Around 5 p.m. on Feb. 4, roughly 70 miles north of Libya, a white reconnaissance plane with a camera on its underside circled a dinghy carrying a hundred desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. The surveillance footage from the airplane’s camera was transmitted live to an office in Warsaw, Poland, at the headquarters of Frontex, which is the European Union’s border patrol agency.

Two hours later, thanks to this surveillance footage, a Libyan coast guard cutter caught up with the migrants and ordered them to stop, even though they were well outside Libyan waters. According to several migrants who survived the experience, the armed officers then took the migrants on board, beat them savagely, and carried them back to the one place they did not want to go: Libya’s lawless gulag of detention centers.

It is efficient and brutal. The at-sea capture and on-land internment of these migrants is what European Union officials hail as part of a successful partnership with Libya in their “humanitarian rescue” efforts across the Mediterranean. However, the true intent of this joint campaign seems to be less to save migrants from drowning than to stop them from reaching European shores.

Since more than a million migrants and refugees poured into Europe in 2015, sparking a fierce debate about whether they should be welcomed or turned back, the continent has been convulsed by the issue of migration, which has become a contentious and acutely sensitive political pressure point. European Union rules governing migrants are outdated and unworkable, but the EU has been reluctant to reform them for fear of stirring up divisions amongst member states and xenophobic extremism in their electorates.

Ed Ou/The Outlaw Ocean Project

A view of the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel operated by Doctors Without Borders off the coast of Libya on June 6, 2021. ​According to evidence gathered by journalists and NGOs, the E​uropean Union​ border agency ​relies on collaboration with the Libyan coast guard to keep ​many​ migrants from European shores. ​Meanwhile, a​mid the​ ongoing pandemic​, humanitarian ships have slowly begun resuming their operations.

Instead, the bloc has attempted to outsource migration control measures to countries beyond its borders. It has sent billions of dollars to African governments to help them improve economic conditions and thus dampen the impetus to migrate that their citizens feel. But tens of millions of those dollars have gone to law enforcement and efforts in countries such as Niger to block migrants’ path well before they reach Libya.

Closer to home, Frontex officers themselves have been accused of illegally pushing asylum-seekers out of Greece and back into Turkey – allegations now being tested in two landmark cases before the European Court of Justice.

Since the migrant crisis started six years ago, European officials have relied heavily on the Libyans to stem the flow from their coastline across the Mediterranean Sea. The EU has not only equipped and trained the Libyan coast guard, but also lobbied the United Nations  maritime organization to recognize an enlarged search-and-rescue zone so that the Libyans could have wider reach off their coast.

The EU, led by Italy, uses the Libyan coast guard as a proxy maritime force. Flying drones and airplanes over the Mediterranean, Frontex locates migrant boats, then alerts the Italians, who, in turn, inform the Libyan authorities. Once captured by the Libyan coast guard, tens of thousands of these migrants have been delivered into a dozen or so detention centers run by militias.

The result of this collaboration has been a precipitous drop in the number of people reaching Europe from Libya. Around 20,000 migrants arrived in the first six months of this year via the Central Mediterranean route, down from 70,000 during the same period in 2016.

Ed Ou/The Outlaw Ocean Project

Migrants from Bangladesh and Ethiopia, rescued in the Mediterranean. Around 20,000 migrants reached Europe from the Libyan coast in the first six months of this year, down from 70,000 five years ago, partly as a result of cooperation between the European border force and the Libyan coast guard.

Though the Libyan coast guard routinely opens fire on migrant boats and senior members of the force work hand in hand with the militias that run the detention camps – one coast guard commander is subject to United Nations sanctions for human trafficking – it continues to enjoy strong EU support. This fall, the EU shipped four new speedboats to the Libyan coast guard so that it could more effectively capture migrants and send them to detention centers where they are routinely beaten, starved, and enslaved.

Growing evidence of collaboration with Libya

Frontex has long denied direct cooperation with Libya, which since NATO allies deposed President Muammar Qaddafi in 2001 has been a failed state largely run by militias. The agency insists that its sole aim is to save lives, and a spokesperson said that it only directly alerts Libyan authorities to migrant boats in true emergencies.

“International law obliges all vessels to provide assistance to any persons found in distress,” the spokesperson said in an interview. Frontex “has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.”

But a mounting body of evidence collected by European journalists and nongovernmental organizations suggests otherwise.

Last year, for instance, Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch nonprofit journalism organization, documented 20 instances in which Frontex aircraft were in the vicinity of migrant boats later captured by the Libyan coast guard. In a dozen of those cases, Lighthouse determined, Frontex was the first to identify the boats, meaning that under international law, it was obliged to notify not just the Libyan coast guard, but the nearest vessel – official or commercial – so that a rescue might be promptly undertaken.

“There is a clear pattern discernible,” Lighthouse researchers asserted. “Boats in distress are spotted; communications take place between European actors and the Libyan coast guard. No notice is given to nearby commercial shipping or NGO vessels despite their proximity to urgent situations where boats are in distress on the open sea.

Ed Ou/The Outlaw Ocean Project

Migrants rescued off the coast of Libya who tested positive for COVID-19 are isolated aboard the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel operated by Doctors Without Borders, before being offloaded to a hospital in Augusta, Italy, on June 19, 2021.

“While the real numbers could be far higher, this representative sample showed that Frontex was present and watching while at least 91 people went missing and are presumed to have drowned.”

That same year, The Guardian, in collaboration with Lighthouse, published the actual recorded exchanges between a European surveillance plane and the Libyan coast guard as the Libyans sought to intercept two migrant boats.

“OK sir, my radar is not good, is not good, if you stay [over the boat] I will follow you,” a Libyan coast guard captain radioed the plane.

“We have approximately five minutes left on station,” said the plane’s pilot, as he tried to guide the coast guard to the migrant vessels. “We will go overhead the vessel, the rubber boat, and we will light our landing lights.”

Hussein Baoumi, Amnesty International’s Libya researcher, said he was not surprised by Frontex’s continuing denial of a formal relationship with the Libyan coast guard. “They want to separate themselves from the dirtiest aspects of migrant containment,” Mr. Baoumi said. “It doesn’t matter. They are cooperating. They are directly complicit.”

Behind the migrant prisons, EU money

The EU has also denied directly funding the militia-run gulag of migrant prisons in Libya, and has consistently both acknowledged their barbarity and called for improvements. But it has resisted calls to end its work with Libya and take steps to rescue those caught up in the country’s web of migrant jails.

Moreover, if the EU does not pay to build the detention centers or staff their guard posts, European money does pay for much else in the system, The Outlaw Ocean Project and The New Yorker found in an 11-month investigation based on financial reports; interviews with European parliamentarians, UN officials, and aid workers; EU purchasing documents; an open-records request to Frontex and the European Commission; flight-tracking data; and open-source platforms including Facebook and Instagram.

That makes the EU intimately involved in a system where a UN-sponsored independent fact-finding mission discovered that “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants … may amount to crimes against humanity,” according to its report, released in October.

Pierre Kattar/The Outlaw Ocean Project

A drone photograph of the Al Mabani detention center in Tripoli, Libya, where militia members hold would-be migrants prisoner. A UN-sponsored report recently found that “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants [in such prisons] ... may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The EU’s Frontex drones and planes are often the first to spot the migrant boats. Then EU-purchased Libyan coast guard cutters capture the migrants and bring them back to shore.

European funds pay for much of what happens next, the investigation found by scouring public databases. They have bought shipping containers that double as coast guard port offices, touch-screen tablets used by aid workers who count migrants as they disembark, and ambulances and buses to transport migrants.

They have paid for blankets, mattresses, winter clothes, showers, toilets, and even toilet paper in the migrant prisons. And when migrants die, at sea or in detention, EU money has paid for body bags.

“Violations documented against refugees and migrants are not an accident, but rather the clear and anticipated outcomes of an EU-supported system of interception, disembarkation and return to detention centers notorious for abuse, built with the aim of keeping refugees and migrants out of Europe at all costs,” charged a report by Amnesty International in July.

As the tip of the spear, Frontex is coming under closer scrutiny. 

A recent investigation carried out by the European Parliament produced a litany of allegations against the agency: that it turned a blind eye to human rights violations committed by coast guard personnel from both European countries and partner countries in Africa; that its own internal system for receiving and acting on complaints of misconduct had failed; and that the agency’s head, Fabrice Leggeri, had done nothing to act on four years of warnings from his agency’s own top human rights official.

Presented with the findings in this investigation, Mr. Leggeri’s office refused repeated requests for an interview.

Border agency faces European justice

This year, two landmark cases against Frontex are being brought by migrants before the Court of Justice of the European Union, the EU’s chief judicial authority.  

One of them, filed in October, alleges that a Syrian family, with four young children between the ages of 1 and 7, was tricked by European and Greek officials into boarding a plane that deported them from Greece to Turkey, after the family had lodged asylum applications. Frontex officials accompanied the family, it is claimed, and stood by while the children were separated from their parents for the flight. 

It took Frontex officials more than three and a half years to handle the complaint lodged by the family, according to Lisa-Marie Komp, their lawyer. In the end, the agency claimed that the Greek coast guard, not Frontex, was responsible for the “pushback,” which would be a violation of EU asylum law.

Ed Ou/The Outlaw Ocean Project

Doctors give instructions to migrants aboard the Geo Barents, a rescue vessel operated by Doctors Without Borders, on June 17, 2021. The humanitarian organization competes in the search for migrants at sea with the Libyan coast guard, which sends them back to militia-run detention centers in Libya.

“Frontex has repeatedly failed to take effective action when allegations of human rights violations are brought to its attention,” said Eva Cossé, Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Its rapid growth into an executive agency of the EU with increased powers, funding, and legal responsibilities makes it all the more urgent for Frontex to put in place effective tools to safeguard fundamental rights.”

Existing tools appear inadequate. Since Frontex set up an independent complaints mechanism in 2016, it has not dealt with a single complaint against Frontex staff members, an EU ombudsperson report found in June.

Created in 2004, Frontex now has an annual budget of 543 million euros (about $619 million) and it employs more than 1,400 staff members, including a uniformed force of roughly 600 officers. The agency is governed by a management board consisting of representatives of the 27 EU member states and two members of the European Commission.

In an analysis of the history of Frontex’s work, Human Rights Watch noted that under its own bylaws, the agency has the power to suspend or end the operations of EU border agencies found to have committed abuses against migrants. It has never done so.

In June, Human Rights Watch sent the agency’s top officials what it said was evidence of serious misconduct either committed or overlooked by Frontex in three European countries. It has yet to receive a response.  

But Frontex is under pressure. Last January the European Anti-Fraud office opened an investigation into the agency, though the specific charges have not been made public. At the same time, a migrants’ rights organization that had for years been part of an independent board of civil society advisers to Frontex withdrew from the group, saying it felt ignored.

Under fire from published allegations it had acted illegally, particularly by assisting “pushbacks” in the Aegean Sea, Frontex ordered an internal review of its operations. Reporters who have seen the investigators’ report say it found deficiencies in the agency’s systems for reporting problems in its ranks, and suggested an overhaul of its culture. 

Dr. Komp, the lawyer who has taken Frontex to the European Union’s Court of Justice, hopes that the case will clarify the agency’s task. “It is especially important,” she says, “that Frontex not only help member states to control their borders, but that it also complies with fundamental rights.”

Ian Urbina is the director of, and Joe Galvin is a writer for, The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on environmental and human rights concerns at sea globally.

Nasser Nasser/AP

Protesters hold a banner that reads "NGOs operate under the law, the occupation has no right marking them with terrorism," during the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network protest in front of United Nations' offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Nov. 10, 2021. Israel has effectively outlawed six Palestinian humanitarian groups by declaring them terrorist organizations.

A rustic building on the outskirts of Ramallah, its main doors chained and padlocked, is a place of refuge for Abu Rasheed.

Up the back stairs of what were the offices of a now-shuttered health NGO, one floor up, a door opens to a busy hallway with lawyers rushing to get affidavits and Palestinian fathers and mothers waiting to hear news of their children.

This is now the headquarters of the Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P), the only NGO providing legal aid for Palestinian juveniles in the West Bank – and one of six Palestinian NGOs controversially designated as terrorist organizations by Israel in October.

Abu Rasheed, a carpenter from the Al-Jalazone refugee camp north of Ramallah, arrives still in his work clothes to meet with his 12-year-old son’s lawyer, provided by the DCI-P.

Since his son’s arrest by the Israeli military in a nighttime raid on their refugee camp three days earlier, the lawyer is now his only channel of communication with his son.

“My son is not mature enough to undergo interrogation,” says Abu Rasheed, who is unsure whether his son did in fact throw stones at Israeli soldiers or was accidentally caught up in the raid. “I just don’t want my son to grow up fast.”

His parental anguish dramatizes how in internationally recognized occupied territory, where conflict and confrontation is part of daily life, humanitarian work is an essential need. It also suggests the human cost of such work becoming a political battleground, as it has in the highly polarized Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Israeli military designation of the six NGOs as terrorist organizations, initially outlawing their activities in Israel, has dramatically escalated the politicization of humanitarian work in the West Bank.

The ordeal has highlighted the longstanding challenge faced by volunteers and aid workers in the Israeli-occupied territories: to prove their independence, credibility, and reliability amid high polarization that often leaves organizations and their employees caught in the middle.

That is especially so of Al-Haq, another of the six NGOs, which documents alleged violations of Palestinian rights by all parties in the region, including the governing Palestinian Authority (PA).

“We work in human rights, we have nothing to hide – we work publicly and publicize our results on international platforms whether it be it against the PA, Hamas, or against Israel,” says Zahi Jaradat, head of Al-Haq’s field documentation unit. 

This places an added pressure on NGO workers, he says, to “maintain credibility” and independence as they are pushed from different directions. 

“The sustainability of civil society’s work is a guarantee for justice everywhere, not just here in Palestine,” says Mr. Jaradat. “If they close us down, crimes and abuses will go without accountability.”

Fatima Abdulkarim

Tahseen Elayan, deputy director of Al-Haq, one of six Palestinian NGOs Israel designated as a terrorist organization, at their office in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 20, 2021.

Complicated legacy

The Israeli Ministry of Defense said its Oct. 29 decision to designate the six West Bank human rights organizations as terrorist groups is due to their alleged links to the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a hardline Marxist-Leninist group and former PLO member that opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords and formation of the PA.

The six NGOs deny the terrorism accusations and ties to the PFLP or any other political group. At the same time, the allegations have put a spotlight on the complicated legacy of humanitarian work in the West Bank.

In the 1980s, another NGO, the Health Work Committees, was founded by volunteer doctors and nurses to provide medical services to Palestinians. PFLP members were among the founders. In June, Israel raided and shuttered that organization.

But a flurry of independent reports by the Associated Press, Israeli journalists, and other news organizations with access to leaked portions of the intelligence dossier Israel shared with other countries have since cast doubts over the October allegations, saying they are based on interrogations of two former members of the Health Work Committees who have no ties to the six new NGOs in question.

The legacy of the Health Works Committees is nevertheless casting a cloud over the humanitarian work of the modern NGOs, which adhere to international standards to maintain their funding from European governments and international groups such as George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

In the past, DCI-P says it faced hindrances in working with Israeli and Palestinian authorities, such as a refusal to hand over official figures and information, and what they describe as a widespread culture of impunity and violence toward their clients in Israeli and Palestinian jails.

“This time we really do not know what the Israeli authorities could do to us; we might be arrested or our offices shut down,” says Ayed Abu Iqteish, a DCI-P director. “This is a whole new level of delegitimization.”

“We feel invaded 24/7”

The alleged surveillance of the organizations’ employees, meanwhile, is a new escalation.

According to an investigation released in November by Front Line Defenders, an Irish-based human rights organization backed by Amnesty International and the University of Toronto Citizens Lab, six devices used by employees of the NGOs and Palestinian diplomats were hacked by the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus software. And that has raised concerns that the employees’ homes and families could become targets of surveillance as well.

“The fact that they can spy on us and access our personal data is not new, but it is especially concerning when it comes to our children. They are the ones I fear for,” adds Mr. Abu Iqteish.

The groups’ concerns have also grown since an additional Israeli military order made their activities illegal in the West Bank as well, opening the door for potential arrests and closure of the organizations.

NGO workers say they are living on a knife’s edge, not knowing whether they could be arrested or their families face legal action. One worker, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of legal reprisal, says he does not know whether he will return home each day he sets out for field work.

Ubay Aboudy, director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development, one of the six blacklisted NGOs, has been arrested by both Israel and the PA over his activism and criticism of suppression of political freedoms.

Fatima Abdulkarim

The shuttered offices of the Health Work Committees, a Palestinian NGO that provided health services in rural communities in the Palestinian territories, in Ramallah, West Bank, Nov. 20, 2021.

Yet nothing, he says, compares to the recent terrorist designation.

“We value diversity, integrity, and professionalism, we work to protect human rights,” says Mr. Aboudy. “How can we be stigmatized as terrorists?”

His wife, Hind Shraydeh, who works for another NGO that monitors accountability and transparency within the PA, says the politicization of NGOs and phone hacking has brought the targeting of rights groups into their own home.

“The only thing we had left was our personal space,” Ms. Shraydeh says. “We feel invaded 24/7. Now not only is my husband under scrutiny, but our entire family feels like we are being spied on. We now feel unsafe in our own home.”

Under fire from all sides

NGO staff insist they are an important pillar in Palestinian society that provides essential services and monitors rights abuses by all parties – often placing their organizations and staff right in the middle of divisions among Palestinians and between Palestinians and Israelis.

Al-Haq says it has testy relations with the Palestinian Authority. Sometimes the PA relies on Al-Haq’s documentation when building cases against Israel before the international community, but then retaliates when Al-Haq publicizes alleged rights abuses committed by the PA.

Multiple times, Al-Haq has disclosed allegations of torture carried out by PA security services in Palestinian prisons, which resulted in the Authority intimidating employees and denying them access to correctional facilities, employees say.

Criticism of alleged rights violations by Hamas and its crackdowns on protesters and civil society has also put Al-Haq under pressure in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, Al-Haq’s documentation of alleged abuses and extrajudicial killings by Israeli soldiers, used in Israeli court cases, has put it squarely in the crosshairs of right-leaning Israeli groups.

Cut in services

There are concerns of the impact should these NGOs be shuttered.

Already the Palestinian health sector has been impacted after the Israeli raid on the Ramallah office of the Health Work Committees, which abruptly stopped their mobile health clinics that serve thousands of women.

The Committees provide primary health-care services and care for COVID-19 patients in remote Palestinian villages and areas cut off from urban health centers and hospitals by geography and Israeli checkpoints.

Israel shut down the organization for a six-month period on allegations of supporting terrorism, allegations the NGO denies.

The Israeli allegations are related to two former employees who were fired in 2019 for embezzling funds and later interrogated by Israel in 2020.

“There are thousands of Palestinians in remote areas who are not getting adequate healthcare anymore, because Israel thinks I’m a terrorist,” says one paramedic who volunteered for years with the Committee.

Amnesty International reported that the closure “will have catastrophic consequences for the health needs of Palestinians across the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Meanwhile, the potential loss of DCI-P would hit the families of scores of Palestinian minors believed to be held by Israeli authorities. (The last official number was 157 in October 2020.)

“Regardless of all the obstacles, our end-goal is for both the Palestinians and the Israelis to ensure respect for standard treatment that puts the child’s interest as a priority,” says Mr. Abu Iqteish of DCI-P.

Al-Haq says lawyers and rights groups visiting from different parts of the world now question whether the organization is biased or has ties to hardline groups, questions which may impact donor funding.  

But, Mr. Jaradat says, “we are more concerned about how to prevent human rights violations.”

Taylor Luck contributed to this report from Amman, Jordan.

Mahesh Kumar A./AP

People line up to register their names to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in Hyderabad, India, Dec. 2, 2021. Far more men were initially receiving doses than women in India, a disparity that public health officials say reveals gender inequality in many countries around the globe.

When health care worker Grace Jokudu and her colleagues began distributing the COVID-19 vaccine in Wau, a city in the northwest of South Sudan, they quickly noticed a disparity.

When people came to their clinic with symptoms of COVID-19, they were mostly women. But almost everyone lining up to be vaccinated was a man.

Why, they wondered, weren’t there more women in those lines?

Across South Sudan, women account for 70% of all COVID-19 cases, but only 26% of those getting vaccinated, according to October estimates by the international humanitarian organization CARE, for which Ms. Jokudu works. That’s the inverse of many countries in the Western world, including the United States, where women are more likely than men to be vaccinated, by about 10%, according to figures from late June.

Gender gaps have been at the top of vaccination drives in many countries beyond Africa, including Iraq, Timor-Leste, and India, which as recently as July had vaccinated 28 million more men than women, exposing a country’s societal values, norms, and realities on the ground. 

“A disaster like a pandemic exposes the inequalities that already exist in our societies,” says Nsovo Mayimele, a pharmacist and women’s health activist in South Africa. “At its core, this is a problem about women being on the receiving end of inequality in our society more generally.”

Although many countries haven’t kept data on vaccination that is broken down by gender, it appears that globally these gaps are also rapidly shrinking – including in South Sudan – thanks to a strategy that many experts say should be at the core of any public health response: Ask people what they need.

“If you get to the level of assuming everyone’s needs are the same, you can’t design programs that actually work for people,” says Helena Ballester Bon, a specialist for the communication for development arm of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) working in east and southern Africa.

That seems like simple advice, but in the heat of responding to health crises, it’s often easy to overlook. Ebola responders in both West Africa and Congo, for instance, faced often violent resistance from communities who didn’t understand why strangers in spacesuitlike protective gear were dragging away people to far-away hospitals. Resistance to treatment, and later to vaccines, declined when health responders created Ebola-safe burial rituals that were in line with local customs.

Uptake of the HPV vaccine in Somalia went up markedly when officials started assigning women to do the marketing, making it easier for those considering vaccination to ask questions about sexual and reproductive health without embarrassment.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine, more women than men in the U.S. and Canada are getting vaccinated, experts say, in part because women in those places tend to be more proactive about seeking out health care in the first place. But health care workers in many countries across the developing world initially found fewer women than men were showing up to be vaccinated for reasons both practical and philosophical.

On the most basic level, says Ms. Jokudu, “they couldn’t get there.” Vaccination clinics kept business hours, and women were often consumed with household tasks – child care, cleaning, cooking, collecting water, farming – that couldn’t be abandoned. Many had neither time nor money for transportation to far-away clinics.

“Logistically, women are disadvantaged in many ways,” says Emmanuel Ojwang, CARE’s health and nutrition coordinator in South Sudan. “That’s especially true when they have to travel long distances to be vaccinated, because they are very busy with caretaking.”

“We find there are many women who have expressed interest in being vaccinated, but the issue is access,” says Upile Kachila, a senior manager with VillageReach, a health NGO working in Malawi.

For others, hesitancy around vaccination was tied up in rumors that circulated widely around the world about the vaccine affecting fertility. Such rumors have gathered particularly ferocious momentum in regions like Africa, experts say, because so few people overall – about 6% of the population – are fully vaccinated.

But that, too, is a problem with a relatively straightforward solution, experts say.

Give women access to people who can answer their questions.

“Hesitancy is not rejection,” Ms. Bon says. “It’s a continuum. People’s positions can change with better information.”

Naturalist Danielle Bronson is ecstatic. The butterflies are back. Specifically, the Western monarch butterfly – more than 20,000 of them hanging in clusters from branches in elegant eucalyptus trees or fluttering around this conservation grove on the central California coast. 

Last year, the count in the Pismo State Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove totaled only 200, in what is a top overwintering spot for monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains. The entire recorded population numbered less than 2,000 last year – down from millions in the 1980s. Experts feared this year might mark their end. Instead, the butterflies are experiencing a resurgence, though no one knows exactly why or if their upward trajectory will continue. 

“I’m thrilled, because having 2,000 as the entire population, it was a blow to the face actually,” says Ms. Bronson. As a schoolgirl, she visited this grove, awed by hundreds of thousands of monarchs so plentiful they covered tree trunks. The sight inspired her to a career with the state park service, where she now works as a park interpreter and educator. “Last year was devastating, but this year I’m very hopeful.” 

Ms. Bronson calls monarchs “the Hollywood species,” celebrities in their own right, flitting about in gorgeous orange-and-black gowns designed by Mother Nature. As stars of the pollinator world, they also serve as high-profile messengers about what is happening to this all-important group.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Danielle Bronson, a ranger and interpreter with California State Parks, poses in the monarch butterfly grove on Nov. 12, 2021.

Both Western and Eastern monarchs – indistinguishable in genetic makeup but distinct populations because of their location on either side of the Rockies – have suffered severe declines since the early 1990s. The Eastern monarchs, which migrate to Mexico where they overwinter and mate, have seen their numbers drop by about 70%. The Western population, which migrates from northern states and parts of Canada to the California coast, is much worse off, plunging by 99%. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to add monarchs to the list of endangered species in 2024, says Sarina Jepsen, director of endangered species for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

The society organizes an annual Thanksgiving count of the Western monarch, at about 250 overwintering sites throughout California, Mexico’s Baja California, and a few places in Arizona. Volunteers arrive at first light to count the butterflies in their clusters. Any later, and they risk an overcount as the sun warms up these cold-blooded creatures and they begin to fly about. 

These monarchs are a special generation that lives for six to eight months. After overwintering and mating, the females fly off and lay their eggs on milkweed, usually inland, on which the emerging caterpillars feast until they turn into a chrysalis and, finally, butterflies. Those adults typically live for only 30 days, with successive generations traveling on before the fall migration begins again.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A monarch butterfly lands on a low branch in the sun at the Pismo State Beach butterfly preserve in Pismo Beach, California, Nov. 12, 2021.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Eric Thibault and his 15-month-old daughter, Ula, look up at the monarch butterflies high in the trees at the Pismo State Beach butterfly grove in Pismo Beach, California, Nov. 11, 2021.

This year, the butterflies arrived early. A preliminary tally of the Thanksgiving count finds more than 100,000 Western monarchs, a stunning 4,900% increase over last year. The final result will be announced in January. It’s encouraging, but “not a recovery,” cautions Ms. Jepsen, who cites a tendency of insect populations to bounce around. 

“We’re really grateful it didn’t bounce to zero. What it means is we have a little bit of time to work toward recovery, but it doesn’t mean the population has recovered,” she says. As a reference point, a population under 30,000 is considered to have entered the “extinction vortex,” she says. 

Many factors contribute to the decline of the monarchs. Overwintering habitat is lost to development. There’s less milkweed – the only food that monarch caterpillars eat – and fewer nectar-producing plants to nourish the butterflies. Pesticides, wildfires, and climate change all play a role, according to the Xerces Society. Because of the many reasons for decline, it’s not possible to pinpoint what’s behind this year’s resurgence. “We really can’t interpret it,” says Ms. Bronson. 

But experts do know that restoring habitat and planting nectaring plants and milkweed can help. The massive infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden in November included $10 million to fund pollinating plants along roads and highways. The Monarch Act, sponsored by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and California Rep. Jimmy Panetta would provide $125 million to save the Western monarch. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A monarch butterfly flies high in the grove of towering Eucalyptus trees in Pismo Beach, California, on Nov. 12, 2021.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Local Rick Skillin (right) lets visitors look at the monarch butterflies high up in the trees through the 3,000 mm lens on his camera on Nov. 11, 2021.

Individuals can play a role, says Ms. Bronson, though she explains that the messaging about milkweed is a bit complicated. It should be planted away from overwintering sites – if it’s too close, it will encourage the butterflies to come out of diapause and mate sooner than they should. And the plantings should be native milkweed. Tropical milkweed, often sold by big-box stores, can house a harmful parasite and should not be used, she advises.

The simplest way to help, she says, is to grow nectar-producing plants to give butterflies energy during their journey and while overwintering. “You really can’t go wrong on that one, because you’re not just helping monarchs, you’re helping all pollinators.” The Pismo Beach conservation site, just off of Highway 1, has a nearby garden with coyote bush and senecio, a flowering succulent, to feed the monarchs.

Visitor Suzi Goodwin got the message. A local, she often visits the grove at this time of year, especially if she has company. She is delighted with the noticeable increase in butterflies, and loves the grove for its peaceful feel and scent. She has put in plants friendly to butterflies and bees at her house in Santa Maria, about 20 miles from the grove. “We did our homework before we bought our plants,” says the retiree. 

Of course Ms. Bronson hopes the monarch numbers will continue to go up. She wants her 2-year-old son to see what she saw as a little girl. “And not just my kid. I get utter joy when you have school groups coming out here, and the ‘oohs’ and the ‘ahs’ and the ‘wow.’ And the smile that you can see in their eyes. That also brings hope.”

When Southern California turns into a tinderbox – with dry winds whipping across parched canyons and foothills – Ray Hutchinson grabs his portable ham radio, dons a reflective vest the color of lemon-lime Gatorade, and heads for the outskirts of Orange County to scan for smoke and flames.

A retired fire captain, Mr. Hutchinson is part of Orange County Fire Watch (OCFW), a group of 328 volunteers who patrol wilderness parks, remote highways, and even a cemetery when the threat of wildfires looms. The goal is to deter arsonists, educate the public about fire safety, and spot blazes before they swirl out of control, says Tony Pointer, who manages the network for the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which oversees nearly 30,000 acres of open space. 

“What a great way to give back. I get to stand and look at beautiful country,” says Noma Bates, another volunteer.  

Mr. Pointer adds, “We sell Orange County Fire Watch as the easiest volunteer activity with the most impact on the land.”

But being a wildfire watchdog is no walk in the park. Well, actually, it often is a walk in the park, but under dicey circumstances.

“If the wind is high, it’s awful,” says Lynda Armbruster, citing dust-bowl conditions that require goggles and a mask. Nevertheless, she regularly signs up for six- or eight-hour shifts. “You protect what you love,” explains Ms. Armbruster, a retired college professor who’s been with OCFW since its inception in 2006. “It’s like people who rescue animals. You have a thing that captures your heart.”

In California’s unending battle against wildfires, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of insurance payouts and charred countryside. The fire watch was formed with that in mind, and its members feel passionate about “helping the land stay safe,” Ms. Bates says.

On average, Mr. Pointer says OCFW patrols 18 to 20 days a year, mostly in the fall and winter, with up to 70 volunteers in the field at a time.

Invariably, the trigger is a weather phenomenon that inspired this 1938 passage from novelist Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”: “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

It’s that “anything” factor volunteers are urged to zero in on: suspicious activity (“hikers” wearing street clothes or taking photos), people operating weed wackers (which can throw off sparks), cars pulling onto grassy shoulders (hot catalytic converters can ignite vegetation). In 2017, a road flare that skittered off a freeway started the Canyon Fire, which burned 2,600 acres and sparked a second, larger inferno.

Photo courtesy of Irvine Ranch Conservancy

Orange County Fire Watch volunteer Noma Bates (far right) speaks to hikers in the Laguna Coast Wilderness. While the primary job of volunteers is to watch for fire, it is also to help educate the public about fire safety.

“Thank you for saving us”

Everything gets reported to OCFW’s command center via cellphone or ham radio. After Ms. Armbruster called in the Canyon Fire 2, she was besieged by “panicked residents asking me what to do. I told them to pack their cars and be ready to go.” One family later drove up and rolled down a window, and a 3-year-old boy chirped, “Thank you for saving us.” 

OCFW is a vast improvement over fire reconnaissance in the 1800s and early 20th century, when lookout towers were the chief detection method in the United States – and bells, flags, lanterns, and heliographs (Morse code via mirrors and sunlight) were the only ways to communicate. 

Orange County’s first lookout station debuted in 1912 atop Santiago Peak in Cleveland National Forest and had an Osborne fire finder (a sighting device to pinpoint smoke locations) and a direct phone line to the fire warden’s house, according to old newspaper articles unearthed by Ron Kemnow of the Forest Fire Lookout Association.  

One of the tower’s earliest employees, Winifred Hunter, moved in “with her gun and two dogs” after a string of male lookouts buckled under the solitude. 

By 1946, three more observation towers had sprung up in the county, but gradually fell into disuse, rendered obsolete by spotter planes, budget cuts, and poor visibility caused by smog. Today, the county’s only lookout stations are replicas at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. 

The concept behind modern flame scouting originated in the mid-1970s. A fire prevention officer in San Bernardino, California, hatched the idea of adding volunteer CB radio operators to the “Red Flag Fire Patrols” conducted by forest rangers, according to a 1974 San Bernardino Sun story. Like their 2021 counterparts, the CB crews worked in pairs and drove around with magnetic “Fire Patrol” signs affixed to their cars.

Actor Buddy Ebsen of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame organized a similar program – Arson Watch – in the Malibu area after a 1982 wildfire nearly torched his ranch.

Cellphones fueled the latest crop of patrol groups. OCFW is the largest in Southern California, Mr. Pointer says, but there are dozens of others. 

Most of OCFW’s members are retirees and nature lovers who joined the program after volunteering with the county parks system or the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. Both agencies mandate multiple hours of training, including CPR and first-aid classes. 

Fire watch recruits get an additional four hours of instruction, along with a manual that covers everything from how to park your car while on duty (always facing out, for quick escape) to where to find restrooms at the 35 locations that members monitor when the National Weather Service declares “red flag” fire danger. 

Most of the watch sites are near park entrances or along canyon roads. Less extroverted volunteers can sign up for a dam that overlooks a Christmas tree farm, an oil field, and one of Southern California’s biggest redwood groves. Or they can lurk at the back of a Catholic graveyard with panoramic views of high-risk mountainsides.

Photo courtesy of Irvine Ranch Conservancy

C.J. Barton and Barb Bodenhoefer, volunteers with the Orange County Fire Watch program, get set to patrol.

Watching via camera during pandemic 

The group also keeps tabs on 34 wilderness cameras set up by utility companies, a popular option during the pandemic. During 2020’s Blue Ridge Fire, remote observers spotted a small, secondary blaze even before nearby residents noticed it, Mr. Pointer says.

How effective is OCFW’s program? The best measure would be the number of blazes that never start, but that’s impossible to quantify, says Sean Doran, an Orange County Fire Authority captain. “We appreciate partnerships of any kind, and having volunteers out there is a deterrent,” he adds, noting that the majority of wildfires are caused by people, although usually inadvertently.

In a typical year, OCFW reports four smoke or flame sightings, Mr. Pointer says. “We handle more medical emergencies,” he adds, because volunteers posted at trailheads routinely encounter injured hikers. 

“There’s not a lot of glory,” says Mr. Hutchinson, the retired fire captain. “But there’s lots of appreciation.” 

People drop off cookies, deliver hot chocolate, and honk their horns, volunteers say. And there are less conventional rewards. “One guy asked if I wanted free gun training,” Ms. Armbruster recalls. 

Interacting with the public and explaining fire safety is “a big part of our success,” says Mr. Pointer, who hopes to expand to 500 volunteers covering 50 sites. 

 Although video feeds and artificial intelligence are gaining ground in fire detection, he says, they’re no substitute for a human touch. AI sometimes mistakes clouds – or dust kicked up by a truck – for smoke, he notes. Ultimately, he says, “I don’t see how you can replace a person.”

Myawaddy TV via AP

Deposed Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, left, and former President Win Myint, sitt before a special court last May.

Once a global icon for democracy and human rights, Aung San Suu Kyi was sentenced by Myanmar’s military on Monday to two years in prison. The charges against the Nobel Peace Prize winner are considered as bogus as the army’s claim to rule after a coup against her elected government nine months ago.

Yet with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi now again facing a long confinement, she has one thing going for her: Democracy activists in Myanmar know what sustained her throughout a previous period of forced isolation.

During the trial, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s fearless demeanor was a reminder of how she endured 15 years under house arrest until her release in 2010. Like other famed prisoners of conscience, she said afterward in a series of lectures for the BBC that “fear is the first adversary we have to get past when we set out to battle for freedom, and often it is the one that remains until the very end.”

She advised the people of Myanmar to “live like free people in an unfree nation” and to fall back on inner resources of strength and endurance. When asked after her house arrest how it felt to be free, she said that she was no different “because my mind had always been free.” She saw no need to forgive the military because “I don’t think they really did anything to me.”

Her words are an echo of two other democracy fighters given prison sentences this year.

In February, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was sentenced in Russia on trumped-up charges. He told supporters that “iron doors slammed behind my back with a deafening sound, but I feel like a free man.”

In September, a pro-democracy leader in Belarus, Maria Kolesnikova, was sentenced to 11 years after telling her supporters in an interview with a German newspaper: “We have already won now. ... We have conquered our fear and our indifference. This is most important.”

This idea about a need for personal liberation first builds on a strong legacy of democracy fighters. Nelson Mandela, for example, said of his attitude toward his South African captors, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

Few of these icons are without their flaws. Mr. Mandela once advocated violence. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi seemed to support the military’s 2017 assault on Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims. Yet what stands out are their actions based on their inherent liberation from fear. They may be prisoners of conscience, but their conscience is hardly a prisoner.