Refined Kitten – also known as APT33, Elfin, and Magnallium – is a shadowy hacker group that cybersecurity firms believe works in the interests of Iran. When tensions between Washington and Tehran spiked last June, Refined Kitten launched a broad phishing attack against a range of U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Energy and national labs.

Soon, Refined Kitten and other members of Iran’s capable cyber corps may be on the offensive again. Iran has vowed revenge in the wake of the U.S. killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike on Friday, and digital disruption could well be one of its weapons.

That’s because Iran has long taken an asymmetric approach to confrontation with America. “War” between the two nations wouldn’t look at all like the Gulf War or the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Experts say it would likely be a shifting, hidden sort of conflict spread over the region and the world, in which Iran tries to surprise and strike quickly at its heavily armed adversary, via hackers, proxy militias, or other indirect means.

“The cyber piece of this is also in Iran’s immediate tool box,” says Elisa Catalano Ewers, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council staff.

Patience may be part of the Iranian approach as well. Rather than responding quickly to the death of a man widely considered the second most powerful leader in the country, Iran appears to be calibrating its response to the U.S. strike, weighing what it deems might be effective while trying to avoid all-out war with the United States.

“They’re taking their time,” says Ms. Ewers.

Where Iran may respond next

The American decision to target General Soleimani as he left Baghdad International Airport likely shocked the Iranian leadership, say experts. He was not hard to find, as he traveled semi-openly throughout the region, visiting Iranian allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Iraq, where the attack took place, is perhaps the first theater where Iran might respond. Iranian-linked Shiite militias in Iraq have been escalating activities in recent months and recently surrounded and attacked the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in response to American airstrikes against fellow militia members across Iraq and Syria.

Iraqi lawmakers were generally outraged at what they saw as a U.S. action that infringed on their sovereignty. On Sunday they approved a resolution calling for the expulsion of American troops in their country – something which, if carried out, would fundamentally tilt the regional power balance.

Iranian proxies elsewhere in the region might also target U.S. troops and American civilians in response to the Soleimani killing. Iran itself could undertake missile strikes on U.S. bases or on Saudi or United Arab Emirates oil facilities. It could increase its naval activity against oil tankers in Gulf waters.

Iran could also completely abandon the 2015 nuclear deal struck with the United States and Europe. On Sunday, Iran said it would feel free to produce as much nuclear material as it wanted, though Iranian officials did say they might reverse and reenter the deal in the future.

Iran might also resort to unconventional means of retaliation, such as individual acts of terrorism in the U.S. or Europe, or a ramping up of its shadowy cyber capability against international banks, power plants, or other vulnerable targets.

“We should be prepared for Iran [to retaliate] across its entire range of asymmetric capabilities, inside Iraq, across the region and elsewhere across the globe where they have active cells,” writes William Wechsler, director of Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council, in an analysis of what comes next.

Rising threats in cyberspace

Since Desert Storm, “literally in every armed conflict, we’ve seen increased action in the cyber domain,” says retired Brig. Gen. Gregory Touhill, adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and America’s first federal chief information security officer, serving from 2016 to 2017.

Cyber warfare has proved particularly attractive to Iran, since a four-decade arms embargo has kept its conventional military from keeping up with other powers in the region.

“Between 2009-10 and 2019, and often via non-state proxies such as the Iranian Cyber Army, Iran has invested heavily in developing and using cyber capabilities, for propaganda, intelligence exploitation and disruption,” noted a November 2019 report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), an international research firm.

Iran’s cyber capabilities are not on par with, say, Russia and China, cyber experts note. But it has shown increasing ability and willingness to use digital means. As far back as 2005, groups linked to Iran have hacked into websites to deface them with pro-Iranian messages. Over the weekend, hackers altered the website of an obscure U.S. government program to depict President Donald Trump being punched in the face by an Iranian fist.

There’s no evidence yet this was sponsored by Iran. But as early as 2005, groups linked to Iran have used such web “defacements” to get their message out. In 2016, the U.S. indicted seven Iranians for trying to gain control of a 20-foot computerized dam in New York.

Iran has also been linked to the Shamoon wiper virus, which in 2012 was used against Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s oil company, and destroyed data on at least 30,000 personal computers.

The cyber efforts are often carried out by nonstate partners affiliated with and often funded by Iran, part of a larger pattern of what the IISS report calls Iran’s “networks of influence.” These networks allow Iran to disavow responsibility for the attacks.

That said, the threats of Iranian retaliation following Friday’s U.S. airstrike killing General Soleimani should not be overblown, cyber experts say.

“It’s unlikely that there might be a large-scale financial attack,” says Rahul Telang, professor of information systems and management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College. “I don’t think Iran has the technical capability.”

Small and midsize businesses that have not assessed their digital risk could see some impact. And specific sectors of the economy might see some events.

Even in cyber warfare, Iran isn’t likely to go too far for fear of provoking a more devastating response – either on the ground or in cyberspace.

“A decision for a cyberattack on the United States will depend on Iranian calculations of the risk of a damaging U.S. response,” wrote James Andrew Lewis, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a commentary back in June. “If Iran does act in the United States, crippling a casino makes a point [about U.S. vulnerability]. Blacking out the power grid or destroying a pipeline risks crossing the line.”

The U.S. doesn’t only have superior capability in conventional warfare, it also has a decided edge in cyberspace. It was the Stuxnet virus, widely believed to have been developed by the U.S. and Israel, that severely damaged Iran’s nuclear program.

“While there’s great talk that the Iranians will act, they do so at their own peril,” says Mr. Touhill, the former federal information security officer.

Aaron Steinberg is standing in the middle of Manhattan’s Foley Square, holding up a handmade sign that, for him, most clearly states the fundamental reason he and his family have come to stand shoulder to shoulder with around 25,000 others this Sunday morning. 

“All humans were made in the image of God,” his sign’s taped-on words proclaim, a reference to the first chapter of Bereshit, or Genesis, in the first book of the Torah, which expresses both a bedrock theological principle in his faith as well as a basis for his civic ideals. 

“It is reinforcing the idea that all human dignity matters,” says Mr. Steinberg, a deputy director at The Bronfman Fellowship in Manhattan, which organizes leadership programs for Jewish teens that emphasize civic pluralism. “All hate is a problem, and anti-Semitism is just one example of the hate that’s out there in the world,” he says. “But ‘All humans were created in the image of God’ means that we’re all equally valuable, and attacks against anyone should bother all of us.”

Recent attacks against Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in the New York area, however, were the primary reasons behind Sunday’s rally and solidarity march across the Brooklyn Bridge, organized by a coalition of Jewish organizations. In December, two incidents – the shooting and killing of five at an Orthodox-owned deli in Jersey City, New Jersey, and the break-in and machete attack on a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in nearby Monsey, New York, have rattled most New Yorkers in ways they can’t remember experiencing before.

A significant number, if not a majority, of the throngs of New Yorkers and others who marched on Sunday were part of the five borough’s 1.1 million Jewish residents – the largest community outside Israel. Expressing the city’s kaleidoscope of Jewish traditions, many sang Hebrew songs and said prayers as they marched, mostly in families, from Manhattan to Brooklyn. 

But in many ways, the undercurrent throughout the conversations of those attending Sunday’s march of solidarity was a perceived erosion of a civic ideal rooted in a belief in universal human dignity. 

“It’s almost as if words like ‘pluralism’ or ‘diversity’ have lost their flavor,” says Tim Croak, a managing director at the Manhattan office of UBS, a Swiss investment bank. A devout Catholic, he came alone today, but struck up a conversation with a group of marchers that included Susie Goldberg and her husband, Edward Brubaker.

“People just don’t care or think as seriously as they should be about getting along together in civic spaces,” says Mr. Croak, who felt something change in the country after the melee during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. “It was just a seminal moment – it seemed to unleash something, and the worst of our angels have come out since then.”

“Pluralism is probably the single most important thing at this rally,” responds Ms. Goldberg, who is part of the Reform tradition of Judaism. “I think that’s what’s so incredibly important, because if people don’t have an imagination for other faiths, seeing our common humanity, the same thing will happen now as with the past with the amount of hate that is really going on.” 

“I’m a child of Holocaust survivors,” continues Ms. Goldberg, whose grandparents perished at Auschwitz. “And they had a beautiful life most all of their lives, but, insidiously, incidents like this crept up and crept up and crept up, and then,” she pauses a few seconds. “I just think we’re in a very similar place now.” 

Scholars have pointed out how eruptions of anti-Semitism around the globe have often transcended ideology, and have not been exclusively defined by acts of neo-Nazis or white supremacists, but include segments of the anti-Zionist left as well.

But last month’s deadly attacks against those in the most visible Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities also laid bare some of the simmering tensions in neighborhoods in which black and Jewish residents live together, and where cultural and class differences exacerbate conflict between Orthodox Jewish landlords and their black tenants. 

“We’ve got to start bridging”

Samuel Michael Roberts is sitting on a public bench on the pedestrian walkway over the Brooklyn Bridge, shouting encouragement and fist-bumping marchers as they walk by. A longtime resident of Harlem, he grabbed his cane this morning and set out to attend the rally – but with an injured leg, this is as far as he can go.

He’s a member of the historic “Mother Zion” African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, New York City’s oldest black church, founded in 1796, and a longtime member of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. But when a group of Orthodox marchers walk by singing a song in Hebrew, Mr. Roberts joins them, full-throated, beaming as he sings the Hebrew words.

Some of the marchers are shocked and ask him how he knows not just the tunes, but the words as well. “Oh, come on, I’ve been in Harlem since 1945!” he says, laughing.

But he also acknowledges the ongoing tensions, and the ignorance and prejudice he sometimes sees in his community. By the same token, he says he’s experienced the same kinds of looks of fear and the same physical recoiling from rabbis he’s come across.  

“A lot of these divisions, we’ve just got to start talking to each other, so when something happens, we know each other,” he says. “We’ve got to start bridging, we have to invite each other to more community meetings, we have to invite them to our churches, and have them invite us to their synagogues.”

Many of the recent attacks, too, have targeted the most visible Hasidic communities, a collection of diverse traditions sometimes labeled “ultra-Orthodox,” which prescribe distinct black clothing and, for some sects, black fedoras. Like many devout religious communities, Hasidic sects often maintain their own civic institutions, including schools, hospitals, and businesses.  

Visible signs of faith

Zalmy Chamowitz, a student in Crown Heights and a member of the Chabad Lubavitch community, has joined other young men in his community to encourage other Jewish men marching to don traditional tefillin, small black boxes containing Scripture, and the words of the Shema, the central statement of Judaism. 

“It’s the text in the Bible, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,’” says Mr. Chamowitz, noting that in his tradition, men over 13 put this on every day, except for the Sabbath and holidays, according to a verse in Deuteronomy that says to bind the law of the Lord upon your hands and between your eyes. 

In some communities, members have discussed whether the outward and visible signs of their faith should be hidden, or perhaps toned down in public places – discussions that had rarely taken place before.

But today Mr. Chamowitz is strapping the shel yad, the tefillah for the hands, and the shel rosh, the tefillah placed above the forehead, on Joshua Holshin, who has agreed to join in this ritual act of prayer. 

“What this does, it reminds us that we have to know there’s one God above us, and that our hearts and our minds should both be directed toward God, and that we should do the right thing,” Mr. Chamowitz says. “We put this on to remind us, there’s something above us, there’s something that’s watching over us, whatever we do, and we have to make sure we keep bringing light to this world.”

Afterward, Mr. Holshin, an auctioneer from the Upper West Side, notes the profound changes in his community, where he has recently volunteered to provide security for his Orthodox synagogue. 

“We’ve been beefing up security at all our institutions, our synagogues and schools,” he says. “A lot of our resources now need to go toward basic security, and not toward other social needs.”

“And after all that’s been happening, my kids are nervous, so that’s something to deal with, too,” Mr. Holshin continues. “So people just have to live all the time in a way that’s more alert and more vigilant and more attentive. And that’s unfortunate, especially in New York.”

Photo illustration by Dado Ruvic/Reuters

As of November 2019, the video-sharing app TikTok has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, with 700 million active daily users.

TikTok, a social network thought to be indispensable to Generation Z and incomprehensible to everyone else, is not just another smartphone app. The video-sharing service has become a cultural phenomenon on a par with YouTube and Instagram, complete with its own lingo, etiquette, and celebrities. As of late last year, it has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, with 700 million active daily users. 

TikTok is also owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. As it rises to become one of the world’s most popular online services, TikTok is also spreading norms that may stand at odds with the free-speech-über-alles ethos long advanced by Silicon Valley. U.S. military branches have banned the social media app on government-issued smartphones after the Pentagon warned them last month to delete the app.

What is TikTok?

It began in 2014 as a Chinese-owned platform called Musical.ly, where users could upload short looping videos of themselves lip-syncing songs. In 2018, Musical.ly merged with TikTok, another Chinese-owned video-sharing service launched a year earlier. Today, the app is known for viral lip-sync videos, silly pranks, memes, and “challenges” – some posed by the company itself. Compared with other social networks, TikTok skews very young.

“The app has become very popular by successfully combining a lot of features of both current and defunct social media popular with youth,” writes Ioana Literat, Columbia University communications professor, in an email to the Monitor. “It revolves around creating short, looping, share-worthy videos just like the now-defunct Vine, it includes the aspirational you-can-become-a-famous-influencer-too ethos of Instagram or YouTube, while at the same time also capitalizing on existing friend networks just like Snapchat.”

But, as with any platform, people have found their own uses for TikTok, including political expression. “Teens are organizing strikes on TikTok, or sharing feminist performance art,” says Professor Literat. “Not all content is brainless fun.”

Does it matter that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company?

It does, because it shapes the terms of service and, importantly, determines where the user’s data is stored. For instance, Feroza Aziz, a high school student in New Jersey, learned this when she was blocked from her TikTok account after posting a 40-second clip about China’s crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs.

The company’s moderation guidelines, as reported by The Guardian, prohibited any “criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc.”  (These guidelines have since been changed, according to a TikTok spokesman.)

In December, TikTok admitted that it had policies suppressing videos of members of the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, people with neurodiverse conditions, and obese people. The company said that the rules were in place to protect vulnerable users from cyberbullying. (These policies have also changed, according to the spokesman.)

“All social media platforms censor content, to greater or lesser degrees, and not always in keeping with their official terms and conditions,” writes Professor Literat. “However, when the Chinese government, one of the most powerful in the world, is a player in this equation, it all becomes infinitely more complicated, and the stakes are higher.”

David Carroll, a media design professor at The New School in New York City, understands very well how location matters when it comes to personal data. He was one of 87 million Facebook users in the United States whose personal information was used by the British firm Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. He is trying to get his data back through the British legal system’s privacy protections.

“Where our data is stored is extremely significant because we can either gain or lose rights depending on it,” says Professor Carroll, whose efforts are chronicled in the Netflix documentary “The Great Hack.”

Is it OK to use TikTok?

“We make the best choices we can about using technologies, but we really don’t have enough information to make the most informed choices,” says Professor Carroll. “And in the case of TikTok, it’s even more difficult to get understandable answers.”

But, as with most technologies, it really depends on how you use it. 

“I tend to be generally optimistic about youth online participation, so I do think TikTok can be a place of powerful self-expression, social connection, and yes, even meaningful political talk,” says Professor Literat, who also suggests older users might enjoy the app, too. “I’d say approach it with an open mind ... and buy into its very particular weirdness and charms.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments from a TikTok spokesman.

Reuters/File

Israeli women ride on a bus used mainly by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, during a protest against religiously devout Jews trying to enforce gender separation in public places, in Jerusalem, Jan. 1, 2012.

On a scorching summer afternoon in Israel, an 18-year-old woman is waiting at a bus stop on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She’s on her way to her first day of work waitressing, eager to arrive on time.

When the bus pulls up, a man waiting with her boards. But the male bus driver tells her, “You can’t get on the bus like that.”

The driver then closes the door and drives off. The young woman, who is now serving as a soldier and can only be identified as M., says she was baffled: Why couldn’t she get on the bus?

Then she realized: The driver was religious; she was wearing shorts. When she filed a complaint with the state-run bus company, she was told her “inappropriate clothing” offended religious passengers.

“At first I felt paralyzed. I was really hurt, and the next day the flush of hurt passed and turned into anger. How did this happen in my country? No one should treat a young woman this way,” says M. She’s now suing the bus company with Israel Women’s Network, which advocates for women’s equality.

Gender segregation and, in some cases, the outright exclusion of women that has become routine in the ultra-Orthodox sector of the Israeli public, is moving into Israeli society as a whole, experts warn.

Its effects range from separate sections for men and women at concerts in public parks and public events at city halls, to separate water fountains at some colleges. In advertising targeting religious consumers, women and girls are often entirely absent, or in some cases even erased.

In Israel’s parliament, an ultra-Orthodox lawmaker was granted permission to be reseated to avoid sitting next to a woman counterpart, and female lawmakers were scolded for wearing sleeveless dresses deemed “immodest” by religious colleagues.

Civil rights

What some call segregation, and others call the erasure of women in the public sphere, is positioned as a civil rights issue by ultra-Orthodox leaders. They argue that if they are going to interact with secular society at public and civic events and in the realms of education, the military, and the professions, their cultural sensitivities need to be accommodated.

It’s a need that goes to the heart of the question of how a pluralistic society adjudicates competing rights and sensitivities, in this case for the ultra-Orthodox, known as Haredim, or “those who fear God.” Are a woman’s “right” to wear shorts and a religious man’s “right” not to see her on an equal footing?

“Both Haredi women and men feel more comfortable in a gender-segregated environment,” says Leah Zach Aharoni, founder of the religious group Women for the Wall, which advocates continued gender segregation at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Jewish holy site (in opposition to the organization Women of the Wall).

“Because it is a central value for the Haredi lifestyle, it would behoove the general community to be accepting. I don’t think anything is being pushed on other communities,” she says. “Haredi rights are just as important as anyone’s rights.”

Their opponents respond that segregating men and women, and a world where women are rarely seen in public roles or in the media, normalizes behavior that discriminates against women and is one that does not remain an isolated, internal issue for the ultra-Orthodox, but affects all Israelis.

They argue that discrimination seeps in across the board when, for example, women academics are not allowed to teach college classes for ultra-Orthodox men and lose out on professional opportunities, women lawyers are seated at the back of the room of professional training courses, and women army cadets must peer through a partition to see a ceremony celebrating their training as officers.

Democracy vs. theocracy

M. grew up in a religious family. She had stopped being observant herself about a year before the bus incident and had sometimes worn shorts – abjuring the traditional dress code of skirts – with some askance looks from neighbors, but no censure.

“I understand there is this issue of exclusion of women, you hear about it all the time,” she says. “But I never thought I would not be allowed to ride the bus because of what I was wearing.”

Ady Kleiner-Tobias, 19, a fitness instructor and model from Kfar Vradim, a town in northern Israel, reports a similar incident when a guard at a train station initially told her she could not board because she was wearing a cropped shirt: “It made me feel like we are not living in a democracy, but a theocracy, where people have decided how women should appear.”

The Israeli Haredi population is growing rapidly, with the average family size at about seven children. Projections suggest their community might swell from 12% to as much as a third of the country by 2065. The boom is bringing new power, as well as an increased backlash from secular Israelis.

For most of Israel’s history the deeply traditional ultra-Orthodox, who reject modern secularism, have lived in their own areas. The men have mostly studied Torah full time on government subsidies. Families are often poor.

But recently, cracks have been appearing in that insularity, through technology and the encouragement of the government, which seeks to integrate Haredim into the economy and the military. Women increasingly have entered the work force to support their large families, and more of their sons have joined the army.

“So you have these two colliding values. One is wanting the religious to participate and contribute to modern Israeli society. But they are saying, ‘If you want us, there are restrictions, and gender segregation is part of those restrictions,’” says Allison Kaplan Sommer, an Israeli journalist.

Segregation in secular Israel

A recent Pew study ranked Israel as one of the top 22 most religiously restrictive countries in the world, with the sixth-highest level of “interreligious tension and violence.” The study placed the blame, in part, on government officials who sometimes “defer in some way to religious authorities or doctrines on legal issues.”

Although historically Jewish tradition limited gender segregation to the synagogue, religious study halls, and dancing at weddings, recent decades have seen that segregation creep into other spheres that never existed.

A new battleground has been concerts. Last spring the national government backed an official in a Tel Aviv suburb when he refused to let a teenage girl sing at an event in compliance with a religious prohibition against men hearing female voices in song.

In November, a fundraising concert that was to include the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and several top Israeli singers was canceled following a public uproar over the demand by the rabbi being honored that no female singers be included.

Military service

All Jewish Israeli youths are drafted into the Israeli army, except for Haredim. Resentment against them, particularly over this military exemption, became a surprisingly potent issue in the two most recent elections.

But there is an increasing if relatively small number of ultra-Orthodox men who are joining the army. To accommodate them there are now all ultra-Orthodox bases, all-male dining tents or designated male-only hours for eating, female instructors who are not allowed to train ultra-Orthodox troops, and women soldiers ordered to abide by restrictions on their dress and roles.

According to Yofi Tirosh, dean of the law school at Sapir College and an expert in anti-discrimination law, the restrictions imposed on women in the army to accommodate their male, ultra-Orthodox counterparts even extend to the sound of female voices over military radio transmissions.

Along Israel’s borders, women are among those who monitor radar screens and fence sensors and relay information to forces on patrol. But Dr. Tirosh says there have been accounts of ultra-Orthodox soldiers refusing to work with women, even in this remote fashion.

“It’s seeping in, and what is really worrying to me is that the Israeli public failed to realize it. Each incident is dismissed as a stand-alone, a rotten apple, nothing we should draw conclusions from,” she says.

“There is this idea that once we cross a ‘red line’ Israeli society will know how to handle it and will stop the madness. But all of these incidents are happening, and the phenomenon is widening and deepening,” says Dr. Tirosh.

“The argument that it will all remain in the backyards and neighborhoods of the ultra-Orthodox is collapsing,” she says.

In September, a photo of an ultra-Orthodox man ripping the image of Stav Shaffir, an Israeli female member of Knesset, off an election ad was shared on social media. It was one of many campaign posters featuring Ms. Shaffir, alongside two male running mates, that was defaced.

In response, Ms. Shaffir reposted her own version of the shared photo, adding this slogan: “You will not succeed in silencing us.”

As the long wooden canoe weaves among tree trunks in the flooded forest, Mark Baker lifts his binoculars and scans the canopy. 

“Yellow-rumped cacique,” he says, pointing, as the rest of us strain to find it. Then, a string of pips come from a towering tree nearby. He turns. “Straight-billed woodcreeper.” On the hourlong outing, he identifies one bird after another. 

Mr. Baker owns and operates Amazon Nature Tours, taking tourists along Brazil’s Rio Negro aboard his custom-built boat. Although he’s long been a nature enthusiast, Mr. Baker hasn’t always championed the rainforest’s rugged beauty. He used to cut down its trees for export. 

But for the past three decades, he’s fashioned himself as a sort of protector of the Amazon rainforest. Mr. Baker’s tour company focuses on fostering appreciation and a sense of stewardship among global citizens – something that grew out of his own personal transformation. 

Such ecotourism is on the rise globally. And in the Amazon, it could prove vital to protecting the unique ecosystem, says João Ferraz, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) and a colleague of Mr. Baker’s. “It’s important to have a lot of people come and see the forest is under threat,” he says, “to go back with that knowledge and keep up the pressure for NGOs and governments to take action. Ecotourism has an impact on the economy and on the tourists themselves.”

Loving the rainforest in a new way

Mr. Baker’s appreciation for nature runs deep. As a boy in North Carolina, he spent a lot of time outdoors. In 1977, fresh out of college, he drove to Rhode Island looking for something to do – ideally outside – for six months before graduate school. An ad in The Newport Daily News for a boat builder, no experience necessary, caught his eye.

Six months stretched into years before an economic recession halted boat building. Young and unencumbered, Mr. Baker joined a crew delivering a yacht to Venezuela. From there, he decided to explore the Amazon rainforest. He walked, rode buses, and hitched rides in military vehicles, reveling in his surroundings. Weeks later, he arrived in the inland port city of Manaus, Brazil.

Eric Gorleer

Mark Baker, seen here on the Rio Negro river in Brazil, founded Amazon Nature Cruises in 1997 to introduce tourists to the wonders of the rainforest, April 29, 2019.

“By that time, I was so entranced with this forest. It had everything I loved: boats, nature, wilderness,” he recalls. “So, I got a haircut, bought a white shirt, met with the American consul in Manaus, and started a lumber business.” It seemed like a natural step, as boat building taught him much about the properties of tropical wood.

For eight years, Mr. Baker’s business, Amazonex Lumber Co., sold rare tropical wood from the Amazon to customers across the United States. Exporting wood provided him with an excuse to spend a lot of time in the rainforest, taking him back to his boyhood days. Mr. Baker told himself that selective harvest was just part of managing the resource.

But gradually he began to notice on his birding outings that the forest had grown quieter. He came across cleared areas more and more frequently. And on the Manaus docks, he saw wood for export labeled with the name of a type of timber legal to export, but knew that it was another illegal type.

“It took me eight years to come to the realization that the construct that you can selectively harvest and manage the forest was a bunch of malarkey,” he says. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Mr. Baker took a mental inventory of his skills – familiarity with nature and boats, experience in the complex culture of Brazil, fluency in its language – and launched a boat tour company in 1989. It had a simple mission: to offer travelers an authentic and nonexploitative experience with nature.

Evolving an eco-friendly business

At the time, ecotourism was a new concept, and Mr. Baker learned by doing. But it wasn’t always smooth sailing.

One of his early expeditions wandered channels through the flooded forest for days before the boat captain found his way out. Local sensibilities about what foreigners would want to see also created challenges. “One of our first trips, the guests said they really wanted to see toucans,” he recalls. “We get in a launch and go looking. About 20 minutes later we hear gunfire and spin around to go back. It was the staff. They say, you wanted to see toucans, right? Fortunately, they were bad shots. That sort of misunderstanding came up for years.”

Initially Mr. Baker chartered boats for the tours, but he soon realized that the only way to ensure a good experience without damaging the environment was to own a vessel – custom-built. His 18-passenger river cruise boat now boasts sustainable features like a gravity-operated water system, solar electric generation, and thermal water heating. The small launches used for short excursions use electric motors. 

He’s also worked to develop a team with a sustainability mindset. “Guides, boat drivers, cooks, everybody involved, has that same desire to enjoy and not affect in any negative way the places we visit,” he says. Local people that the tours come in contact with have started to embrace the concept, too. “Our influence, such as it is, has been in attitudes. But it requires constant vigilance, because the smallest behaviors in those places can have big consequences.”

The Amazon rainforest covers more than 2.3 million square miles and is the biggest carbon store in the world, according to Giordane Martins, a biologist at the INPA. Forty percent of Brazil’s land lies in the Amazon, but roughly 20% of it is already deforested. Mr. Baker laments his contribution to that statistic, but opening a tour company may have offered a bit of atonement.

“No government has invested sufficiently in environmental enforcement in the Amazon,” says Dr. Ferraz. “Ecotourism, what Mark is doing, has a positive impact.”

Mr. Baker’s company, Amazon Nature Tours, now operates about 45 cruises per year. 

“Our role is to educate,” he says. “Many people arrive with that nature sensibility. Some acquire it on our tours. We take out a lot of U.S. high school groups as well. I had a parent call and say, ‘It’s your fault my son now studies gorillas in Africa.’” 

The rate of deforestation in Brazil is on the rise after falling for years, but Mr. Baker remains optimistic. “One of the goals of ecotourism is to share the economic benefits of travel. The other is to help promote conservation, to generate income and help protect the forest. We’ve seen that happen,” he says. “I wish we could say we saved the rainforest. We haven’t. But we have had an impact.”

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

Jabin Botsford/Pool via Reuters/File

Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stands at a 2018 ceremony at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Capitol Hill in Washington.

The Supreme Court, at most times the least visible of the three legs of the U.S. government, is about to be drawn reluctantly into the national spotlight by the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. 

That likelihood was undoubtedly on the mind of Chief Justice John Roberts as the new year dawned.

The Trump impeachment trial, when it does occur, will convene with Chief Justice Roberts presiding. The founders expected that the chief justice would provide an impartial facilitator for what would be a confrontation between the legislative and executive branches.

In his recent annual year-end remarks Chief Justice Roberts wrote of the need for civics education, and the eternal public vigilance necessary to ensure a healthy democracy endures. In some other year the document might have earned a shrug, a set of truisms deserving little comment. But in the current political atmosphere they took on heightened relevance.

Over the past 15 years the chief justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush, has consistently shown a conservative point of view in his rulings. But he’s also made a few significant departures from that camp, including a vote along with the court’s liberal justices that upheld the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” and another that rejected the inclusion of a citizenship question as part of the U.S. Census.

In the chief justice’s recent remarks he took care to defend the independence of the judiciary, which by staying out of partisan politics, he said, is then able to supply “a key source of national unity and stability.” 

He made a plea for civic education which, he said, “has fallen by the wayside.” An informed public is needed to “understand our government, and the protections it provides” in an age where “social media can instantly spread rumor and false information on a grand scale.” Many observers saw those last words as a reference, at least in part, to the president’s frequent tweets.

“We should reflect on our duty to judge without fear or favor, deciding each matter with humility, integrity, and dispatch,” Chief Justice Roberts said. In an earlier 2018 statement he wrote of how politics should not intrude on the judiciary. There are no “Obama judges” or “Trump judges,” he wrote. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

The chief justice himself will come under intense scrutiny as he presides at the impeachment trial. Will he show any favoritism on behalf of the president or his accusers? 

The role of the Supreme Court, the chief justice has said, is like that of a baseball umpire, who must call the balls and strikes as he sees them, unswayed by either competing team. 

In the coming impeachment trial, his ability to maintain a perception of total neutrality will greatly influence whether or not the trial is seen as fair and impartial.