Astra Temko

Ned Temko works in his office/garden shed in London on July 10th, 2020.

Welcome to my office. Actually, my garden shed.

On one side, a lawnmower; on the other, a leaf blower. There’s an electric fan and a space heater. And a laptop, on which to write or WhatsApp or Zoom. And in the age of COVID-19, I’m constantly aware that I am one of the very luckiest ones. I’m healthy. Unlike millions around the world, I’m able to self-isolate. I can work remotely. So can my wife. We have running water, electricity, Wi-Fi. A home of our own.

Yet even so, our life has changed beyond recognition. And the whole world has been thrown into flux – not just by the pandemic, but by a cacophony of social, political, and economic crosscurrents – at a time when the old post-World War II order and institutions were already under unprecedented pressure.

I wonder how many of the changes in my own life will prove lasting. And far more importantly for the world, how many of the COVID-induced changes, in public health and education, in race-relations and climate change, will persist? Could the recent trend toward populism and narrow nationalism give way to some form of resurgent international cooperation?

And will today’s single most important international rivalry – between a United States that has been in diplomatic retreat and an increasingly assertive China – become more starkly adversarial in the wake of heightened public sparring over the coronavirus?

Odd though this may seem, given the enormous number of lives and jobs tragically lost to COVID-19, an issue-by-issue look into the post-pandemic future offers reason, if not for unbridled optimism, at least for cautious hope.

Many of these potentially hopeful strands emerged in a Monitor series, beginning early this year and concluding with this article, called “Navigating uncertainty.” Planned well before the first coronavirus cases emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it drew on our writers from around the globe and sought to delve into the ways that, even before COVID-19, our world had become untethered from decades-old institutions and alliances, and from basic life assumptions.

The series explored the many forces pulling nations, and sometimes citizens, apart from each other. It covered the growing ambitions abroad, and authoritarianism at home, of China under leader Xi Jinping. It looked into the appeal of strongman populist leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and at the way technology and social media have become powerful tools for right-wing extremism.

But it also told another story, one that seems especially relevant and hopeful in a world that was changing dramatically as the series unfolded, influenced by COVID-19 and by the international wave of popular protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in the U.S.

That other story was one of remarkable human resilience. It was about individuals and communities taking ownership of problems they faced and pressing for their resolution. And it was all the more striking because it seemed at odds with a powerful trend that has fed polarization and populism in many countries: a loss of trust in government and a loss of the sense of agency that anything they could do as individuals could really change the course of events.

A number of examples in the Monitor series stood out. There were the “citizens’ juries” discussing and debating, learning and listening, and recommending policies at local or national level to confront climate change. The extraordinary determination of human-rights activists in Egypt and Gulf states to keep pushing, at potential risk to their liberty or even their lives, for the values that inspired the Arab Spring a decade ago.

There were major business figures trying to refashion and reform a capitalist economic system that is increasingly favoring shareholders and top executives over the interests of employees, customers, and society as a whole.

And there was a whole country, or an almost-country. Somaliland split itself off from Somalia in 1991 during that country’s civil war. It remains desperately poor.

Yet in the decades since declaring itself a state, it has established and maintained peace. It has built a working democracy. Through assiduous efforts to secure financial support from diaspora Somalilanders in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, it is staying afloat. And all of this without international recognition as a country – or, crucially, the access to international aid funds that such recognition would bring.

It might well be said, of course, that the prospect of any of this leading to real change remains daunting. Progress on climate change is still going to require international action, not to mention short-term costs that may prove particularly unappealing amid the economic downturn from the pandemic. The Arab Spring has given way to an Arab winter, with old-style authoritarian rulers back in command.

For business leaders, talking about reform is easier than actually changing the way they see their bottom line. And the prospect of international recognition for Somaliland remains roughly zero: The international community is wary about setting a precedent for other potential breakaway states.

A changed context

Still, the context for these examples of resilience, of human agency in action, has changed dramatically over recent months.

One reason is the pandemic itself. It has put governments worldwide through an unprecedented stress test, and revealed a lack of any coherent, truly international response. It has shone a glaring spotlight on issues like climate change and gaping economic inequalities. Most significantly, it has interrupted life-as-usual for millions upon millions of people; it has freeze-framed our world, forcing us to stop and look afresh.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Demonstrators protest near the White House in Washington June 6, 2020, over the killing of George Floyd as he was detained by police in Minneapolis. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, polling shows dramatic movement in Americans’ opinions on police brutality and racial injustice.

The wave of protest against racism and police violence following George Floyd’s killing is more than just a rekindling of human agency. With at least some policy changes at local or state level already announced, it has validated and vindicated it. The protests have also served as a reminder that the power of social media can be put to work by anybody, not only far-right political parties or populist politicians. It is an indispensable communications tool for individuals or communities on all sides of an argument.

Ultimately, though, any major political change will require action by governments or other established institutions. On that score, the prognosis so far is mixed.

While COVID-19 and economic shutdowns have heightened awareness of climate change and of the human causes of carbon emissions, it’s not yet clear whether the world will adopt new, greener investment strategies wholesale.

The European Union does seem committed to a “green new deal”; Britain has announced new investment in green infrastructure. But other countries, including the U.S., Russia, Canada, and France, are devoting more of their economic recovery budgets to the fossil fuel sector than to renewable energy sources.

In business, the signs are more positive. A number of major American companies have embraced the anti-racism message of the protests that followed George Floyd’s death. Some have even taken a step unthinkable just a few months ago: They’ve paused advertising on Facebook, the most powerful social media platform on earth, to protest its handling of hate-speech and conspiracy theories.

International connections

Geopolitically, it’s too early to say whether the enormous human cost of the world’s failure to coordinate its response to COVID-19 will prompt governments to breathe new life into international institutions and alliances.

But in Europe, at least, a shift appears underway. Initially, European countries abandoned ideas of continental solidarity, and each followed its own policies. Now, though, the European Union is poised to bridge a longstanding divide between wealthy, fiscally conservative northern states and its more indebted, harder-pressed southern members. Germany, the largest EU economy, is leading efforts to raise financing for a single, central fund to support all member states in their recovery from the economic effects of the pandemic.

It’s also conceivable that the COVID crisis could prompt some voters to rethink their support for populist, strongman leaders. The two leading exemplars, President Donald Trump in the U.S. and Brazil’s President Bolsonaro, who have both played down the seriousness of the pandemic, preside over the two nations that top the death toll rankings.

Still, with politics across the world still in unprecedented flux, the exact shape of a post-pandemic world can only be guessed at.

So why the cautious hope?

Come back to my garden shed. Since my wife and I are both of an age that qualifies us as “COVID-vulnerable,” we’ve been in self-isolation for months, since before Britain declared its formal lockdown in late March. Within days, all across London a group of younger people formed and got in touch to volunteer their help with whatever “self-isolators” like us might need.

One young woman had been helping us for weeks, picking things up from local shops – sometimes at scandalously short notice – when I texted her to say that I hoped my wife and I would be able to take her out for a post-pandemic dinner to convey the depth of our gratitude. Her answer: “Not at all! It’s not a big deal for me, and while I can do it, I like to help people in your position.”

Our shared shut-in experience has also led to a new, closer relationship with our neighbors, who’ve always been friendly enough, but who now draw less deeply on their well of English reserve.

This may all sound trivial. But it seems to me part of a genuine rekindling of simple human connections that I fully expect to outlast COVID-19.

And another social change with far wider implications – the rekindling of individual agency, of engagement across different communities and countries, races and age-groups, to promote change by tackling shared problems – seems likely to last as well. COVID-19 has amplified social problems and accelerated political movements; people are readier to confront and talk bluntly about race, climate change, corporate responsibility, and other issues of our age.

Grassroots activism alone will not solve the major domestic and international challenges that confront us. It cannot, by itself, disentangle the “uncertainties” mapped out and investigated in our Monitor series.

But it has profoundly changed the landscape in which established institutions – governments, businesses, and international organizations – will have to address them.

And whatever else may settle back into the old normal once the worst of COVID-19 has passed, “people power,” in one form or another, seems here to stay.

Joe Skipper/Reuters

Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of President Donald Trump, reacts after the president commuted his federal prison sentence, outside his home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, July 10, 2020.

President Donald Trump’s commutation of the prison sentence of longtime adviser Roger Stone last Friday night was entirely predictable, and shocking at the same time.

It was entirely predictable in that anyone who’s paid much attention to the subject has seen it coming for months. President Trump has long complained about what he perceives as the unfairness of Mr. Stone’s prosecution. Mr. Stone, for his part, openly pleaded for his old friend to save him from prison.

Yet it was still shocking to consider the consequences when the act finally occurred. President Trump was not only relieving Mr. Stone of the threat of jail. He might also have been removing a threat of future exposure of wrongdoing from someone else: himself.

The Stone commutation might also ensure that one of the great mysteries revealed by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation remains unsolved: whether Roger Stone communicated with Russian cat's-paw WikiLeaks in advance of its release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton, and whether he apprised candidate Donald Trump of that at the time.

That channel, if it existed, might, theoretically, have involved coordination or collusion, and certainly communication, between known Russian agents and members of the Trump team. Of all the threads left dangling by special counsel Mueller, it’s perhaps the most intriguing.

“Unprecedented historic corruption – an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, in a statement on the Stone commutation.

In written answers to Mr. Mueller’s inquiries, President Trump said that he did not recall “the specifics of any call” he had with Mr. Stone during the 2016 campaign. He did not recall any discussion of WikiLeaks and possible upcoming releases of any information damaging to the Clinton campaign, he said.

But at the least, redactions from the original Mueller report recently made public suggest the Mueller team strongly suspected the president lied in his written responses to questions about his dealings with Mr. Stone. Then-candidate Trump had direct knowledge of Mr. Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses cited by Mr. Mueller. The candidate pushed his staff, hard, to continue that outreach. Campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Mr. Trump personally told him to follow up the Stone connection.

It’s possible President Trump simply forgot these details after several years had passed.

“But the President’s conduct could also be viewed as reflecting his awareness that Stone could provide evidence that would run counter to the President’s denials and would link the President to Stone’s efforts to reach out to WikiLeaks,” the Mueller Report concludes.

The White House, for its part, has defended the commutation in part by flipping the table and saying that it was the Mueller investigation that was corrupt. Mr. Stone’s prosecution and sentence, seen through that lens, could be regarded as illegitimate.

“Roger Stone was treated very unfairly,” said President Trump over the weekend. ”Roger Stone was brought into this witch hunt, this whole political witch hunt, and the Mueller scam – it’s a scam, because it’s been proven false – and he was treated very unfairly.”

But that statement runs contrary to the stated opinion of Attorney General William Barr, who, although critical of the Mueller probe, has called Mr. Stone’s prosecution “righteous.”

Mr. Mueller, breaking a long silence, published an Op-Ed in the Washington Post over the weekend defending his investigation in general and the Stone prosecution in particular. He pointed out that Mr. Stone lied to Congress repeatedly, about everything from the identity of his intermediary with WikiLeaks to his communications with the Trump campaign. Mr. Stone tampered with a witness as well, threatening among other things to do violence to the witness’s beloved dog.

“When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable,” Mr. Mueller wrote.

“It may ultimately impede those efforts,” he added.

On the crowded streets of Panama City, a woman approaches a hospital, clutching her purse and phone. Before she reaches the entrance, two police officers block her path. 

“You! What are you doing? Today only women can be outside,” the woman, who is transgender and asked not to be identified by name for her security, recalls one officer saying.
 
She took a deep breath, trying to cover her fear, and explained she had a doctor’s appointment. But the officers interrogated her and denied her entrance, she reported to a human-rights group later that week. The second officer, who is also a neighbor, punched her in the face when she tried to step outside on a separate, subsequent date, she said.

Panama, along with a handful of other Latin American cities and nations, has introduced gender as a guideline in their attempts to limit the number of people outside during the coronavirus pandemic. It has had unintended consequences, like trans violence and discrimination, often at the hands of police.

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Panama’s decree requires people adhere to the sex assigned on their birth certificate, and does not recognize sex changes legally. As a result, trans women must either leave on “days for men,” a gender they don’t identify with, despite their birth certificates, or journey outside on even dates and subject themselves to harassment.

Since these policies were enacted, scores of videos have circulated on social media chronicling trans shoppers kicked out of stores, harassed on the streets, and even assaulted. The combination of international pressure and outspoken pushback from LGBTQ+ groups, who argue the measures put trans and nonbinary individuals at heightened risk, resulted in most Latin American countries and cities revoking the gender-based lockdown measures.

The victory wasn’t universal: At least one Colombian municipality still persists with the policy, and Panama, after initially reversing the policy, reinstated the gender-based restriction in early June as COVID-19 cases once again spiked.

Still, activists say the conversations sparked by these policies give them hope for the future. Government ministries and nongovernmental organizations that never publicly concerned themselves with trans rights have reached out to leading activists to form alliances and coalitions in the wake of gendered lockdown policies. The increased visibility has forced some governments and the public to acknowledge discrimination against transgender individuals. While the successes are not nearly as resounding as the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling that LGBTQ+ employment discrimination is unconstitutional, they hold potential for progress.

“We have a small but powerful movement,” says Daniela Maldonado Salamanca, a Colombian trans woman and founder of the Trans Community Network in Bogotá. “I don’t think they ever imagined a small group that has been historically ignored would be listened to this time,” she says of the policy’s repeal in most of Colombia. It’s led to new, broader conversations about “exclusion in our daily lives.”

Fight for trans rights

Each country’s implementation of the gender quarantine policy has differed.

After Bogotá announced its decree, about a dozen local governments across Colombia followed. Eventually, almost all cities ended the policy. In Peru, the national government revoked its decision just one week after its introduction, stating it did not succeed in limiting mobility. Panama paused the measure for just one week, then reinstated it as COVID-19 cases surged. The Central American nation, however, was praised by Human Rights Watch for its statement against trans discrimination.

LGBTQ+ groups and academics say they believe most governments that implemented the measure were ignorant about how it could affect transgender citizens.

While several Colombian governments released statements encouraging authorities to respect trans and nonbinary individuals, “the police have been (and continue to be) one of the primary aggressors of trans people’s rights throughout Latin America,” says Dr. Juliana Martínez, professor of gender and sexuality at American University, via email. She says expecting respect for gender identity simply because governments asked security officials to do so was naive and “disingenuous.”

Despite those efforts, NGOs documented various cases of police violence against trans and nonbinary people, says Dr. Martínez, and “the entire society began policing gender as well.”

The Panamanian Association for Trans People has received over 40 reports of discrimination against trans people since April 1. The Trans Community Network in Bogotá documented dozens of cases of violence and discrimination in three weeks. Peruvian activist groups documented at least 20 cases in the one week the policy was in place. In response, LGBTQ+ groups have circulated videos of abuse, coordinated with international press, written to local and national governments, and created petitions to draw attention to the impacts of the gender-based policy on trans rights.

Thaina Duarte Diaz, an Afro Colombian philosopher and trans woman in Cartagena, says this measure “exposed the inequality we experience” daily, even pre-pandemic. Because of the attention discrimination against trans communities drew during the lockdown measures, many NGOs say they’ve found solidarity in new, promising alliances.

“Various institutions have called us and want to have a conversation about this,” says Venus Tejada Fernández, president of the Panamanian Association for Trans People. In order to build momentum and create any kind of lasting change, “dialogue is essential,” Ms. Tejada says. She was contacted by Panama’s Ministry of Social Development, the Institute of the Public Defender’s Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and local and international NGOs. “All want to know much more about how this policy has affected us,” she says. It gives her hope.

“This movement demonstrated their organization and their capacity to mobilize rapidly,” says Dr. Martínez. She sees it as a sign of burgeoning political power for trans activists in the region, where historically trans rights have been overlooked, even as gay-rights movements have achieved more recognition and important legal victories.

We “have taken advantage [of the moment] to talk … not only about the gendered quarantine policy, but also about how historically we have lived in exclusion,” says Ms. Maldonado, from the Trans Community Network in Bogotá.

Moving forward, advocates regionwide hope to harness the international momentum around these policies to amplify the conversation beyond the pandemic. That includes the treatment of trans sex workers, deaths and disappearances of trans people, and discrimination in the health care sector. In Panama, trans NGOs are pushing for a law that protects gender identity, as well as amendments to police protocols that will limit harassment.

“We are demanding the rights that already exist [for others] that have been denied to us,” Ms. Tejada says. “We want to see change, and I know we can do this. There is willpower, and I am witness to it.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

By early June, Taylor Rutland was certain God wanted him to preach about racism. What he didn’t know is how his congregation would react. 

Mr. Rutland pastors First Baptist Church of Dothan, Alabama – a Bible belt town just above the Florida border. Like many white Evangelical churches, he says, First Baptist almost never discusses racism. And like many such churches in the South, he says, First Baptist has racism in its past. In 1961, the church voted to stop funding Southern Baptist Theological Seminary after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited campus. 

So on June 7, after delivering his first sermon on racism as sin, Mr. Rutland says he felt comforted to hear congregants tell him they wish he’d addressed it sooner.

“We have a history of this,” he says. “And so we’ve got to go before the Lord and confess these sins and repent of them in order to move forward.”

But moving forward may be a long, narrow road. First Baptist, like many white, evangelical churches nationwide, is now addressing issues related to race for the first time. Motivated by the Black Lives Matter movement, faith groups from the Southern Baptist Convention to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have acknowledged that systemic racism remains today, and that churches can’t ignore it. Their challenge now, experts say, is that they’ve historically done just that.

The church has long been one of the country’s most racially divisive institutions, historians say – so much so that denominations remain largely segregated. (It has also been a frequent setting for racially motivated violence.) As many white congregations now call for reform, many Black church leaders say real change demands much more than a sermon, statement, or conference. 

“Even as Christian leaders and institutions make statements and make commitments to racial justice in the future, very few are taking a critical look at their own history,” says Jemar Tisby, a historian and president of The Witness, a Black Christian collective. “For us, racial justice is an ongoing pursuit. It’s not seasonal according to events or headlines of the day.”

When the past is silence

To build a lasting commitment to faith-based racial justice, white churches need to understand their past. That past is one of silence, segregation, and complicity, says Mr. Tisby. 

In early America, racism existed in the church just as it did in the rest of society, says Michael Emerson, head of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading expert on race and religion. For a long time, white Americans debated whether Black Americans could even be Christian. Even after the Civil War, says Professor Emerson, white churches still refused to integrate – entrenching a spiritual divide that remains today. 

“We’ve had 160-plus years of separate cultures forming, with different authors people read, different interpretations of the Bible, different music that’s listened to, and I think most fundamentally completely different lived realities.”

Courtesy of Neaz Arefin

The Rev. Dr. Frederick D. Haynes III, lead pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, says it is critical to address systemic and structural racism. Otherwise, "it's almost as if you want to clean the attic of cobwebs, but you don't want to address the spider."

Such a long rupture has made it so that integration now requires more than mixing white and Black congregants, experts say; it requires bridging institutions, whose differences saturate to their very theology. 

“Christianity in the United States has been coded as white, which means that any attempt to identify whiteness and white supremacy in it is taken as an attack on the faith,” says Mr. Tisby. America’s distinct blend of white supremacy and Christianity, he says, has evolved with the times. It existed when white churches used the Bible to defend slavery, when the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses during Jim Crow, when pastors remained silent during the civil rights era, and now, when many white churches avoid addressing racism today.

Consistency of activism 

Mr. Rutland says he understands why many pastors – particularly those in the South – are so reluctant to preach on issues of racial justice. No congregant wants to be called a racist, he says, and no one wants sermons to get too political. 

Yet the common evangelical refrain that politics should be kept from the pulpit can be rather hypocritical, given how active they are on other social issues, such as abortion and LGBTQ rights, says Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission at the Southern Baptist Convention. 

The question for Evangelicals – and white churches more broadly – is not whether they should be socially active, says Mr. Moore. It’s whether they should be consistent in their activism.

“When the subject is race, there’s a temptation for white Christians to suddenly become mute or very ambiguous,” he says. “That was the case in 1963. That’s the case in many contexts in 2020.”

Meanwhile, promoting racial equity has long been one of the key roles of the Black church, which has historically connected social and spiritual liberation, says Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.  

To join that movement in earnest, she says, white churches will need to dismantle systems of structural racism that disproportionately benefit them – some of which they helped create.

As always, change comes at a cost, says the Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas. But accepting that cost to uplift the most vulnerable in society, he says, is the gift of religion. 

The church, in his opinion, needs the “moral courage” to promote a more equal future and the humility to admit failures in the past. Rev. Haynes, whose father and grandfather were also ministers, is all too familiar with those failures. 

Daryl Sullivan/The Daily Times/AP/File

The Rev. Dr. Willa Estell (left), receives a standing ovation at the end of a rally Aug. 23, 2017, at St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Alcoa, Tennessee, when she speaks about why it is important to say "Black Lives Matter." She is pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Zion Church in neighboring Maryville.

In 1991, he remembers the heartbreak of addressing his church after the beating of Rodney King. It was a similar feeling, he says, when he spoke on the death of George Floyd this year. Both times, he says, he took that pain and laid it before his congregation. In his opinion, advocating racial justice is the responsibility of every church – including white evangelicals, who may at first need to listen and learn.

“If you’ve been quiet for 400-plus years and all of a sudden you say something for a week, I’m sorry,” he says. “That’s not enough.”

After the spotlight

Mr. Rutland agrees. Still, even he admits that had this summer’s protests not come, he doesn’t know when he would have first preached on racism. He plans his sermons in advance, he says, and the topic wasn’t on the docket.

“We should have responded to this hundreds of years ago, and we didn’t,” he says. “We can’t just act like because I preached one sermon on racism we’ve arrived.”

But after decades of silence, one sermon can matter – at least Mr. Rutland’s did to Abby Maddox, a congregant at First Baptist for most of her life. 

“I just wanted to stand up and cheer,” she says. “We’re called to mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice. And we’ve got a whole group of people who are mourning right now.”

Mourning, for her, has involved reflecting on racism in her community, and even her own life. She’s been reading books on race theory, attending a discussion group with friends, and having hard conversations with her children and family. People need to talk about the issue to make it better, she says, but making it better requires more than talking. The change needs to last.

In the eyes of Mr. Tisby, leader of The Witness, change doesn’t come from the many who join a movement when it’s easy. It comes from the few who remain, who adopt social justice as a way of life. The current level of activism around racial justice is unsustainable, he says. So, when it wanes, who will be left?

That’s a question the Rev. Reginald Davis, of First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, also has in mind. Founded in 1776 by a group of slaves worshiping in a carriage house, he says, First Baptist is one of the oldest Black churches in the nation. Martin Luther King Jr. visited in the early ’60s, and the crowd was so large that many listened through open windows on the street.

“Black Americans, we have fought about this. We have preached about this. We have marched about this. We’ve been jailed about it. We have written about it. And we died for it,” says Mr. Davis. “But it has not been solved because enough white Americans have not gotten involved.”

For the first time ever, he’s seen a large number of white Americans getting involved. The question now, he says, is who will remain.

“When the media walks away, the cameras are not on us, the interviews are gone, if we don’t engage the system to correct the systemic problems,” he says, “we’ll come right back to where we were before.”

A spotted sandpiper flies in spurts across Delaney Pond and alights on a bed of lilies near the water’s edge – right in the frame of Rita Gibes Grossman’s spotting scope. 

“At 11 o’clock there are some yellow flowers, and then there’s that little lily pad island,” she says to Sandy Oxley, a fellow bird-watcher who had joined the small late-June expedition in the Delaney Wildlife Management Area.

Ms. Oxley raises her binoculars to the sandpiper, then skyward to the gliding form of a great heron. Humming nearby is a colony of ground-nesting bees. 

The birds at this site have picked prime real estate for nesting season. The 580-acre swath of protected land sits in a state with a robust legacy of bird conservation. Migrating here across state lines, however, can be challenging for a bird – and it’s getting harder.

Migratory birds have been protected for a century under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), but a rollback of that federal law has turned conservation into a piecemeal network of state laws and regional efforts. To combat shrinking global bird numbers, states and towns are turning to collaborative conservation programs.

“Conservation works through strong partnerships and by working across boundaries,” says Katie Blake, conservationist at Highstead, a land conservation organization. “A wood thrush doesn’t stop at the border … and think ‘Oh wait, I should stop here because this is the state line.’”

Tough trek for birds 

Nine out of 10 migratory birds are inadequately protected during at least one leg of their annual migrations, according to a 2015 study published in Science. 

Jules Struck/The Christian Science Monitor

Rita Gibes Grossman and Sandy Oxley zero in on a spotted sandpiper floating on a bed of lily pads in the pond at Delaney Wildlife Management Center in Stow, Massachusetts, June 20, 2020.

Before 2017, a person could be prosecuted for accidentally killing a bird, but an opinion submitted by the Department of the Interior effectively changed that interpretation so that only intentional harm – mainly illegal hunting – is legally punishable.

Critics say that, since that change, companies have been free to take fewer precautions to avoid migration paths or nesting grounds.

“Under the previous implementation of the MBTA, many states looked toward the federal government as the backstop, and leaned on the authorities … to both provide guidance and enforce that,” says Katie Umekubo, a lawyer representing the Natural Resources Defense Council and National Wildlife Federation in a lawsuit against the change to the MBTA.

“With that gone now, I think it’ll be a mixed bag. It’s yet to be seen how the states will react.”

Eight states including Massachusetts are challengers in the case. The Trump administration’s opinion has been in practice since 2017, but will likely become regulation after a public comment period ends on July 20.

With challenges like climate change and bird decline, “the work that is already ahead of a lot of conservation groups is so steep and constant that this would really exacerbate that,” says Ms. Blake.

A separate bill that would punish incidental killing of birds was introduced to Congress in January. 

“Bringing birds back … is pretty darn complicated,” says Pamela Hunt, senior biologist in avian conservation at New Hampshire Audubon. She says the weakening of the MBTA isn’t “huge” for New Hampshire, where the law is often used to caution homeowners from disturbing nests near their houses.

Western states hosting big energy companies will see a stronger impact on their birds, she says. 

The MBTA has been used to prosecute energy companies for failing to minimize the risk to birds of getting caught in wind turbines or electrical wires. BP had to pay $200 million to conservation efforts for violating the MBTA after its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Still, Dr. Hunt says bird protections need to go even further. “It involves Brazil and Trinidad and Guatemala and Florida. … Birds are going to be impacted somewhere else during the year when they’re migrating.”

Jules Struck/The Christian Science Monitor

Sandy Oxley points out a bird in the treetops above at the Delaney Wildlife Management Center in Stow, Massachusetts, June 20, 2020. “It’s endlessly fascinating to us,” says Ms. Oxley.

The state of bird protections 

July is nesting season, which means the spotted sandpiper back in Stow will be settled for a while in a state where bird-friendliness appears to be growing. In 2019, four acres of land were protected for every one developed in Massachusetts, up from a 2-to-1 ratio in 2005, according to Mass Audubon.

Massachusetts is “very, very strong in terms of lots of habitat, lots of protected land,” says Scott Edwards, professor of biology and curator of ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

“Yeah, I would say Massachusetts is an excellent place to be a birder.”

Dr. Edwards is taking phone calls from the bike lane as he makes his own kind of migration across the United States. He’s biking to Oregon to raise awareness of Black Lives Matter and #BlackBirdersWeek, and to do some cross-country bird-watching. 

Last week he pedaled through rural Indiana, where a “staggering” acreage of corn and soybean fields have taken over vibrant bird habitats. His route will later wind through the sprawling fields of the West – once dotted with greater sage grouse, but today a friendlier territory to oil and gas companies.

Dr. Edwards took off from Massachusetts, where the first Audubon society was founded in 1896 by Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall, who were angered by the killing of millions of well-plumed birds for ladies’ hats. Their steadfast lobbying led in 1913 to an early version of the MBTA.

But even this state, home to naturalists past like Henry David Thoreau and present like David Sibley of “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” has seen changes. 

“We have a river birch in front of our house, and during spring migration or even fall migration, it would be nothing to see more than a dozen yellow-rumped warblers” 20-odd years ago, says Ms. Gibes Grossman.

“Now, if I see two or three, it’s dramatic.” 

The weakening of the MBTA is only the latest “chip away” at bird conservation, says Dr. Hunt. “I think keeping awareness of … what individuals can do is in some ways the most important thing.” 

“If they care at least, that filters up.” 

Shaded under Stow’s white pines, Ms. Gibes Grossman looks away from the spotted sandpiper to explain the relatively quiet morning. During migration season, “all the males have on their … courtship clothes, and they’re singing their little hearts out,” she says. “Now, they’re all nesting, they’re quieter.”

Ms. Oxley, a birder of 20 years, still delights in migration season. “It can be pretty intoxicating,” she says.

AP

A teacher in protective gear teaches her students seated at partitioned desks near Bangkok, Thailand, July 1, 2020.

When Finland and Denmark became two of the first countries to reopen their schools amid the pandemic earlier this year, they were motivated by equality. Both countries enshrine education as a constitutional right. 

The Danish Ministry of Children and Education noted that during the shift to online learning “schools and municipalities cannot guarantee that children receive the education in all subjects for which they are entitled.” 

Viewed that way, controlling COVID-19 was not just a matter of public health or economic recovery. It was also a legal requirement. The pandemic was preventing these governments from fulfilling their constitutional obligations to their youngest citizens. 

As public officials and educators assess whether and how to reopen schools in the United States, thinking of education as a right due all children provides a principled and compassionate basis for working through the challenges of starting the academic year at a time when new cases are surging upward. 

Little consensus exists among public officials, educators, and parents on whether schools should reopen or remain only online. President Donald Trump is pushing for a full return to classroom-based learning. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued recommendations for phased reopenings. 

Measures like these have worked in countries where the number of cases has declined. But many U.S. teachers are concerned that their safety cannot be ensured. Requests for leaves of absence and early retirements are up in school districts across the country. 

The Los Angeles teachers union, the country’s second largest, has demanded that online classes continue in the fall. Their concerns reflect a riddle that the medical community has not yet cracked: why adults are apparently so much more susceptible than young children. 

Primary and secondary schools in countries such as Australia and Singapore have had no outbreaks since reopening. But a high school in Jerusalem was forced to shut down again after a spike in new cases. 

Administrators say they are under pressure from those who want their children back in school, believing it is a better learning environment than at home, and that ongoing efforts to juggle children's needs and working from home are unsustainable. But a Politico/Morning Consult poll last month found that 54% of American voters are somewhat or very concerned about reopening K-12 classrooms. Among Black respondents, the survey found that 73% were somewhat or very concerned, reflecting the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on minority communities.

The U.S. is one of the few countries that does not regard education as an explicit right. Its Constitution is silent on the issue. The result is a patchwork of disparate provisions and uneven funding among the states. In a landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, however, the Supreme Court found that segregated schools were inherently unequal and violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. 

The pandemic’s disruption of education makes the spirit of that decision freshly relevant. Treating the crisis as an impediment to every child’s right to education, as Finland and Denmark have, could help depoliticize state and federal strategies to contain it. 

The next step is ensuring that every school district has adequate resources to support students for as long as it takes to return to classrooms. 

Congress is already debating whether to fund such measures. Doing so would affirm that education, even if not enshrined in the Constitution, is a national imperative.