Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone/AP

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (left), Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (center), and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu shake hands after a joint statement following the consultations on Syria, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Dec. 18, 2018.

President Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from Syria could make the eastern third of the country an open arena for several competing forces and herald a new chapter in the country’s bloody civil war, just as it was beginning to wind down.

Some 2,200 US Special Forces are deployed in the vast terrain east of the Euphrates River, where they support and train the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a local Arab and Kurdish militia that has played a leading role in the battle against the Islamic State (ISIS).

Mr. Trump declared victory over ISIS as the reason for pulling out of Syria, but many analysts warn that the extremist group could bounce back in the vacuum caused by a US departure. The US troop presence has also served as a block to other parties that might seek influence or control over the territory.

They include Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has long stated his intention to restore full control over the entire country, and Turkey, which views the YPG, the Kurdish element of the SDF, as a terrorist organization, and is threatening to invade northeast Syria to crush the force. Then there is Iran, which is steadily entrenching militarily in Syria, a consequence of the key role it has played in helping safeguard the Assad regime. The US departure from eastern Syria potentially eases the way to develop ground supply routes between Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Still, while all parties are mulling the consequences of Trump’s decision and assessing courses of action, much depends on the nature of the US withdrawal and future support for the Kurdish-dominated SDF, which has done most of the heavy lifting in the fight against ISIS in Syria.

“What the Kurds do will depend, I think, on how the precise implementation of President Trump’s decision plays out,” says Frederic C. Hof, senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council and former envoy to the Syrian opposition under President Barack Obama. “Will this simply amount to the removal of US ground forces from eastern Syria? Will the air war against ISIS remnants in support of YPG ground operations [against ISIS] continue? Will the US military communicate to Russian counterparts that the Euphrates River remains a ‘do-not-cross’ de-confliction line? Will US air assets and the [SDF] continue to defend that line? Will the United States dissuade Turkey from invading northeast Syria?”

Kurdish options?

These questions are apparently being debated within the administration in light of Trump’s decision. The Pentagon reportedly is mulling using Iraq as a base of continued operations – such as air strikes or Special Forces raids – against ISIS in Syria.  

“My sense, however, is that there is not a lot of time to decide,” Mr. Hof says. “Unless we can come to some specific understandings with the Kurds that might mitigate President Trump’s announcement, they will likely retire from the ISIS fight, consolidate in the northeast, and reach out to the [Assad] regime and the Russians for a cooperative arrangement.”

Indications of such a Kurdish appeal were evident Friday. Syria said its troops had entered Manbij, a northern town reportedly still patrolled by US Special Forces, though CNN quoted an unidentified US official as saying the Syrian claim was premature.

The SDF has warned that a US withdrawal could lead to an ISIS resurgence, reversing the gains of the past 18 months during which the group’s self-declared caliphate – which once extended across the Syria-Iraq border – shriveled to a few isolated locations in the desert of eastern Syria and villages along the Euphrates.

But overshadowing the prospect of a revitalized ISIS is the possibility of a Turkish military invasion of mainly Kurdish-populated northeast Syria to fight the YPG, which is linked to the Kurdish Workers Party – classified by Ankara as a terrorist organization. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has warned of an imminent offensive, and the US presence in the region was seen as a check to his plans. Following Trump’s tweeted announcement of the US withdrawal – shortly after a telephone conversation with the Turkish president – Mr. Erdoğan said the planned offensive would be postponed, but added “this is not an open-ended waiting process.”

“In the upcoming months, on the ground in Syria, we will follow a style of incursion that eliminates both [Kurdish] elements and remnants” of ISIS, Erdoğan told business leaders in Istanbul.

Erdoğan’s domestic concerns

Nevertheless, the decision to invade northeast Syria may stem less from the threat posed to Turkey by the YPG and more out of domestic political concerns for Erdoğan in the run-up to municipal elections in March, analysts say.

“The rally-round-the-flag effect … seems to be his only hope to win votes,” says Aykan Erdemir, senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a former member of the Turkish parliament. Erdoğan’s “ultranationalist allies have already made clear that they want to go ahead with full-scale military operations in eastern Syria. Erdoğan, desperate for the support of the ultranationalists, is not in a position to go against their will.”

It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will intercede to protect its erstwhile Kurdish allies from a Turkish onslaught. But, Mr. Erdemir adds, “Erdoğan’s political survival instincts at home will trump any offer Washington can make.”

SOURCE:

PeopleDemandChange.com

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Pinned between the prospect of an ISIS resurgence and a Turkish invasion, the Kurds may find their only hope lies in reaching some form of accommodation with the Assad regime and the Russians, the main outside power in the country. If Damascus reasserts its authority over eastern Syria, perhaps with some limited autonomy for the Kurds and with Russian blessing, it might dilute Erdoğan’s enthusiasm for an invasion.

“Erdoğan would now prefer Assad’s direct rule in eastern Syria to self-rule by the [Kurds]. Erdoğan has long given up his goal of regime change in Syria, and killing the idea of Kurdish autonomy across Turkish borders has become a key objective,” says Erdemir.

Iran sees a US plot

It is for that reason that some in Iran view with suspicion Trump’s motives in withdrawing. While some in Tehran see it as part of a reelection bid by Trump, “other Iranian views, which likely will be shared by many at the top ranks of the regime, look at Trump’s decision not as a sudden emotional decision but as a calculated sinister step,” says Alex Vatanka, senior fellow and Iran expert at the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

“These observers believe that Trump is pulling out of Syria as part of a plan to break the Iran-Turkey-Russia alliance by pulling Turkey out with the promise of giving Ankara a free hand to crack hard down on the Syrian Kurds,” he says. “In this view, the decision to pull out of Syria was not just Trump’s decision but a US plot to prolong the Syrian war and deprive Iran, Russia, and Assad of a chance to solve the conflict politically.”

With its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and associated Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has played a pivotal role in protecting the Assad regime. Now it’s establishing a discrete but potentially potent military presence in parts of western Syria that bring it into closer proximity to Hezbollah and Israel.

For its part Hezbollah, which at the height of the war fielded 5,000 to 10,000 fighters in Syria, has returned most of its cadres to Lebanon, where they have switched their full attention back to Israel. Tensions lately have been running high, due in part to Israel’s discovery of cross-border attack tunnels from Lebanon, allegedly constructed by the Iran-backed group, as well as Hezbollah’s ongoing efforts to improve the accuracy of its stockpile of guided missiles.

Israel’s close eye on Iran

Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, a hard-liner in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, predicted that with the withdrawal of US forces in eastern Syria, Hezbollah could receive more weapons from Iran.

But the US presence in Syria has not been an insurmountable barrier to Iranian arms convoys coursing west through the deserts of Iraq and Syria. US forces currently deployed at the Tanf border crossing near Jordan effectively block the shortest route from central Iraq to Damascus, but another option, albeit more circuitous, is a route that crosses the border well to the northeast, travels along the west side of the Euphrates, and then turns toward Damascus at Deir el-Zour.

Still, Israel has signaled it will destroy consignments of Iranian weapons destined for Hezbollah regardless of whether they are transported across Syria by ground or air.

On Wednesday, Mr. Netanyahu said the departure of US troops from eastern Syria would not change Israel’s policy.

“Protecting our homeland begins with nipping major threats in the bud,” he said at an Israeli Air Force graduation. “We'll not accept Iranian entrenchment in Syria, which is meant to harm us, and we are acting to eradicate it.” The US withdrawal “doesn't change our policy. Our red lines remain the same – in Syria and everywhere else.”

Netanyahu spoke hours after reports of multiple Israeli air strikes Tuesday night against Syrian military bases around Damascus. It was the first significant Israeli air attack in Syria since mid-September, when a strike on missile facilities near Latakia in northwest Syria led to a Syrian air defense system shooting down a Russian surveillance aircraft. Russia blamed Israel then for “irresponsible actions,” and on Wednesday Russia again chided Israel, saying it had threatened the safety of two civilian airliners passing through the area.

Nevertheless, Iran’s interests in eastern Syria – unlike those of the Assad regime and Turkey – are limited, perhaps solely to establishing land corridors for arms transfers and possibly securing economic benefit from oil and gas fields east of the Euphrates.

“I just can’t see the Iranians investing too much in this project [in eastern Syria] at the moment given the situation on the home front and given that they have already helped secure Assad’s survival,” says the Middle East Institute’s Mr. Vatanka. “I would bet on the Iranians being cautious about their involvement in eastern Syria. They really don't have a strategic case to risk much there.”

Alex Cavendish/NurPhoto/Sipa/AP

Friends and families of knife-crime victims protested opposite Downing Street in London in June. In December, London recorded the 132nd homicide of the year – the most in a decade – and 77 of those killings were stabbings.

Sephton Henry is on a mission: he wants to keep British kids away from violence and gangs.

The activist was once in their shoes himself. As a child, he was groomed into a gang, and he went to prison seven times before he found a way out. One of the keys to turning his life around, he says, was finding mentors who could relate to him, and who saw his worth and made him understand it, too.

Now he does the same for others, mentoring at-risk young people and speaking in schools, using his personal experience to get through to them. “We go into schools to try to prevent them from getting into it in first place,” he says. “They’re young enough that they’re not conditioned yet. But it’s not so much about what we say, it’s about who says it.” His past gives him credibility.

Work like Mr. Henry’s is suddenly getting more attention as knife crime is surging across England and Wales. The number of police-recorded offenses with a knife or sharp instrument has been rising steadily since 2015. This year saw a 25 percent increase, compared to the last three years, in knife crimes leading to court action.

In December, London recorded the 132nd homicide of the year – the most in a decade – and 77 of those killings were stabbings. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick suggested in a recent interview that knife crime in London may have “leveled off” in 2018, noting that the number of stabbing deaths this year was on a par with the 80 such killings in 2017. But London's murder rate is just one aspect of a broader phenomenon. Particularly worrying is the rising number of young people involved in knife crime – both as victims and perpetrators.

The concerning figures have prompted a race to understand what’s driving the increase in stabbings, and work to prevent them. That’s complicated, both because the causes are complex and interconnected, and because not everyone agrees on what they are, or how best to address them. The suggested drivers of knife crime range from structural problems such as poverty and inequality, to more recent phenomena such as changes in gang activity and an austerity policy in Britain that has slashed resources for police and social workers over the past decade.

But the focus now is on preventive efforts through “early intervention,” directed at young people. The action plan launched by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, focuses heavily on such efforts in hope that keeping young people from getting involved in violence is easier than getting them out, and addressing deeper causes instead of just immediate symptoms will bear long-term fruit.

‘County lines’ crime

England and Wales are not experiencing a massive crime wave. Overall, crime levels are lower than they were a decade or two ago, and serious violent crime, while rising, is still relatively rare. (There have been more than twice as many murders so far this year in New York than in London.)

But the rise in knife crime is happening alongside an increase in serious violent crime throughout the two nations, particularly in cities. And that is causing worry.

For Rick Muir, director of The Police Foundation, an independent think tank in London, the best supported explanation for the recent surge in stabbings is that gangs are changing the way they deal drugs, which has led to increased competition and conflict.

Increasingly, gangs based in cities are not only selling drugs in their own territory, but also exporting drugs to provincial towns – and often using children to do so, an activity known here as “county lines” (after the phone lines drug gangs use to communicate between towns). That’s bringing the groups increasingly into contact with other gangs, which can fuel conflict.

“What may be happening now is that we’ve seen increased competition between groups trading in crack cocaine and heroin, and obviously increased competition leads to conflict, and conflict in this world leads to violent crime,” says Dr. Muir. He added that the groups use violence to control and intimidate the young people they’ve recruited.

Some also see a connection to austerity policies in Britain, imposed in 2008, that have led to reduced funding for police forces and social services, including youth centers that worked with disadvantaged and at-risk young people. Research by the YMCA shows that local government spending on youth services fell by 62 percent since 2010.

Hannah McKay/Reuters

A police officer stands at a cordon after police arrested a man carrying a knife outside Buckingham Palace in London in August 2017.

Fighting crime like an epidemic

Mayor Khan’s strategy to reduce the numbers takes the public health approach: Authorities treat violent crime not just as a police problem, but as an infectious disease that must be stopped from spreading. Such an approach has been successful elsewhere – Glasgow saw murders drop by half between 2004 and 2017 after adopting it.

In addition to increased police funding and more targeted police intervention, the mayor is boosting prevention efforts, much of them focused on young people. That includes a planned “Violence Reduction Unit” that will bring together police officers with social workers and health workers to focus on early interventions. The mayor is also funding initiatives directed at organizations that target at-risk youth.

There are now multitudes of organizations trying to keep young people away from gangs. Growing Against Violence (GAV) is one of them. Shaun Willshire, operations and safeguarding manager at the organization who spent three decades as a police officer, says the growing number of children recruited into “county lines” gang activity has led to a normalization of violence.

“To stab someone or to shank someone, it’s just part and parcel of being a ‘road man,’ and there’s no talk whatsoever as to consequences or the reality of what they’re doing,” he says. Violence is sometimes used as a way to prove themselves to senior gang members, to earn “ratings.” “They don’t actually see it as stabbing someone, they see it as their way of getting ratings,” he says. “You would pick up a car keys and go out of the house; they would pick up a knife and go out of the house.”

GAV targets students, giving talks to all the students in each grade at the same time, in an effort to instill “positive peer pressure” against gangs. “The reality is, the kids are groomed into gangs by negative peer-on-peer pressure,” he says. “Now our program is about the positive peer-on-peer pressure. It’s the preventive program. Our program works in that we get kids to look out for each other, and speak out for each other.”

Underlying problems?

The mayor’s plan has won praise, but also some criticism – including that the funding falls far short of what is needed. The London Assembly’s police and crime committee raised concerns with the plan in a recent letter to the mayor, including that it had an outsized focus on young people.

One of the challenges for the program is that its efforts won’t bear fruit immediately, says Muir. “The important thing is all of this won’t result in easy wins. You might be able to suppress some of this through enforcement activity in the short term.... But unless you deal with some of these underlying problems, you’ll end up in the same place in two years time or five years time.”

Those deeper drivers of violence are exactly what Henry, the former gang member turned activist, sees as the biggest issues. The root causes of young people getting involved in gang violence are simple, he says: structural inequality and poverty that lead to social alienation, particularly for young people of color.

“The biggest thing is this: These young children don’t feel a part of society, so they make their own worlds,” he says. When they don’t see members of parliament or police officers or business leaders who look like them, they don’t see opportunities for themselves in a world outside street culture. “Unless these young men see themselves in places of power, they will not see themselves as part of society,” he says.

He says the government does not focus enough on poverty and inequality as drivers of violence. He’s also frustrated by bureaucratic rules that can sometimes keep help from those who need it, and what he sees as a failure to empower the right people to do the job. Because of his past, Henry has a credibility that many others don’t, and can serve as an effective role model and mentor. Henry says more of the support and funding needs to go to people who have credibility in the communities they are targeting.

Preventive work is also personal for Yvonne Lawson. She started the Godwin Lawson Foundation, named for her son, after he was stabbed to death eight years ago. She works with students, visiting schools to share her story and help young people understand the consequences of getting involved in criminality. Her organization also does workshops for students deemed high risk, working to develop their personal and emotional development, resilience, and self-esteem.

“Most of the young people that we spoke to before our project would say they’ve been forced into a certain lifestyle against their wish,” she says. “So developing those skills gives them power and confidence that they can face up and express themselves and actually tell to the gang that they don’t want to be a part of it.”

Shovel in hand, Duane Hager heads for his cornfield and digs up a shovelful of dirt, revealing wriggling earthworms. Although a pelting rain has soaked his gray T-shirt in seconds, not a single puddle lies in the field or in the cow pasture beyond – a sign of vigorous, uncompacted earth.

“If you have soil that is healthy and balanced, it translates into your animals,” says the Kellogg, Minn., dairy farmer.

Across the American Midwest and Plains, small groups of farmers are looking at their most important resource – the soil – and contemplating big change. Their grandfathers and great grandfathers planted trees for windbreaks and planted along the contours of the slopes rather than up and down them to reduce soil erosion. Their fathers began leaving crop stubble in their fields to improve moisture retention, and some gave up tilling the soil altogether. Now, the new generation of producers is looking underground to try to replenish their soils, and they’re doing it by growing something in addition to corn and soybeans. The new farm bill, which President Trump signed on Dec. 20, includes measures that could help popularize the idea.

“Mainstream agriculture, they just don’t get it,” says Jerry Doan, standing by a mix of 20-plus cover crops from low-lying legumes to tall stalks of millet on his farm in Sterling, N.D. “You have got to feed the biology of the soil.”

It’s an international problem, with a third of the world’s soils already degraded, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, due to everything from erosion and salinization to untreated urban waste and mining.  Here in the United States, a big concern is commercial agriculture, where evidence is growing that decades of an exclusive corn-soybean rotation has caused farmland to lose nutrients and its ability to hold and filter water.

The effects reach far beyond the farm to waterways and the grocery store. Because farmland doesn’t hold the nitrites and nitrates produced from fertilizers and herbicides, they leach into the water and find their way as far as the Gulf of Mexico, creating state-sized areas of low or no oxygen, which kills fish and other marine life. What’s more, the commercial vegetables at the grocery store have fewer nutrients than in the 1950s, according to several studies, in part because the soil has fewer nutrients they can take up.

Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Duane Hager, owner of Hager Farms, a dairy farm in Kellogg, Minn., has been embracing healthy soil practices, such as limited fertilizer and no till, for years. On a rainy summer afternoon, his efforts pay off: There is no flooding, or even large puddles, anywhere in his field.

Farmers have tried to minimize the environmental damage by using GPS and soil analysis to fertilize only areas of fields that need it and by creating buffer strips between crops and ditches and waterways, so the nitrates and nitrites stay put.

But “we are not going to fix water quality with just fertilizer [reduction],” says Sarah Carlson, strategic initiatives director for Practical Farmers of Iowa, a nonprofit helping producers build resilient farms and communities. “We need other products with more roots.”

In the Midwest and Plains, that means finding something to grow in addition to corn and soybeans.

“We’re always going to grow corn and soybeans but we need other stuff,” says University of Iowa water expert Chris Jones. “We need a third crop in Iowa really badly.”

Seeding ‘hotspots’

Farmers are experimenting with growing cover crops on their fields, such as barley or oats, during the winter season. The Land Institute in Salina, Kan., is pushing perennials, such as Kernza, an intermediate wheatgrass it developed and trademarked. That way farmers wouldn’t have to plant new crops every spring. Still others are calling for a return to a mix of animal and crop agriculture that used to predominate in rural America.

“My grandfather started contouring, my dad started no-till, so I wanted to do this,” says Darrell Steele, a farmer in Iowa's Washington County, who’s experimenting with 10 acres of barley, which he mixes into the feeds for his 2,000 hogs. “But when you put these things in, you take a hit. In the off-season, the ground is on the couch eating Ho Hos. But when you start putting this stuff in, it’s like telling the ground to run a marathon. It’s going to stumble and fall at first.”

That’s a problem for many producers, whose thin margins make them reluctant to make big changes if their yields are going to fall, even temporarily. Another challenge: Making the switch can be costly. For example, continuous no-till and low-till farming, which decades of studies have shown improve the soil and reduce costs, is still used on only 1 in every 5 acres of US cropland, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). One big reason: It requires farmers to invest in completely new equipment.

Then there’s the cultural barrier: Farmer communities tend to be conservative.

“That peer pressure, that is huge,” says Kristin Brennan, state soil health specialist at the Minnesota office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). “No one wants to be the weird farmer with lots of Kernza.”

Still, there are exceptions.

“Where we see it really taking off is where you have a community of farmers,” says Ms. Brennan. “We call them hotspots.”

Washington County, which has the most acres of cover crops of any Iowa county, appears to be one of those communities. Farmers tour each others’ farms. Mr. Steele, the local hog producer, says he tried barley on the advice of a fellow farmer. At least once a week, he talks to Steve Berger, a Washington County farmer who has gained national attention for his use of no-till cover crops. “We all do our own thing but it’s teamwork, too.”

“In this neighborhood you just have a bunch of really conservation-minded folks,” says Tony Maxwell, a district conservationist for the NRCS.

Provisions of the new farm bill, which encourages farmers to plant cover crops and use soil-sensitive crop rotations and grazing techniques, suggest that awareness of the problem is growing. “We had a lot of strong champions this past year for legislation related to soil health,” says Alyssa Charney, a senior policy specialist for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a Washington-based alliance of grass-roots sustainability groups. “There's a growing interest for sure.”

This story was made possible in part by a fellowship with the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources.

At a time when many see looming clouds on the horizon of American democracy, I’ve been thinking about glimmers of hope.

From interviewing high schoolers running for governor in Kansas to following a canvasser in Kentucky as he knocked on doors, I’ve had the privilege this past year of meeting many Americans energized about their role in making government better.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Jack Bergeson, pictured outside his parents’ restaurant in Wichita, Kan., was the first teenager to run for governor in Kansas – after discovering that there was no age limit for the position.

Political activism in America, especially as depicted on social media or TV, tends to focus almost exclusively on die-hard Trump supporters or those who form the official “resistance” to the current administration.

But in between the red Make America Great Again hats in Appalachian diners and the pink hats at urban protests, a renaissance of everyday citizens, especially women, is sweeping American politics, posits the journal Democracy. The encouraging signs I’ve seen across the heartland this year are, I believe, part and parcel of a broader awakening that includes both sexes.

An earnest argument

It’s easy to miss even the most poignant examples of democracy in action.

I almost did.

After 12 days on the road for The Christian Science Monitor in Montana, I was exhausted when I finally left a carefully crafted rally featuring the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in late September. Earlier in the evening I’d seen protesters bang on a window after being denied entrance, holding up their pink poster-board signs and yelling.

When I walked out into the cold autumn night, one of those protesters was still there, leaning over the fence, arguing with a supporter of GOP Senate candidate Matt Rosendale on his way out. She was young, scrappy, and passionately liberal. He was older, weathered, and equally fervent.

Yet more rancor, I thought as I walked past them.

But what I heard in passing was honest, earnest, and brave. They were asking serious questions about what kind of America the other wanted to live in – and responding with substantive answers.

I turned around to listen, savoring democracy in action. Right there in the dusty parking lot of the Bozeman fairgrounds, two Americans were coexisting in a rarely inhabited space between Facebook diatribes and in-person “Kumbaya” sessions. If we are ever to bridge our current divides, the most crucial bridge-building will take place here.

Learning to defend the other side

This spring, I saw high schoolers preparing for the sort of reasoned argument that would enable them to be such bridge-builders.

“Debate forces you … to hear the other side,” student Ben Engle told me on the sidelines of a Saturday qualifier for national championships.

“Not just hear them, but defend their beliefs,” added fellow student Bobby Phillips, one of the top nationally ranked policy debaters. (The contest requires that debaters also argue the other side of the question.)

Nationwide, more than 140,000 students are involved in the National Speech & Debate Association, and the national championships have doubled in size since the 1990s to 5,200 participants.

Shared love of country

Lest you be tempted to think reasoned debate is limited these days to high school students in controlled environments, meet Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot.

Lt. Col. McGrath ran for Congress as a rookie Democrat in a Kentucky district where President Trump won big, drawing many national reporters to the Bluegrass State, myself included.

In a diner parking lot along the campaign trail, where she had sat and talked for more than an hour with a handful of locals, I asked her about how losing fellow soldiers affected her view of a politician’s role. She told me about a fellow pilot in the Marines – a Republican with whom she had had vigorous political debates.

“Sugar Bear and I might have disagreements but we never doubted our patriotism, we never doubted our love of country,” said McGrath, who is part of a broader movement to put country above party on Capitol Hill.

McGrath narrowly lost her bid for Congress, but she seeded a new crop of civic activists – people like Scott Browder.

“I used to think all I had to do was vote, and let others do the work. No more,” said Mr. Browder, a first-time canvasser who let me follow him around for an afternoon in Richmond, Ky. “I used to think I couldn’t make a difference. No more.”

‘Without you ... the election just won’t be the same’

Back in Montana, Rebecca Johnson organizes people like Browder, except her team’s whole focus is getting people to vote, period –  never mind for whom. She and her team visited the farmers’ market, college classes, even homeless shelters, chipping away at the masses of Americans who are too busy or apathetic or despairing to go to the polls.

They adopted the slogan, “Without you ... the election just won’t be the same.” 

Montana registered the third-highest turnout rate of any state, helped in part by the tight Senate race but undoubtedly by volunteers like Ms. Johnson as well.

While there’s ample room for improvement – even in Montana, about 1 in 3 eligible voters are still forfeiting their role in shaping America’s path forward – it’s people like Johnson who give me hope.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Glenn Brunkow checks on his ewes and their lambs, March 2018. He and his father farm 2,500 acres in northeastern Kansas, including land their forebears homesteaded in the 1860s. Mr. Brunkow, who sells about half his beef to Asia, voiced his concerns to his representatives in Washington over President Trump’s trade policy.

‘We the people’

There were many other inspiring examples of democracy in action, too: Glenn Brunkow, a Kansas farmer concerned about President Trump’s steel tariffs, who left his lambs during a chilly week in March to talk with his representatives in Washington; Ohio welders with tough hands and well-worn overalls sitting around a sleek glass conference table presenting their proposals for making their shop floor more efficient, battling America’s dearth of skilled laborers with grass-roots ingenuity; and the team of folks in a West Virginia city at the epicenter of the opioid crisis who cut the city’s overdose rate in half.

If you don’t have hope in America’s government, look to its people. They are sovereign in this country, after all. As Abraham Lincoln once said ­– drawing on the words first penned by Bible translator John Wycliffe – our government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

And there are a lot of good people out here in America.

Royal Thai Navy Facebook Page/AP)

Members of a boys soccer team in Thailand trapped inside a cave in Mae Sai, northern Thailand, last July smile as a Thai Navy SEAL team reaches them with aid. Though stranded more than a week in the partly flooded cave, the youths were all rescued alive.

The year 2018 would seem to be ringing itself out in a Dickens of a mess, a prime candidate for “the worst of times.” 

Paying attention to what troubles humanity is understandable: The out-of-whack needs fixing. But some observers are looking deeper and seeing a different picture.

Harvard University’s Steven Pinker makes the case that humankind’s current great leap forward is being overlooked. The reason seems to lie with human nature: Tragedies land outsize emotional wallops. And people tend to think about potential dangers more than enjoy what’s good. (His book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress” made the Monitor’s list of the best books of 2018.)

The better news of 2018 is there for the finding, almost across the board. While the world needs to abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible, renewable energy supplies are coming on strong: They make up almost 25 percent of the world’s electrical output, and the figure is growing. At the same time electrical service, with its many benefits, now reaches 87 percent of humanity.

The number of girls in school worldwide now almost equals the number of boys. In 1986 it was about 85 girls in school to every 100 boys.

Women’s role in politics has seen huge gains in many countries. In Spain women hold 11 of the 17 cabinet posts. In the United States, nearly 23 percent of the members of the new Congress will be women, bringing their share of seats close to the international average of 24 percent. 

Worldwide rates of ills such as poverty, infant and maternal mortality, and teen pregnancy continue to trend down, down, down. 

And so on.

This progress doesn’t come without effort. It’s being stirred by individuals’ love for humanity and maximized by intelligent thinking. “As ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition,” Dr. Pinker notes, “life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting.”

“More interesting” might include the fact that earthly troubles haven’t dampened human curiosity about the cosmos: Private aerospace companies have joined governments to launch payload after payload into earth orbit, and even to lay plans for trips to Mars. For its part, in 2018 NASA placed the unmanned lander InSight on the Mars surface, the first landing on that planet’s red dirt since 2012.

Innumerable individual acts of courage and kindness were represented by a few that gained international attention, including the brave Thai Navy SEALs who rescued a dozen of schoolboys from a flooded cave in July. 

During the Christmas holidays, church members and other volunteers along the US-Mexico border are stepping up to give food, shelter, and other aid to asylum-seeking migrants. They’re being dropped off, sometimes by the hundreds, by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel at bus stations or in front of homeless shelters and churches to fend for themselves.

Ruben Garcia, the director of Annunciation House, a shelter in El Paso, Texas, is one volunteer now scurrying to meet a surge of need. He’s been at it a long time and says he’s just where he wants to be. 

“I’m really, really glad” to be doing this work, he told the Monitor in 2012. “I get to do something with depth and purpose and meaning. I get to live my life in a way that is fundamentally about the rights and dignity of the human being.”

More stories of inspiration and progress like these lie ahead in 2019.