In news coverage of global tensions over trade, a dominant message has been one of growing concern over the damage that tit-for-tat tariffs would do to the global economy.

The worries are well founded – with forecasts ranging from rising consumer prices to falling exports and sagging economic growth. Tariffs have already resulted in layoffs at some US manufacturers. At others, supply chains have been disrupted, according to anecdotes in a Federal Reserve survey of businesses released Wednesday.

Yet, even as Republicans in Congress weigh a rare legislative effort to rein in one of President Trump’s policies, something important has been largely pushed out of the spotlight: that US experts widely agree that China is using unfair trade practices in ways that harm both the US economy and the goal of a rules-based system for global trade.

Jennifer Hillman, who has served on the World Trade Organization’s appellate body, lists a host of Chinese practices that run counter to the values on which the WTO was founded: heavy use of subsidies, theft of intellectual property or trade secrets, and requirements that US firms transfer technology to Chinese partners as a precondition of doing business in China.

But for more than a decade, it has proved hard to build a consensus – within the US or with global allies – on how to challenge China effectively. And although the Trump administration is trying to change that, its simultaneous focus on smaller trade disputes with Europe, Canada, and Mexico have created a distraction.

“There has been a losing sight of the real problems with China,” says Ms. Hillman, who now teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center. “China didn’t do what it promised to do when it joined the WTO, which was to become a more market economy.”

No one disputes China’s right to develop its own economy, but what’s in doubt is the long-held hope among Western nations that the ruling Communist Party would, after joining the WTO, abide increasingly by the norms of Western market-based economies.

“The entire WTO framework, including its dispute settlement process, is premised on governments abiding by the rule of law and there being a fundamental separation between the state and the private sector. Neither is true in China,” Washington-based trade expert Rob Atkinson said in testimony to a House committee last week.

Bipartisan moves in Congress

For now, though, some influential forces in the US are focused on countering Trump administration policies. The US Chamber of Commerce has launched an advertising campaign opposing tariffs.

And bipartisan efforts in Congress could result in legislation designed to stop an escalation of trade conflict. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R) of Tennessee and Doug Jones (D) of Alabama plan to introduce a bill next week to prevent new tariffs on foreign cars and auto parts. Both states have seen workers gain from growing automotive production.

Senator Alexander said Wednesday that “nothing could do more to damage those family incomes than the proposed tariffs on imported automobiles and automotive parts, combined with the tariffs on imported steel and aluminum that the administration has already imposed.”

Meanwhile, another bill in the Senate would block the president from using a national-security rationale to impose new tariffs, unless Congress approves. This month the Senate also passed a nonbinding resolution, 88 to 11, implicitly questioning the administration’s tariff moves.

In polls, Americans show concern about trade conflict but also about China. About 73 percent of Americans, in a late June Quinnipiac University poll, said a trade war would be bad for the economy. But the same polling group, earlier in the month, found that by a 52-to-36 percent margin, Americans favored putting tariffs on Chinese imports.

“In the Congress there’s a sense that we need to do something with respect to China,” says Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership of manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union. But the levels of concern differ, he says, and lawmakers have taken few firm steps to tackle the issues, such as a glut of Chinese steel on world markets.

“If you don’t like the president’s plan, what’s the plan?” Mr. Paul wonders. “The mistake that Congress could make is pulling the rug from beneath the president’s feet before we see the chance for this strategy to play out.”

So far, it hasn’t played out in a pretty fashion. US talks have at various times faltered with both China and more traditional trade partners. The tally of expected tariffs and countertariffs keeps rising.

Some bending on steel

At the same time, negotiations aren’t over. And with the new US tariffs nudging it, Canada has announced efforts to curb transshipment of China-made steel, Paul notes.

This month, the European Commission has voiced interest in working with the US and others on WTO reforms, which might address America’s process-related concerns about the body that hears trade-case appeals.

“It represents a very promising start,” says Hillman at Georgetown, referring to the European overtures.

Frustrated with the WTO, the Trump administration has been blocking discussion of new appointments to the WTO’s appellate body, which currently has only 4 of 7 members in place, she says.

Trade experts don’t expect all issues to be resolved through the WTO, but they generally support efforts to preserve and use it as a global forum on trade. Hillman says the best hope of resolving disputes with China is for nations to join a broad-based WTO case against Beijing’s practices, going well beyond past cases in scope.

For now, though, Trump and his trade team haven’t appeared to set a clear path forward amid the smoke of tariff threats toward China and long-time allies alike. Not for coalition-building, at least. The hope appears to be that tariffs will make other nations buckle to US demands.

“It does not appear that there is any strategy to get at the long-term significant problems with China,” Hillman says.

Manuel Valdes/AP

Marine Corps veteran Chris Sheppard, photographed in his Seattle office on July 17, 2018, shows a picture of himself taken during his service in Iraq in October 2004. "I thought that press conference yesterday with him [and] Putin, I thought that was a national tragedy. I just couldn't believe it," Sheppard said, echoing the sentiments of other veterans interviewed by the Monitor.

Kristofer Goldsmith served in the military during the presidency of George W. Bush, and while he came to regard the Iraq War as unnecessary, he respected then-President Bush’s loyalty to the armed forces and the intelligence community.

“I never once felt that he didn’t have the best interests of the United States at the forefront of his mind,” says Mr. Goldsmith.

But the Iraq war veteran says it was totally different watching President Trump stand side by side with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki this week and cast doubt on unanimous US intelligence assessments that Russia systematically sought to manipulate the 2016 presidential election.

“To have a former KGB agent and an authoritarian standing next to a democratically elected president, and then to have the president condemn the entire US intelligence and security community – it’s mind-blowing,” says Goldsmith, founder of High Ground Veterans Advocacy, a nonprofit group in New York. “I can’t imagine what it was like for current service members to watch our president eating out of Putin’s hand.”

Trump sought to dial back his remarks Tuesday. But just as he was telling reporters at the White House that he had “full faith and support for America’s intelligence agencies,” the lights went out.

“Oops, they just turned off the light,” the president said, then added: “That must be the intelligence agencies.”

While only a joke, Trump’s words underscore his frequent belittling of the US intelligence community, which its members say dangerously undermines American credibility abroad – as well as among law and order professionals at home.

Amid that backdrop, the president’s Helsinki summit performance Monday is heightening doubts about the commander-in-chief among Americans who have risked their lives for national security. They consider themselves patriots first and supportive of the office of the presidency – some to the point that they are not even willing to be quoted anonymously – but are deeply concerned about Trump’s words in Helsinki this week. They say his open display of distrust is likely to have consequences far beyond political point-scoring at home.

During Goldsmith’s combat tour in 2005, for example, he helped gather intelligence from residents in Sadr City, Iraq, walking door to door in the impoverished district that was full of anti-American militia fighters to ask for information that could assist his US Army unit.

He asserts that Trump’s criticism of US intelligence agencies will deter people living in war zones from working with US troops.

“The president doesn’t understand the life-and-death risks those people take for us,” says Goldsmith. “[Trump] sent a message to every asset or potential asset in the entire world that when information gathered at ground level reaches him, he considers it worthless. That’s going to make people ask why they should cooperate.”

Distrust on both sides

To be sure, there is a range of views among veterans, a majority of whom have supported Trump in the past.

“I think he’s got a reason to be friends with Putin,” said James Flaskey, who served in the US Army during the height of the cold war with Russia, in an interview with the Associated Press. “And I think it’ll be to our advantage, just like with North Korea.”

In addition, some suggest Trump may be right to call into question the conclusions of US intelligence agencies, particularly around politicized issues.

Security professionals point out, for example, the calamitous intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to neutralize Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. It is arguably harder, however, to find evidence of a secret weapons program in a foreign country than of foreign interference in one’s own electoral system, even if that, too, has become politicized.

But as messy as politics can become, many have noted the resilience of US government institutions, which have overcome a multitude of shocks – including, in the last two generations alone, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and the impeachment of President Nixon.

Yet while Trump’s mistrust of his own intelligence services – and apparently greater faith in the words of autocratic leaders he has met, from Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un – may be a passing phase of American intramural acrimony, it has broken long-standing rules.

“The intent of countries like Russia is to create confusion, dissent, and chaos in their adversaries, and we have let it run wild in the US at every level,” says Bobby Ehrig, a retired US Army master sergeant and veterans advocate in Albuquerque, N.M., who served two tours in Iraq and suffered severe burns from a 2006 suicide bomb attack.

Mr. Ehrig worries that discord evident in Washington has created the perception abroad of a country in disarray, a view he fears could place deployed US troops at risk. In the past, he recalls, even when missions went awry, military leaders and troops resisted a public airing of differences.

Even as he was seeing many fellow soldiers killed or severely wounded, says Ehrig, “we would never say anything negative in front of our allies or enemies that would show a lack of unified support.”

‘A certain humility required’

Yet that lack of support is the message vets are hearing now from the White House, whatever the president’s intention. Despite dialing back his rhetoric this week, Trump did not hide his contempt for intelligence assessments of Russia, and what he derides as a political “witch hunt."

“There’s a certain humility required to appreciate what it takes to gather intelligence and what the intelligence tells you,” says Zach Skiles, a former Marine corporal who took part in the 2003 Iraq invasion. A doctoral student in clinical psychology in the San Francisco Bay area, Mr. Skiles says he is troubled by Trump’s apparent reluctance to accept findings that conflict with his own beliefs.

“You might have a gut feeling about something but the intelligence says something else and so you have to follow that order, that direction. That takes character, and he’s not showing it,” says Skiles.

The president’s unpredictable behavior and contradictory statements achieve the opposite of projecting toughness as commander-in-chief of a massive, powerful military, he says.

“The fact that he wants to buddy-up to someone like Putin and seems to be so malleable isn’t strong,” says Skiles. “It’s scary, it’s embarrassing, and it’s shameful.”

Dina Kraft

Ada Gross (l.), the kibbutz volunteer coordinating the resettlement effort of refugees on Kibbutz Maagan Michael, with Yael Eisner, who has 'adopted' one of the families, outside Eisner's home on the kibbutz, Tuesday, July 10, 2018.

Under a canopy of jacaranda and eucalyptus trees, Rowha Dabrazion, an Eritrean asylum seeker, pushes her one-year-old daughter in a crib on wheels, a fixture of kibbutz life. Her five-year-old flashes a triumphant smile, enjoying her perch on the back of a kibbutz member’s bicycle.

It’s been a week since she arrived here to this lush cooperative community along the shores of the Mediterranean, midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. And the relief is beginning to set in that she is no longer one step away from homelessness.

Just one month ago her husband left her and the children. She had quit her job cleaning to care for her baby daughter, and she found herself with no income and no idea where the money would come from to cover rent and expenses.

Then Ms. Dabrazion got word that a kibbutz would take in her and her children as part of a new program in which kibbutzim across Israel are volunteering to take in the highest risk cases of refugee families. Most such families are headed by single mothers struggling with dire poverty in Tel Aviv, where the majority of asylum seekers live. The program offers them housing, health care, education for their children, and “adoptive families” for social support.

“I feel better, like I can breathe. Every day my mind would race and wonder what would be,” she says, sitting in the living room of Yael Eisner, a kibbutz member who, along with her husband, volunteered to host, or “adopt” Dabrazion and her children.

While Dabrazion talks about her life as an asylum seeker in Israel – she crossed the Sinai Desert, partially on foot, to get here seven years ago – her younger daughter fidgets in her lap. “Come to savta,” (Hebrew for grandmother), Ms. Eisner says, sweeping the little girl into her arms. As Rowha continues, recounting some of the harrowing moments in Eritrea that led her to seek asylum in Israel, Eisner takes the girls to visit the kibbutz cowshed.

Outrage at official policy

So far twelve asylum-seeking families have been placed on kibbutzim, and the goal is that 100 families will be hosted by the end of the year. The grassroots initiative was undertaken by individual members within the national kibbutz movement. They were first mobilized to help refugees in Israel early this year, outraged by government plans for a mass expulsion of asylum seekers, whom officials referred to as “infiltrators.”

The plan was to deport the asylum seekers, most of them from Eritrea and Sudan, to third-party countries in Africa. Those expulsion plans were at least temporarily thwarted, but the fate and legal status of the asylum seekers, who number some 38,000, remains uncertain. A decision was made by some kibbutzim to host families temporarily, for 12 to 18 months, in hopes of providing them and their children with stability and support during a desperate time in their lives.

Dina Kraft

Rowha Dabrazion, right, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, walks along a path with her children on Kibbutz Maagan Michael on July 10, 2018, with Ada Gross, who is helping settle the family in this communal village.

“Even though the refugees have been here for as long as 12 years, the expulsion order woke up people in a way that is hard to describe,” says Avi Ofer, a member of nearby Kibbutz Maanit who is overseeing the effort. “I’m more proud to be Israeli now. There are people who really are there to help.”

“The plan is to help first those considered high-risk emotionally and economically,” Mr. Ofer says. “There are those who have resorted to prostitution or feel so on the brink of despair that they would take the government offer (a one-time payment of $3,500) to go to Rwanda,” a country Israel has encouraged asylum seekers to go to. Testimonies of migrants who have gone, however, warn of bleak consequences – of being robbed of the payments and even of human trafficking and death as the migrants continue on toward Europe.

The kibbutzim, originally founded as socialist agricultural collective communities in the days preceding Israeli statehood, have a tradition of taking in people in distress, beginning with Jewish children orphaned during the Holocaust. Ofer’s own mother was one of them. In more recent years, kibbutzim have temporarily taken in refugees from Kosovo and immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

‘I too could have been a refugee’

Although the kibbutzim themselves are initially covering the cost of hosting the families, to make the effort sustainable they are seeking sponsors.

The Consortium for Israel and the Asylum Seekers, an umbrella group of activists working on behalf of the asylum seekers has launched what they are calling the Kibbutz Resettlement sponsorship initiative to support the work of the kibbutz movement.

Eisner, a nurse, recently volunteered at an Israeli medical clinic in Serbia at a refugee camp for those fleeing Syria and Iraq.

“That is where the story of refugees came into my heart. It was there I understood I too could have been a refugee. That they are like me with homes, careers, and communities, but they lost everything,” she says.

“All of us need to do something to help. And I have everything I need in life, a family, money, a kibbutz, a normal country even if I don’t like the government,” she adds as her one-year-old “adopted” granddaughter naps next to her. “So how can I be quiet and do nothing? And when the story of [the proposed] expulsion began, I thought, how can we as Jews do this?”

‘You can laugh here’

Dabrazion enters her one-room apartment with her daughters. She had just stopped at the sprawling communal dining room with its views of the sea and multiple food stations offering fresh salad fixings, watermelon slices, hot meals, and once a week even sushi. 

In her tiny kitchen, a cooking pan overwhelms a corner of the counter used to make traditional injera bread.

“On the way to the kibbutz, I was fearful, wondering ‘where am I going?’ but when I arrived and saw how I was welcomed by people with all their hearts, I saw that things are good for us here,” she says.

She says in Tel Aviv she was concerned about the role-reversal she saw in her older daughter, who was constantly tending to and worrying about her.

“She now says, ‘Mommy, we have a grandma and grandpa now. We go to the pool here, we go to the sea. You can laugh here.’ ”

Wallis Sands State Beach doesn’t lose an inch of sand without this team noticing.  

Claudia Gilmartin and Sylvia and Lee Pollock have driven from their homes in Maine to this small beach in Rye, N.H. – their trunks packed with clipboards, neon stakes, and a rope-yardstick measuring apparatus – at least once a month for the past two years.

Each time they visit, Mr. and Ms. Pollock leapfrog the measuring rope down the beach and yell out elevation numbers while Ms. Gilmartin carefully records the measurements.

Gilmartin and the Pollocks aren’t ecosystem specialists. They are retirees turned beach profile monitors, thanks to the Coastal Research Volunteers (CRV) program, a citizen science initiative run by the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension and New Hampshire Sea Grant. They plan to produce the first-ever long-term database on erosion and accretion of sand at Wallis Sands.

Across the United States, participation in citizen science is growing. Program coordinators say new technology and phone apps have simplified the data collection process, and the general public now has a better understanding of what “citizen science” means.

But they also cite a new sentiment that has fueled the citizen science movement in the past few years. Dissatisfied with environmental action at the state and federal level, the Wallis Sands team sees citizen science as a form of activism – a concrete way for them to make their own small difference. They may not be able to keep the United States in the Paris climate accord, for example, but citizen scientists from Wyoming to New Hampshire say collecting data for researchers and scientists is a more productive use of their time than ranting on social media.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Students hang out before class in the Biodiversity Institute building at the University of Wyoming, on April 29, 2018, in Laramie, Wyo. The Institute seeks to promote research, education, and outreach concerning the study of living organisms in Wyoming and beyond.

“It makes you feel a little bit less helpless,” says Ms. Pollock, a clinical psychologist. "I think it reduces people’s sense of not being able to do anything.”

Unlike volunteer or educational opportunities where participants are given a lecture or a particular clean-up task, citizen science projects like the CRV program bring the public into the scientific process. After some initial reluctance, researchers and scientists have come to welcome the extra help in populating datasets, provided that the citizen scientists have adequate training and oversight.

“Global climate change seems overwhelming and impossible… But if I’m doing something and contributing to knowledge, it is an action we can take against some monumental problems that don’t have easy solutions,” says Sarah Kirn, education programs strategist at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and board member of the Citizen Science Association. “We’re also at a place in our national, political culture where there is some distrust and desire to take things into our hands… There is an interest in transparency.”

A growing corps of citizen scientists

It’s easy to feel like a scientist just by walking into the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute in Laramie, Wyo. Art installations of birds hang from the ceiling, and the hallways are lined with glass shelves of fossils and taxidermic animals.

Since its founding in 2012, the Biodiversity Institute has focused on strengthening citizen science in Wyoming through programs such as the Rocky Mountain Amphibian Project, bi-annual Moose Day, and tracking programs for monarchs and freshwater mussels. Earlier this year, the Institute announced a new project to survey the short-eared owl, a notoriously mysterious bird. The Institute asked volunteers to visit the snowy Red Desert before dusk and spend at least 90 minutes looking and listening for signs of the bird.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Gary Beauvais, director of the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Wyoming, speaks about their work with citizen science and other outreach activities, on April 29, 2018 in Laramie, Wyoming. A cardboard figure of Charles Darwin is seen behind him.

“That was one where we said: ‘We’ll never get anyone to sign up for this one,’ ” says Institute director Gary Beauvais, laughing. “‘Hey, you get to go out in the middle of the Red Desert and survey for something you're probably not going to see.’ ”

But to his surprise, word of the project spread quickly among serial citizen scientists and all of the slots filled up before the Institute could open registration to the public.

Across the country, program coordinators tell similar stories. Brian Ritter, executive director of the Nahant Marsh Education Center in Davenport, Iowa, hoped 100 people would attend a June “BioBlitz” to document as many living things as possible on the 305-acre reserve. Participation more than doubled his expectation. Danny Schissler, program coordinator for the Tree Spotters program at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University in Boston, says he has continually increased the number of 3-hour training sessions offered each year since the program was founded four years ago.

And CRV program manager Alyson Eberhardt has been amazed by the dedication of beach profilers who brave New Hampshire beaches in February amid snow and below-zero temperatures. Gilmartin jokes that Ms. Eberhardt should invest in team long-underwear with the CRV logo.

Real science for all?  

The majority of program participants are retirees, particularly for time-intensive projects, such as the beach monitoring effort in New Hampshire. Eberhardt hopes to encourage more diverse participation with lower commitment and kid-friendly projects such as horseshoe crab counting and eel monitoring that are more likely to fit into young family and college student schedules.

“When we ask participants what drives them to do this work,” says Eberhardt, “they say they want to give back, learn new things, and meet like-minded people.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Volunteers Sylvia Pollock (from l.), her granddaughter Brooke Pollock, Claudia Gilmore, and Lee Pollock demonstrate how they measure beach erosion at Wallis Sands State Park, on July 16, 2018, in Rye, N.H.

But citizen science is about more than feel-good opportunities for the participants. Amid funding cuts to research at the federal level, and a changing environment posing more scientific questions than ever before, citizen-generated data hold real value for scientists.

The CRV team’s data have already proven useful. Three Nor’easters hit the New Hampshire coast in March, and before the Beach Profile Monitoring program, researchers would not have fully understood the storms’ effects. But because citizen scientists recorded beach elevation levels across the project’s 13 locations before and after the storms, researchers and state officials now have a better idea of which locations need protection during severe storms.

That utility only reinforces the enthusiasm around citizen science programs. When the Pollocks and Gilmartin talk about their work, for example, they are quick to mention the Nor’easter data.

“It ties you into the land,” says Ms. Pollock. “I had never seen anything like what those storms did. It was a jarring awareness. I said, ‘Wow. There is some serious stuff going on here.’ ”

This story was produced with support from the Earth Journalism Network and from an Energy Foundation grant to cover the environment.

Lucio Usobiaga has childhood memories of going to Xochimilco, a network of ancient, man-made canals and floating islands in southern Mexico City. When he thinks back, he can hear the blasting mariachi music, smell the grilled corn, and see the garbage floating in the waterways.

Today, the area is still known for its crowds of tourists and brightly painted party boats, but Mr. Usobiaga’s associations with Xochimilco have changed. Sitting on the bench of a green wooden boat, known as a trajinera, he’s surrounded on a recent morning by calm glassy waters, white egrets soaring into flight, and the resurgence of ancient farming practices.

“Farming organically is the best way to preserve the chinampas,” Usobiaga says of the islands created in the Valley of Mexico that were incorporated into a larger network of waterways by the Aztecs and later the Spanish.

Usobiaga co-founded a nongovernmental organization, Yolcan, in 2011 to preserve and spread these farming practices in Xochimilco. In doing so, he also aims to improve the livelihoods of smallholders and bring organic, local produce to those living in Mexico City – one of the biggest metropolises in the world.

“The idea from the beginning was to make [Yolcan] about ecology, economy, and connecting peasant farmers with consumers” in a megacity, Usobiaga says.

This morning the trajinera pulls up to one of the floating islands, and Usobiaga hops off. He’s giving the owner of a cafe and a handful of other visitors a tour, showing them how the food that Yolcan provides to some of the top chefs in the city is grown. The food is also distributed via weekly farm boxes to more than 150 individuals, families, and schools.

The group carefully crosses a short bridge. Usobiaga points to the gravel and bamboo in the water below – a natural filtration system that Yolcan worked on with university students from a local engineering school. It allows farmers to purify the polluted water and use it for irrigation.

Yolcan, which means “land of origin” in Nahuatl, has introduced new vegetables and varieties to the chinampas in an effort to keep the soil healthy and producing year-round. Mostly young men have partnered with Yolcan, pulling up orange and pink beets, piling up leaves of chard, and cutting off heads of purple cauliflower.

The area was named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, protecting it from development. But in recent decades, it’s become more common to find the islands rented out for soccer matches or birthday parties than tilled by chinamperos, as farmers here are known.

Getting farmers on board

Persuading local farmers to get on board with Yolcan’s vision was a challenge initially.

“At the beginning they weren’t interested because they didn’t trust that what we were doing was going to work,” Usobiaga says. The way most farmers had learned to survive was to produce one crop in bulk in order to sell it to the largest wholesale market in Latin America, Central de Abastos. Usobiaga and his partner, Antonio Murad, who focuses largely on bookkeeping, encouraged people to move away from monoculture and stop using chemicals. They also decided they could set an example.

“We changed our strategy and said, ‘We’ll do it ourselves and hope they’ll start coming,’ ” Usobiaga recalls.

Ginnette Riquelme

Lucio Usobiaga (r.) works with two farmers in Mexico City’s Xochimilco to deliver vegetables to a restaurant.

Key to this was finding a local partner who bought into the idea of making small but important changes. Noe Coquis Zaldivar and his father served as that bridge for Yolcan. Mr. Coquis was working at a nearby park when Usobiaga approached him.

At first he turned Usobiaga down, as he was busy with farming his own land and working at the park. But then he started thinking about the goal of helping locals reclaim the chinampero tradition and making a decent living in the process.

“It’s sad people here don’t want to dedicate themselves to the land,” he says. “They go to the city to find work, and their priority is to leave the fields.”

Since Yolcan arrived, Coquis says he’s noted changes in the community. “Before we were using agrochemicals,” he says. “It was a challenge to see if we could grow new things.... There are more people expressing interest in joining the network of producers; there’s curiosity around what’s happening here.”

Five families in Xochimilco are working full time with Yolcan, out of roughly 30 farming here. Some will never join the project simply because they are able to make more through the agrochemical approach.

Yolcan buys what the project’s farmers produce. The price Yolcan pays depends on what is grown as well as on the season and market price, Usobiaga says.

“The farmers have the commitment to produce the food organically and sell what they’ve committed to only to us,” he says. “In exchange, we give them all the advice, workshops, technical assistance, seeds, ingredients for fertilizers, and we follow through on our commitment to buy everything we’ve agreed to.”

A different life before farming

Usobiaga didn’t grow up farming; in fact, he grew up in a very different environment. “Where I come from, the social background is private schools and you have your road already paved out for you,” he says. “Agriculture is never on the table. Never. Neither is philosophy,” he says of the subject he studied in university.

He sees a direct link between his studies and agriculture, though. “Working with farmers and the land has given me a way to put some of those [philosophy] ideas into place,” he says. “For example, Aristotle says ‘being’ is said or thought about in many ways. That has taught me to see agriculture in its many different meanings and as a tool for ecology, health, food, and social justice.”

It’s not just farmers reaping the benefits of Yolcan’s work. Nearly three days a week one of Mexico’s top chefs, Eduardo García, wakes up before dawn to take a trajinera out to the chinampas and pick out the produce he’ll serve in his restaurants.

Having access to locally grown, organic food “changes everything for me as a chef,” says Mr. García, who sources from a handful of organic suppliers. When he opened the restaurant Maximo Bistrot in 2011, he estimates that 80 percent of his produce came from the city’s wholesale market. Today, thanks in large part to Yolcan, it’s closer to 80 percent organic.

“For my restaurants, it’s important because I feel that it helps me in a way to do less work, because [the food] is already pure. It tastes like it should taste,” he says.

Farm boxes with daikon radishes

Yolcan is also trying to connect farmers and consumers. “In Mexico, only the rich people and the farmers can eat right,” Usobiaga says. “What happens to all these people in between?” he asks.

The farm boxes are a recent development. Although they’re getting “easier and easier” to sell, they’re sometimes met with confusion and complaints.

“The boxes are full of things people aren’t familiar with,” he says, noting daikon radishes and rutabaga. “We need to work on delivery, making lettuce arrive crisper, not having any insects or bugs in the vegetables,” he acknowledges.

Mexico “is still in that phase where it’s cool to say that you eat organic or you support local farmers, but it’s not really true yet,” he says. “But we’re closing the link between farmers and consumers, and that can make all the difference.”

Three other groups involved in ecology

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects below are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause.

• EcoLogic Development Fund works with rural and indigenous peoples to protect tropical ecosystems in Central America and Mexico. Take action: Aid efforts in Honduras’s Pico Bonito National Park.

• Osa Conservation applies scientific and other expertise to safeguarding the biodiversity of the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. Take action: Give money to the organization’s sea turtle conservation program.

• Let Kids Be Kids is an advocate for disadvantaged individuals, as well as animal species that are at risk. Take action: Support indigenous peoples.

Reuters

Satish Bhaykre, who was beaten by a mob due to a fake WhatsApp text, poses inside his house on the outskirts of Nagpur, India, June 23.

The world’s biggest social media network is thinking rather small these days.

On July 18, Facebook announced that it will start removing misinformation on its digital platforms that could spark violence. While the goal is global, the company will act on what it hopes are local community standards, relying on “local context and local partners” to help it in making decisions to ban language and images that might incite physical harm.

The move comes after India accused Facebook of allowing rumors about the kidnapping of children to circulate on its messaging service WhatsApp. The allegations led to the mob killing of several innocent people. Similar violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar has also been attributed to false information on Facebook platforms. In many countries, rules about the wrong kind of speech are similar to a legal norm in the United States that people cannot yell “fire!” in a crowded theater. Certain rights such as free speech are not protected if they are abused to cause harm. 

Like other social media companies, Facebook is already trying to meet new privacy standards imposed by the European Union and to regulate content under a new German online hate speech law. It is also providing more transparency about political ads that run on its site. And it is working with local fact-checking organizations to better filter out fake news.

Last April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the company faces a dilemma because, while it is based in the US, where universal ideals are largely understood, 90 percent of its 2 billion users live elsewhere, with different social norms and different cultures. “It’s not clear to me that our current situation of how we define community standards is going to be effective for articulating that around the world,” he told Congress.

Facebook is now on a search to find those local norms, either informal or written in law, that will then be used to restrain local content in hopes of keeping the peace in particular societies. At the same time, Facebook also sees its platforms as an opportunity to create a global community with shared values. For example, it imposes a general ban on certain types of expression, such as nudity.

In a 2017 book, Canadian scholar Michael Ignatieff tried to find a balance between universal ideals and what he called “ordinary virtues,” or the moral operating system of local communities. Such virtues are seen not as an obligation within a society but as a “gift,” negotiated between individuals, one at a time and in the spirit of reciprocity and solidarity. He questions whether the language of rights has “reached into ... the common practices of trust and tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation that are the essence of private moral behavior.”

What is noteworthy, writes Dr. Ignatieff based on his research in several countries, is the common desire for moral order, or a framework of expectations that allows life to be meaningful.

His work builds on that of the late Harvard University moral philosopher Lawrence Kohlberg, whose research on young children discovered an innate ability of humans to rise up to higher stages of moral reasoning. His work also discovered that individuals at those higher stages can influence those at lower stages through democratic discussion on moral dilemmas. As people’s thinking on issues is improved, they develop a “commonality’’ on right and wrong.

The ordinary virtues of a local community can eventually become universal if people feel both safe and free to communicate with others. Facebook, along with Twitter, Google, and other social media giants, is venturing down this long road. The more these companies honor local virtues, the more they can help define global ethics.