban. His administration engaged in a series of talks with the militant group in Qatar, and even invited them to a secret meeting at the presidential retreat Camp David for the 9/11 anniversary in 2019. Trump later reversed this decision after a Taliban attack killed a US service member in Afghanistan.
Still, Trump reached a deal with the Taliban in February 2020, which stipulated that US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan within 14 months on the condition that the Taliban not turn the country into a terrorist base. The agreement had been widely criticized at the time for acceding to the Taliban and excluding the Afghan government. Pompeo attended the signing ceremony and took photos alongside Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is anticipated to head the next Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Trump has now attempted to absolve himself from the situation and pinned responsibility solely on President Joe Biden for the Taliban’s takeover and the Afghan government’s collapse.
Though Kinzinger on Sunday attacked Trump, he also placed blame on Biden, who “could’ve easily turned this around” once he became president.
“The Republicans are putting out talking points to make Biden look bad. The Democrats are putting out talking points to point out the past administration. In truth, they’re both responsible,” Kinzinger said.
“Both parties have failed the American people,” he added.
Biden agreed to carry out Trump’s deal and pull out of Afghanistan. This week he defended his withdrawal of US troops, despite receiving widespread criticism from both sides of the aisle amid disturbing scenes coming out of Kabul of people clamoring to leave the country and the resurgence of the Taliban.
Rural NC counties are shrinking. Republican policies aren’t helping at all.
Ned Barnett
The General Assembly’s Republican majority overwhelmingly represents rural North Carolina, but rural North Carolina has little to show for it.
Actually, it has less to show for it. Of the state’s 100 counties, 51 mostly rural counties lost population in a census report issued this month, even as booming urban areas increased the state’s population by 9.5 percent. Rebecca Tippett, the director of Carolina Demography at UNC-Chapel Hill, said, “More counties than expected lost population and the losses were larger than expected.”
The shift refutes the low-tax, low-spending policies Republican legislative leaders have slavishly followed since taking control of the General Assembly in 2011. While the movement from rural to urban areas is a national trend, the legislative majority has accelerated the exodus by blocking or neglecting policies and investments that would spur rural job growth.
Norris Tolson, a former Democratic state legislator and former state secretary of transportation and secretary of commerce, now leads Carolinas Gateway Partnership, a group trying to boost economic development in Tolson’s native Edgecombe County. Since 2010, the county has lost 14 percent of its population. “The migration of the population speaks for itself,” he said. “People are moving to where they think the jobs are.”
Republicans have hurt the very people who elected them. Consider what the majority has done:
• Blocked Medicaid expansion for seven years. That has left hundreds of thousands of working poor without medical insurance and denied the state billions of dollars in federal aid. The impact has fallen hardest on rural hospitals. Since 2010, five of North Carolina’s 50 rural hospitals have closed and another nine are considered at risk of closing, according to a report from the Chartis Center for Rural Health.
• Slowed spending on public schools. Public schools are the main employer in 59 counties. Starving them for operating and capital funds stymies the local economy. Urban counties have raised property taxes to compensate. Rural counties don’t have the tax base to do that.
• Cut income taxes in ways that give the biggest breaks to large corporations and higher earners. The reductions mostly benefit white-collar urban workers even as they reduce the state’s ability to invest in rural areas.
• Opposed state borrowing. Republican leaders prefer a pay-as-you-go approach over approving state bond issues. What rural governments need most is money for roads, water and sewer, but the legislature has not supported the level of borrowing needed to fund major rural infrastructure projects.
• Bungled broadband expansion. In 2011, the legislature, kowtowing to telecommunications companies, blocked municipalities from operating their own broadband networks. Ten years later, access to high-speed internet – an essential tool for businesses, remote work, virtual schooling and telemedicine – is still unavailable or of poor quality in much of rural North Carolina.
• Targeted undocumented immigrants. Hispanic immigrants are a key part of the rural workforce in meatpacking and agriculture and their share of the rural population is growing. In Duplin, Sampson and Lee counties, for instance, 20 percent of the population is Hispanic, and that’s likely an undercount. Rather than helping the undocumented among the Hispanic population gain legal status, Republicans have encouraged their arrest and deportation.
Tolson said there is no single “silver bullet” to help rural counties, but “good, conscientious government policy” can make a difference.
On the other side, bad, callous government policy also has an effect.
Ten years ago, rural voters put their faith in Republican promises to lift their communities. Now, feeling the effects of those broken promises, rural residents are increasingly voting with their feet.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
Hayley Smith, Alex Wigglesworth
Chad Hanson, ecologist and president of the John Muir Project, examines the burn scar region of the San Jacinto Mountains. (Madeleine Hordinski / Los Angeles Times)
As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.
“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”
Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.
But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.
“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.
Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.
But reimagining well-worn approaches to forest management will require a reckoning with what is and isn’t working amid the state’s shifting landscape. In lieu of focusing funds and resources on fuel treatment, Hanson and other ecologists have said the onus should shift toward home hardening and community protection.
“This is a climate change issue, and you can’t address it with chainsaws and bulldozers or even drip torches,” Hanson said. “The only effective way to protect communities from wildland fire is to focus directly on homes.”
Though fuel reduction has been part of Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service’s practices for decades, former President Trump helped politicize it when he announced in 2018 that California’s devastating wildfires could be thwarted by better “raking” the forest floors.
Yet vegetation removal is only one among a handful of strategies that fall under the umbrella of forest management — not all of which were created equal, said Morgan Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.
Tingley outlined three basic categories of work: prescribed burns, forest thinning and clear-cutting.
Prescribed burns, also known as controlled fires, are among the better solutions for maintaining forest health, he said. But given the restrictions, planning and logistics required for those types of burns, it’s impossible to utilize them to any real benefit.
The Forest Service this month vowed to stomp out every fire that ignites — a statement of political necessity that left many ecologists grimacing at the implications for the landscape.
Even more controversial than prescribed burning is mechanical thinning, a vegetation reduction process that can involve chainsaws, masticators and other tools to clear out certain types of trees or densities of trees. While some ecologists believe that removing accumulated fuels can help limit the potential for catastrophic fires, others have argued that thinning can in fact make conflagrations worse.
One 2016 study published by the Ecological Society of America and coauthored by Hanson examined three decades of fire data across the western U.S., and found that protected forests — those that had not been thinned — had lower levels of burn severity despite having higher amounts of biomass and fuels.
A 2008 study published by Forest Ecology and Management similarly worked to combat misconceptions. It took a more tempered approach, noting that some forest thinning can be helpful, but also said that removing vegetation to reduce the size and frequency of wildfires is “both futile and counter-productive,” and warned that fuel reduction should not be viewed as a panacea for reducing fire hazards.
“Given the right conditions, wildlands will inevitably burn. It is a misconception to think that treating fuels can ‘fire-proof’ important areas,” the report said.
Among the primary concerns is that thinning a forest not only eliminates much of the forest’s carbon-sucking benefits, but also removes canopies that provide shade and help maintain moisture.
The 2018 Camp fire, which reduced much of the Butte County town of Paradise to ashes, burned in an area of forest that had been logged for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said. When the wind-whipped fire reached the thinned-out, sun-baked forest, it flared up so quickly that it arrived in Paradise hours sooner than it otherwise would have.
The fire ultimately destroyed 19,000 structures and killed 86 people.
“It was going to reach the town no matter what, but it definitely burned more intensely and got there faster because of the logging,” Hanson said. “I think it would have meant the difference between life and death for most of those people.”
And it’s not just the Camp fire: A similar pattern can be seen in several other high profile fires, including the Dixie fire, the Caldor fire and the 413,000-acre Bootleg fire in Oregon, said Bryant Baker, conservation director for the Los Padres ForestWatch.
Maps of those fires fit almost squarely over maps of recently logged and treated forestlands, he said.
“We’ve heard a lot of folks in the Forest Service say that we need a paradigm shift in the way we deal with fire, and almost always, it’s a shift into the same paradigm we’ve been in: Keep suppressing fires, and double down on fuel treatment and cutting vegetation,” Baker said.
“What we’re actually talking about is a real paradigm shift. We really do have to rethink how we live with wildfire.”
One major element of that paradigm shift is home hardening and community defense, Baker said. That includes steps like reducing debris from gutters, retrofitting roofs and windows with ignition-resistant materials, and moving combustible items away from homes’ exteriors.
It also means improving early warning and evacuation systems within communities. If employed effectively, these strategies have been shown to protect more lives and homes during even very intense wildfires.
“It’s the one blanket approach that works,” he said.
Yet even as crews struggle to gain a footing on the massive Dixie fire, Forest Service officials said the blaze is doing what it was intended to do, at least in part.
“From an ecological standpoint, [fuel treatment] is not really supposed to stop fire,” said Ryan Bauer, fuels and prescribed fire program manager for the Plumas National Forest. “The treatments are supposed to make the forest healthy enough to withstand fire.”
He pointed to successful fuel treatments around Meadow Valley, Butterfly Valley and Twain, where he said crews were able to hold the fire off from communities. He also said the Dixie fire has burned through a mix of treated and untreated land, as well as logged areas and burn scars.
“Certain areas of the forest are really well managed, and then other parts have almost no management history in the last several decades,” he said. “When the fire’s this big, it’s a mixed bag. It’s running over everything.”
Although the Forest Service had recently completed a large hazardous-fuels reduction project around Greenville that included prescribed fire, thinning and fuel breaks, Bauer said it simply wasn’t enough to make a difference — particularly once winds picked up and carried spot fires over the ridge and into the town, with a steep drainage right behind the community also contributing to the extreme fire behavior.
Another challenge is that many communities including Greenville are surrounded by a buffer of private land separating them from the national forest, resulting in a patchwork of owners who are sometimes unwilling to participate in treatment projects, he said.
But what happened in Greenville adds to multiple examples in years past of fuel breaks failing to guard towns against wind-driven fires, which can launch embers right over them.
“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”
Managers of the Plumas National Forest have known for several years that there was enough fuel on the landscape for it to be critical during any given summer when conditions are right, and it appears that time has arrived, he said.
“A year like this is the primate example of that, that year that we’ve deferred all of our risk into,” Bauer said. “It’s so dry this year that it doesn’t matter how much fuel is on the landscape. The fuel that’s there is going to burn. And we just have to hope that the trees on those landscapes are resilient enough to survive it.”
One thing most experts agree on is that clear-cutting — or logging all or most of the trees in an area — has almost no benefits to the forests or to their surrounding communities.
That the Forest Service remains in the timber sales business is something that has left some ecologists flummoxed, particularly since the federal agency is still required to meet annual quotas known as timber targets.
“Clear cutting is a purely economic choice,” said Tingley, of UCLA. “It is. There is no forest that is healthier if all the trees are cut down.”
When mechanical thinning or logging are done for profit — or when whoever is doing it gets to use the timber they’re taking out — that instead incentivizes removing the oldest, biggest and strongest trees, which fetch a higher price, and leaves behind the trees that are the least fire-resilient, he said.
In March, more than 300 scientists, stakeholders and community members signed a letter to Newsom asking him to reconsider his wildfire budget allocations for 2021 and 2022, noting that logging and clearance projects have “consistently failed to protect our neighborhoods from wildfire.”
The budget includes more than $1 billion to increase the pace and scale of forest management and fuel reduction projects, the governor’s office said. $100 million has been allocated to building disaster-resilient communities.
Rick Halsey, the California Chaparral Institute director who spearheaded the letter, said he is growing increasingly frustrated by the imbalance.
“There’s essentially nothing we can do on the landscape to stop these fires because the environment is conducive to them, so we have to sort of stare that in the face and acknowledge it,” Halsey said. “What can we do? We can protect communities.”
That means focusing on making homes less permeable to embers, reducing flammable materials within 100 feet of structures and preventing developers from placing neighborhoods in harm’s way, he said.
Hanson echoed the sentiment as he walked through the scar of a wildfire in the San Bernardino National Forest, pointing to dense vegetation and old-growth trees that withstood catching and spreading the flames.
If wildfire management could shift from a forest-focused approach to a homes-focused one, he said, more tragedies like those of Paradise and Greenville could be avoided.
“We don’t need to lose another community — and another community and another community — every fire season,” he said. “Once we start focusing on the right places, it’s going to be incredibly effective.”
U.S. report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline
A supply depot servicing the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline lies idle in Oyen.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government watchdog found multiple problems with the construction, manufacture and design of the Keystone pipeline, validating President Joe Biden’s decision to revoke the permit for a Keystone XL extension, leaders of several House Democratic committees said on Monday.
The lawmakers requested the Government Accountability Office report in November 2019 after more than 11,000 barrels of oil leaked from the pipeline system in two releases in less than two years.
“GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends,” they said in a statement.
Keystone’s four largest spills were “caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline,” the GAO report said.
Biden canceled Keystone XL’s permit on his first day in office on Jan. 20, dealing a death blow to a project that would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska. [L1N2JX1D8]
“TC Energy’s record among its peers is one of the worst in terms of volume of oil spilled per mile transported,” a statement from the lawmakers said. The lawmakers included Representative Frank Pallone, energy and commerce committee chair.
TC Energy Corp officially canceled the $9 billion Keystone XL in June. It filed a notice of intent in July to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim and is seeking more than $15 billion in damages from the U.S. government.
The company did not immediately respond on Monday to a request for comment.
Pipeline opponents want to slow the movement of Canadian oil to the United States. But pipeline supporters say it will be shipped anyway and that oil sent by rail has caused numerous fiery accidents.
Biden “was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests,” the U.S. representatives said.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Dan Grebler)
