Brynn Anderson/AP/File

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks during a news conference on Nov. 11, 2020, in Atlanta. After refusing to reject Georgia's 2020 presidential vote count in favor of Democrat Joe Biden, Mr. Raffensperger is now facing a primary challenge from a rival endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

Most voters can’t name the secretary of state where they live. Traditionally a low-profile office, it doesn’t often merit much in the way of media coverage or fundraising when on the ballot, as it is in 27 states this fall. 

In Georgia, however, GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has become a household name. His now-famous refusal to “find” 11,780 more votes for former President Donald Trump – and his insistence on the accuracy of the 2020 results in his state – made him both a hero to Democrats and a villain to many Trump supporters. 

“There’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated,” President Trump told Mr. Raffensperger in a recorded phone call that was later made public, after he’d recertified Joe Biden’s victory.

Now Mr. Raffensperger is facing a tough four-way GOP primary on May 24, in a contest that will test Republican voters’ concerns about “election integrity” and the salience of Mr. Trump’s disproven claims of widespread fraud. Whoever wins the primary, which polls suggest could go to a runoff, will face a Democratic opponent in November’s midterms. 

Candidates hewing to Mr. Trump’s “election fraud” narrative are running for secretary of state in 17 of the 27 states where the office will be on the ballot in the fall, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group, the States United Democracy Center. And Trump-endorsed candidates are running in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Arizona, all states where Mr. Trump contested the 2020 results. 

In Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger’s main GOP challenger, Rep. Jody Hice, has the former president’s endorsement. A member of the right-wing Freedom Caucus, he is quitting his House seat to run. In a May 2 debate, he accused Mr. Raffensperger of allowing fraud to taint elections in Georgia, calling it “the most insecure state in the country.” Other candidates said they would have done more to investigate the 2020 election – even after Mr. Raffensperger pointed to multiple recounts and efforts by law enforcement to find proof of machine or human fraud, all of which only served to reaffirm President Biden’s win. 

The powers of secretaries of state can vary from place to place, but most are tasked with overseeing how votes are cast, counted, and certified. That can make them a crucial backstop against partisan meddling – or potentially, a thumb on the scale at election time. 

Dustin Chambers/Reuters/File

Congressman Jody Hice, who is currently running for Georgia secretary of state, is seen on stage with former U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally in Perry, Georgia, on Sept. 25, 2021. Mr. Hice has accused current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of allowing fraud to taint elections in Georgia, while Mr. Raffensperger has pointed to efforts by law enforcement to find proof of machine or human fraud.

Typically, secretaries of state “leave their party hat at the door” and serve all voters, says Tammy Patrick, a former federal elections official in Arizona. That norm may be tested by a slew of candidates who are running specifically on a platform of disproven or unprovable claims about 2020 – and who will be tasked with administering the 2024 election, when Mr. Trump is expected to run again.

In a democracy that relies on respect for the lawful transfer of power, that should concern everyone, says Ms. Patrick, who is a senior adviser to the Democracy Fund, another nonprofit. “You can vote for a candidate who stands for the rule of law, or a candidate who’s running on conspiracy and conjecture – because that’s all it is,” she says. “Elections have consequences.”

Discretionary powers 

Republicans in Michigan have already chosen Kristina Karamo as their nominee. A community college instructor, Ms. Karamo rose to prominence in conservative circles after she claimed she witnessed fraud at Detroit’s absentee counting board, and later received Mr. Trump’s endorsement. In Wisconsin, where state elections are run by a bipartisan board, Republicans running for governor have said they would dissolve the board and put the secretary of state – or the legislature – in charge. 

In 12 states, the secretary of state is appointed directly by the legislature or the governor. The latter is true in Pennsylvania, where Republicans on Tuesday chose Doug Mastriano as their gubernatorial nominee. Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 results, going to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and pushing to send an alternate slate of electors to Congress.

In a decentralized system, it often falls to local election officials to interpret complex rules determining which ballots are valid or not. Still, in close races, the discretionary power of secretaries of state can be critical.

Emily Elconin/Reuters

Candidate for secretary of state Kristina Karamo looks on as she and others gather to watch votes tallied during the Empowering Michigan 2022 Michigan GOP convention at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 23, 2022. A community college instructor, she claimed she witnessed fraud at Detroit’s absentee counting board in 2020. Former President Donald Trump has endorsed her candidacy.

Georgia is a case in point: In 2018 Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, lost by 55,000 votes to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp. She refused to concede, accusing him of purging eligible voters from the rolls ahead of the election, a charge he denied. A federal lawsuit over her claims is ongoing. Ms. Abrams is making another run for governor this year. 

And secretaries of state have been accused of tipping the scales in presidential elections. In 2004, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who was simultaneously serving as honorary co-chair of President George W. Bush’s campaign in his state, was accused of voter suppression for ordering poll workers to deny provisional ballots to voters who couldn’t confirm their address. After a recount, Mr. Bush was determined to have won Ohio by about 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million cast.

In 2000, a far smaller margin separated Mr. Bush from Vice President Al Gore in Florida. Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who had been appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush, the candidate’s brother, resisted demands for recounts in three counties. A lawsuit over her decision went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled it wasn’t possible to hold a timely recount, handing the presidency to Mr. Bush.

“2,000 Mules”

In Georgia, Mr. Raffensperger’s opponents have seized on a documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza called “2000 Mules” alleging widespread ballot collection by third parties, which is only allowed in Georgia among family members. Its claims rely on supposedly suspicious patterns of movement in cellphone tracking data, which critics counter could easily be attributable to other things. On Tuesday, Georgia’s elections board – consisting of three Republicans and one Democrat – voted unanimously to dismiss three cases of alleged “ballot harvesting” after investigators determined the ballots in question were from family members living in the same households. One of the cases had relied on footage shown in the film.

Indeed, for all the election-related accusations traded in Georgia, the most prominent criminal investigation to date involves the pressure former President Trump put on Mr. Raffensperger. Earlier this month, a special grand jury was selected in Fulton County to look into whether Mr. Trump and his allies violated Georgia’s laws against election interference. The jury will sit for up to one year. 

For his part, Mr. Raffensperger is doggedly defending his oversight of the 2020 election, while proclaiming his support for Georgia’s 2021 election law that tightened the rules around casting ballots by mail. Democrats have assailed the law, which will also allow state legislators to replace county election boards in some circumstances. Mr. Raffensperger has also begun calling for a constitutional amendment against non-citizens voting in Georgia, which is already a criminal offense. 

His primary opponents enjoyed a head start because Mr. Raffensperger, as a state officeholder, couldn’t campaign until Georgia’s legislative session ended in April, notes Amy Steigerwalt, a politics professor at Georgia State University. This made it harder to refute what his GOP rivals were saying about his record. “You had unanswered claims across the airwaves,” she says. 

And while Mr. Raffensperger won the respect of Democrats and independent voters for standing up to President Trump, which could help him in a general election, many in the GOP base hold a dim view of his actions.

“Raffensperger is in a lot of trouble. He could very well lose,” says Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University who studies elections.

Finishing up his breakfast at a diner in Ludowici, a rural county seat in southern Georgia, Henry Korrecta shakes out a fistful of pills on a napkin. A retired Army veteran, he says he cast an early primary ballot for Representative Hice as secretary of state. “We need a true conservative. [Mr. Raffensperger’s] not a true conservative,” he says. “He’s got to go.” 

Likewise, Lynn Savage, an artist and Republican voter in Jackson County, wants Mr. Raffensperger gone. “We saw fraud [in 2020] and nothing was done about it,” says Ms. Savage. She believes something nefarious happened with the voting machines, despite the fact that the state had replaced its paperless voting machines prior to the 2020 election. “You can manipulate a computer. There were lots of [bad] things going on,” she says. Georgia conducted a hand recount of every vote cast, which reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s win. 

At a civic meet-and-greet in Macon, state Rep. Robert Dickey agrees that Mr. Raffensperger is facing a serious challenge. But the Republican legislator, who represents a central Georgia district, also believes the grassroots anger over the 2020 election is beginning to subside, despite Mr. Trump’s efforts.

“I think people are ready to move on,” he says.

Sitting outside Starbucks as the lunch rush dwindles, employee Adrianna Ross points to the fenced-in dumpster in the parking lot where she made her most daring move as a newly minted union organizer. It was January. A month earlier, the staff at a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, had successfully organized into a union. The corporation, eager to head off more organizing efforts, was sending executives to stores around the Boston area to hold after-hours listening sessions with employees. 

As the mandatory meeting at her Watertown, Massachusetts, store drew to a close, Ms. Ross whispered to her fellow workers to meet her outside by the dumpster. There in the cold, using their cellphones as flashlights, workers signed official cards calling for a union election. “I kept peeking around the corner to make sure they [the executives] didn’t see me,” she recalls.

Ms. Ross collected more than enough signatures and sent them to the National Labor Relations Board, which authorized the election and, two weeks ago, held the official count. During a break, fellow Starbucks worker and organizer Robin Hyatt ran to Ms. Ross’ nearby apartment to see the proceedings unfold on Zoom. Final tally: 10 votes for the union, one vote against, and two other “yes” votes contested by management. The assembled workers whooped for joy.

“There’s a lot of support, and nationally there’s a huge movement,” says Ms. Hyatt. “I am excited to see it.”

In the past 16 months, union organizing efforts have sprung up around the country like sparks on a dry prairie of worker discontent. The surge in union activity includes workers at some of America’s best-known companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, and Alphabet (parent of Google). Two weeks ago, a group of current and former Apple workers, calling themselves Apple Together, sent an open letter urging the company to drop its new policy requiring employees to work at the office three days a week. 

Much of the energy behind these moves is coming from the newest entrants to the labor force: workers in their late 20s at the tail end of the millennial generation, such as Ms. Ross and Ms. Hyatt, and their successors, Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, who are beginning to land their first jobs. Many exude an organizing zeal not seen in decades. 

“What you’re seeing is the emergence of a new generation of organizers,” says Toby Higbie, professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s hard to stop this stuff once it gets out to a lot of people.”

Whether this period leads to a resurgence of unions in the United States is not yet known. In the 1970s, when young people, fresh from protesting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, began to organize workplaces, their efforts were crushed, Mr. Higbie points out. Like that period of upheaval, the current surge in unionizing is a manifestation of a larger sociopolitical movement among Gen Z, influenced by everything from Black Lives Matter and left-tilting Sen. Bernie Sanders to the rise of social media and the current labor shortage. The pandemic has added its own fresh zing. 

“The ingredients are here for something quite dramatic happening,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But there’s the law and the managerial mindset, which is still adamantly hostile.”

Sarah Silbiger/Reuters

Amazon Labor Union President Christian Smalls testifies before the Senate Budget Committee during a hearing on Amazon's labor practices on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 5, 2022. Even though he had been fired, Mr. Smalls continued union organizing efforts at his former workplace from the outside. Last month those efforts resulted in it becoming the first Amazon workplace to vote for union representation.

Pandemic-affected workers lead the charge

When Christian Smalls won a transfer from an Amazon fulfillment center in Connecticut to a new facility, called JFK8, in the New York borough of Staten Island in 2018, he thought he would get a fresh start with the company. Instead, he continued to be passed over for a promotion and at one point considered leaving Amazon. Then came COVID-19 and controversial circumstances that he says led to his firing. (Amazon says it fired him for violating his terms of employment and putting other workers at risk.)

Mr. Smalls didn’t fade away. Instead, he continued organizing JFK8 from the outside, hosting gatherings, answering workers’ questions, and eventually forming the Amazon Labor Union. Almost exactly two years later, on April 1, the union won the right to represent the workers at the facility, the first time any union had won an organizing election at Amazon.

Much of the union enthusiasm is coming from workers who couldn’t work remotely at the height of the pandemic: teachers, warehouse employees at Amazon, baristas at Starbucks, and other retail workers, including an REI sporting-goods store in New York City. Next month, workers at an Apple store in Atlanta are scheduled to vote on unionization. The pandemic has also scrambled the values and priorities of Gen Z, marketers say. 

“Shaped by the de-prioritisation of individual liberty during the most trying periods of the Covid-19 pandemic ... Generation Z will bring rise to a culture that rewards collective action over self-interest,” predicted the London-based marketing intelligence service Contagious in 2020.

Other factors have also contributed to the union surge. “COVID was a thing,” says Mr. Smalls, head of the new Amazon union. But “there were many reasons that made this work.”

One of them is the internet and the rise of social media. Of course, these tools have been around for years. The difference for this youngest cohort is the speed and intensity with which its unfiltered news is processed and used.

“The internet has definitely made this process a lot easier,” says Ms. Ross, the Starbucks barista trainer and organizer here in Watertown. “You can take something corporate has said and disprove it within five minutes.”

“There’s an awareness of all of the events happening throughout the globe, throughout the country, that you just never got before unless you just sat in front of the TV for 12 hours a day,” says Julian (Mitch) Mitchell-Israel, an organizer with the Amazon union. “I don’t think it’s that we’re better at communication, because I think that that frankly gives us way too much credit, when it’s really just that we are plugged into this absolute monster of a machine that we don’t know how to understand or can control.”

Mr. Mitchell-Israel came to the labor movement through politics. Galvanized by the 2016 Sanders presidential candidacy just as he was becoming politically aware, he started organizing for various campaigns. Eventually, he became disenchanted with politics as an engine of change, reached out to Mr. Smalls after reading about his Amazon campaign, and later joined him as an organizer. After the milestone victory at Amazon JFK8, the union tried to organize a smaller unit nearby, called LDJ5. There, earlier this month, Amazon won the vote by a better than 3-to-2 margin.

“I wouldn’t say I feel at all disheartened,” says Mr. Mitchell-Israel. “If we had just had more time, we could have easily won.”

Jay Reeves/AP

Suspended Amazon employee Reyn McGuire (right) talks with an unidentified union organizer in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 10, 2022. Workers are voting for a second time on a labor push at the company's warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, after the National Labor Relations Board ordered a do-over election upon determining that Amazon unfairly influenced an initial vote in 2021.

A generation seeking inclusion

Racial inequity has also energized many young people to embrace unions. “Radically inclusive,” a McKinsey & Co. report concluded about Gen Z in 2018. Non-Latino white workers will be in the minority for this generation by 2026, according to census projections. 

“Digging into my Asian American heritage, I have come to understand that the United States really looks to Asia for a source of cheap labor,” says Mayuri Raja, a third-generation South Asian and software engineer in Google’s Austin, Texas, office. “So my racialization, the way people see me in the United States, has been shaped entirely by my status and my people’s status as a source of labor. It would be foolish of me, honestly, to not organize as a worker when my oppression is tied to my ability to produce labor. ... I watched my parents be unhappy in their jobs and keep their heads down.” 

Now she wants to help other South Asians “think about how they have internalized this.”

Six months after Ms. Raja joined Google, a small group of fellow workers announced in January 2021 it had formed a union. The union went public a month after a high-profile Black artificial-intelligence researcher said Google fired her for her criticism of bias in the workplace. “I saw that it went public on Twitter, and I immediately was, like, ‘Sign me up!’” Ms. Raja says.

This youthful organizing zeal is about to be sorely tested. The union’s loss at Amazon LDJ5 is a sign that companies will not easily give up their anti-union efforts. And large corporations have shown themselves ready and able to boost salaries and sweeten benefits to blunt the appeal of unions. 

Also, the new unionized units will have to bargain at the negotiating table and, if needed, convince new recruits to go on strike – skills that will require more structure and expertise than the young independent unions now have. If history is any guide, the help these groups have received from established unions will lead to more formal ties.

What workers want

These young workers’ demands are not much different from what previous generations of union workers have fought for. Fairness is important. At Starbucks, for example, the problem doesn’t seem to be starting pay as much as the lack of pay raises for hourly workers who stick with the company.  

“There are people who have been there for literally over a decade ... who are making like $2 more than the people who were hired two months ago,” says Caitlin Caughlan, a barista at Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Seattle, which voted to unionize last month.

Here at the Watertown store, Ms. Ross wants to push for a system where, if the staff has to cover for a worker who doesn’t show up, that worker’s pay is divided among the staff rather than pocketed by the company.

At Amazon’s JFK8, one of the more disliked practices is called “time off task,” organizers say. The system automatically detects when workers are no longer at their station and tallies how long they are gone. If the break lasts more than 10 minutes, a manager might come around asking the employee what took so long.

“I even wouldn’t use the bathroom too much, because I really hated how the managers would walk up to us,” says Micheal Aguilar, who worked at the JFK8 fulfillment center.

Nearly a year ago, Amazon changed the system so time off task wouldn’t necessarily trigger for any one incident but would accumulate over a longer time, after which a worker might be talked to or fired. 

Or coached. Amazon says the process is designed to help workers. “Like most companies, we have performance expectations for all our employees,” the company said in a statement to the Monitor. “When setting those expectations, we take into account things like time in role, experience and their safety and well-being. We support people who are not performing to the levels expected with dedicated coaching to help them improve. ... Our employees, in addition to their regularly scheduled breaks, are able to take informal breaks to stretch, get water, or talk to a manager.”

This battle over who has a say in how the workplace is structured may prove the biggest chasm between workers and management. Many of these companies have become extraordinarily successful doing things their way. Now, some of their newest workers say that’s not good enough.

“My mother, she had no rights and no protection,” says Mr. Aguilar, whose mother came to the U.S. from Mexico. “What we’re fighting for is our own rights, so companies will not be able to treat us as they did them.”

“The company just makes this decision and we have to live with it,” says Ms. Hyatt at the Watertown store. “And that’s the whole reason for union organizing.”

I can never forget Shireen Abu Akleh’s lesson in courage.

It is a lesson I was reminded of when I learned that my mentor and friend had been shot and killed last week, reportedly by Israeli forces, while covering an Israeli military raid in the northern West Bank for Al Jazeera.

There was no point in putting ourselves in danger, Shireen constantly told us younger journalists. Courage in journalism came only through asking for the truth, not in anything else.

She was shot and killed seeking the truth, wearing her press vest and helmet.

According to the journalists who were at her side – as well as Palestinian officials, Al Jazeera, and independent researchers using material from Palestinian and Israeli military sources – she was killed by Israeli military fire during a shootout with Palestinian militants in Jenin, in a raid that followed a string of deadly attacks in Israel.

As I, other journalists, and Palestinians across the political spectrum mourn her killing, I am reminded of the bloody days of the second intifada that began more than two decades of insecurity and turmoil for the Palestinian people that continue to this day. It was an era that catapulted Shireen’s career, making her a trusted voice for Palestinians and Arabs around the world.

Shireen was a pioneer, part of a new generation of female field reporters in the Arab world at the turn of the 21st century. While women were commonly seen as anchors behind a desk, to see a woman reporting from the middle of the action broke stereotypes and led the way for dozens more Arab women to follow.

These past two decades were nevertheless also years in which my friend and colleague guided me and others through the uncertain and dangerous times with warmth.

Her voice was my chaperone

In the early days of the second intifada, which began in late 2000, I attended Birzeit University near Ramallah, studying English literature but harboring dreams of becoming a journalist. The violence between Israelis and Palestinians and the growing number of Israeli military checkpoints made my 5-mile commute dangerous.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Artist Jaber Abbas applies final touches to a mural he painted to pay tribute to slain Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, in Nazareth, Israel, May 16, 2022.

Our main live news sources at the time were satellite channels, like Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera. Specifically, we all relied on the tenacious work of Al Jazeera’s Palestinian American correspondent, Jerusalem’s own Shireen Abu Akleh.

Shireen’s hour-by-hour updates allowed me and tens of thousands of others to know how to navigate Israeli military checkpoints, which areas were witnessing violence, and what roads were unsafe that day.

With her voice, Shireen was my chaperone to university.

Shireen’s calm presence, persistence, confidence, and professionalism brought her close to viewers, who trusted her accurate reporting. For many, their lives depended on it.

Her iconic signoff – “Shireen Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera, Ramallah” – became so well known, I would hear Israeli forces occasionally repeat it when announcing a curfew through loudspeakers on Ramallah’s streets.

It may have been meant to mock her, but it solidified her as a pillar of Palestinians’ daily lives.

I knew that if I pursued journalism, I would seek to follow in her footsteps.

Emphasis on safety

Years later, when I finally did become a journalist, I would see her in the field for every event, every incident, every crisis. She took me and many other younger journalists under her wing, and shared her stories of survival and constant lessons on safety and vigilance.

She told us how she utilized fear as an instinct to keep her safe. She drilled into all of us the importance of being alert and in the right place at the right time, of avoiding violence and being safe.

It was a mentorship that continued to her very last moments on earth; when she was shot she was working alongside journalists Shatha Hanaysha and Mujahid Al-Saadi, both in their 20s.

Off-air and away from the cameras, Shireen was a kind and generous soul. Her voice had a Zen-like quality that calmed people around her, and her account of the news was factual and direct. She was always there to lean on.

Shireen also preached the importance of the press holding those in power to account.

Over Shireen’s career, Palestinians saw violence sprawling from within and without. Rounds of peace talks started, sputtered, and collapsed, opportunities missed. Israeli settlements spread across the West Bank. Fatah-Hamas infighting divided the West Bank and Gaza. Elections were postponed, and an undemocratic leadership dug in.

Frustration grew for an entire generation that has grown up in instability, unable to choose their own leaders or their futures.

Shireen was there through it all, reporting it, helping us make sense of it. Until she was not.

Outpouring of gratitude

Her three-day funeral procession from Jenin to Nablus, then Ramallah and Jerusalem, brought people to the streets in a message of gratitude for a woman welcomed into every household like a daily meal.

As if in a state funeral, masses of mourners accompanied her body. People who had never met her stood in the streets and wept, expressing both their anger and sorrow.

In her birthplace and hometown of Jerusalem, a city of the three Abrahamic faiths, thousands of people across all backgrounds, political factions, and religions united behind her on Friday. It was an enormous emotional outpouring, but it was marred by an Israeli police crackdown and the clubbing of mourners carrying her coffin, an event caught on the lenses of the world media.

I followed the ugly scene, emotionally torn, from Jenin, where I was trying to reconstruct the story of her killing. I hadn’t slept in days, but dealing with Shireen’s death as a news story may have given me the distance I needed to focus on my job.

Even in death, Shireen cast light onto the harsh realities of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. The bullet that struck her and the turmoil of her funeral renewed Palestinians’ awareness of their urgent need: to tell their narrative, our narrative.

We shall tell it the way Shireen did, factually and unapologetically.

The view from Jewell Hollow overlook is hard to beat. More than 3,000 feet above ground in Shenandoah National Park, it’s a 180-degree window into miles of valley and mountains. Surrounded by a mossy stone fence and hiking trails, the sight is one of the best in Virginia.

But today, Kris English isn’t focused on that. Instead, she’s looking at dirt – grassy green to tan to gravelly brown. 

She pauses when the ground gets dark. Telling her three-person crew to stop, she teaches them to study dirt like paint swatches (every artist needs a canvas). Darker dirt is wetter dirt. Wetter dirt means the trail will erode faster. 

Then Ms. English, a technical trail specialist for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, shows them how to dig a drain. 

Grabbing a 4-foot hybrid rake known as a McLeod, she clears debris in wide brushstrokes and carves a gentle slope. Five minutes later there’s a comet-shaped channel to guide water down the mountain. 

Within two hours, her crew finishes two more of their own before fleeing to their cars to escape a spring thunderstorm. But, now, the small monsoon is only an inconvenience, not a threat to that slice of trail. Rain will pack the dirt closely and preserve their work.

Ms. English, leading a training session that morning in early May, helped add a few volunteers to the roster of those who routinely preserve the Appalachian Trail – the East Coast’s 85-year-old, 2,200-mile hikers’ paradise. Her role is professional, but each year a 14-state network of trail crews from Georgia to Maine volunteer hundreds of thousands of hours to keep the trail sustainable, accessible, and clean. 

The pandemic has made it harder. When indoor gatherings were off limits, people went outdoors in record numbers. And, not knowing basic hiking etiquette, they made a mess. 

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

Trail maintainer Russell Riggs diggs an impromptu drain in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, May 1, 2022. The drain helps water gently slope down the mountain and off the trail, limiting erosion.

That hasn’t stopped the volunteers. Last fiscal year, the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, which oversees 240 miles of the trail – 101 of which are in Shenandoah National Park – amassed 2,000 more volunteer hours than it did the year before the pandemic. Wayne Limberg, one of the PATC’s district managers in Shenandoah National Park, says one of his first maintenance crews this season was about a third larger than usual. 

To him, the response shows that people understand the Appalachian Trail’s inherent contract. It offers humans an almost unrivaled opportunity to interact with nature. But that agreement takes preservation. 

“We want to make sure that it can be enjoyed by those of us living now and also future generations,” says Mr. Limberg, who helped Ms. English lead the training session in May. “Trails need to be maintained.”

A compromise with nature

“Why build trails?” Ms. English asks near the start of the session. Standing next to her muddy SUV, she explains that trails are a compromise. 

Humans want to see nature. But nature doesn’t always appreciate the interest. Trails solve that problem by concentrating folks into a single, relatively small path, she says. The arrangement maximizes people’s exposure to nature and minimizes their impact. 

But this is a fragile agreement. Humans – particularly new hikers – can disturb the forest with litter, graffiti, music, and millions of footprints. Nature, for its part, will always try to take the trail back with weeds, moving water that erodes the path, and fallen trees known as “blowdowns.” 

Hence, the need for trails creates a need for trail maintainers. And trail maintainers need training. 

After a series of safety tips, Ms. English walks her group to a set of tools, arranged in a line next to her car and under the watch of a Smokey Bear bumper sticker. Each has the same candy corn-colored handle with a metal end shaped to its purpose. The fire rake’s harsh triangles help clear gravel and debris. The mattock’s two ends can dig earth and tear roots. 

Each member of the group grabs a couple tools and follows Ms. English to the trailhead. There, in the field’s exacting jargon, she explains the path’s taxonomy. Hikers walk on the “treadway,” beside the “backslope,” leading up the mountain, and the “edge,” leading down. 

“I could nerd out about tools for a minute,” she says. And briefly she does, even posing in proper technique – like the relaxed stance of a surfer, not the hunch of an “old witch.”

Noah Robertson/The Christian Science Monitor

Kris English, a technical trail specialist with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, celebrates with volunteer Russell Riggs after digging an impromptu drain in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, May 1, 2022.

“Leave no trace”

Maintainers follow several simple rules. Preserve a 4-foot-by-8-foot rectangular “trail prism” free of weeds and fallen trees so hikers can freely walk. Gather litter. Report anything they can’t fix.

And, perhaps most important of all, guide water. Rain needs to flow down the backslope and off the edge, not pool on the treadway. Otherwise, the path will erode, gather debris, or change shape entirely as months of nature junk accumulates. 

Official policy is that the treadway should slope down at a 5-degree angle. The reality is almost never that precise. If they want an impromptu level, Ms. English says, a half-filled, transparent water bottle will work.

Ms. English, Mr. Limberg, and the crew’s other two members remove a rickety log “water bar” and replace it with a fresh channel. Pulling the log up, Ms. English finds two curled millipedes. Mr. Limberg finds a AA battery.  

In the last two years, litter like that has only become more common. ​​“We have definitely noticed the impact of, well, having one of the safest places to be,” says John Stacy, the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club’s supervisor of trails. 

The motto for seasoned hikers is “leave no trace.” But many of the new visitors during the pandemic hadn’t yet learned the code. The Appalachian Trail has many access points and can’t record each hiker. But the multiple trail maintainers interviewed by the Monitor described a clear increase in use over the last two years. With it, too, they found an increase in waste and degradation – from little bags of dog poop left in a stack at the trailhead to spray-painted boulders. 

“When you see stuff that frustrates you, you don’t like it, but you realize that’s why I’m here,” says Jim Fetig, who manages the PATC’s program of paid seasonal trail ambassadors known as “ridgerunners.” “You just rise to the occasion and take care of it and move on.”

North District “Hoodlums” 

To Mr. Limberg, the good news is that trail maintenance is getting back to its natural state. When national and state parks closed at the beginning of the pandemic, his trail crew’s work stopped as well. Even when things reopened, there were capacity limits and required social distancing. 

Trail crews are divided by the areas they maintain, known as “trail districts.” Each has its own district manager and identity. Mr. Limberg supervises Shenandoah National Park’s North District. His crew is known for hosting potlucks once a month after they work and for having a younger, more gender-equal volunteer base. 

Every group has a name – from the “Spooky Beavers” to the “Flying McLeods.” Mr. Limberg’s is the North District “Hoodlums.” 

It’s been more than 20 years since Mr. Limberg joined the PATC. Two decades of maintenance have reminded him that “the mountain always wins.” No matter how many times he digs drains, whacks weeds, and lifts litter, the trail will need more work. It’s humbling. 

But it also gives him a connection to the land he might not otherwise have. That’s something Russell Riggs, another PATC member at the training session in May, values. 

Mr. Riggs, who attended the session to sharpen his skills and terminology, is a Washington real estate lobbyist by trade and a maintainer by heart. He’s worked a section of Shenandoah National Park called the Rose River Loop for 10 years. 

He’s brought his family. His family has brought friends. From the 3-mile loop of waterfalls, woods, and a quarry, he can still see the fallen trees he cut up and rolled off the trail years ago, slowly decomposing nearby. The trail helps him measure his life. 

“I’ve gone out in all seasons, all kinds of weather, and every single time I’ve never regretted it because you always see something beautiful” – even when there’s more litter and louder visitors and little space on the crowded path. 

“I think love is probably not too strong of a word,” he says.

AP

Hania Zaatari, center, who was an independent candidate in the May 15 parliamentary elections, campaigns in Sidon, Lebanon, April 9.

More than three-quarters of Lebanon’s population lives in poverty. Among young people, more than 70% want to emigrate. The value of the national currency has dropped 90% in the past two years. And the electoral system remains rigged for religion-based parties. So last Sunday when Lebanon held parliamentary elections for the first time in four years, what did its voters decide to do?

They made sure the Islamist group Hezbollah and its Christian-based allies lost their majority in Parliament. They boosted the number of anti-Hezbollah members of Parliament. And most unexpected of all, they voted in 16 independent, reform-minded activists who could be kingmakers in forming a new government. The 16 include 12 first-time lawmakers and four women.

This election result fits a recent pattern in the Middle East of people not wanting to be subject to political systems based along religious lines and instead wanting to be treated as individuals in need of good, secular governance free of patronage by sectarian leaders.

In Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, and Iraq, Islamist political parties – which internally are not very democratic – have faltered in the past two years. In Turkey, the ruling Islamist party has lost popularity.

Before Lebanon’s election, pollsters found that half of voters had no confidence in Hezbollah, the pro-Iran militant group that controls much of the country’s Shiite areas in a dictatorial way. That sentiment had escalated in 2019 after mass protests against the country’s corrupt ruling elite. As one protester put it, “The people are one – Shia, Sunni, Christian, they’re all one here.”

A 2020 survey of Arab youth found most do not want their public society defined by religion but by individual rights and shared interests – especially job creation. The major religions of the Middle East teach their followers that God (or Allah) sees each individual as created in the divine image. Now voters in Lebanon have sent a signal that democracy relies on treating all citizens as equals, not as mere members of a demographic group. Or as one voter, Samer Arabi, told The National news website, “We want to change how politicians are playing with people and their religion.”