The stretch of pedestrian paths, bikeways, and newly landscaped parks that extend along the Hudson River on Manhattan’s west side is a place where local residents, students, and visitors from around the world have mixed together to experience the sights and sounds of New York City.

That experience famously includes New York’s mosaic of cultures – the languages, clothing styles, and cuisines that define its famously cosmopolitan cityscapes. High-paid bankers, women wearing hijab, and fashion-conscious students often mingle here to a degree rivaled in few cities throughout the world.

So when a man sped through a riverside bike path with a rented pickup truck on Tuesday afternoon, killing eight and injuring 11 in the deadliest terror attack in New York since 9/11, authorities say, it was in many ways an assault on the particular energies that have long drawn people here, both to visit and to live.

“I’m a New Yorker and a cyclist, so I know that route – all the twists and turns from Houston to Chambers – quite well,” says Charles “Chuck” Strozier, director of the John Jay College Center on Terrorism. “I’ve been flooded with messages because friends know I bike there.”

Diversity that empowers peace

And as a scholar currently working with colleagues in Oxford University in England, studying how diversity affects various kinds of discord in cities around the world, he notes how New York stands out:

“The most important example of those kinds of cases is the absolutely most diverse place on the face of the earth – and that is Queens, New York,” says Mr. Strozier, author of “Until the Fires Stopped Burning” about the experiences of 9/11 survivors. “It has 134 nationalities and ethnicities. People live cheek-to-jowl. Hindus have Muslim friends, they date each other, they go to the same colleges, they take the same trains. Queens is also the most peaceful place on the face of the earth. And that’s the most positive thing one can say about New York City and the most hopeful as we move forward.”

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Natalie Kortman lays flowers for victims of Tuesday's attack outside a police barricade on the bike path next to West Street on Nov. 1, a day after a man driving a rented pickup truck mowed down pedestrians and cyclists on a bike path alongside the Hudson River in New York City.

Six of the eight people killed on Tuesday were visitors to the city. One was a woman from Belgium, who was visiting her mother and sister, officials said. The others included five Argentine businessmen who had come with a group of eight to celebrate their 30th high school reunion. Before they left, they posed for a group photo, each wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word, “Libre” – the Spanish word for “free,” the AP reported.

And despite its reputation for its “mean streets,” over the past decade New York has in many ways worked to become a more gentle place. It has become one of the safest big cities in the world, hitting record low crime rates each of the past few years.

The rampage, perpetrated by Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, officials say, occurred on a stretch where new parks had been built on the city’s former mighty Hudson piers. Along with the bike paths and pedestrian walkways, a new skateboard park was recently built. There’s also place to kayak for free.

The city, too, has begun to promote the use of bicycles as part of its campaign against congestion and traffic fatalities. The city has more than doubled its bike paths over the past decade, from 513 miles in 2006 to 1,133 miles in 2017.

Kevin Bolger, a bike messenger in New York since 1992, has has ridden the route “a million times, at least once a week,” he says.

“I think this attack can be life-changing for anyone, and it may make some people decide they don’t want to live here anymore,” says Mr. Bolger, father of a six- and 10-year-old in Brooklyn, and the owner of Cyclehawk, a small bike messenger company. “But for me, personally, I love my job, I love where my kids are growing up here, I don’t want to be anywhere else. There are so many good people here that we’re going to survive whatever comes along, as long as it doesn’t wipe us off the map. I don’t know what it is about this town, but I love it.”

For this reporter, too, who lived just blocks from the Tribeca intersection where the perpetrator crashed his rented pickup truck after plowing nearly a mile through the area’s crowded bike path, it was a place for daily jogs and relaxing Sundays on one of the lawns that sit atop one of Manhattan’s former massive piers.

Many New Yorkers have expressed what could be called a particular kind of resiliency. The writer E.B. White once described New York as “particularly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along ... without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.”

Immigration’s role debated

On Wednesday President Trump, a native New Yorker, called for an end to the Diversity Visa Lottery Program, which randomly selects certain individuals from countries that otherwise do not send many immigrants to the US, and singled out Senate minority leader Charles Schumer (D) of New York for implicit blame.

In fact, Senator Schumer had been part of a major, but unsuccessful bipartisan proposal to overhaul US immigration law as part of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” in 2013.  

The alleged attacker, Mr. Saipov, was able to get a green card after being selected in the lottery, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed Wednesday.

Some security experts, including Strozier, worry that efforts such as ending the diversity visa program can be counterproductive, because “you antagonize even further your minority community, where people are more likely to get radicalized.”

“I believe the message is misguided: It misplaces the source of radicalization onto the ‘foreign land’ and ‘foreign nationals,’ ” says Mariya Omelicheva, professor of political science at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “Saipov, as others, has been radicalized domestically, in the United States.”

Adding that most terrorist attacks in the West are committed by second- and third-generation Muslims and Muslim converts, she says, “What might have contributed to their radicalization is the perception that their way of life and belief system has been challenged by growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, exploited by the recruiters and propagandists of the violent Salafi groups.”

Sean Telo, a sales representative for Island Creek Oysters, feels fortunate he wasn’t there Tuesday, since he frequently works near where the attack occurred.

The parade went on

After checking in with friends to see if they were OK, he says he realizes that living in New York, as in other cities, entails the risk of such attacks happening. “The one thing I’d say is that we’re not scared, and nothing is really going to change,” he says. “As soon as we figured out what had happened, we went out.... It wasn’t really something that was going to change what we’re going to do.”

A Halloween parade went on as scheduled Tuesday night, and the New York Marathon is scheduled to proceed as planned on Sunday, though some surrounding events may be canceled.

“New York is a pretty amazing place, and not only because of where we are and what is around us, but because of the people here,” Mr. Telo continues. “This is a very resilient city, and I don’t see anything changing anytime soon.

“I’m walking through a packed Midtown as we speak, and it takes a lot to disrupt New York,” says Zachary Goldman, a native New Yorker and executive director of the Center on Law & Security at New York University in Manhattan. “In one sense, this is new, because it has not happened in New York or anywhere in the US yet.”

“But France, England, and Germany have had attacks like this using a ubiquitous weapon – a truck – with a person who doesn’t need any external planning, coordination, or encouragement, who can literally wake up in the morning, rent a truck and kill eight people without raising any red flags,” Mr. Goldman continues. “That is really, really, really hard to protect against.”

Bolger, the bike messenger, remembers last May when a driver barreled through Times Square, killing one and injuring 22 others. “There’s not much you can do. People got to live. The next day they put up a bunch of giant cement blocks, which would prevent a guy from doing that exactly where that guy did it. But five blocks away there are no cement blocks.”

Wrestling with fears

Yet Strozier, who interviewed scores of 9/11 survivors for his book, notes that some New Yorkers were indeed “overwhelmed by apocalyptic dread” after this week’s attack.

“These things become reinforcing,” he says. “That’s the thing about trauma – you get locked in time. So it’s not only that the impact lingers, but to an extent that an event like 9/11 is genuinely traumatic [at a group level], not only does the fear not go away, but when you have another event it feels more intense and more scary because it evokes the earlier sense of trauma.”

These kinds of attacks, he continues, are especially poignant to cosmopolitan New Yorkers.

“That’s the ambiguity,” says Strozier, who was heartbroken by the images of fallen fellow bikers and runners on Tuesday. “You cannot protect everybody. We have to live with the danger, yet not live in a state of fear and despair.”

Andrew Harnik/AP

Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware points to a poster depicting an example of a misleading Internet ad, as executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google testify during a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Even as congressional probes into Russian interference in America’s 2016 election are splitting along partisan lines, one area has become an equal-opportunity field of inquiry: Russian use of social media to reach millions of Americans with divisive political propaganda.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, executives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google were on Capitol Hill answering questions about Russian infiltration of their platforms, what they are doing about it, and why it took them so long to acknowledge the problem and its scope. Under US law, it’s illegal for foreign governments, companies, or individuals to spend money to influence US elections.

The recent revelation that the Hillary Clinton campaign funded a salacious dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump that relied on information from Russia has sent House and Senate committees looking into Russian election interference on two different tracks. Republicans are following the Clinton trail, while Democrats are looking at whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The one committee that is still moving forward in a bipartisan manner – for now – is the Senate Intelligence Committee. And one issue that seems to unite Democrats and Republicans is social media. It’s something that deeply influences public opinion, that politicians of all stripes use, and that is clearly vulnerable to outside forces that want to undermine American democracy and the American way of life.

That’s not to say lawmakers are totally aligned as to the nature of the problem. In their questions, Republicans tended to broaden the scope of their inquiries to other Internet threats, such as sowing cultural division generally, terrorism, and human trafficking. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr (R) of North Carolina opened Wednesday’s hearing with a defense of the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Democrats stayed focused on Russia and the election. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, who took part in both days of hearings complained of “vague answers” to her specific questions on Tuesday and said that the country is seeing “the beginning of cyber-warfare.”

If Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg was originally incredulous that fake ads and content planted by foreign actors could influence an election, by the time of the hearing, the company’s lawyer was not. Colin Stretch told senators that Facebook is “deeply concerned” about such threats.

In submitted testimony, Mr. Stretch said that about 126 million Americans could have seen content from a fake Facebook page associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm,” as the page was liked and shared over the course of the two-year election cycle. That’s 40 percent of America’s population that received the content in their Facebook news feeds (though whether they looked at it is another question).

Twitter’s acting General Counsel Sean Edgett said that Russian bots sent out about 1.4 million election-related tweets, generating about 288 million views. Google found only two accounts operated by known or suspected government-backed agencies but around 1,100 videos on YouTube that were uploaded by such actors.

Corrective measures

The companies are taking corrective measures – some just announced last week, as the hearings neared. Facebook has disabled millions of fake accounts in the United States. It’s hiring 1,000 people to monitor advertising, investing in artificial intelligence to more easily recognize fake ads and take them down, and will soon begin testing a way for users to see who is paying for political ads.

Twitter has also suspended fake accounts, but as Mr. Edgett admits, it’s hard to ferret out the original source behind a shell corporation. “That’s a problem.” Indeed, that was a sharp line of questioning on Tuesday from Sen. John Kennedy (R) of Louisiana.

“I’m trying to get us down from La-La Land here,” Senator Kennedy said. “The truth of the matter is, you have five million advertisers that change every month. Every minute. Probably every second. You don’t have the ability to know who every one of those advertisers is, do you?”

Two Senate Democrats and a Republican have sponsored bipartisan legislation that would require social media companies to identify who is funding political ads on their platforms, just as broadcasters do. But depending on how such legislation is ultimately worded, that could be potentially “devastating” to a social media company, says Clifford Lampe, a social media expert at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Online platforms like Google and Facebook depend on vast automated systems for selling ads, he says. Requirements for transparency in ad funding could range from adding a check box or information field to learn more about the advertiser, to requiring human checkers. “Legislation that would require human checkers would have serious consequences for the companies, since their ad sales are predicated on volume.”

But Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) of Minnesota, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, says that if a radio station in her home state can figure out how to abide by the rules of airing political ads, so can “sophisticated” social media companies. “They are no different. They are media companies.”

News companies or not?

Whether these companies should be treated as publishers is a pertinent issue that could affect their regulation, and it’s one that was raised in the hearings. The executives maintained they are not news companies because they do not generate content – they are simply sharers of news content.

“That may be a distinction that is lost on most of us,” responded Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas, which seemed to indicate an open door to tighter oversight.

As Facebook, Twitter, and Google grapple with what they admit is new territory to them, Congress will be watching closely. But at least the American public now knows the extent to which Russia has used – and is still attempting to use – these platforms, says Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine.

“One of the greatest contributions that I believe the Senate Intelligence Committee has made to this investigation has been to expose the role of social media and the fact that social media was used very heavily in the fall election,” says Senator Collins, a member of the committee that heard testimony from the executives on Wednesday.

“It perplexes me that some of the social media companies would accept payments in rubles for a political ad and not have seen a big red flag that this would be in violation of federal law.”

Monitor staff writer David Sloan contributed to this report.

The European Union is often said to be all talk and too little action.

Catalonia’s controversial bid to break away from Spain has been all action and no talk at all between the two sides.

It would seem a perfect opportunity for EU officials to step in as mediators.

But as Catalonia’s ousted president Carles Puigdemont made a surprise appearance in the EU’s capital, Brussels, this week, after unilaterally declaring independence last Friday, he has won no sympathy from any of the bloc’s member states.

Behind their silence in the face of Catalonia’s independence drive lies a patchwork of separatist and nationalist movements gurgling elsewhere around the continent. European leaders also fear that Catalan sentiment could spearhead more protests against the established order – represented both by governments and the European Union itself.

From the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to Sicily in the Mediterranean, from Brittany in the west of France to Silesia in the Czech Republic, nearly two dozen regions have spawned political movements demanding more autonomy, if not outright independence.

They are a disparate bunch, but they are linked by frustration and a sense that globalization has taken decisions out of their hands.

“People across countries are trying to say we want to decide about our own lives,” says Pere Almeda, the coordinator of the Barcelona-based Catalonia Europe Foundation, which aims to strengthen links between Catalonia and Europe.

Mr. Puigdemont himself, who faces the threat of prosecution for rebellion at home, is a committed European. He had gone to Brussels, he explained to reporters, because the city is “the institutional heart of Europe. This is a European issue, and I want Europe to react.”

Francisco Seco/AP

Ousted Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont gave a press conference Tuesday in Brussels, where he said he was seeking “freedom and safety” after Spain blocked his bid for Catalan independence and sought to bring charges against him that could put him in prison for decades. But Mr. Puigdemont has failed to win any support from European Union leaders for his independence bid.

So far it hasn’t. Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel gave the Catalan separatist a cold welcome, lining up with other EU heads of state who have declared they will only deal with Madrid on the question of Catalonia.

States, not statelets, please

Mr. Michel has his own reasons for such a stance; one of the partners in his coalition government is a Flemish nationalist party that has in the past called for the breakup of Belgium. And Belgium is not alone.

The only serious breakaway movements in Europe are to be found in Scotland and Catalonia, and even there they enjoy only minority support. But secessionist sentiment remains a live issue across the continent.

Ten days ago, voters in a referendum in northern Italy chose greater autonomy. As in Catalonia, citizens were voicing a mainly economic demand from a wealthy region that sees its local authorities as more efficient and less corrupt than the central government.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker stated the EU’s position clearly on Friday as Catalonia declared independence. The EU “doesn't need any more cracks, more splits,” he said. “I wouldn't want the European Union to consist of 95 member states in the future.”

The EU’s response makes legal sense: The independence referendum that the provincial Catalan government called on October 1st was declared unconstitutional by Spanish courts before it was held. It makes political sense too: Only 43 percent of Catalonia’s voters turned out at the referendum, and opinion surveys have never shown more than half of Catalans seeking their own republic.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the EU comes from the generalized protest against the political status quo that echoes from Brexit to Milan to Barcelona.

“It is an enormous challenge,” says Justin Frosini, an associate professor at Bocconi University in Milan. “I think we are … in a kind of crisis of the nation state as such. There is a lot of pressure on a lot of the member states.”

Many Catalans, disappointed by the EU’s passivity, were especially outraged by Brussels’ failure to condemn the violence that Spanish national police used to try to prevent the illegal independence referendum from happening.

“Because the established order is at stake in the European Union,” they look the other way, says Bart Maddens, a politics professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and a Flemish nationalist with sympathy for Puigdemont.

“I wouldn’t expect the EU to support the Catalan cause,” he adds, “but at least show some understanding for Catalan demands. This is not something that happened overnight.”

Mind the gap

Nowhere is such discontent stronger than in Catalonia. Alfonso Albarracin, sitting at a coffee bar in a food market in Barcelona on a work break, says he was never interested in independence. But the Spanish government’s intransigence and heavy handedness prompted him to head to his polling station on October 1st.

He didn’t get a chance to express his views though: The Spanish police had shut the polling station down. The entire experience has left him angry – at all players. “The problem is the Catalans just want power, and Madrid wants the money,” he says. “And Europe is never going to do anything about it.”

Twenty years ago the EU paid more attention to its regions, making proposals that would have given them more of a voice in Brussels. “Europe of the regions” was a concept embraced with enthusiasm in Catalonia and elsewhere, says Michael Keating, who teaches Scottish politics at the University of Aberdeen.

“They were interested in that idea because they thought if they could get a regionalized Europe there wouldn’t need to be independence,” he explains. But the idea never took off: the EU was interested in regional policies but not their politics, Prof. Keating says. Today the union remains a bloc of member states who deal with each other only at the national level.

Their united stance has, for now, buoyed the Spanish government and weakened Catalonia’s hand, says Prof. Frosini. But resentments persist, and the EU ignores them at its peril. “EU institutions need to try and understand some of the problems at the grassroots levels in member states,” he suggests. “There is a gap … between institutions and ordinary people on the streets in different countries.”

In some quarters, the Catalonia crisis has generated heady discussions about the future of the nation state. New states were founded, and accepted by the international community, in the geopolitical shakeups after the two world wars and the fall of communism, recalls Mr. Almeda in Barcelona.

Now, he believes, it is time once again for Europe, its nation states, and its regions to rethink decision-making and sovereignty. Catalonia, he hopes, will spearhead that effort. 

Alexander Zemlianichenko/ AP

Alexei Venediktov, editor-in-chief of the Ekho Moskvy, speaks to the Associated Press at the radio station's office in Moscow, Russia, on Oct. 23, 2017. The deputy editor-in-chief for the station was stabbed by an attacker on Monday — the latest of a string of attacks on journalists and opposition activists in Moscow.

Russia's dwindling band of liberal-minded opposition journalists is shrinking fast in the face of a spate of terror attacks. The Kremlin insists it has nothing to do with the violence. But critics say the government has stoked a hostile atmosphere in the country by demonizing liberal reporters as traitors.

“The level of neurosis and hysteria is growing, with official attempts to find scapegoats to blame,” says Dmitry Muratov, the editor of one of the few remaining opposition newspapers, Novaya Gazeta.

The latest victim was Tatiana Felgenhauer, a Kremlin critic with a popular radio program on Ekho Moskvy. She was stabbed in the neck last week at the station’s studio and rushed to the hospital.

Ms. Felgenhauer was attacked in the wake of two separate programs on state TV that had denounced her, by name, for supporting foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations.

Days later, Ekho Moskvy’s chief editor announced that he had told another of the station’s journalists, Ksenia Larina, to leave Russia in the wake of a personal assault on her, also broadcast on state TV.

Last September, Novaya Gazeta columnist and Ekho Moskvy program host Yulia Latynina fled the country after her car was set on fire and her family received death threats.

'Crazies?'

The Kremlin says that the violence is the work of mentally disturbed individuals. But human rights advocates argue that the stage has been set by an official media campaign that brands liberal activists and reporters as “fifth columnists” and “foreign agents,” creating an atmosphere of hatred that encourages some ultranationalists to take matters into their own hands.

“In general, the level of aggression in society is very high these days,” says Oleg Anisimov, an expert with the independent Foundation to Support the Mass Media in Moscow. “Perhaps this is due to the economic crisis, or the tone of the official media. But there is no doubt that journalists need to be better protected.”

More than 300 Russian journalists have been killed in the line of duty since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the death rate has slowed significantly in recent years, the recent incidents have prompted Mr. Muratov to arm Novaya Gazeta staff members with non-lethal gas pistols with which to protect themselves.

“There have been too many cases where people have been attacked when they had no means to defend themselves,” he says.

Novaya Gazeta has seen six of its journalists murdered since 2001, including Anna Politkovskaya, a vocal Kremlin critic who earned fame for her reporting from Chechnya. The paper has never before taken the drastic step of arming its employees, but Muratov says the attacks on Felgenhauer and Ms. Latynina and the increased presence online and on the streets of ultranationalist groups such as SERB, the South East Radical Bloc, herald heightened danger.

“We believe groups like SERB are behind this” wave of antijournalist violence, Muratov says. “They are a kind of embodiment of the hatred evident in public opinion. The state not only distances itself, it pretends that it has nothing to do with it. It's a kind of hybrid violence, but we know where it's coming from. So, we’re going to ensure our people have the means of self-protection if they need it.”

The police say a Russian-Israeli dual citizen who claimed that Felgenhauer had been “harassing” him telepathically for years has confessed to stabbing her.

Speaking to journalists on Monday, President Vladimir Putin expressed sympathy for Felgenhauer but deflected any suggestion that the Kremlin might have been involved in the attack.

“What does freedom of speech have to do with this?” he wondered. “A sick person arrived from Israel, attacked this journalist. Ekho Moskvy is funded by the government,” Mr. Putin said. The station belongs to the media arm of Gazprom, the state natural gas monopoly.

A 'free pass' for thugs

Latynina wrote in the English-language daily The Moscow Times recently that she had never expected to flee Russia, even during the worst times – during the 1990s and early Putin years – when large numbers of journalists were being murdered. But she said the atmosphere had recently grown more insidious and more unpredictable as a flailing Kremlin outsourced violence and intimidation to murderous thugs.

“It’s not that Putin or the Kremlin are directly instigating these kinds of attacks,” she wrote. “They are winking at those who want to organize them. They’re empowering ‘local talent’ and those people are given a free pass. Some of them are crazy. Some are in search of some power or want to curry favor.

“This doesn’t absolve the Kremlin from responsibility,” she argued. “It makes it worse.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Sara Dykman biking from Taylor, Tex., to Austin, Tex. She is nearing the end of a 10,000-mile bike journey along the Monarch butterfly's migration route aimed at raising awareness about how to save the species' dwindling population.

It’s a cool, cloudy late-October morning in this small Texas town. Sara Dykman is outside a Wal-Mart, and she is, by her own admission, a bit grouchy.

But then you might be a bit grouchy too if you’d been pedaling a 90-pound bike eight hours a day for eight months along the 10,000-mile monarch butterfly migration route.

Ms. Dykman has been biking since March, when she left the alpine forest sanctuaries in Mexico’s Michoacán province where the iconic orange and black monarchs overwinter. The butterflies leave at the same time each year, embarking on a nine-month migration loop that winds over much of the United States and as far north as Canada, before returning in the fall to the same forests in Michoacán. Since the butterflies die soon after mating and laying eggs, the annual migration spans about five generations of monarchs. No other species is known to make a similarly long and multigenerational migration.

But as hardy as the species is to complete such a complex and arduous journey, its survival depends on fragile ecosystems and finely tuned habitats.

Monarchs can overwinter only in those specific forests in Mexico. When they migrate their caterpillars can eat only milkweed plants. And as adults, they rely on nectar from native flowers for food – and those habitats have steadily degraded in recent years.

Twenty years ago, some one billion monarchs overwintered in Michoacán, enough to fill some three dozen football fields. During the winter of 2013-2014, a record low 33.9 million butterflies arrived in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, not even enough to fill two football fields, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

On this cloudy morning, Dykman is biking along country back roads – and into a fierce headwind – to Austin, Texas. She is due to give a half-dozen presentations at schools around the city. She has been visiting at schools throughout her trip, talking about her adventures, the various pressures on the monarch, and how kids can help by planting milkweed and nectar gardens.

Dykman says she’s just supplementing a strong save-the-monarch subculture that already spans the continent. But for Karen Bishop – an Austin-based education outreach coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation who helped organize Dykman’s school visits in the city – it is a valuable supplement.

“It becomes more tangible and more alive for them,” she says. “Us talking about it isn’t the same as someone who’s experienced it talking about it, talking about nine hours of [climbing a] hill, and things like that.”

Yes, Dykman spent one of the first days of her trip biking up a hill for nine straight hours. But she’s no stranger to exhausting, education-oriented adventures. She biked through 49 states with college friends in 2010 and 2011. She built the bike she is using now for a yearlong bike trip with three friends from Bolivia to Texas in 2013 and 2014. A year later, she took the bike on a 3,500-mile canoe trip down the Missouri River.

All her trips have involved stops at schools along the way – this one even includes an educational YouTube channel. She has a degree in wildlife biology, but in professional science, she believes, “you document how everything’s going horribly wrong, and don’t do anything about it.” The education aspect of these trips though, “ feels like a solid step towards progress.”

Her “ButterBike” monarch butterfly trip is her longest solo bike trip. She spends her days listening to NPR and current events podcasts, and she has used the relative isolation to think about issues beyond just the plight of the butterflies she’s following.

Parts of her presentation aim to debunk fears of Mexico and of “others.” Her favorite story involves a motorcyclist approaching her on a long paved road in Mexico. He stops right in front of her, she recounts to her audiences.

“Every adult thinks this is a story about how I’m about to get mugged,” she says. But in actuality, he simply wanted to offer her ice cream.

“A lot of fear is from the unknown,” she tells a crowd of adults and children at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin the next day. “Then you get out there and it’s not so bad.”

The solitude of her journey has caused her to think about her privilege. “I’m very acutely aware that as a white woman I can get away with a lot of things,” she says.

Most nights she camps on random patches of grass, something passersby have so far overlooked. That may not be the case, if she did were a man or a minority, she suggests.

“People want to help me because I think they see me as vulnerable,” she says.

One woman in Canada drove her 20 miles to pick up a bag that had fallen off her bike. Another woman in Davilla, Texas, surprised her with cookies while she was charging her phone.

Would those women in Canada and Texas have helped her “if I had been a black man? Or a Latino man? Or even a white man?” she wonders. “I think about that stuff a lot.” She is even considering weaving white privilege into a book she hopes to write for fourth graders about her journey.

However the core purpose of her trip is still the monarchs. And as much as she tries to energize children in her presentations, she also tries to anger (or shame) adults in hopes of igniting action.

“I’ve heard over and over on this trip, ‘When I was a little kid there were thousands and thousands of monarchs,’ ” she tells the Wildflower Center audience.

Those anecdotes spark not just sorrow in Dykman, but frustration as well. When people share those memories, she can’t help but think, “Wait a second. You got to see thousands of monarchs, you got to change the planet, and you left me with less?”

She hopes that her work will spark the next generation to take action before it is too late.

“If we don’t take responsibility we’re going to in 20 years, tell people that there was this monarch migration,” she says.

The good news, she tells the crowd at the Wildflower Center, is that everyone can help to save the species simply by planting milkweed and native wildflowers.

“I have not seen a monarch every single day, but every single day, I’ve seen a person who can help a monarch,” she concludes. “So let’s make this happen. If you have a neighbor who thinks you’re crazy [for planting gardens], send them to my website and show them someone crazier.”

Reuters

Caroline Ventura looks down at flowers she laid for victims of the Oct. 31 attack on the bike path in New York City.

In defiance of the fear-based approach to terrorist acts by most news media, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced after the Oct. 31 truck attack in Manhattan that the killing spree by one young man “did not instill terror” among New Yorkers. Indeed, the city’s Halloween parade was not canceled. Life mostly went on.

And the governor’s point was made. We must not be complicit in the Islamic State’s aim of spreading self-debilitating fear.

The Islamic State (ISIS) appears worried that an attitude of calm and aplomb is prevailing. The militant group has lately lost its strongholds in the Middle East, not only to superior military forces but also to the lack of support among Muslims forced to live under its rule. Yet New York police officers reported that the driver of the truck, Sayfullo Saipov, left handwritten notes that essentially said ISIS will “endure forever.”

Not quite. What really endures does not rely on regular acts of violence against innocent people.

ISIS keeps sowing the seeds of its demise by nudging its dispersed followers into violence, such as vehicular attacks.

The motives or mental state of the perpetrators as well as whether they are caught matters less than how people react to their violence. Was there unnecessary panic beyond the immediate scene that caused harmful overreaction? Did journalists, politicians, and others quell fears or exploit them? Did terrorism experts agree on the best steps in preventing more attacks?

The desire to understand motives is understandable. It is a sign of a hope that society can reach would-be terrorists in time. In Mr. Saipov’s case, a preacher at his mosque in Tampa, Fla., tried to calm his extremism. “I used to tell him, ‘Hey, you are too much emotional. Read books more. Learn your religion first,” the preacher told The New York Times.

Such words of calm to a troubled individual are the necessary opposite to ISIS’s tactic of provoking a contagion of fear. The best reaction to terror is to double down on providing the light of hope and unity. That, and not numbing, self-perpetuating fear, is the best answer to hate and violence.