Andrew Harnik/AP

Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo leaves a meeting with Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, on Capitol Hill in Washington on April 9, 2018.

Ears perked up at the State Department last week when CIA Director Mike Pompeo, President Trump’s pick to become secretary of State, told senators at his confirmation hearing that “You will seldom find me ensconced on the senior level of any building.”

For a year, Mr. Trump’s short-lived first secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, isolated himself on the State Department’s storied seventh floor to pursue a slash-and-burn department reorganization. So the implication of a boss who would roll up his sleeves and consult – even value – the rank and file was music to a good many diplomats’ ears.

But Mr. Pompeo is not out of the woods – or assured of becoming the nation’s top diplomat – just yet.

With one Republican and a rising number of Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee already saying they will vote against confirmation, the former Kansas congressman looks unlikely to get an affirmative committee vote and faces an uncertain outcome in a full Senate vote later this month.

His chances were probably enhanced by reports that the president dispatched his CIA chief and secretary of State nominee to Pyongyang over Easter weekend to meet secretly with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. The meeting, meant to pave the way for Trump’s own meeting with the rogue leader, will likely burnish Pompeo’s diplomatic credentials and blunt the criticism from some that he is too much of a hawk to take the country’s diplomatic reins.

Michael Bonfigli/The Christian Science Monitor

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, speaks at the St. Regis Hotel on April 18, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

“From my perspective this is a plus,” said Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, appearing at a Monitor Breakfast Wednesday in Washington. “What many people don’t know is that for years we have kept back channels to North Korea through intelligence, [so] it’s perfectly logical [the CIA director] would be the person to have the first meeting.”

Yet for all the misgivings about Pompeo – and they are many, mostly pertaining to his longtime advocacy of regime change in North Korea, his preference for bombing Iran’s nuclear program out of existence, and his past Islamophobic and anti-gay remarks – his promise as an effective repairman with the ability to revitalize American diplomacy is what’s keeping his nomination afloat.

Indeed, while the key to a successful run as secretary of State may be a close rapport with the president, experts say, what is needed above all in Mr. Tillerson’s wake is a strong manager who will act quickly to turn around a hollowed-out and demoralized diplomatic corps.

Pompeo, the former Army platoon leader who won over Trump with his daily intelligence briefings, is widely seen as checking both boxes.

“As CIA director, Pompeo spent the better part of a year depending on the career people out of necessity, because the CIA has so relatively few political appointees,” says Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department Middle East official under Secretary of State John Kerry. “But he also built a close and trusted relationship with the president and the White House,” he adds, “and if he can combine those two attributes as secretary of State, he would at least have the foundation for moving things forward from their current very low state.”

For Mr. Goldenberg, who is now director of the Middle East Security Program at Washington’s Center for a New American Security, the trick for Pompeo will be to advocate for the diplomatic corps in his charge before a president who has dismissed those same career diplomats as a fetid part of Washington’s “swamp.”

Pompeo “will have to figure out how not to be the skunk at the president’s garden party,” Goldenberg says, “even as he works to maintain the loyalty of a diplomatic corps that is going to be looking for him to do just that: challenge the president’s inclinations and occasionally disrupt the party.”

Culture at CIA

Certainly no one is arguing that the State Department’s sense of its mission and its role in crafting foreign policy were enhanced during Tillerson’s short stint at the helm. Most senior positions remain empty after many seasoned officials and career diplomats either resigned in the face of the administration’s animosity or were forced out. Dozens of ambassadors’ chairs, many in key posts such as Germany and South Korea, remain empty.

Tillerson willingly took on the task of implementing the administration’s plans for a 30 percent budget cut for the department – a plan whose most deleterious impact, some critics say, will be to shrink recruitment of young talent into the department and to discourage others from aspiring to a career in diplomacy.

Senator Corker, who says he “avidly supports” Pompeo’s nomination, used Wednesday’s breakfast appearance to underscore his view that not just Pompeo’s words but his actions as CIA director suggest he’s the right captain to right the State Department ship.

“He’s done a very good job creating a culture at CIA that’s good, he understands the importance of diplomacy,” Corker said. “He is the right person to bring the appropriate culture to the State Department.”

Corker also addressed Democrats’ criticism that Pompeo has not always upheld the values they see as a must for anyone aspiring to promote America’s image around the world, including religious tolerance and respect for individual freedoms. As a congressman from Kansas, Pompeo espoused critical views of Muslims and Islam and expressed anti-gay sentiments.

Indeed, in announcing his opposition to Pompeo’s nomination Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat, New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, said that Pompeo’s “past sentiments do not reflect our nation’s values, and are not acceptable for our nation’s top diplomat.”

But Corker said he thought Pompeo had moved beyond the sentiments he expressed in Congress. “He’s had a maturing time as head of the CIA, I think it’s had an effect on him,” Corker said. “His former comments – he’s not that person.”

New direction unlikely

Yet for some former high-ranking State Department officials, all the political wrangling over what Pompeo once said and whether or not he’d really work to boost a deflated diplomatic corps is distracting from the bigger story – that the Trump administration is furiously deepening a sustained shift in foreign-policy making and execution from the State Department to the White House.

“I’ve had any number of people tell me not to fear, that [Pompeo] is a military man and a respecter of the ranks who will put his troops at the State Department first and will make sure their voices are heard, and I hope that turns out to be true,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “But I also see how beholden he is to the administration’s script,” he adds, “so I don’t expect him to venture too far from the vein of thought that disregards and even holds in contempt the soft power and everything else the State Department is about.”

Pompeo may indeed move quickly to fill key positions that Tillerson left vacant, Mr. Wilkerson says, but he doesn’t expect that to fundamentally alter the State Department’s gradual eclipse.

Pompeo “realizes there are some key posts he must fill and some critical places he’ll need to post people,” says Wilkerson, who is now distinguished adjunct professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

“But we’re not bringing in the fresh recruits.… We’re essentially eating our seed corn. It’s an ideological predilection,” he adds, “and I don’t see that Pompeo is going to change any of this.”

Indeed Wilkerson, while hardly a fan of the current administration, underscores that the hollowing out of the State Department so flatly attributed to Tillerson has actually been a feature of a decades-long shift of foreign-policy decision-making from the State Department to the White House.

“We set in motion this redesign of our foreign-policy structure with the National Security Act of 1947, which in many respects was a new constitution, and we’ve been pursuing this shift ever since,” Wilkerson says. “The result is that over time [the act] has placed all the power into the NSC [National Security Council] staff, while the resources – the money the State Department gets – has dwindled to a minuscule amount.”

Videos of two black men leaving a Starbucks in handcuffs last week has confronted many Americans with one of the nation’s most troubling and divisive questions: How deep does racism still run?

Half a century after lunch counter sit-ins that cemented the civil rights movement, the similarities between the images then and those from a downtown Philadelphia Starbucks were jarring: police officers escorting two stone-faced black individuals from a storefront after they had insisted on equal treatment.

In this case, two black men were waiting for a friend, but not making a purchase, in one of the most overtly progressive corporations in the nation. Often with comfortable couches, electric outlets, and a do-your-work-here vibe, Starbuck’s green-trimmed coffeehouses were built to reflect its often-advertised values, including a stated commitment to racial diversity, an atmosphere of relaxed creativity, and an effort to provide its cadre of baristas with industry-leading benefits.

After all, this is the company that infamously asked its baristas to write #RaceTogether on coffee cups and initiate discussions on racial justice three years ago. And it has often advertised itself as a “Third place,” a coffeehouse that provides both the the convenience of an office and the comforts of home, along with free WiFi.

But the blowback to the videos of the arrest, one of them watched over 10 million times, is turning out to be a watershed moment, both for the company and those who say America’s history of race relations is still bogged down with hidden prejudices and privileges.

“The creative class talks about the value of diversity all the time while living in a not-very-diverse world, so Starbucks is almost a stage for that,” says Bryant Simon, author of “Everything But The Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks.” “We live in a moment now when we’ve come to understand that gestures toward diversity don’t eradicate the structural racism in society.”

In Starbucks’ case, he adds, it turns out that the company’s “exclusionary practices, like many in America, were really hidden.” Retail experts say the company's core demographic for its $4-a-cup coffees are middle- and upper-class white professionals.

In turn, Starbucks’ response – including plans to close all its stores one afternoon next month and conduct a massive, all-hands-on-deck training to address issues of race – reveals the growing difficulty many US corporations and individual citizens face when it comes to the well-worn cliches about diversity.

“This is just another example of how as a black person in America your very existence is questioned and your ability to move freely throughout the world is really policed,” says Evelyn Carter, a UCLA social psychologist who studies the impact of bias on culture.

There have been other racially charged incidents recently in IHOP and Applebee’s restaurants and a Chanel perfume store. And a second video has emerged involving Starbucks, showing a black patron in California being denied a bathroom code because he didn’t make a purchase. A white patron, however, was given the code, even though he, too, hadn’t bought anything.

Starbucks has announced a vigorous response. Chairman and founder Howard Schultz is meeting with Philadelphia clergy on Wednesday. CEO Kevin Johnson personally apologized to the men. The store manager has been fired. Plus the training in 8,000 company-owned stores.

“It would be easy for us to say that this was a one-employee situation, but I have to tell you, it’s time for us to, myself included, take personal responsibility here and do the best that we can to make sure we do everything we can,” Starbucks chief operating officer Rosalind Brewer, who is black, told NPR on Monday.

But calls from civil rights leaders asking Starbucks to look deeper at its hiring practices suggest the international coffee purveyor is facing a deeper conundrum: the difficulty of rooting out bias with just a few targeted training sessions.

And with a vibe and pricing structure that caters mostly to white creative types and professionals with money to spend, the company’s ballyhooed progressive values have boomeranged back, some observers say.  

Indeed, in some ways, Starbucks fell victim to its own messaging. Through its advertising, the company has placed itself at the center of other heated cultural debates, including gun-carry laws and gay marriage. And in 2015, amidst a slew of police killings of unarmed black men, it bought ads in major US papers asking “Shall We Overcome?” even while asking its baristas to engage its customers in “Race Together” conversations.

“That’s the complicated thing about Starbucks: Its racial diversity policy has always been aimed at its white audience, and that’s why this is such a crisis, right?” says Mr. Simon, a Temple University historian who has tracked the company’s place in culture for years.

“Starbucks is this postmodern company that doesn’t really sell a product as much as it is selling a kind of version of your best self,” he continues. “And that comes laden with a lot of values, and those values are eventually going to clash with other people.”

On Monday, protesters marched through the downtown Philadelphia Starbucks, with chants including one that ended, “Starbucks coffee is anti-black.” And since the incident last week, the hashtag #BoycottStarbucks has been trending widely on Twitter.

But researchers like Professor Carter, who is black, say that while biases throughout society are often ingrained and even unconscious, that does not mean that those views are immutable. And she’s been an enthusiastic Starbucks customer over the years, she says. While taking summer classes at Harvard years ago, she got the thrill of being a regular when the crew remembered her order as she came in the door.

“Do people become more aware of the prevalence of bias if they hear story after story?” says Carter. “Yes, sharing those instances do help open people’s eyes that this isn’t a one-off incident but a persistent pattern where blacks are treated as second-class citizens.” 

“And Starbucks reaction – to be embarrassed, to want to take action – is exactly right,” she continues. “It shows that this is a pervasive problem.”

On the top of a steep hill in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Palestinians’ de facto capital, the new Mahmoud Darwish Museum unfolds like the pages of an open book.

In one wing of the milky colored stone building, poems written in the neat hand of the man celebrated as the Palestinian national poet are on display alongside items like his writing desk and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which he penned.

On the other side is a hall where Palestinian authors, poets, filmmakers, and other artists from around the Arab world give readings and talks.

On a tour of the building’s grounds, Sameh Khader, director of the museum and its foundation, points out an outdoor amphitheater and the lemon and olive trees transplanted from Palestinian villages and cities. He pauses next to the centerpiece of the outdoor plaza: Mr. Darwish’s tomb.

“Our goal is to not only commemorate Mahmoud Darwish, but to open horizons to create another Mahmoud Darwish. We don’t want to just be a beautiful graveyard, but an active cultural center,” says Mr. Khader, a fastidious man in a tweed blazer and a red tie. “We are dedicated to promoting the cultural scene in Palestine as part of our national identity.” 

Even as hopes for negotiating a future Palestinian state seem more remote, perhaps, than ever before, there is an attempt here to build cultural institutions and a cultural life that inspire people to respond to their Palestinian history and identity through art and exhibitions.

In the last two years alone, three major Palestinian museums have opened, the Darwish Museum among them. There are also performing art centers, music schools, theaters, and art schools.

“I think these institutions have developed because of the absence of a state. They are an attempt to establish a niche which an otherwise newly established state would have fulfilled,” says Salim Tamari, a Palestinian sociologist at nearby Birzeit University who is currently teaching at Harvard. “They give pride of ownership to Palestinians who can see part of their heritage recognized in artistic and aesthetic form.”

Another new museum is the Yasser Arafat Museum in the center of Ramallah, which houses a museum of Palestinian history with an emphasis on the life of the former Palestinian leader. The gleaming white modern edifice incorporates the bunker where he spent the last years of his life under siege, surrounded by Israeli forces, as well as his large tomb, which is guarded by a pair of Palestinian soldiers.

In the nearby Palestinian town of Birzeit, the Palestinian Museum, a sprawling $35 million, 3,500-square-meter modern space built into a hillside and overlooking ancient terraces, defines its mission as highlighting the history and culture of Palestinian society. Its founders, including Zina Jardeneh, who chairs the board of the museum, describe it as a “transnational institution.”

Courtesy of Iwan Baan/The Palestinian Museum

Visitors to the The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit.

In this way, Ms. Jardeneh writes in an email, the museum is “capable of overcoming geographical and political boundaries to reach Palestinians within historic Palestine and beyond. Its digital collections and online platforms, alongside its network of local and international partnerships, will allow for the sharing of skills, resources, programs and exhibitions with individuals and institutions worldwide.”

‘Bolstering the national identity’

Among the museum’s online projects is a digital archive that includes oral narratives of Palestinians recounting their lives before and after 1948, when Israel was founded as a state and Palestinians fled or were evicted en masse, an event mourned by Palestinians as the Nakba, Arabic for the “disaster.”

“We certainly believe that we can take on a leading role in building the community and bolstering the national identity,” Jardeneh writes. “Our work revolves around sensitizing students and the new generation and arming them with knowledge. We believe that these are the essential steps toward” enabling nation building.

Along with the trio of museums, recent cultural milestones include UNESCO’s declaration of Hebron’s Old City as a world heritage site and the building of a Roman style amphitheater – with seats for 5,000 carved out of stone and room for another 15,000 spectators on adjacent grass – in Rawabi, a new city on the outskirts of Ramallah.

Ramallah currently serves as the Palestinians’ cultural – in addition to the political – capital.  It is home to the Ramallah Cultural Palace, which stages plays and concerts in a 750-seat hall, and hosts the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, which is named for the late Palestinian intellectual and has branches in other West Bank cities, East Jerusalem, and Gaza City. In 2010 the conservatory revived the Palestinian National Orchestra. Ramallah is also the site of a national arts school, and in recent years Palestinian art biennials.

East Jerusalem, which Palestinians declare to be their future capital, is home to the Yabbous Cultural Center, a performing arts center, and is the other main cultural nexus.

‘People want to be seen’

Presenting Palestinian culture is considered a tool for promoting national liberation by Palestinian leaders even if the funding for much of the cultural activities comes from foreign donors.

But the fragmented nature of Palestinian political and physical geography – its population divided and restricted from traveling between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – makes the reach of cultural life a challenge. For Palestinian artists, they can more easily travel abroad to exhibit their work than they can travel between the Palestinian territories, let alone travel to nearby Jerusalem to museums there.

Courtesy of Alaa Badarnehm/The Palestinian Museum

Visitors walk through The Palestinian Museum's 'Labour of Love' exhibit opening.

“What astonishes me is how many people want to be seen and to do, so they write poetry, paint, act in films, and direct films. I think this is about looking for recognition art and culture and literature. We are looking for a place to stand to be equal,” says Khader, himself a novelist.

In his office sitting in front of an oversized black and white photograph of Darwish, Khader puts a slideshow on his computer of the over some 100 events he oversaw last year before pivoting to politics and bemoaning the impasse with Israel.

“Culture is an act that creates hope for people. But how can we create hope and promote hope and give people hope at a time when the world is going crazy?” he asks.

He views the Israeli orientation as hawkish and fitting into a larger tilt toward the right that, he says, can also be seen in countries like Italy and France.

He pauses and moves on, then circles back to his message of inspiring people to become activists, saying, “Hope is core of the change.”

Visit to the Arafat Museum

The Yasser Arafat Museum describes itself as both a place of commemoration for Arafat as the father of Palestinian nationalism and as a museum of Palestinian contemporary memory.

“We tried to overlap the history of Yasser Arafat with the Palestinian narrative,” says Mohamed Halayka, director of the museum.

And indeed, although the museum is bookended by a visit to Arafat’s tomb, and at the end, his bunker headquarters where he spent 36 months under siege by the Israeli army during the second Intifada, the museum feels as much as a museum of Palestinian history as it does as a museum of Arafat himself.

Walking up ascending ramps, visitors learn about Palestinian national history from the turn of the 20th century until 2004, when Arafat died. Paintings, murals, photos, and videos depict key historical moments – from the arrival of young European Jews to farm in then-Ottoman Palestine at the turn of the 20th century to the outbreak of both intifadas.  In one of the exhibition rooms, a long list of prominent Palestinian cultural figures who have died is highlighted, among them novelists, filmmakers, painters, and poets.

Courtesy of Yasser Arafat Museum

“They helped unify the Palestinians despite our being fragmented,” Mr. Halayka says. “They maintained the Palestinian spirit and collective identity.”

Pages of Arafat’s diary, written in neat small letters, are on display alongside a pair of trademark thick black plastic framed glasses and the pistol he always wore (even when addressing the United Nations). A description of Jewish settlement building and its impact on Palestinian aspirations for statehood is seen soon after the Nobel Peace Prize that Arafat won in 1994 – together with his Israeli counterparts, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – for negotiating the Oslo Accords.

Perhaps the most powerful exhibit is one that only has the barest touches of the curator’s hand. It’s the underground living quarters of Arafat during his time under siege in the Mukatah, the Palestinian center of government.

Tourists walk through the room where his guards slept, their blankets still on the beds. There’s a conference room with a television set and a long wooden table where Arafat met with advisers and guests. Sand bags are lined up against the walls of the space, and in the final room, Arafat’s bedroom, a stack of his trademark keffiyehs, folded neatly and in a stack, still remain in a filing cabinet repurposed as a closet.

A conversation with Palestinian artists

The task of nation-building through culture can feel especially overwhelming given the grim political situation, says Khaled Hourani. A painter and former artistic director of the Palestinian Academy of Art, Mr. Hourani gained a measure of local fame in 2014 when he brought the first Picasso painting to Ramallah.

“There is a dynamism in the art scene despite the political situation,” he says in a sun-flooded balcony off the Ramallah apartment he uses as his studio. “But there is less hope than usual.”

Sitting next to him is his friend, Mohammed Bakri, a well-known actor and director. He is also Palestinian and lives in Ramallah, but was born and grew up in Israel.

“We do art because we feel it. We don’t do it for Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] or Hamas or Bibi [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]. We do it for our future, ourselves. For our soul,” he says.

“I’m dying to do a film which is not related to this place, I mean politics,” Mr. Bakri says. “But every time I say I don’t want to deal with politics, life is pushing you to be political, forcing you to deal with identity and political issues.”

“I would love to make just a love story.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Laura and Eric Sorkin, owners of Runamok Maple, stand in their production facility in Cambridge, Vt. The artisanal firm produces a wide variety of flavored syrups, from lime leaf to ginger root.

On the rugged western slopes of Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield, a web of plastic tubing connects some 71,000 tree taps to one of the frontiers of Vermont’s rapidly changing maple syrup industry.

For weeks now, sap has been flowing through these tubes into 10 tanks, each holding 7,000 gallons, at the Runamok Maple sugarhouse, a block of a building that looks more like a small factory than the shedlike shacks of New England lore. Multimillion-dollar equipment – reverse osmosis machines, a steam-powered evaporator, ­iPhone-connected monitoring systems – hums along next to inventory ready to be shipped around the world. Workers package up sleek bottles holding cardamom-infused and pecan wood-smoked maple syrup – two of about a dozen flavors that Runamok’s owners Eric and Laura Sorkin have developed in the two years since they ditched bulk syrup production and started this artisanal, direct-to-consumer business.

The Sorkins have been upending conventions here since they started sugaring a decade ago, a few years after they quit jobs in Washington, D.C., to farm in Vermont. Back then they jolted locals with the size of their operation, deciding to jump into sugaring with 28,000 taps, an outrageously large number at the time.

“The most charitable way to put it is that we were a curiosity,” Mr. Sorkin says with a laugh. “There were a lot of people who were not expecting it to work out.”

But since then, rather than playing the role of “flatlanders who had more money than sense,” as Eric puts it, he and his wife have emerged as key players in what has become the big business of maple syrup. Armed with a sleek internet presence, contemporary packaging, and a product tasty enough to land on Oprah Winfrey’s “favorite things” list, the Sorkins have helped dramatically change what was until about 20 years ago an agricultural practice fundamentally unchanged since the 1800s. 

And they are not alone. In the past decade, the Vermont maple syrup industry has boomed, bringing outside investors, private equity firms, and a host of new challenges and opportunities to the Green Mountain State. Many longtime farmers who once sugared as a way to make some cash in winter now have year-round operations with soaring syrup output, but also increasing capital expenses and debt. Technology and weather are changing, allowing the short maple sugar season to start earlier and end later. Meanwhile, the long shadow of Quebec – the world’s dominant maple syrup producer, whose prices and quantities are set by an OPEC-like federation – is ever present. 

The story of the Sorkins, and of their neighbors in the snow-draped mountains of central and northern Vermont, however, is not just about maple syrup, one of the world’s last wild harvested foods and a cultural icon of the Northeast. Rather, it is in many ways the tale of global agriculture writ small. For here, beyond the reach of cellphone reception or tarred roads, the one-time mom-and-pop sugaring operations are increasingly beholden to international exchange rates, global commodity trading, world food trends, other countries’ regulations, and a noticeably changing climate. 

What happens over the next few years here, say those involved in maple sugaring, matters not only in the relatively small latitudinal swath of North America where maple trees grow. Rather, it gives insight into the challenges and opportunities facing farmers around the world.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Sap collected from trees flows through a network of pipes and tubing – 1,000 miles of it in all – and into tanks at Runamok Maple.

***

The Sorkins moved to Vermont to start a vegetable garden. Eric had been working as a lawyer and Laura as an environmental activist in Washington. But she was also a trained chef and was eager to get out of the office and grow food. Eric, as he puts it, was eager to follow Laura wherever she went. So they ended up here, in the town of Cambridge (pop. 3,600), with a mountainside plot and an old farmhouse with holes in the roof. They cleared land and built a greenhouse, and for about eight years they grew vegetables. But over time they tired of the operations side of the business and started looking for something new. Soon, they turned their attention to the trees around them.

Maple syrup is one of the world’s more fickle agricultural products. It is the golden brown remains of sugar maple sap after water is removed, the mixture is heated (but not too fast, or else the sap might burn), and the sugary remains are forced through a filter. These trees grow primarily in the “sugar belt,” which includes much of the Northeastern United States, some of the Upper Midwest, and southern Canada. 

Maple sap “flows” during those times of the year when the weather creeps above freezing during the day and dips below it at night. During this season, explains Joshua Rapp, a forest ecologist at Harvard Forest, a research area managed by Harvard University, the vessels within the tree’s trunk that carry water from the ground remain full – there are no leaves to take the water or transpire it to the atmosphere. At night, when the temperature dips beneath 32 degrees F., that water flows from these internal pipes into adjacent, chamber-like air pockets and freezes. This creates more space within the vessels, which in turn creates a vacuum effect, sucking up more water from the ground. In the morning, when that frozen water in the internal chambers thaws, it flows back into the already-full vessels, pushing what’s there back toward the ground. 

Maple producers intercept this downward-flowing maple sap. To do this, they drill holes into the tree’s trunk – a process that is still done by hand – and insert a collection device. “If you put a hole in the tree the water comes out of that hole,” Mr. Rapp says. “The water that’s falling back down the tree was frozen the night before.”

For generations, this falling sap was diverted into a spout inserted into the tap hole, which led to a metal bucket. The process depended on gravity. More recently, though, producers have turned to tubing and attached vacuum systems, which pull the sap out of the tree more quickly. 

Although tubing reduces the hassle of collecting and emptying thousands of buckets, it also introduces its own challenges. A pinprick-sized hole somewhere within the vast web of plastic can disrupt an entire vacuum system. Maple producers have been known to spend days trudging through snow-blanketed forests, looking for the spot where a tube may have been damaged by a moose, a downed tree limb, or an errant cross-country skier. “It’s a ludicrous way of making food,” Eric says.

When the Sorkins first mentioned their plan to start tapping the thousands of maple trees they had on their property, most longtime Vermonters cautioned them to go slowly. They should start with a few hundred taps, perhaps. Maybe a thousand. But after crunching numbers, the Sorkins decided to go with 28,000 – which overnight would make them the largest producer in the state. The locals took bets on how soon they would go out of business. 

At least, Eric recalls, it was easy to find a builder for the sugar shack. It was 2008, the height of the financial crisis. They broke ground in September and started with their large sugaring operation in January of the next year. It worked. 

During the financial crisis, oil prices had spiked, which in turn sent the Canadian dollar to one of its strongest showings against the US dollar in decades. Because the price of bulk syrup is largely tied to prices set by producers in Quebec, which still supplies 70 percent of the world’s maple syrup, that meant Americans were getting more per gallon for their syrup than they had in years. At a time when world markets were tanking, maple syrup was booming.

This, says University of Vermont economist Arthur Woolf, caught the attention of investors looking for anywhere they might make a profit. Outsiders, including some private equity firms, began buying up sugar shacks and woodlands. 

“There’s a lot of money that’s pouring into maple in Vermont,” Mr. Woolf says. “Twenty years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, this was something dairy farmers did. Things were slow in the winter so they’d tap some trees and they’d make some extra money.... Nowadays it is a full-time thing, with people buying thousands of acres of land, putting up tens of thousands of taps.”

In 2015, for instance, Sweet Tree Holdings, part of the portfolio of Connecticut-based Wood Creek Capital Management, a hedge fund firm, bought the former Ethan Allen furniture factory in the town of Island Pond, Vt. Sweet Tree installed four massive steam boilers at the plant, tapped 200,000 sugar maple trees, and promised to bore holes in 550,000 more, according to The Maple News and other publications – a move that quickly made it the largest maple syrup processor in the world.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Workers at the sugaring facility in Cambridge, Vt., operate a reverse osmosis machine that removes much of the water in sap before it is boiled, saving time and reducing energy costs.

But the growth does not just come from outsiders. “There’s not so much a shift as there is an addition,” says Matt Gordon, executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers’ Association. “It’s a lot of the same people.... There are still a great many sugarmakers in Vermont who are multi-generational; their families have been sugaring since the time of Ethan Allen.”

These farmers, too, Mr. Gordon and others say, are looking bigger – investing in new equipment and buying or leasing more land. This is one reason there hasn’t been much acrimony between old maple families and newcomers. Everyone is going big, there is enough land to go around, and more companies with big operations just mean more jobs for locals with experience in the woods.

By 2015, the number of taps in Vermont had increased to around 4.55 million from
2 million in the early 2000s, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In 2017 it was 5.41 million. That meant that Vermont was producing in 2017 nearly 2 million gallons of syrup – up from 460,000 gallons in 2000, according to the New England Agricultural Statistics Services.

The Sorkins’ 28,000 taps, which stunned people a decade ago, “would be completely unremarkable today,” Gordon says.

***

This worries Dave Folino. For 40 years he has worked in the forests on the Lake Champlain side of the Green Mountains, not far from the ski resorts of Mad River Glen and Sugarbush. He still has the same sugar shack, although he has built onto it, bit by bit, as his operation grew from a hobby with a few dozen trees to the 15,000 or so taps he and his wife, Sue, have today.

Mr. Folino’s Hillsboro Sugarworks is unusual in that it sells directly to consumers. The vast majority of sugarmakers in Vermont are in a commodities market – they grade their syrup, put it into drums, and then bring the product to one of the region’s few large packers, which combine the syrup and resell it to retailers or food processors. These firms then incorporate it into everything from salad dressings to maple candy. 

As the maple syrup industry skyrocketed, Folino noticed that many of his fellow sugarmakers seemed to be adopting the same strategy as the state’s dairy farmers – producing more syrup when the bulk price is high, because the return is so good, but then also producing more when the price drops to make up for the lower income per unit. This has become even easier to do with the advent of maple-producing technology – both the tubing and vacuum systems, which let producers get more sap from each tap, but also reverse osmosis, a process that removes most of the water from sap before it is heated. This dramatically reduces the time and fuel it takes to boil sap into syrup.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

‘WE ARE KIND OF FREE RIDERS. WE ARE BENEFITING FROM THE RESTRAINT AND [AT THE] EXPENSE OF THE [FEDERATION OF QUEBEC MAPLE SYRUP PRODUCERS]. IF THEY LET SYRUP FLOOD THE MARKET, IT WOULD COLLAPSE.’ – Dave Folino, owner of Hillsboro Sugarworks in Vermont

Last year, Folino wrote an article for the trade publication The Maple News, warning the industry not to follow the path of the dairy farmers. “Each side of the cycle drives increased milk production, and every round of low and high prices pushes farmers toward bigger farms with larger herds and supposedly greater economies of scale, but more debt,” he wrote. “Recently I’ve begun to worry that maple producers may be falling into the same trap.” 

The article got attention throughout the maple belt. “I’m known for it now,” he says. “I’ll go to a meeting and they’ll say, ‘Don’t let Dave in! He’ll just tell us don’t add cows.’ ”

Folino says that he is trying to start a movement. And while he gives a short laugh when he says this, he is also totally serious. He’d love to get other maple producers to focus on marketing themselves directly to consumers, rather than relying on a bulk market. He’d also like syrupmakers to start talking about how and whether to restrict yields. He says he knows this last point isn’t going to get much traction here. 

“We like to think of ourselves as big free market people,” he says. “But really, we’re freeloading off Quebec.”

***

Indeed, Quebec is the elephant in the sugar shack of Vermont maple sugaring. There, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers regulates, with the backing of the Quebec government, the production and sale of all maple syrup in the province. 

That means that most of Quebec’s 13,500 maple producers must sell their product directly to the federation, which then resells it. The federation sets quotas for how much a farm is allowed to produce any given year (there are exceptions for very small producers), and also negotiates the price of syrup with a council of buyers. Because of the dominance of the Quebec maple industry – in 2016 the province produced more than 11 million gallons of syrup – the federation’s decisions impact producers everywhere.

The federation also maintains a well-guarded “Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve,” with hundreds of thousands of gallons, to counter any market fluctuations in maple syrup pricing, much like the US maintains a strategic petroleum reserve (except that a barrel of maple syrup is worth about 16 times as much as a barrel of crude, selling at just over $1,000 to oil’s approximately $65). 

In 2012, this Canadian maple reserve became the focus of one of the world’s more brazen agricultural heists: the theft of some 3,000 tons of syrup, valued around $13 million. Authorities later arrested 26 people in connection with the caper.

Although there have been Quebec producers who have chafed under what they see as the federation’s strong-arm tactics, such as using law enforcement and harsh fines to ensure producers are complying with quotas, overall the system has benefited most maple sugarmakers, including those in Vermont, says Woolf, the economist.

“The losers in all of this are the consumers,” Woolf says. “If there was a normal market situation, the price would be a lot lower than it is. If the federation disappeared, the Vermont market would decrease; Quebec’s would increase.” 

Folino agrees. “We are kind of free riders,” he says. “We are benefiting from the restraint and expense of the federation. If they let syrup flood the market, it would collapse.”

Rather than classic supply and demand, then, foreign exchange rates with Canada have some of the strongest effects on US maple syrup prices. And this, says Luiz Amaral, global manager for global forest watch commodities at the World Resources Institute, is characteristic for all sorts of agricultural sectors. Currency changes in London, for instance, affect the price of basic raw materials that in turn impact a coffee grower in Nicaragua. 

“This much more connected world affects the risks and opportunities farmers have,” Mr. Amaral says. “Their job isn’t just producing and producing more effectively. I often say the most important plot for agricultural producers measures three by three yards – it’s their office.”

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Mary Hahr inspects samples of boiled maple syrup for color and clarity at Runamok Maple in Cambridge, Vt.

***

This year the sap at Runamok and elsewhere in Vermont started flowing in earnest in early February. Nearly 8,000 gallons an hour coursed through the spaghetti-
like tubing, into the massive sterile holding tanks, and then into the reverse osmosis machinery that begins to remove the water. A decade ago, this wouldn’t have happened until March.

“The spring season is moving earlier and earlier,” says Tim Perkins, director of the University of Vermont Proctor Maple Research Center.

Because of new sugaring technology, such as the tubing and vacuum systems, this climactic shift hasn’t caused much hardship, Mr. Perkins and others say.

Still, scientists are working to understand what sort of impacts changing weather might have on maple forests. Ecologist Rapp at Harvard Forest, for instance, is part of the Acer Climate and Socio-
Ecological Research Network, a collaboration of researchers exploring everything from the chemical composition of sap to the way producers are responding to climate change. They have already found that the maple sugar range is shifting northward – a slow-moving trend that nevertheless will impact future generations of sugarers. 

“Our sites in Virginia we expect to be in dire straits,” Rapp says.

The researcher has also found that the average temperature in March not only indicates the peak of the maple syrup season but the overall amount of sap collected. In other words, the most sap is collected during a season when the average March temperature is around 32 degrees F., regardless of whether the season starts early or late.

“It was surprising to me,” he says.

Rapp and his colleagues have also discovered a correlation between the temperature in July and the sugar content of sap collected in the spring. A hotter July means sap with a lower sugar content.

On the ground, some sugarers, like Folino, are noticing other impacts of climate change. There has been an increase in erratic, violent weather: wind storms that have decimated sugarbushes and torrential rains that have caused mudslides through forests. 

“There are already huge effects,” he says.

***

The most common worry among sugarmakers, though, remains the amount of syrup flooding the market, which puts downward pressure on prices. This is one reason that producers like the Sorkins are looking for new ways to differentiate themselves. Last year, they worked out a deal to buy the maple candy operations of Bascom Maple Farms, one of the largest maple syrup wholesalers in the US.

The Sorkins are also managing the logistics of moving Runamok into a bigger space. Recently, they purchased a 55,000-square-foot factory in the nearby town of Franklin that once produced tiles for the game Scrabble. “We hope that accommodates some growth,” Eric says. “We’ve spilled out of this place.”

In the meantime, he and Laura and other colleagues continue to brainstorm the next best flavor. They already have perfected their Makrut Lime-Leaf Infused Maple Syrup (“out of this world over coconut ice cream,” he says) and Ginger Root Infused Maple Syrup. Wasabi syrup was a disaster, but they found what they believe is the perfect amount of heat with their Merquén Infused Maple Syrup, flavored with spices from Chile.

“Maple,” he says, tasting one of their recent creations. “It’s an incredible product.”

Wilfredo Lee/AP

Sarah Egner, director of curriculum development at Marinelab in Key Largo, Fla., takes a water sample to check for the presence of microscopic plastics in the water, Feb. 7, 2017.

When it comes to eliminating plastic waste, a great deal of progress is being made at the smallest of levels: microbeads.

Used as exfoliators in such personal care products as face washes and shower gels, these tiny plastic spheres often end up in waterways and oceans, with the potential to pass toxins to fish and humans. Microbeads are so small they can’t be filtered out of the water system once washed down the drain.

But in recent years there has been a growing effort to ban these beads from manufacture and import. In the United States, the Microbead-Free Waters Act was signed into law in 2015. The law bans microbeads in the US in incremental stages, starting with outlawing the manufacture of microbeads in cosmetics in July 2017, with full implementation of the law in 2019.

“We saw pretty swift action taken at the national level by Congress to pass ... [the] legislation, and we’re seeing similar legislation efforts elsewhere around the world,” says Nick Mallos, director of the Trash Free Seas program at Ocean Conservancy, an environmental advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. 

Launched in January, Britain’s ban, which includes biodegradable plastics, is lauded as “the strongest and most comprehensive ban to be enacted in the world,” according to Sue Kinsey, senior pollution policy officer at the Marine Conservation Society in Herefordshire, England. Canada, too, implemented the first stage of its ban early this year. New Zealand’s ban will go into effect in June.

Microbeads, which the US law defines as plastic particles 5 millimeters or smaller in size, contribute to the much larger issue of plastic waste entering the ocean. Eight million to 10 million metric tons (8.8 million to 11 million tons) of plastic waste are dumped into the ocean annually. By 2050, there could be more plastic by weight in the ocean than fish, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

Prior to the US ban, an estimated 3 trillion microbeads were released into the environment each year. And when microbeads enter waterways and oceans, they can have a devastating effect as they soak up toxins and are eaten by fish.

“[Microbeads] are like little tiny sponges. They can suck up any pesticides or flame retardants,” says Rachel Sarnoff, executive director of 5 Gyres, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that focuses on reducing plastics pollution. As a result, microbeads become a million times more toxic than the surrounding water.

Mistaking them for fish eggs, marine life often eat these tiny, toxic particles. Ingesting plastic isn’t a problem just for fish, says Mr. Mallos. “Plastics have infiltrated every level of the marine food web, and of course, humans are at the top of the marine food web, so there is some question about the potential risk to humans as a result of the contamination of plastics in the marine environment.”

The negative environmental effect of microbeads first gained attention in 2013 after a report by 5 Gyres and the State University of New York at Fredonia revealed a high concentration of the plastics had infiltrated the Great Lakes. In response, Illinois became the first state to pass legislation against microbeads. The plastic pollution issue struck a chord with the public, notes Jennifer Walling, executive director of the Illinois Environmental Council.

“Illinois is rarely a state that steps up on environmental issues first, but Illinoisans care deeply about Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes,” says Ms. Walling in an email.

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones taking action. Once microbeads were identified as a problem, some manufacturers began to voluntarily discontinue their use in various products. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson committed to phase out microbeads from its products worldwide. Unilever pulled microbeads from exfoliating products in 2014, exchanging them for natural alternatives such as walnut shells and cornmeal.

Researchers are hopeful that the quick action in banning microbeads will pave the way for banning other plastic items that could easily be replaced with biodegradable options.

“We would argue that it’s the same thing for plastic straws, plastic cups, plastic coffee lids.... If we can show that these items are clearly contributing to this issue, then I think we can gain some more,” says Ms. Sarnoff.

AP Photo

A South Korean soldier in Seoul passes by a TV news screen showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

In coming weeks, the world’s most heavily armed border, or the line between North and South Korea, could soon be the scene of the greatest peacemaking in 2018. That is, of course, if peace on the Korean Peninsula can be defined as something other than an end to military hostility.

On April 27, Kim Jong-un is expected to cross the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone and become the first North Korean leader to set foot inside South Korea. His planned meeting with President Moon Jae-in would be only the third summit between the two Koreas since their war in 1950-53. Yet it may be the one with the greatest expectation of a quick result. “The most ideal solution,” Mr. Moon said last year in a rather bold statement, “would be to completely denuclearize North Korea in a one-shot deal.”

Then, if all goes well at that historic meeting, President Trump could, either in May or June, fly to a yet-unknown country and become the first sitting president of the United States to meet a North Korean leader. The fact that the CIA director, Mike Pompeo, secretly visited Pyongyang in early April means the US is laying the groundwork for a serious negotiation.

Summits, of course, are generally an opening only to make a deal on paper. Twice since 1994 the world has seen how North Korea has ripped up deals aimed at curbing its nuclear ambitions. In fact, its past deceit is now one of its greatest liabilities.

This time its real intentions are still unclear, but Moon, the main driver of the latest summitry, believes that talking gives an advantage to South Korea and its ally, the US. His position, which has differed from Mr. Trump’s in the past, is that a full-fledged treaty defining many aspects of peace, including trade and family exchanges, can come before the North starts to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs. Trump seems to have come around to this approach.

The North and South are still technically at war. Only a US-led armistice 65 years ago provided a temporary end to the conflict. If the countries can sign a treaty, one that must also be signed by the US and China, it means each Korea recognizes the other as a sovereign nation. The long-held notion of reunifying through armed force would be ruled out.

As with any negotiations, details matter. Will Mr. Kim insist that US troops and strategic weapons leave the South? Will the inspections of the North dismantling its nuclear arsenal be transparent?  How much will the US reduce economic sanctions in return for concrete steps by the North?

Answers to such questions rely on the level of trust built up at these summits and at further talks. After years of mis-starts, threats, a build-up of arms, and minor confrontations, building trust may soon start on the world’s most dangerous border. It all depends on each side agreeing to a common vision of peace.