Rahmat Gul/AP

Taliban fighters display their flag on patrol in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 19, 2021. The Taliban celebrated Afghanistan's Independence Day Thursday by declaring they had defeated the United States, but challenges to their rule ranging from finances and personnel to potentially facing an armed opposition began to emerge.

For 50 days, Abdul Hanif and his small Afghan paramilitary force had been battling Taliban fighters putting a stranglehold on the city of Asadabad, the capital of Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province.

The Taliban were gaining ground, and Mr. Hanif, a tall, lanky provincial official and longtime Taliban nemesis, was rushing from one front to the other urging the Afghan National Army to fight.

“We are fighting on one side, and on the other side the ANA just lets the Taliban come through, and gives them their own weapons and ammo, and even their armored trucks,” he said in a phone interview, his words sometimes punctuated by gunfire.

“It’s been really tough to hold because we are trying to convince the ANA to fight,” he said, asking that his real name be withheld for his protection. Running low on ammunition and other supplies, he estimated they could fend off the enemy for three or four more days.

As it turned out, Asadabad fell to the militant group the next day, Saturday. It was one of the last major cities to be captured by the insurgents before they rolled into Kabul and took over Afghanistan Sunday.

The Taliban’s routing of Afghanistan’s national security forces – which saw Asadabad and more than half of the country’s provincial capitals topple like dominoes in just one week – shocked much of the world.

Yet the story of how the Taliban gained the advantage over a large, 300,000-strong Afghan national security force – trained and equipped by the United States at a cost of about $85 billion – starts with Afghan history and culture.

“They used age-old Afghan traditions, as was the case when they came to power the first time [in 1996],” says Douglas London, former CIA counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia. “It wasn’t through a series of military conquests. The Taliban leveraged negotiations and bribery with local and provincial officials.”

Gains, valley by valley

The Taliban’s sweeping, concluding military offensive was just the final push of a dogged, homegrown insurgency that was years in the making.

“Contrary to popular belief, this was the ... quick end to a campaign they had been waging for quite a long time,” says Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at CNA, a research and analysis organization in Arlington, Virginia. “Since 2015, when the U.S. [troop] surge ended and the U.S. transitioned to the advise-and-assist model, the Taliban have been steadily encroaching.”

The Taliban’s long-term strategy was grounded in the countryside. It leveraged local relationships to win territory, guns, and recruits – valley by valley – eventually allowing the militants to encircle and cut off the cities. It took advantage of shifting political calculations among Afghan warlords and commanders triggered by the U.S. military withdrawal. And it deftly waged psychological warfare on social media to spread a narrative of their inevitable victory, demoralizing Afghan government forces.

The Taliban used “an isolation strategy that had an extremely adroit information component to it,” says Dr. Schroden.

In sharp contrast, the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani focused on concentrating power and building national forces to defend large, populous cities – a strategy that runs counter to Afghanistan’s history of decentralization, he says. In a January assessment, he warned that the Taliban would have “a slight military advantage” over Afghan security forces if the U.S. withdrew all its forces.

Home turf

The Taliban projected confidence as they encircled the dusty, rugged town of Asadabad, nestled in the Hindu Kush mountains about 8 miles from the border with Pakistan. They were laying siege to the capital with thousands of men, including fighters from allied extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistani Taliban, Mr. Hanif said.

“We are left with only about 300 people who are fighting,” said Mr. Hanif of his paramilitary force. Some had been redirected to bolster Herat, the large oasis city in western Afghanistan, he explained. About 900 men from local tribal militias had stood up, but between them they only had 80 AK-47 rifles.

“I don’t have weapons for them,” he said, exasperated. “It’s hard for the central government to do resupply because the fight is going on all across the country,” he added. Two of his soldiers were killed by the Taliban the day before, and two lay wounded. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” he said.

Emrah Gurel/AP

Young men who say they deserted the Afghan military and fled to Turkey through Iran walk in the countryside in Tatvan, in Bitlis province in eastern Turkey, Aug. 17, 2021. Turkey says it's concerned about increased migration across the Turkey-Iran border as Afghans flee the Taliban.

Lopsided battles like the one at Asadabad played out in cities across the country, with elite units such as the Afghan special forces being among the few to put up a fight.

And the Taliban had the advantage of fighting on their home turf.

Most Taliban come from rural villages, where they are members of the same tribal clans and subclans as government officials and military commanders – making them relatives or neighbors. Starting at the district level, they created shadow governments and militaries in every province. Then they offered deals to switch sides.

“About a year ago, the Taliban started reaching out to lower-level government troops and fighters, offering money for their weapons and to abandon their posts. And then they ratcheted up the process to reach more senior provincial leaders,” says Mr. London.

The Taliban’s control over rural areas, which had grown steadily since the U.S. military handed over security to Afghan forces in 2014, rose dramatically as U.S. forces began their final pullout this summer. In one month, from June to July, the number of districts under Taliban control doubled from 104 to 216, according to tracking by the Long War Journal.

U.S. departure

Critically, the departure of the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops and U.S. military air power (before the current evacuation mission) deprived the Afghan army of a powerful, quick reaction capability against the Taliban. This freed Taliban forces to move rapidly to seize large swaths of territory and road networks and posts along the Iran, Tajikistan, and Pakistan borders. All of this left Afghan army units increasingly surrounded, isolated, and vulnerable, as they could only be resupplied by air, severely overtaxing the Afghan air force.

The Taliban then began attacking cities, first in the north. Contrary to the popular narrative, initially some Afghan units did stand and fight, says Dr. Schroden. But, he says, “they very quickly ran out of ammunition, food, water. They called for airstrikes, and none would come. They called for reinforcements, and none would come.”

Long-standing problems with corrupt commanders and “ghost soldiers” – fighters who existed only on paper, in order to line the commanders’ pockets – as well as the lack of pay and the incongruence of the model of a central, integrated military in a country that functions on ethnic and tribal lines, had weakened allegiances to the national army.

“If you know that help is not coming, and you’re not totally invested in the government with all your heart and soul, when the fight finally comes to your doorstep, why would you stand and fight?” Dr. Schroden says. “That just became an avalanche of desertion.”

Displaying social media savvy, the Taliban amplified these events by texting images and video of their fighters walking around army bases and driving Humvees. The posts went viral on social media, advancing the narrative that a Taliban victory was inevitable.

The psychological impact of this message of the Taliban’s imminent return to power ran deep, especially as all Afghans knew the Taliban had never left.

The Afghan government and Pentagon planners had counted on the Afghan army to defend hardened positions – a “ring of steel” around the cities – to force the Taliban to mass in concentrations that would make them vulnerable to bombing from above. But morale broke among much of the force before that ever happened.

Many elite forces, including Afghan special forces and paramilitary units such as that under Mr. Hanif, did fight until the last possible moment. Unlike the regular army, these units were organized largely along community and tribal lines, with elders vetting new recruits.

“They have kind of an obligation to one another,” says Mr. London, author of “The Recruiter,” a book about the CIA’s post-2001 transformation. “Given their reputation after years of bleeding the Taliban ... such troops realized that surrender was less likely to be an option and amnesty highly unlikely,” he says.

Mr. Hanif had to fight his way out of Kunar and is on the run. “We will fight until our last breath,” he said in his last phone call.

Darren Ballentine thinks he knows what it takes to successfully fight a huge wildfire, and he can provide it: meatloaf.

“Good food and good morale make for a safe fire,” says Mr. Ballentine, who is in charge of feeding about 1,200 firefighters at the Oregon Bootleg Fire, which for two weeks was the largest in a swarm of wildfires in the West. “They love the meals like they would get at home.”

Tens of thousands of men and women are fighting the West’s wildfires. Mr. Ballentine, the food supply officer at Forward Operating Base ZX on the north side of the Bootleg Fire, is part of the army that provides the logistics, food, sleeping, and even showers for the firefighters. They are the machinery behind the scenes.

President Joe Biden recently has expressed concern for that machine. “Our resources are already being stretched to keep up. We need more help,” he told Western governors July 30. The ranks have been weakened by exhaustion from the pace of fires, concern over COVID-19, and the sapping demands of the work in a tinderbox of heat and drought.

The firefighting effort is made up of thousands of volunteers who give up their summers for the prospect of modest pay, unforgettable camaraderie, and dangerous but purposeful work. They get mobilized on short notice to a strange, hot, and dusty place, and create mini-cities in two days to fight fast wildfires. An estimated 15,000 federal firefighters and even more state and local personnel and contractors are in constant choreography. Whole crews are turned over every 14 days or so to provide rest, and numbers on the ground are shuffled daily as fires sputter low in some areas and leap ahead in others. 

Behind the front lines is an infrastructure that must respond in lockstep: Encampments of thousands sprout within 48 hours, providing hot meals, tents, medical care, showers, watering stations, communications, and pay vouchers for everyone involved. All the personnel must be accounted for, monitored for their time on the line, and another man or woman must be ready to step in when a team shifts out of the front.

“It’s all in motion every day, every hour,” says Jessica Gardetto at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. The federal command center on a 55-acre campus in Boise shuffles people and resources – everything from huge air tankers to banks of portable toilets – to and from fires, operating 24 hours a day. “Hotshot” parachute teams depart from the adjacent airport in Boise, helicopters flutter off, and the chiefs of the top federal firefighting agencies huddle twice daily amid maps to shift battle plans.

Doug Struck

Cook Jonathan Smith prepares scrambled eggs at the forward operating base for the battle against the Snake River Complex Fire in Idaho.

“It’s a constant chess-piece exercise,” says Ms. Gardetto. The operation has cost the federal government about $2 billion this year alone, and millions more from state and local budgets.

Those on the ground reflect Mr. Biden’s worries. “There are shortages nationwide. We don’t have enough people, says Alysa Johnson, the logistics officer of the Oregon camp, who hustled down from a salmon stream near Fairbanks, Alaska. Many of her requests for additional staff are met with a bureaucratic reply: UTF – unable to fill.

“We just make do,” she says.

Setting plans, one day at a time

It’s 6:30 a.m. at a firefighting camp in southern Idaho, hundreds of miles from the Bootleg Fire. The air smells charred and dusty as the sun climbs behind a high gauze of smoke. About 40 firefighters stand in a rough circle in an open field to hear fire boss Brian Plume and his team outline the plan of attack and repeat their daily liturgy: Stay safe.

“Everybody saw trees and heard trees fall yesterday,” says safety officer Jeff Handel of dead or weakened “snags” that can fall on firefighters focused on the ground. “Look for those snags. Get rid of them.” 

The men and women stand hands-in-pockets, wearing heavy boots and smoky clothes. Some wear T-shirts from previous fire campaigns. They are battling the Snake River Complex Fire in the steep Craig Mountains, where more than 100,000 acres have burned. 

There is little glamour to the work. The firefighters and their support corps sleep in tents in a shadeless field, work from dawn until late at night, grab a hot meal, and collapse until they are trucked back to the fire tomorrow. On the line, much of the work is done by hand, crude reshaping of ground and vegetation to clear a fire boundary. Those behind in camp scurry for resources to keep the army moving. But most say they want to be nowhere else. 

Lewis Holt is working his first year as a firefighter trainee. He knows the land. He is from the local Nez Perce tribe. 

“This is my backyard,” he says of the stretch of scrubby hills. He says he appreciates the outsiders who converged on this fire. “I really enjoy them taking care of the land. It’s an honor having them here and helping.”

Wide-ranging backgrounds

The battle against this season’s fierce fires is being done by those people who step forward. They are paid, though often not well. It has dangers. But each has said yes, agreed to an assignment that will take them away from homes and families. 

They are diverse: college kids and Army vets, retirees and city firefighters on “vacation.” They are ex-Boy Scouts, cops, people who have served time in prisons, managers, clerks, and ski bums. They are wives and husbands and some drifters. Many are in families in which wildfire fighting is a tradition. In conversations, they say they share the satisfaction of doing hard work for a good cause.

“It’s in their blood. These people are firefighters,” says Ray Miller, who was dispatched to the Snake River Complex Fire from Needmore, Pennsylvania. 

“This is the first time we’ve been sent west of the Mississippi,” says John Wambaugh, a former district forester from Potter County in Pennsylvania, who abandoned his retirement garden to help drive two trucks and a crew to Idaho. Firefighting crews often move as a team, but blend with ever-shifting reinforcements. 

Doug Struck

Operations chief Brian Plume briefs firefighters before the day's work against the Snake River Complex Fire near Craigmont, Idaho.

Mickey Myers, from Twin Falls, Idaho, was added to the Pennsylvanians’ team. He admits he does not see his two small children at home much during the summer – “I call them whenever I have cell connection.” 

“My parents and family are always scared for me,” says Mr. Myers, who notes that he turned 24 on the fire line. “But I tell them this is what I was meant to do. I enjoy the heck out of the job. It gives me a sense of purpose.” 

Wandering over from a nearby tent, Phillip Foster says he will be riding a water truck today, then straining to tug 200 feet of hose into the heat to spray flare-ups and hot spots. It is hard and dirty – a lot different from his life as “ski coach Phil” – his alias on the winter slopes in Colorado, he says with a grin. 

“I’ve done a lot of fun things like that,” he says of his ski instructor’s job. “But I was a Boy Scout. I always thought that was not enough. I wanted to do more for people.”

He is on a crew headed by engine boss Luke White, from Pensacola, a compact man who works for the Florida Forest Service. Mr. White succinctly surveys his new workplace: “Lot more hills. Lot less snakes.”

“They are ready to go”

Parked on the edge of the camp is a big red firetruck, unusual among the dusty brown backcountry vehicles. Eric Smith rode the truck here from Benson, Arizona, for a private firefighting company.

At age 52, Mr. Smith says he is an old-timer on his fire crew, and says he will feel it today when he hikes 7 miles into the fire perimeter as part of a hand crew, lugging a 50-pound pack. But he says he is glad to be here. 

“I started out fighting fires from a state prison,” he says. He jumped at doing the same work when he was released three years ago. “’This really helped change my life,” he says. “That was my first prison term, and I wanted it to be my last one.”

His engine boss, Peter Munro, says his Sundance Fire company welcomes people with prison records for the firefighting work. “They are usually good. They have their head straight, and they are ready to go,” he says.

The third member of their team, Rayna Hansen, says she discovered a passion for the work. “I didn’t like studying much,” she says. “This was the first thing that ever intrigued me. I found out about wildlands and found out I loved it. This has become my life’s goal.”

There are not too many women on the fire lines, but she shrugs it off. “If you’re OK with being dirty, and you don’t mind kicking back with the boys, it’s fine,” she says. 

Showers, food, and encouragement

As the firefighters rumble off in trucks toward the fire line, Jeffrey Dixon, the base manager or “camp boss,” contemplates the preparations for the evening. Mr. Dixon, a cheerful veteran of 35 years of firefighting, is here from Anchorage, Alaska. The behind-the-scenes work is crucial, he says. 

“The first thing firefighters look for when they come back is communication, food, and showers,” he says.

Pleasing a weary crew with communal food is not always successful, he admits. But he meets complaints with good-natured razz. “Hey, you’re not paying for this,” he tells them. “You get more meals than you get at home; you get free clothes, free food, got a job, got a free airplane ride. And you’re getting to see America. You are living the dream!” 

The mobilization has come a long way since they went to a fire with “bluejeans, one radio, and some MREs” – excess meals-ready-to-eat from the military, he says.

Ashley Melanson is proof of that. She arrived from Spokane, Washington, at the forward base with two long trailers of showers. Each night and morning, there is a line for an enclosed 10-minute shower. Ms. Melanson’s crew works in between each use to keep the showers clean. She is determined to take a few days off in August to get married. 

But as a contractor, she figures she will move from fire to fire all summer. Since the reporting visits for this article, for example, firefighters have made progress on both the Snake River Complex and Bootleg fires, while other blazes in the region remain uncontained.

Over at the food tent, cook Jonathan Smith is swirling a huge bowl of eggs to scramble for the second breakfast shift (the support personnel wait for the firefighters to eat first and get back out on the line). Mr. Smith usually works as a cook at the Wayback Café in Lewiston, Idaho, and jumped at the chance to cook in the field when his restaurant got the catering job.

Tonight he will serve nearly 1,200 meals of fried chicken, baked beans, corn, salad, watermelon, and pies. “These guys work hard, and they need to eat.”

Xander Peters

A view of the Living Word Christian Center on historic Ryan Street in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on July 13, 2021. In the weeks after winds and rains from Hurricanes Laura and Delta damaged the city, residents lined up in their cars for supplies donated and handed out by the church and its congregation.

After back-to-back storms struck southwest Louisiana last year, Monty and Nashonna Aucoin were left without a home to return to. Many of their friends and family, in a similar position, decided not to go back, citing the exhausting rebuilding process that lay ahead. 

But the Aucoin’s have a different plan. They have a dance studio to run. They own land, even if the mobile home on it didn’t survive the intense winds.  

“Lake Charles, that’s home for us,” Ms. Aucoin says.  

They’re still living in a camper trailer the family is renting from friends. In the past year, they’ve also had to depend on the generosity of their church’s congregation, the Living Word Christian Center. It hasn’t always been much – an occasional $50 gift card to Walmart, some supplies. 

“To be honest with you, the money wasn’t meeting much of what we needed,” Mr. Aucoin says. What mattered was, their church was there for them during their time of need. “It made us not give up.” 

Business dreams. Support from a church. A piece of land. 

Such are the tenuous threads that are giving some residents the determination to rebuild their lives in a small, close-knit but heavily damaged city. For others who lack this fabric of connection and support, the impetus has been to restart their lives elsewhere. The larger message of Lake Charles: In a time of more severe storms due to climate change the recovery of communities is far from automatic even as people strive for ways forward.

“It’s clear that people are beginning to kind of question if that logic of rebuild and return makes sense,” says Dr. Elizabeth Fussell, a researcher at Brown University who studies population and environment. “Not only, does the logic of it make sense, but are the resources actually there?” 

The challenges and peoples’ fortitude in response are especially visible in places like Lake Charles. It’s a low-income city, with nearly 23% of its population living below the federal poverty level, according to a 2019 Census estimate. Over the course of nine months, the citizens of Louisiana’s fifth-largest city have found themselves in the middle of three federally declared weather disasters – Hurricanes Laura and Delta, and then Winter Storm Viola, which, in February, froze over and broke critical infrastructure in cities from central Texas to Alabama. 

A church rallies together

After each disaster, many have been displaced from their homes.

At the Living Word Christian Center, Bishop Joe Banks saw to it that prayer among his congregation continued in the wake of each storm. He set up a phone line for folks to call if they felt the urge to pray together. He phoned members of the congregation individually to check on them. He told them to stay strong. 

“From Day One, he’s given us a lot of faith,” Ms. Aucoin says. 

Day One began in late August 2020, when Hurricane Laura made landfall with winds up to 150 miles per hour in nearby Cameron, Louisiana. Weeks later, in early October, Hurricane Delta formed in the Gulf of Mexico and followed up on Laura’s damage with more than 100 mph winds. 

Xander Peters

Bishop Joe Banks, the Living Word Christian Center's leader, surveys ongoing renovation work by construction crews on July 13, 2021. The church in Lake Charles, Louisiana, hasn't been operational since last year. Its congregation has been holding services in the church's gym.

The storms left Lake Charles in shambles. Like the Aucoin family, many of its citizens were scattered from New Orleans to Little Rock to Memphis and beyond. Bishop Banks returned to their church to discover it had taken on as much as $2 million in damage. The windows that beckon in light during Sunday morning services were blown out. Water seeped into the walls. Nearly a year later, services are still being held in the church’s gym.

Even before the storms the city's population was declining; after the storms the exodus picked up pace.  

Current population estimates aren’t available, but data from the U.S. Postal Service found that Lake Charles witnessed more out-migration between 2019 and 2020 than any of the 926 metro areas included in its survey. The tally found a decline of nearly 7% in 2020, from the city’s prior-year population of 77,000. The pattern here hints at how people, perhaps especially in low-income coastal cities like this one, may increasingly question where to stake their future in a period of more intense storms – and that permanently relocating can for many be the most feasible option. 

Relocation on the rise

This echoes a trend that’s not just national but global. Worldwide, more than 30 million people were displaced as a result of disasters last year, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, which uses data to better understand shifts in worldwide migration patterns. More than 1.7 million of those displaced were living in the U.S.

The climate crisis is widely seen as a leading impetus behind movements that researchers predict will become even more dramatic in the coming decades. University of Georgia researchers estimated in 2017 that continuing sea level rise alone could force 4 million to 13 million Americans to flee their homes in coastal regions by 2100. 

“We see a lot of similarities” between modern climate migrants and some 2 million or more who fled the Plains states during the 1930s Dust Bowl, says Carlos Martín, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. But “I think the difference we’re seeing here is that [today’s climate migrants are] often on a household level, rather than a whole community-level decision-making process.” 

Among those who relocated from Lake Charles at the household level are folks like Jennifer Landry, who left her hometown alongside her husband and son when the mandatory evacuation came down prior to Hurricane Laura making landfall. For the first few months, the family was provided with shelter in a hotel in New Orleans. Since then they’ve been living in a FEMA trailer in Lafayette, about 75 miles away, while Ms. Landry draws federal unemployment and attempts to find a job. Her husband is on disability, she says.

With the recovery of Lake Charles public schools in doubt, some 4,000 students have yet to return – their families apparently part of the diaspora.  

Ms. Landry and her family initially planned on returning to Lake Charles once they were back on their feet. But their top-floor apartment was completely destroyed during the first storm. They lost nearly everything they owned, Ms. Landry says. When they attempted to return to retrieve what they could, what was left of the ceilings collapsed on them while they sorted through their waterlogged possessions. For her, it was heartbreaking. 

“A lot of us literally lost everything and we have nothing to go back to,” Ms. Landry says. “The few places that they did have available, they made the rent three times what it’s even worth.” 

Research finds that the longer people like the Landry family are away from their home cities after a hurricane, for example, the less likely they are to return. In fact, places that are struggling economically can be almost primed for a post-disaster exodus.

When Dr. Fussell examined the population exodus seen in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and then Rita’s havoc across the Gulf Coast region in 2005, she and her colleagues found that Louisiana’s largest city saw many lifelong residents eventually return. Yet many rural parishes across southeast Louisiana did not experience a similar type of population recovery. 

When “we’re living in prosperous times, we can recover,” Dr. Fussell says. “But now we’re experiencing rare events really frequently and we’re living in not so prosperous times, because of the pandemic recession, it’s not clear that we’ll be able to recover the way we have in the past.” 

“We have to transform Lake Charles” 

The morning after Hurricane Laura was quiet across Lake Charles, save the sound of chainsaws. 

Downed telephone lines and pine trees, snapped in half like giant twigs, littered the streets. Road signs were bent and mangled. Windows in downtown office towers were blown out as if bombs had gone off. 

“The whole city was in really bad shape,” Bishop Banks says. “Whether you’re rich, poor, white, Black, it didn’t matter. Everybody had some type of devastation.” 

Bishop Banks and his congregation swung into action. Members handed out food, water, beds, clothes – anything anyone throughout the city might need during extended water and electricity outages.

Mr. Banks’ faith and his mission to the congregation, he says, has been the steadying force that’s kept him grounded during the city’s trying times. 

It’s also why he remains optimistic that many church members will return, even though he’s witnessed the mental and physical toll the storms’ aftermath has had on them. Telling of two people who died recently from drug overdose, he says his focus is on how to help others rise rather than sink. 

“The Bible says that without a vision, the people perish,” Mr. Banks says. 

That’s why it’s crucial for city leaders to get the rebuilding process right, he adds. 

Lake Charles city councilman Craig Marks says he understands the need. The way forward, he says, “is to rebuild – rebuild all the businesses and all of the homes we lost to the disasters” to draw citizens back to town. 

It’s a tall challenge. Many homeowners lacked adequate insurance. And while most residents haven’t moved away, a sea of boarded up windows along Ryan Street, the city’s historic corridor, is testament to the gaps left in the local economy. Blue tarps abound on unrepaired residential rooftops. 

But Councilman Marks says city leaders are attempting to lay the groundwork for revival. Incentives for locals like a tax break last year and waiving water bills was a start, but the future rests on who they’re eventually capable of attracting to the city – a younger crowd, in essence. 

“I think the consensus of the council is that’s our target age, because that’s our future,” Councilman Marks says. “We have to transform Lake Charles. It’s going to take a lot more than just the [petrochemical industry] being here. We’re going to have to dip our hand into entertainment and different things like that” to incentivize Louisiana locals to stay home, as well as to lure nearby Texans to relocate and to eventually bring the city’s natives back home. 

If it goes as hoped, the sound of saws and hammers will increasingly replace the memory of those post-storm chainsaws. New buildings will spring up as others are repaired. 

“I do believe there’s always some light at the end of the tunnel,” Mr. Banks says. “I’m the type of person who even in the middle of a storm, I believe that you can come out and get to the other side better than before. I always say, whenever there’s devastation, prepare for restoration.”

It’s a hot summer afternoon in St. Louis, and Dawn Weber’s yard is teeming with life. A gray catbird meows over the low hum of bees, as dragonflies skip across the still water of the garden’s pond. At just over a quarter of an acre, the carpet of wild violet and native plants around Ms. Weber’s house is home to about 38 species of butterflies and 99 species of birds.

“I really enjoy seeing the life,” she says. “There are about 300 species of plants between the front and the back [yards].”

Ms. Weber is among the growing number of homeowners who have traded manicured lawns for wild and diverse “naturescaped” gardens. Her garden includes native species, such as yellow bell flowers and queen of the prairie, and features a small, lily-covered pond. It’s also a certified wildlife habitat, a recognition Ms. Weber earned after becoming involved with the St. Louis Chapter of Wild Ones – a national organization that provides resources for homeowners and others interested in cultivating native plants to support local ecosystems. Ms. Weber began as a volunteer in 2013, and today she is the vice president of the Wild Ones’ largest and most active chapter. 

The trend of planting native and wildlife gardens is on the rise nationwide. So far this year, an estimated 67.2 million American households specifically purchased plants to help butterflies, bees, and birds, and an estimated 30 million adults converted part of their lawn to a natural or wildflower landscape, according to a 2021 survey by the National Garden Association and the University of New Hampshire. The popularity of native gardening follows growing awareness of the need for species conservation in local ecosystems.

“The plants and animals around us run the ecosystem,” says Doug Tallamy, professor in the Entomology and Wildlife Ecology Department at the University of Delaware. But, he adds, “We’re losing our insects, we’re losing our plants and losing our birds. This is a serious biodiversity crisis.”

“And it stems from the fact that we’ve taken away the [native] plants or used incorrect plants [to landscape],” he says, “Not all plants support the insects that run the food webs that feed the birds and everything else.”

The use of harmful pesticides also affects the food web, hurting pollinator insects like bumblebees and butterflies, as well as wildlife such as hummingbirds and song birds.

Courtesy of Dawn Weber

An American robin, perched on an American beautyberry shrub in Dawn Weber’s yard in St. Louis, holds a berry from this native plant in its beak. Providing food, water, shelter, and a place for wildlife to raise their young are among the requirements for one’s yard to be certified as a wildlife habitat.

Fixing the food web

This breakdown of the food web has triggered what environmental experts call a global mass extinction event.

But conservation experts think anyone with a yard or even a deck outside an apartment can be part of the solution. The United States currently has more than 40 million acres of land dedicated to lawns. Although wide expanses of mowed green lawns may look pleasing to the eye, Professor Tallamy calls them “dead scapes,” land that does not support biodiversity or the local ecosystem.

Native gardens of any size in residential areas form “conservation corridors” that support local wildlife. Local pollinators such as butterflies, bees, and moths depend on these conservation corridors and in turn support creatures higher on the food chain, such as birds.

“If you add all of the residential landscape, it’s far more than our national park systems combined,” says Dan Pearson, coordinator of the Bring Conservation Home program, a community outreach program run by the St. Louis Audubon Society. BCH provides consultation to private landowners in the St. Louis area on landscape practices – such as removing invasive plant species, monitoring the health of the soil, and providing a water source – that encourage the growth of native plant species. The program hopes to encourage homeowners to convert their lawns into ecologically diverse landscapes.

“If enough people could dedicate a significant portion of their landscape to the native plants that have co-evolved with the insects in [their] ecosystem, we could reduce the impact and maybe even stop the mass extinction event,” says Mr. Pearson.

From lawns to habitats

Since 2011, the Bring Conservation Home Program has completed 1,500 site visits in St Louis, with 150 more requests to fulfill before the end of the year. Homeowners who transform their land into a native garden can apply for official wildlife habitat certification. As of 2020, there are more than 260,000 certified wildlife habitats registered with the National Wildlife Federation, the largest private nonprofit organization dedicated to conservation education and advocacy. Once homeowners fulfill the requirements – provision of food, water, shelter, and a place for wildlife to raise their young, along with the use of sustainable practices – they receive a sign to post in their garden.

Courtesy of Dawn Weber

Garden phlox, hydrangea, and hazelnut all grow in Dawn Weber's St. Louis garden. She advises people considering a native garden to start small. “It gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and make big changes,” she says.

“You get a sign that says, ‘This is a certified wildlife habitat,’” Mr. Pearson says. “It helps to tell the neighbors, ‘Hey, this isn’t just weeds.’”

Signs are very important for native and wildlife gardeners who may face resistance from suspicious neighbors and homeowners association rules that limit how much of their land can be dedicated to native species.

“A lot of times it’s subdivisions with homeowners associations [that resist the change] because they feel like it’s going to bring down the property value,” Ms. Weber says. “But there are things that people can do to make that landscape more formal,” she adds, such as choosing shorter native plants.

For those without land of their own who want to provide habitats for wildlife, there are other ways to get involved.

“If you live in an apartment complex and the grounds have any trees, adopt a tree,” suggests Professor Tallamy, including taking care of the soil around the base of the tree to make it more habitable for native insects that spend a good portion of their life cycle in the earth beneath the trees. He also encourages people to volunteer at parks.

In St. Louis, interest is growing as neighbors talk to each other about gardening and more people learn how to identify and make room for native plants, says Mr. Pearson. 

“I always tell people that you start small,” Ms. Weber says as she leans over a garden bed, inspecting the purple buds of the downy skullcap – a spiky, perennial plant native to the Midwest that attracts pollinators. “It gives you the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and make big changes.”

When Siân Heder first pitched “CODA,” a movie featuring several deaf characters, she struggled to be truly heard. 

Her movie is about Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a teenager who is the only hearing member in a deaf household. (CODA is an acronym for “child of deaf adult.”) Ruby’s torn between her desire to pursue a singing career and her guilt about leaving her family, who make a living fishing in a Massachusetts coastal town. They’ve come to depend on her as their translator.

Ms. Heder, the writer and director, felt a strong need to cast deaf actors to play the Rossis. But film financiers balked at the idea.

“‘CODA’ started out as a studio movie, and it became very clear that the studio wasn’t going to make that movie,” says Ms. Heder in a video call. “I felt clear that if they didn’t want to make it in the way I knew it should be made, then the movie shouldn’t exist.”

The backstory about the making of “CODA” is how Ms. Heder and her cast persisted through challenges – much like the characters in the story. The crowd-pleaser, now showing in cinemas and streaming on Apple TV+, was a breakout hit at the Sundance Film Festival and is generating Oscar buzz. “CODA” is representative of deaf people in more ways than just its casting, which includes actor Marlee Matlin. Rather than offer up “a precious story about disability,” Ms. Heder says she wanted to normalize the deaf characters in a story that’s about resilience. It’s portrayed by actors Hollywood often neglects. 

“I’m glad the director stood firm on having deaf actors,” Rikki Poynter, a public speaker whose YouTube channel chronicles her experiences as a deaf person, writes in an email. “I love Marlee Matlin, she was someone I looked up to growing up because she was the only famous deaf person I knew at the time when I was a kid. But knowing all the deaf people and actors I do now, I do hope we get more of a chance to see them too!”

A re-imagined remake

“CODA” is a remake of the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier.” Ms. Heder envisioned a fresh approach for her English-language adaptation. The Massachusetts-born writer and director took classes in American Sign Language. With the assistance of ASL masters, she translated approximately 40% of her script into sign language so that viewers can see her “words literally come to life.” (The film includes subtitles during scenes with signing.) Then she recruited Ms. Matlin to play Ruby’s mother in a role that’s both comedic and acerbic. Jackie Rossi doesn’t understand her daughter’s desire to use her singing talent to win a scholarship to Berklee College of Music. Her indignant response: “If I was blind, would you want to paint?” Speaking in an interview through an interpreter, Ms. Matlin says the storyline reminded her of her own experience as a precocious teen.

Apple TV+

Ferdia Walsh-Peelo (left) and Emilia Jones play love interests in “CODA.”

“When Henry Winkler came to visit us at the Center on Deafness, I said, ‘Hi, I’m Marlee, I want to be an actor just like you in Hollywood,’” recalls Ms. Matlin, who won the Oscar for best actress for her debut movie, “Children of a Lesser God.” “My mom, being a mom who wanted to protect me, said to Henry, ‘Don’t encourage her too much because the scenario of a deaf actor in Hollywood won’t happen. People will dismiss Marlee.’ And Henry looked at her, turned around, and said to me, ‘Marlee, you can be whatever you want to be as long as you believe in yourself and follow your heart.’”

Unlike the original French movie, which featured a hearing cast, Ms. Heder and Ms. Matlin took a stand for hiring deaf actors. Opportunities for such actors remain scarce in Hollywood. Consequently, they lost backing for the movie. But Ms. Heder had learned a thing or two about perseverance. Her first short film, “Mother,” was rejected from 11 film festivals before it was accepted into competition at Cannes. Her next movie, “Tallulah,” a 2016 feature starring Elliot Page and Allison Janney, took nine years to make.

“There were so many instances where I would run into people and they’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re still trying to get that [Tallulah] made?’ You know, with this sort of judgment,” says Ms. Heder. “I did listen to that voice inside myself that said, ‘Keep going and this will happen.’ And I think the same is true for ‘CODA.’” 

Empowering the characters

The director found new backers who believed “CODA” would find an audience. Having grown up in Massachusetts, Ms. Heder set “CODA” in the coastal town of Gloucester rather than on a dairy farm like in the original movie. Each morning before school, Ruby and her family venture out on their trawler to haul up nets clotted with fish. The Rossis receive meager pay for their catch, and they feel like outsiders in the community. Yet Ms. Heder was careful to steer clear of the Hollywood tropes of depicting people with disabilities as saints, martyrs, or characters to feel sorry for. 

“That victim mentality is antiquated. It’s an old way of thinking. We don’t need pity or help or saving,” says Troy Kotsur, who plays Ruby’s father, Frank, speaking through an interpreter. “There are so many successful deaf attorneys, teachers, doctors, dentists, you name it. They’re out there. They’re just overlooked and we’re a minority. And now with the movie ‘CODA,’ we’re heroes.”

The Rossi family members affectionately tease each other with salty language and delight in embarrassing Ruby with frankness about sex. As the daughter of Hungarian and Welsh immigrants, Ms. Heder identified with that family dynamic. The protagonist’s struggle to be individuated outside of her clan reflects her own experience. She describes “CODA” as a coming-of-age story not just for Ruby, but also her mother, father, and brother. 

“Those bonds and those ties continue and persevere, even under incredible strain and within circumstances that you think would pull them apart,” says Ms. Heder. “That’s, to me, what the film is about: the resilience of family.”

“CODA” is available in theaters and on Apple TV+. It is rated PG-13 for drug use, language, and strong sexual content.

AP

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Vietnamese Defense Minister Phan Van Giang inspects an honor guard in Hanoi, Vietnam, July 29, 2021.

For many of its friends and allies, America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan has not only drawn parallels to the 1975 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam; it has also dealt a similar blow to U.S. credibility as a trusted power. Yet it says something about the resiliency of America’s global role that one of its friends – Vietnam itself – has said nothing about lost trust since the Aug. 15 images of helicopters lifting people from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In fact, on Aug. 24, Hanoi will play host to Kamala Harris, the first U.S. vice president to visit Vietnam since 1975.

The visit will help further seal the warming – and healing – of postwar ties between Vietnam and the United States that began 26 years ago with the normalization of official relations. While the ruling Communist Party largely ignores U.S. promotion of human rights and democratic values, Vietnam sees Washington as a reliable friend – “a leading partner” – in upholding world order.

The two are working closely to counter China’s military encroachments on islands in the South China Sea – including Vietnam’s own islands. The U.S., for example, has helped beef up Hanoi’s maritime forces, while in 2018 Vietnam allowed an American aircraft carrier to dock at Da Nang.

The U.S. has become Vietnam’s largest export market, while the U.S. has helped Vietnam deal with the pandemic. The closeness of their ties is reflected in the fact that Ms. Harris’ only other stop in Southeast Asia will be Singapore.

The relationship may well serve as a symbol of the ability of the U.S. to bounce back as a steadfast leader after its historic mistakes during the Cold War and the war on terror.

The war on terror has yet to be won, but as former U.S. diplomat wrote for the Atlantic Council on Aug. 17: “As it turns out, U.S. strategy during the Cold War – supporting freedom and resisting Soviet communism – succeeded, even in the face of Washington’s blunders in Vietnam and elsewhere. We must have been on to something about the attractive power of freedom and about the resilience of the U.S.-led liberal international system – and the United States itself.”

A healthy debate has begun in the U.S. on what it did wrong – and right  – in Afghanistan. A similar debate after the Vietnam War (or what Vietnamese call “the American War”) eventually led to a revival of U.S. preeminence, including its role in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a country based on ideals, the U.S. can often lose sight of those ideals – and lose the trust of allies. Vietnam experienced both sides of that America. Perhaps it knows something more than other countries.