One reason American gas prices remain so high lies in the ruts of J&J Rental’s parking lot here in Watford City – the heart of North Dakota’s oil country. 

At a time when spiking oil prices should be driving a boom in U.S. production, and helping to relieve those painful numbers at the pump and on monthly utility bills, two of the company’s five service rigs have been idle. Vice President Greg Burbach, whose coveralls are spattered with mud, sits down in his office to explain why.

In January, as the price of oil climbed steadily higher, he started getting daily calls from customers interested in hiring the rigs, which are used for maintaining and repairing oil wells. So over the next two months, he spent $12,000 on ads in 10 markets across the country trying to hire workers. He only got one. 

Customers still call weekly to see if he’s assembled any crews to run the $900,000 pieces of equipment. He hasn’t – despite offering a monthly housing allowance, a daily bonus, and a 10% pay raise. 

“I can’t just hire people off the street,” says Mr. Burbach, walking around one of the rigs, which stands 104 feet tall, with a ladder for crews to climb and long guy wires to anchor it to the ground. With the winds that whip across the prairie here, it requires experienced hands to operate the machines safely. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

Greg Burbach (left), a vice president with the oil-services firm J&J Rental, stands with his colleague John Thiers near one of their rigs used to repair and maintain oil wells. The North Dakota company is having a hard time finding experienced workers, despite offering hefty bonuses and housing allowances.

After decades in the industry, Mr. Burbach has seen his fair share of booms and busts. But something is different this time. Despite oil soaring to more than $100 a barrel, almost no one here is expecting a significant boost in production this year. 

They can’t get workers. They can’t get capital from Wall Street. They can’t secure new leases on federal lands. And the cost of doing business has gone up dramatically – everything from labor to steel to the diesel needed to drill for oil. 

“We were told not to drill and shut everything down because the planet’s going to burn up,” says Dave Williams, chief executive officer of Missouri River Resources, an oil producer on the Fort Berthold Reservation. “And now we’ve got everyone saying we’ve got to produce as much as we can.”

North Dakota illustrates that there is no switch to flip that will instantly boost U.S. oil production, not even in one of the most prolific, pro-oil states in the country. And part of that, people here say, is due to the Biden administration’s hard pivot away from fossil fuels in its bid to mitigate climate change. 

To be sure, there has long been a fundamental tension between meeting America’s energy needs and saving the planet. But that cleavage has grown in recent years amid increasingly urgent warnings that Earth is on the verge of a meltdown. 

Now, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans in Congress are calling for an overhaul of America’s energy policy. The president has miscalculated in his efforts to fight climate change, they say, undermining national security and U.S. foreign policy. They argue instead for increased oil production to enable America to lead unfettered by unsavory leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, progressives are accusing oil companies of profiteering – taking advantage of high oil prices and federal subsidies – while ruining the planet. 

Amid the national debate, North Dakota presents an interesting case study in balancing the push for increased U.S. production with the growing social and political momentum toward mitigating climate change. Some states have sought to transition off fossil fuels, following the lead of many European countries. Others have dug in with a “drill, baby, drill” mentality, suing their way out of federal regulations or waiting until the next GOP president. North Dakota was arguably in the drill camp – until last May. At a conference of oil bigwigs, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum shocked the crowd by announcing that he planned to take North Dakota carbon neutral by 2030. 

Blake Nicholson/AP/File

Controversy has swirled about the environmental impact of a proposed oil refinery near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which lies in the Badlands of western North Dakota.

“We’re trying to chart a course that takes us down the middle of that road – not drill at all costs and produce at all costs, or shut things down because we have a climate crisis,” says Lynn Helms, director of the state’s Department of Mineral Resources. “We think we can do both.”

The question is, will it work?

The last time oil prices spiked, Gary Goodman left Kentucky for a fresh start in the oil fields of North Dakota. It was 2012. With a felony conviction and few job prospects, he boarded a train in Cincinnati and headed west with a few work clothes, a sleeping mat, and $1,600 he’d saved up from doing odd jobs. Thirty-nine hours later, he arrived in North Dakota. 

He was not alone.

People from all over the country poured into Williston and Watford City, staying in “man camps,” tents along the street, or RVs in the Walmart parking lot. Mr. Goodman headed for a Lutheran church that was letting people sleep on the floor. “You ever been in trouble?” he recalls the pastor asking him.

“I’ve got a rap sheet as long as your arm,” admitted Mr. Goodman, explaining he was imprisoned on drug-related charges, but nothing violent. “I’m here to make a life, to try to do the right thing.”

The pastor checked out his story and let him in. Mr. Goodman bought a pillow and hunkered down with 60 other guys for a couple of months, getting a gym membership so he could take daily showers. He soon landed a full-time gig and stayed for seven years.

It was thanks to workers like Mr. Goodman that North Dakota became the country’s No. 2 oil producer after Texas. “We were paying gobs of money for a pulse,” says Paula Lankford, who runs the Williston branch of Job Service North Dakota.

The boom transformed Watford City from a town of 1,700 to 6,200, and made the surrounding county the fastest-growing in the United States, according to the 2020 census. 

Then the pandemic hit, oil went to $0 a barrel, and Mr. Goodman and many others headed home. 

From 2019 to 2021, North Dakota’s oil production dropped 25% – far worse than the 9% decline nationally. One of the main reasons it’s not possible to simply turn on the oil spigot now that prices have surged again is that many of the itinerant workers have vanished. Some have headed to the Permian, the large oil field that stretches across Texas and New Mexico. The oil is cheaper to extract, and there are no cryogenic windchills that leave icicles on your eyelashes and “make you wish you’d never been born,” as one worker here puts it.

In March, the local job service office had seven times more openings as active résumés in construction and extraction, says Ms. Lankford. An RV park where out-of-state workers used to sleep stands empty, a “for sale” sign tacked to the fence.

Some employers in this Republican state also blame the Biden administration’s COVID-19 unemployment insurance bonuses and expanded child tax credit. 

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

“We definitely have the problem of more jobs than job seekers.” – Paula Lankford, who runs the Williston branch of Job Service North Dakota, a state employment services agency

“I had guys asking me to lay them off so they could collect unemployment insurance,” says Shane Johnson, who owns J&J Rental, which includes the oil-services operation in Watford City where Mr. Burbach has been trying to woo workers. 

“We’ve lost a little bit of spirit and a little bit of drive,” agrees Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council.

But Mr. Goodman is still driven to work. After recently returning from Kentucky to Watford City, he swings by J&J Rental to fill out paperwork, pick up a harness to keep him safe on the derrick, and grab a hat with the company’s black-and-red logo. Then he heads to Outlaws’ Bar and Grill on North Main Street, to fill up on bison meatloaf and mashed potatoes. 

Tomorrow will be his first day back at work in the oil fields in two years.

The next morning, with a full moon still hanging in the sky, workers in Carhartts and muddy work boots trudge into The Corner Post gas station to fuel up for another day in the oil patch. They clutch sodas, sticks of beef jerky, and wedges of frosted cake, as well as foam containers loaded with eggs, biscuits, and bacon from the breakfast buffet. The four cashiers punching registers have been working since 5 a.m. 

Outside, supersize pickups and flatbed trucks brimming with equipment fill up with gas before rumbling out of the parking lot. There are pipelines to fix, wells to drill, and, yes, there’s oil to pump.

But despite the high prices, Mr. Helms at the Department of Mineral Resources projects that North Dakota will only see an increase in production of at most 9% this year, to 1.2 million barrels per day – still 300,000 barrels short of the 2019 peak. Currently 40 rigs are operating across the state, down from 55 pre-pandemic. 

Iron Oil CEO J.R. Reger says he’s sticking to his plan to use only one drilling rig in the Williston Basin for now because his costs have risen as much as 15% over the past year. He worries oil prices will plummet before he can recoup his costs. 

Industry officials say investors are hesitant, too, for several reasons. They poured money into oil for years and didn’t get great returns. Secondly, as socially responsible investing picks up, windmills are in vogue, not oil rigs. Then came the Biden administration’s pivot – and with it, increased regulation. 

“That’s just been a triple whammy to us,” says Mark Pearson, president and CEO of Liberty Resources, a Denver-based oil and gas firm.

The federal government has canceled the $9 billion Keystone XL pipeline; suspended lease sales; bogged down the permitting process, according to industry executives; and nominated people who see banking policy as a key tool in accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels. 

“I really think the regulatory impact on the financial sector is the largest thing tamping down the industry,” says Kathy Neset, a geologist and founder of Neset Consulting Service, who recently finished a term on the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. She says Biden administration officials are putting unrealistic expectations on the industry during a crisis.

They see it differently: The Ukraine war and its consequences for energy underscore the need for weaning the country not only off foreign oil, but also off fossil fuels altogether. And it’s “important and appropriate” for the market to price in climate risks, says Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, who formerly led the sustainable investment team at BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund manager. 

In the short term, there are no policy constraints on ramping up production, he adds, noting that corporations like Exxon and Chevron are already doing so. Speaking at a Monitor Breakfast in Washington April 6, Mr. Deese acknowledged that smaller companies reliant on private equity are having a tougher time boosting production and said the administration is willing to help. “We are open to practical and pragmatic ideas as long as they’re grounded in real, not imagined constraints.”

GOP Rep. Kelly Armstrong, North Dakota’s sole House member, has a few suggestions: Approve permit applications that have languished since last year, signal support for building natural gas pipelines, and reform the environmental review process.

Over in the Senate, his fellow North Dakota Republican Kevin Cramer is also pushing for less federal regulation as well as more investment in the industry. But Senator Cramer, who sits on the Senate Banking Committee, says it’s important for both sides to step away from extreme positions and work together. 

“You can’t dig your heels in on, ‘Climate change is a hoax,’ or the other side saying, ‘The world is ending tomorrow if we don’t do something about it,’ and expect a real solution,” he says. 

Delvin Rabbithead Sr. worked as a roughneck in the oil patch for a year during the last boom. Then one winter, as the temperatures started dipping to minus 30, he decided to switch to the comfort of a heated truck cab. As a driver, he hauled away the salty water that is a byproduct of oil production.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

“I started realizing what [oil drilling] was doing to our land.” – Delvin Rabbithead Sr., a former truck driver for oil companies who became concerned about practices he was seeing in the industry and joined an environmental group

Yet he quickly witnessed something on the new job that disturbed him: drivers who wouldn’t bother to go to the designated disposal sites but would dump their effluents elsewhere under the cover of darkness. These and other experiences served as a wake-up call about the industry he’d grown up around. “I started realizing what it was doing to our land,” he says.

Much of North Dakota’s oil and gas is obtained through fracking, a controversial extraction technique that enabled the U.S. to become the world’s biggest producer in 2018. In this GOP state that gets 50% of its tax revenues from energy production, few are calling for scrapping fossil fuels altogether. But environmental activists and landowners are concerned about everything from saltwater spills and leaky pipelines to emissions from the flaring of gas that is extracted alongside oil. 

During the previous oil boom, the flames could be seen from the International Space Station. “It was like a Christmas tree, all lit up,” says Mr. Rabbithead.

The Fort Berthold Reservation where he grew up is particularly notorious for gas flaring. So he joined a group called Fort Berthold Protectors of Water and Earth Rights, and says they were close to reaching a deal with tribal leadership to lower emissions before the pandemic hit.

Natural gas flaring statewide has dropped 96% since 2011, according to state officials, who inspect flaring sites and review companies’ self-reported numbers on the practice. But activists say the rates are far higher, citing a satellite study. 

Across the Missouri River that Lewis and Clark once plied, farmer Donny Nelson is fighting another battle. He personally has lost about 100 acres to saltwater spills, despite the state’s remediation efforts. 

“They always come up with some new foo-foo dust,” says Mr. Nelson, referring to the state’s attempts to repair the land.

As co-founder of the Salted Lands Council, he’s fundraising to map saltwater spills statewide and determine the cost of properly restoring the land. His guess: $1 billion or more.

As trucks rumble out of The Corner Post headed for the oil fields, Larry Dokken is driving 70 mph away from the Bakken. Mr. Dokken been working in the oil industry here since 1964. But now he’s on a new mission for Neset Consulting: overseeing a carbon storage initiative that would be the largest in the world.

The idea is to capture emissions at 31 ethanol plants in the Upper Midwest and send it by pipeline to Beulah, North Dakota, where it would be injected deep underground and stored permanently. The state would get to claim huge carbon offsets, and the ethanol producers would be able to sell their low-carbon ethanol at a premium in states like California, the largest ethanol market in the nation. 

It’s one of numerous initiatives launched since Governor Burgum announced his carbon-neutral goal last year, and by far the biggest. Other projects include advancing a $1 billion plan to capture and store coal emissions, building one of the nation’s largest low-cost hydrogen hubs, and turning soybeans into diesel fuel.

“The projects we’ve approved in the last nine months since we made this announcement equal about 31% of our CO₂ emissions,” says Governor Burgum. “So we’re off to a good start toward hitting a goal that’s not even a year old.”

The $4.5 billion carbon storage project is not yet approved, and there are plenty of skeptics. In order to get the necessary permits, Summit Carbon Solutions is drilling three wells and bringing up core samples from thousands of feet underground, then shipping them to Denver for analysis. Its goal: prove that the sandstone layers can hold carbon, and that the cap rock just above them is impermeable enough to keep it from escaping. 

Mr. Dokken, the project manager, pulls up to the entrance gate at the site on a recent sun-dappled morning. A drilling rig is boring 4,000 feet underground. Inside one of the heated trailers on-site, a geologist monitors the rock layers they are expecting to find, and at what depth. The crew is pleased with the progress so far. 

“The world is probably going to model carbon storage after this project,” says Mr. Dokken later over a burger at a local diner. 

Summit is offering to pay landowners to lay a pipeline across their property and for carbon storage rights. But not all are thrilled with the project.

One disgruntled local landowner has been leaving leaflets in people’s mailboxes warning about the dangers of transporting carbon gas. In Richland County, to the east, residents recently approved a resolution to deny Summit the right to invoke eminent domain for the pipeline. 

“The state could overrule it,” says Todd McMichael, an electric utility salesperson who led the effort. “But it sends a message.”

Mr. McMichael is not opposed to pipelines. But the idea of highly pressurized, odorless CO₂ running across his property concerns him. He says his insurance wouldn’t cover an accidental leak or its effects, including on livestock grazing nearby.

Christa Case Bryant/The Christian Science Monitor

“The world is probably going to model carbon storage after this project.” – Larry Dokken, an oil industry veteran who, along with engineer Jean Datahan (right), is overseeing work on a huge carbon sequestration project in North Dakota

Troy Coons, founder of the Northwest Landowners Association, believes property owners need to be brought to the table.

“Good things still have to be done in a thoughtful way – not the wild, Wild West approach that we just got done with in the Bakken oil field,” says Mr. Coons, whose organization recently sued the state over a new law governing “pore space,” where carbon would be stored.

Questions still linger about how well carbon storage works. In 2020, a $1 billion coal carbon-capture plant in Texas sequestered 15% less carbon than was projected. The project was mothballed after three years because it wasn’t economically viable. 

“You’ve got to develop the technology so you can make it pay in the free market,” says Sen. John Hoeven, who as the GOP governor of North Dakota laid the regulatory groundwork for carbon storage and later advanced tax credits for the technology. “We’ve got about a 10-year head start on everybody else.”

To some skeptics, the emerging carbon storage industry is more about making money than about saving the environment.

“[These companies] are trying to figure out how to be the next robber barons,” says Scott Skokos of the Dakota Resource Council, an environmental watchdog group. Although he credits the governor with finding a third way between unchecked drilling and an abrupt turn toward green energy, he sees it as a quixotic quest. “He’s trying to have his cake and eat it, too – and I don’t think it’s possible.” 

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Ethan Miller works on his taxes at home in Silver Spring, Maryland, in January 2022.. The IRS has dropped mandatory facial recognition verfication to file personal taxes because of privacy concerns. But it remains an option for those taxpayers who consider it a security measure.

The Internal Revenue Service dropped a requirement for taxpayers to use facial recognition identification verification when it met bipartisan opposition in Congress earlier this year. And on April 14, a congressional committee opened an investigation into a facial recognition identity verification company over concerns about privacy, security, and the technology’s potential to discriminate.

Federal agencies have expanded, or have had plans to expand, use of the technology by 2023.  

What problem is facial recognition trying to solve?

The IRS, which will still offer biometric recognition as a taxpayer option, hopes to reduce fraud.

“A significant challenge over time for the IRS has been the problem of stolen identities and then refund fraud,” says John Koskinen, former IRS commissioner. When he began as head of the IRS in 2013, he says, over $5 billion a year went to criminals.

Last year, the IRS contracted with the private digital identity verification company ID.me to use facial recognition screening for taxpayers who wished to access their historical tax documents online. The company also is used by the federal government for unemployment assistance. Comparing a user-uploaded “video selfie” to government records like a driver’s license, the company’s software is intended to automate identity verification and ferret out fraud.

ID.me is used by at least 27 states and multiple federal agencies, but concerns over privacy and data security caused the IRS to drop the service in February.  No federal law regulating how facial recognition data can be used or shared.

How does it work?

Facial recognition uses algorithms to make comparisons and find matches. Those algorithms can be classified into two types: one-to-many and one-to-one. One-to-many matching compares a photo against a gallery of stored photos while one-to-one matching evaluates an image against another to verify a person’s identity.

A handful of agencies use facial recognition to control building access. Other agencies like the Department of Homeland Security use the technology for domestic law enforcement, including for leads in criminal investigations, and border security.

A mistake in one-to-one may allow access to impostors while a wrong one-to-many match could lead to false accusation.

Steven Senne/AP/File

Joy Buolamwini, a facial recognition researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fielded questions from reporters in February 2019. Her research uncovered racial and gender bias in facial analysis tools sold by companies such as Amazon that have a hard time recognizing certain faces, especially darker-skinned women.

Is the tech equitable?                                         

Depending on the data the algorithm focuses on, the software can be less accurate for women and those with darker skin, says Ashley Johnson, senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

While an error in certain applications of facial recognition like accessing one’s records could be a hassle, mistakes in other applications such as law enforcement could have deleterious effects.

Artificial intelligence researchers argued that, because of gender and skin-tone bias, Amazon’s facial recognition software shouldn’t be sold to law enforcement. The company placed a moratorium on police use of the technology in 2020. Cities, including Boston and San Francisco, have banned facial recognition.

Meanwhile, China reportedly uses the technology, reportedly to track its Uyghur population.

“If [the United States] just bans facial recognition technology outright, instead of creating rules for how it should be used, then the U.S. is ending up in a world where China is setting the example of how to use facial recognition technology, and setting a very bad example,” Ms. Johnson says.

But the country of origin of facial recognition software is no guarantor of fairness or freedom. The New York-based company Clearview AI, used by 10 federal agencies, has an “index of faces” with billions of photos collected across the internet and social media sites. Such wide-scale collection represents an attack on Fourth Amendment privacy considerations, says Nathan Sheard, deputy managing director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

Adoption of facial recognition across government is not a foregone conclusion, says Mr. Sheard, who points to legislative opposition to facial recognition, especially to its law enforcement uses.

What are potential benefits?

Former IRS Commissioner Koskinen sees the technology as a tool that can potentially protect government resources and personal information.

“Ten years from now, we’ll look back on this problem and say, ‘Well, that was the beginning when people were nervous,’” says Mr. Koskinen, now a board member at the National Academy of Public Administration. “The purpose of all this is to protect [people] and protect their data.”

Takehiko Kambayashi

Second-generation cattle farmer Aoki Ren stands by his cattle on March 14, 2022, in Oshika, Japan. He says his biggest concern is that the nearby river would dry up following the tunneling work on Central Japan Railway’s maglev project.

In a remote and hidden valley with a babbling brook in the southern Japanese Alps region, Aoki Ren used to proudly show his cattle farm’s serene surroundings to fastidious buyers of quality wagyu beef. 

That tranquility, however, has been shattered by helicopter noises, blasting operations, and truck traffic since the launch of local construction for the superconducting magnetic levitation train in 2016, operated by Central Japan Railway.  The “maglev” train is expected to connect Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes – compared with the 150-minute trip offered by Central Japan Railway’s existing shinkansen bullet train – with the majority of the route enclosed in tunnels. The project cuts right through the mountain village of Oshika, where Mr. Aoki and about 940 others live among nature. 

“This is supposed to be a wonderful setting,” Mr. Aoki says, shrugging his shoulders in resignation. 

Critics of the maglev project say Oshika is the latest in a long list of rural communities bearing the brunt of Japan’s rapid economic growth, without seeing the reward. Some residents welcome the development and hope a new high-speed rail stop located an hour’s drive from Oshika will help address the village’s population decline. But many others argue that the project threatens the very character of the village, and call for more grassroots, sustainable forms of development. 

“Villagers are opposed to each other over the maglev project,” says Konno Kaito, sister of Mr. Aoki. “But what we have in common is we love Oshika.” 

Loss of nature

Ms. Konno and Mr. Aoki’s parents moved to Oshika more than four decades ago from Tokyo and started the farm, one of a few left in Oshika today as the village’s population has declined 82% since 1950. Many young people in Japan’s rural areas like Oshika have moved to big cities in search of job opportunities. 

The second-generation cattle rancher fears the maglev project could bring more damage to the environment, as construction workers prepare to erect a transmission tower on the thickly forested mountain behind his house and build a tunnel underneath the river. 

And Mr. Aoki isn’t the only resident noticing changes.

At her wooden house that clings to the mountain slope with spectacular views of the Japanese Alps, Tohno Midori once enjoyed watching monkeys saunter into her yard and eat persimmons. 

“But we have not seen any more monkeys” since hundreds of trees were cut down in neighboring areas for the maglev train, says Ms. Tohno. “I absolutely believe [the construction] has upset the ecosystem.”

Takehiko Kambayashi

In Oshika, a small village in central Japan, tunneling work for the maglev train project continues, despite concerns over environmental damage.

Massive piles of dirt unearthed by tunneling now crowd the “beautiful stream” where she used to splash with children, she adds. Ms. Tohno decided to settle in Oshika after living in Nepal and northern India. She calls the village “Little Himalayas.” 

Despite such environmental damage, Oshika Mayor Kumagai Hidetoshi says the village and other neighboring municipalities welcome the long-awaited railway, as well as plans to build a train stop in the nearby city of Iida, a one-hour drive from Oshika.

Mr. Kumagai says Oshika thanks Central Japan Railway for helping build the two new tunnels for a local road leading to a major expressway, which the village had long wanted. These improvements cost $48 million, according to a Nagano prefectural government official. Central Japan Railway shouldered 59% of the cost and the other 41% was footed by the prefecture. (The railway company also plans to launch a maglev system in the United States.)

Costs of construction

The line was scheduled to open in 2027, with the final leg completed in 2037. However, Central Japan Railway has conceded that it will be difficult to do so because of local opposition along the route and a string of construction accidents, including a fatal one last October.

“We take the repeated accidents very seriously,” the company’s spokesperson says. “We look into the causes, take preventive measures, and deal with them in a careful manner.” 

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people live and work, and stopped many businesspeople from taking shinkansen bullet trains, Central Japan Railway’s cash cow. As a result, the company had a net loss of $1.7 billion in fiscal 2020 – the first net loss since the privatization of national railways in 1987. It has already borrowed $25 billion of public money for the new train, and the total estimated cost of the project is expected to reach $86 billion. 

Longtime climber and Oshika transplant Munakata Mitsuru worries about the village’s increasing dependency on the Nagano prefectural government, as well as pollution.

“When you build a tunnel for trucks and dig big holes in the mountains, what comes next is industrial waste even if the maglev project aborts,” he says. “More public works projects mean more destruction of nature.” 

Takehiko Kambayashi

Climber and writer Munakata Mitsuru, pictured in Oshika, Japan, on April 2, 2022, moved to the village in 2016 and opposes the maglev project. "More public works projects mean more destruction of nature," he says.

Many critics point out that the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was sending electricity to Tokyo and its surrounding areas, not to people in Fukushima, who suffered most from the station meltdown in March 2011, the nation’s worst nuclear accident.

Experts and locals worry the maglev tunnel construction could trigger a natural disaster in the landslide-prone Oshika. In 1961, torrential rains caused landslides and flooding in Oshika and its neighboring areas, killing 136 people and destroying 1,500 homes, according to central government figures. This incident is blamed, in part, for Oshika’s shrinking population. 

“It is frightening that they are excavating such a fragile land,” says Yanai Mayuko, an official at the Tokyo-based environmental organization Friends of the Earth Japan, adding that the jobs and other benefits these megaprojects bring “cannot even be compared to the risks.”

However, Ms. Yanai has noticed that some locals, regardless of their opinion on the maglev project, feel they “have no choice but to depend on something that comes from outside of Oshika,” she says. “Perhaps, that shows a fundamental problem of Japan’s outlying regions.”

Oshika’s future

Kaneko Masaru, an economics professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, calls the idea of urban firms building massive public works projects in rural areas “obsolete,” and says Japan needs to break away from its centralized system of development.

“It’s very important for each region to think about how to get the economy moving on its own,” he says.

Instead of relying on an infrastructure project like the maglev, many in Oshika stress the need for sustainable development. 

“We can do community planning on our own while valuing what we have,” explains Yamane Sa-ki, an Oshika resident who runs a day care center for older adults and, along with her friends, conducts tours for those who are interested in relocating to the village. The region lures many people with its mountains and natural beauty, and Oshika is also a starting point for climbing the southern Alps. 

In order to prevent further population decline, Oshika has enhanced support to new residents and families raising children, according to Kawamoto Akiyo, a member of the village council. She says the village pulls in more transplants than other rural areas, and many young people, including one of her own children, have come back. 

Ms. Konno, daughter of cattle farmers and mother to a teenage daughter herself, shares this focus on family. 

“It’s very important for adults [in Oshika] to show our children we have not given up on this land,” she says. “We love this land and will protect this land. That’s what my parents had done.”

It is a challenge not to limit Jackie Robinson’s life to a single date – April 15, 1947. On that date, Robinson crossed the color line into Major League Baseball and eventually transformed No. 42 into a symbol of progress. 

And yet, Robinson was more than a number, more than a world-class athlete. As a member of the NAACP and a columnist, he was a champion for baseball and for Black people. 

“You have made every Negro in America proud through your baseball prowess and your inflexible demand for equal opportunity for all,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to Robinson as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in May 1962. King frequently spoke of how Robinson’s nonviolent approach to the integration of baseball inspired him.

Robinson made his presence felt in civil rights organizations while still playing baseball, as his 1956 Spingarn Medal awarded by the NAACP shows. He described his civil rights and entrepreneurial endeavors as a way to help Black people attain full citizenship through “the ballot and the buck.”

In 1957, the year he retired from baseball, Robinson spearheaded the NAACP’s Freedom Fund Drive, which raised $1 million for the organization. In 1964, he co-founded and chaired the Freedom National Bank in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, designed to assist African Americans financially.

Robinson famously stole home in the 1955 World Series; 15 years later, he founded a construction company named after him that provided housing for low-income families.

It is remarkable to think of Robinson as an activist and philanthropist. One of his most impactful efforts, the Jackie Robinson Foundation scholarship program, still serves young people of color.

Harry Harris/AP/File

From left, Brooklyn Dodgers third baseman John Jorgensen, shortstop Pee Wee Reese, second baseman Ed Stanky, and first baseman Jackie Robinson posed before a baseball game against the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field in New York on April 15, 1947, the day Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

A voice in the Black press

There is a more fiery Robinson, though. The man who often suppressed his anger over baseball’s racism during his playing career found an outlet for that passion as a columnist.

The chronicles of Robinson’s time with the Dodgers were noted in the Black press, thanks to the Pittsburgh Courier and journalist Wendell Smith. Robinson lauded the Black press in his second autobiography, “I Never Had It Made.”

“In a very real sense, black people helped make the experiment succeed,” he wrote, speaking of his commitment to integrate baseball. “I learned that clergymen and laymen had held meetings in the black community to spread the word. We all knew about the Negro press,” referring to their promotion of the idea.

Robinson wrote for the New York Post and the Black-owned New York Amsterdam News. The fact that Robinson sometimes publicly disagreed with both King and Malcolm X is a reflection of the diversity of Black thought during that turbulent time. Robinson’s views on integration put him at odds with the separatism of Malcolm X, and he spoke out against King’s opposition to the Vietnam War.

“A black man in a white world”

Yet despite his influential role in society far beyond the baseball field, Robinson always remembered what it meant to endure as a trailblazer, and he showed those scars in his autobiography. In one excerpt, he described how he felt prior to the first game of the 1947 World Series:

There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. 

But the song didn’t speak to him.

As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Up until his death, Robinson pushed to break baseball’s other color lines – in coaching and management. Untiring in his approach to life and baseball, he loved the game with all of his heart, even when it didn’t love him back.

AP

Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw throws during an April 13 baseball game against the Minnesota Twins.

Every now and then a baseball pitcher will throw a perfect game: 27 batters, 27 outs. It has happened in the major leagues only 23 times in 150 years, on average once every 10,000 games. On April 13 there was nearly a 24th. Clayton Kershaw, longtime ace for the Los Angeles Dodgers and one of the best arms of his generation, retired 21 batters from the opposing Minnesota Twins – 13 by strikeout – over seven innings. He had thrown just 80 pitches. And then, in a move that left many fans gobsmacked, he was pulled from the game.

The game that Americans have played since the Civil War has always held a mirror to society, offering a reflection of the country’s evolving values. But in one significant way, baseball and society may be moving in opposition directions: in their attitude toward risk.

Here’s one way to measure that divergence. Between 2010 and 2021, the total number of stolen bases declined by 750. During that same period, the number of business startups in the United States jumped from 2.5 million to 5.4 million, according to the Economic Innovation Group. Both of those trends are shaped by attitudes about risk.

On the ball field, more complex analytics “has led to a reduced risk-taking mode,” New York Yankees manager Brian Cushman told Athlon Sports. So have labor costs per season. Salaries for top starting pitchers have swelled to eight figures. So has caution. Managers now use more pitchers per game to avoid injuries. That is why Mr. Kershaw was pulled.

Growth in technological innovation, meanwhile, suggests that “cultural factors such as trust, patience, and individualism” are deepening, a recent study in the Journal of Economic Growth found. One reason for that may be a wider embrace of the merits of failure. In recent years countries like France, China, and Mexico have sought to boost entrepreneurship by lifting cultural taboos about failure.

Similar attitude shifts are unfolding in education and conservation. A study published in World Development in February, for example, found that acknowledging failure requires more of environmental groups in developing countries than just learning how to do something better. It involves the honesty and humility to assess how their work might result in “adverse impacts on local populations and incitement of negative attitudes toward conservation more generally.”

A “right to fail” has also gained currency as a key approach to learning. A study published last year in the Review of Educational Research underscored a key distinction between teaching by instruction and teaching by problem-solving. The former assumes a lack of knowledge and seeks to avoid failure. The latter emphasizes the discovery of ability and agency through “productive failure.”

“Individuals who approach tasks with a growth mindset – where they are prepared to fail and learn from that failure – are much more likely to be successful in the long term compared to those who operate with a fixed mindset where they see ability as inherently fixed and unchanging, and failure as fatal,” Indiana University professor Greg Fisher told The Economist.

Whether Mr. Kershaw had six more flawless outs in him will never be known. But for a sport struggling to reverse its declining audience, the widening global embrace of risk holds a cautionary tale. Trial and error are a safer play than timidity and caution.