Thomas Peter/Reuters

Pandemic prevention workers in protective suits knock on a resident's door in an apartment building that went into lockdown as COVID-19 outbreaks continue in Beijing, Dec. 2, 2022. Chinese who took to the streets to demand freedom from lockdowns and COVID-19 tests are acutely aware that the required health codes on their cellphones track not only their COVID-19 risk status, but also their minute-by-minute movements.

Chinese police have extensive surveillance capabilities at their disposal – including a vast network of mounted cameras that canvass public places – as they pursue protesters who spoke out last month against China’s stringent COVID-19 policies. Yet even more ubiquitous than the cameras is a relatively new tracking tool: the individual digital health QR codes that live on the cellphones of nearly all residents.

Designed for contact tracing, the health codes are key to enforcing China’s COVID-19 rules, and now constitute one of the most widely used population control technologies in the world. 

Chinese who took to the streets to demand freedom from lockdowns and COVID-19 tests are acutely aware that the required health codes on their cellphones track not only their COVID-19 risk status, but also their minute-by-minute movements – where they go, how they travel, and the people they encounter – data that is available to police.

While it’s uncertain whether police officers are leveraging health code data as they swarm cities, stake out protest locations, and crack down on unrest, there have been cases in recent months of Chinese authorities abusing the codes to block demonstrations. 

Ng Han Guan/AP

Residents show their health code before they enter a market as restrictions are eased in Beijing, Dec. 3, 2022. Chinese authorities on Saturday announced a further easing of COVID-19 curbs with major cities such as Shenzhen and Beijing.

A key question now – as China’s leaders downplay the severity of COVID-19 and begin to ease restrictions – is whether the health codes will be abandoned, or instead “normalized” and repurposed for other uses, experts say.

While loosening the COVID-19 rules is likely to increase public expectations that the country will end the health code system, Chinese authorities have already suggested they may want to retain the powerful surveillance tool. Legal scholars in China have started pushing back against that possibility, saying the codes contain sensitive personal information and should only be used temporarily and for specific emergencies.

“When the epidemic is over, the health code should be abandoned,” says Liu Deliang, law professor and dean of the Asia-Pacific Institute of Artificial Intelligence Law at Beijing Normal University. “Continuing to use it would result in unreasonable harm to people’s freedom.”

The use – and abuse – of China’s health codes

After the epidemic swept the city of Wuhan in 2020, causing thousands of deaths, most Chinese residents accepted the use of the health codes as a necessary means of curbing the outbreak. The codes have helped keep cases and casualties in China low compared with many other countries.

But the technology also created an unprecedented new surveillance capability in each person’s pocket. The health codes use a green, yellow, and red stoplight system for COVID-19 risk status, and people are required to scan their mobile QR code wherever they go. Only those with green codes can enter public places – from grocery stores and apartment buildings to train stations and parks. People with yellow and red codes are quarantined at home, in shelters, or in hospitals.

The health codes link people’s ID cards, facial features, phone numbers, vaccination status, and COVID-19 test results, using cloud computing and big data, while tracking their movements through mobile communication networks.

Over the past three years, the use of the codes has expanded – for example, by enforcing frequent testing and by linking the codes to public transit systems.

But they have also put a new tool in the hands of authorities – from neighborhood committee members to city and provincial officials – that has led to arbitrary use and abuse of the codes.

In June 2022, authorities in the central province of Henan deliberately turned the health codes of more than 1,300 people around the country red to prevent them from protesting over a bank scandal in the Henan city of Zhengzhou.

In July, officials in Henan’s Minquan County automatically gave red and yellow codes to all residents – regardless of health status – in a draconian bid to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19. That same month in Wuxi, Jiangsu province, authorities announced people must conduct rapid COVID-19 tests two or three times a day, and violators would have their credit investigated and be blocked from entering public places.

“When will the abuse of health codes stop?” wrote Hu Bin, a lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law, in an August article. Once such technical tools are in the hands of officials, “they can easily be abused and cause serious consequences.”

Thomas Peter/Reuters

People hold white sheets of paper in protest of COVID-19 restrictions, after a vigil for the victims of a fire in Urumqi, as outbreaks of the coronavirus continue in Beijing, Nov. 27, 2022. While it’s uncertain whether police are leveraging health code data as they crack down on the unrest, there have been cases in recent months of Chinese authorities abusing the codes to block demonstrations.

Tool of social health?

“The misuse of the health code information – by adding requirements and forcibly giving people red codes – restricts people’s movements … and violates people’s interests,” says Dr. Liu. He says China needs laws to clarify its epidemic control measures and the legality of health codes in the context of protecting citizens’ basic rights.

Still, Chinese authorities have floated the idea that the health codes could become routine, while some localities have already attempted to expand their use into new domains.

“The zero-COVID-19 policy may go away, but some of the policy tools may be retained in building the so-called surveillance state in China,” says Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. The health code system “essentially provides a proof of concept that it can work.”

“The state, whether it’s on the local level or the national level, they have every incentive to keep these tools as mechanisms for their general ‘governance’ purpose,” says Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Health codes could become expanded or normalized, just as subway security checks did after the Beijing Olympics in 2008, says Jeffrey Ding, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University.

“The fear is that this becomes not just about COVID control but takes on this broader meaning of social health,” says Dr. Ding, publisher of the ChinAI newsletter about artificial intelligence in China.

Pushback expected

Such efforts can backfire. The coastal city of Suzhou sparked controversy in late 2020, for instance, when it tried to popularize a “civilization code” that would mete out punishments and rewards based on whether people obey traffic laws or engage in volunteer work. “Citizens with high civilization points will enjoy priority and convenience in work, life, employment, study, and entertainment,” said the official announcement.

“Will you be told you cannot be offered the job because you are not civilized?” one person commented online.

Following a public outcry, the Suzhou initiative was withdrawn after only four days, reflecting concerns of citizens over what was viewed as government intrusion into their private lives. “There is pushback from Chinese people in terms of what society they want to live in,” says Dr. Ding.

Similarly, the recent outpouring of popular frustration over China’s strict zero-COVID-19 policies suggests that retaining the health code system in a post-pandemic world may be met with significant opposition.

“If there isn’t a reasonable purpose for the health code, the ordinary people will complain,” said one Beijing worker, standing outside a park closed due to the city’s record outbreak. “They won’t accept it.”

When unrelenting flood waters hit the small, hardscrabble village of Mir Khan-Goth in Pakistan’s Sindh province last August, Seema had no idea how a life that had carried on in familiar patterns over many decades was about to change.

First, the powerful tide of earth-laden water carried away Seema’s daughter, who had ventured out into a thigh-high river to salvage any food she could at the outdoor kitchen. She would never return, leaving Seema, who offered only her first name, to care for her four grandchildren.

But the floods also left the family’s traditional thatched, one-room hut roofless and teetering – no match for the weeks on end of unprecedented rains that followed the floods. Scientists say that pattern is likely to repeat with climate change fueling increasingly extreme weather. Like more than half of the 50 thatched or earthen houses that made up Mir Khan-Goth before this year’s monsoon rains, Seema’s house was suddenly no longer a refuge, but a trap.

So it is some measure of progress that, despite the sadness and setbacks, Seema can now gather her grandchildren in a new thatched house. The dirt floor is on elevated ground, and the walls and roof are secured by bamboo pillars.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

People traverse washed-out roads in Pakistan’s Gadap region on Nov. 18, 2022. Pakistan consistently ranks in the top 10 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries.

“There was so much loss, but we do have this,” she says as she motions inside the doorway of her new home, built by the Alkhidmat Foundation, a private Islamic charity with a long history of disaster intervention and recovery.

Across Mir Khan-Goth and the dozens of similar villages dotting the landscape of the Gadap region of Sindh north of Karachi, signs slowly sprout of recovery from Pakistan’s devastating floods of July and August. Goat herders – including the father of Seema’s grandchildren – are back in mud-caked fields, tending their shrunken flocks. Local men desperate to see transportation and deliveries resume have done what they can to patch up washed-out roads. Women have reassembled outdoor kitchens and banded together to stretch donated food supplies across their villages. 

But with an already weak civilian government overwhelmed by the scale of the devastation, and the country’s powerful military ill-equipped to transition from emergency intervention to climate adaptation, nothing on the order of a national recovery project has yet to take shape. Instead, rebuilding efforts have been driven largely by local universities and nonprofits, such as Alkhidmat.

“Right now Pakistan is an example of climate crisis,” says Naveed Baig, director of Alkhidmat’s Sindh office in Karachi, “but I think if we can respond to the task before us and make a success of our national recovery, Pakistan can be a model for climate adaptation and resilience.”

Waiting on aid

Pakistan consistently ranks in the top 10 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Not only is the interval between catastrophic monsoon seasons shrinking, but also rising temperatures are rapidly melting glaciers in the north. Karachi, a city of 15 million people, is considered by some experts the world’s most vulnerable major city. 

At the same time, an international community distracted by rising global hunger and mounting climate catastrophes seems to have almost forgotten about Pakistan.  

Just last month, United Nations officials relaunched pleas for emergency assistance for Pakistan, noting that the $816 million humanitarian appeal for Pakistan is barely one-fifth funded.

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Naveed Baig, director of Alkhidmat Foundation's Karachi office, stands beside donated clothing and other supplies outside the offices in Karachi, Pakistan, Nov. 16, 2022.

Some form of emergency food, shelter, and health care assistance has reached more than 4 million Pakistanis, according to U.N. officials. But with nearly one-fifth of the country affected by the flooding, and at least 5 million Pakistanis remaining displaced from homes and livelihoods as winter sets in, they say the crisis will only deepen without a quick turnaround in intervention.

In November, Pakistani officials did score what they say will be an important step forward when they led a successful campaign at the COP27 in Egypt for a wealthy-country-financed climate mitigation fund.

The fund, the details of which remain sketchy, would be designed to help developing countries like Pakistan that are increasingly prone to climate disasters build a more resilient future. 

But as promising as the concept may be, it does nothing for the millions of Pakistanis now facing rising food insecurity, lost shelter, and disrupted livelihoods and education.

Increasingly, it is private Pakistani charities and a few innovative projects aimed at building back with more climate-resilient communities that are among the few bright spots on the country’s immediate bleak horizon.

When nonstop torrential rains beginning in July suggested this would be a monsoon like nothing in Pakistan’s experience, Alkhidmat swung into action in areas where it was already well implanted in development work – often areas where a government presence is weak or nonexistent. Places like Mir Khan-Goth.

“We didn’t turn to the government to take emergency action in the worst-affected areas. If anything it was the other way around,” says Mr. Baig. “They came to us when it became clear very quickly that the unprecedented needs for food, shelter, and health were beyond any one government’s or organization’s capabilities.”

Yet now as flood recovery gradually shifts to reconstruction and renewal, Mr. Baig says he sees few signs of planning or preparation for the national “build back better” project government officials have begun touting.

On the other hand, he says Alkhidmat has already developed a blueprint for a climate-resilient village, certain elements of which have been incorporated into their recent flood recovery projects.

The new village Alkhidmat envisions would have 32 houses, all built on high ground, with reinforced construction materials and elevated flooring. Each village will have a solar-powered water pump and purification system – the pumps being a favorite feature for women, whose traditional job is to carry water, often long distances, for cooking and cleaning. 

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Farah Mahmood (left), director of UOL Relief at the University of Lahore, stands with Nasrullah Manjhoo, a university student who was instrumental in connecting UOL Relief with his hard-hit native area of Balochistan, on Nov. 14, 2022.

Resilience through innovation

Another example of climate-crisis innovation is playing out farther north in Pakistan, where a relief organization established at the University of Lahore (UOL) is utilizing students’ talents and their familiarity with a wide range of communities across the country to take flood recovery and renewal to hard-to-reach areas.

“We realized when the floods came that here [at the university] we had not just the resources to help, but through our students the access to remote affected areas, the enthusiasm to help, and the variety of talents required to play a critical role in the recovery,” says Farah Mahmood, director of UOL Relief.

Thus students from the university’s medical and nursing schools and nutrition majors were called on to help out in the initial emergency phase. More recently, students in architecture, engineering, and technology are joining in to envision and develop climate-resistant housing, agriculture, roads, and water infrastructure.

“Our students are our strength and our secret ingredient,” says Ms. Mahmood.

Nasrullah Manjhoo is just one example of UOL Relief’s “secret ingredient.”

A physical therapy student from a remote area of Balochistan province, Mr. Manjhoo came to UOL Relief’s attention after he posted videos on Facebook of the devastation in his native region. 

“I was surprised when I got a phone call from them, but when I realized it could help my village, I became enthusiastic,” says Mr. Manjhoo. 

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor

Aisha Taj stands with her five children on the stoop of her new climate-resistant house Alkhidmat recently built for her family in the Gadap region of Sindh province, Pakistan, Nov. 18, 2022.

In exchange for help with access to an area traditionally suspicious of outsiders, Mr. Manjhoo was able to help set the priorities for UOL Relief’s intervention in his area. Those included food, water, emergency shelter, and a medical clinic.

Seventy percent of his area’s traditional mud-and-straw houses “disintegrated” in the endless rains, he says. So now architecture students are developing a sturdier model house using bamboo, reinforced clay, and tiles for roofing.

The flooding “was terrible for so many people in my area, but I think now we” – by which he means his partnership with UOL Relief – “can help bring a better future,” Mr. Manjhoo says. 

Back in Gadap, that “better future” is already taking shape in new climate-resistant housing and the community’s first solar-powered lighting and water installations. Aisha Taj, a mother of five, proudly assembles her brood outside the cobalt blue house Alkhidmat recently built for her family. She says the house, built on a cement base with a roof designed not to retain water, is an example for the whole village of the progress coming from the tragedy of the flood.

Abdul Rahim, who is on the list for a new house, shares this hope as he invites a visitor to view his family’s destroyed house, an earthen shell with crumbling walls and no roof.

“We almost didn’t get out alive. Water and mud were coming from everywhere,” Mr. Rahim says. “What we are going to have soon will be much better.”

Annie Sanderson had grown to love the quiet of her home, set on the bend of a gravel road deep in the prairies, far from the heart of her reserve.

But when the James Smith Cree Nation reserve witnessed one of Canada’s deadliest mass homicides – a stabbing rampage Sept. 4th in this remote region – being set apart took on new meaning.

It took the police nearly 40 minutes to reach the reserve from their base 25 miles away. Ultimately the killer, a member of the community, visited 13 different sites, slaying 11 people, including his brother, and wounding 18. 

“When all that happened, we really felt so isolated,” says Ms. Sanderson.

Now Indigenous communities here in Saskatchewan, and across Canada, have renewed a push for more community-oriented policing, including their own self-administered forces. That, they say, holds out the best hope of protecting isolated communities grappling with issues such as poverty and addiction that are compounded by generations of state-imposed violence.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

First Nation member Annie Sanderson sits in the living room of her home with her granddaughter, Sharon, on Nov. 11, 2022, in James Smith Cree Nation, Saskatchewan. She lost her sister-in-law during a mass stabbing in September.

The drive also reflects a broader move in Canada toward Indigenous autonomy. “Policing, for a lot of these communities, is one of the most visible signs of self-determination,” says Lennard Busch, executive director of the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association.

The Prince Albert Grand Council, to which the James Smith Cree Nation belongs, signed a letter of intent recently with federal and provincial governments to explore new ways of delivering police services. At the same time, Canada is mulling legislation that would classify Indigenous policing as an “essential service,” the way other emergency services are categorized. That would help ensure more generous and more consistent funding.

The Mounties’ mixed legacy

Violent crime in Indigenous communities is growing. A 2022 government report showed rates nine times higher in primarily Indigenous communities than non-Indigenous ones.

In the prairies, many Indigenous reserves are policed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which marks its 150th anniversary next year. While the “Mounties” are a popular global brand, they originated as a colonial force to settle the West, and they have enacted some of Canada’s most violent policies against Indigenous residents.

Though Indigenous peoples make up just 5% of the Canadian population, they comprised one third of victims shot to death by RCMP officers between 2007 and 2017.

Indigenous policing got its start in 1991 as part of the First Nations and Inuit Policing Program. Under that model, the RCMP dedicates officers to Indigenous communities, instead of rotating them in and out, or communities run their own self-administered forces. Today there are 36 autonomous forces, including one in Saskatchewan, of which Mr. Busch became the police chief after a long career in the RCMP. But a lack of funding has hampered their growth, he says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A memorial to veteran and First Nation member Earl Burns stands on the spot where he died during a mass stabbing in September, on Nov. 11, 2022, in James Smith Cree Nation, Saskatchewan.

Kimberly Murray, appointed this year as the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites, says federal legislation to classify Indigenous policing as “essential” would turn it from a “program” into an emergency service just like any other community relies upon.

Self-determined policing, says Ms. Murray, would protect communities better than “outsiders coming in and imposing colonial laws.” Officers in autonomous police forces “are taught about treaty obligations, treaty rights, and the responsibilities of individuals in the family according to Indigenous laws,” she points out. They enjoy the trust of communities in the ongoing search for unmarked graves at former residential schools, and they take a more informed and nuanced view of land disputes.

They understand the issues, and do not just see “protesters trying to stop a pipeline,” Ms. Murray says.

“We’re going to be warriors again”

Darryl Burns sits at his kitchen table in the tranquil house he shares with Ms. Sanderson – photos of their grandchildren throughout. He lost his younger sister, Gloria, in September’s rampage.

He and his late sister worked as crisis counselors for James Smith Cree Nation; she was killed as she responded to victims’ calls. “I have to come to terms with my own feelings, my own anger, my own resentments,” says Mr. Burns. “We have good days. We have really good days. And all of a sudden, this. Boom.”

He supports the efforts spearheaded by the Prince Albert Grand Council, which includes 12 First Nations, because the challenges extend well beyond his own reserve. But they also run much deeper than policing, he says. Addiction and drug-fueled violence have grown too prevalent – the perpetrator had a history of both – and he sees the solution in reclamation of Indigenous beliefs and values.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

First Nation member Darryl Burns, a drug and alcohol counselor on the Cree reserve, speaks about losing his sister during the mass stabbing in September, on Nov. 11, 2022 in James Smith Cree Nation, Saskatchewan.

The government appears to support that idea. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited James Smith Cree Nation last month to announce $62.5 million (Canadian; U.S.$45.7 million) in government programs, some of which will pay for mental health and substance abuse services.

“We can make a decision to start healing and start leading our people on a good path,” Mr. Burns says. “That’s the vision I have for us, not only in James Smith but across North America, Canada, and the United States. That we’re going to be warriors again, we’re not going to be survivors.” 

“Unless we address the trauma and the hurt and the pain and the addictions,” he adds, “I don’t know if we can ever feel safe.”

According to federal statistics, Saskatchewan has the highest murder rate of all the Canadian provinces. It also has the highest per capita homicide rate among Indigenous people: 13 times higher than that for non-Indigenous.

Hilary Peterson, a lecturer in law at the University of Saskatchewan, says the justice system is broken for Indigenous people, beset by systemic racism. “The reason why policing is so important,” she suggests, is that the police are the front line of that justice system, and “it’s often the place where (racism) starts.”

Not that Indigenous police officers would always be a panacea, cautions Doug Cuthand, a newspaper columnist and documentary film maker in Saskatoon. Being close to a reserve and its residents can cut both ways, he points out. An Indigenous officer would know a reserve’s issues intimately. On the other hand, “it can be very difficult for a policeman to ... police the reserve because you are related to so many people,” he says.

“But there is a need for a homegrown police force,” he adds. “And it has to be put together by our own people.”

Down a single-lane, sand road where yellow county signs warn “dead end” and “no turnaround,” the standoff begins.

As a pickup truck driven by Gullah Geechee activist Reginald Hall backs up the rutted path, a work van comes the other way. Both vehicles stop. Then the van noses within inches of Mr. Hall’s rear bumper.

The van driver honks. Mr. Hall, whose bloodline stretches to when enslaved Black people first disembarked on Sapelo in the beginning of the 19th century, doesn’t budge. Two carpenters in overalls, both white, walk around the truck, stare, and wave their hands in disbelief. No words are spoken.

Eventually, Mr. Hall puts his truck in gear, makes a U-turn, and cuts through a private driveway to get around the van.

The confrontation, says Mr. Hall, shows “how high the tensions are running” as one of America’s last intact settlements of Gullah Geechee struggles to maintain its grip on lands first ceded to them at the end of the Civil War. Recent victories in court will help, but for Mr. Hall they are just one step in a long road ahead.

“We are in dogged pursuit of a place that has been preserved by us,” he says.

Along with racial injustices, the clashes here on Sapelo highlight the pitfalls of a “coastal capitalism” that marginalizes the descendants, with their vast experience living in a barrier island climate, in favor of expensive homes and infrastructure set squarely in the path of rising seas and increasingly inclement weather. That disregard for the environment, some descendants say, could be solved by returning the land to its rightful owners. 

“The displacement of communities goes hand in hand with environmental exploitation that [is] damaging to the very coastal ecologies that are attracting people to these places in the first place,” says Andrew Kahrl, author of “The Land Was Ours.” “Conversely, the modes of living with the land that native islanders ... developed over many generations were much more sustainable and in tune with the limits and liabilities of living in a highly fragile, very dynamic environment like a barrier island.”

A shrinking Black footprint

Once home to hundreds of enslaved Africans who tended rice, cotton, and sugar cane, Sapelo Island after the Civil War became a haven for the Gullah Geechee descendants, whose isolation birthed a distinct brogue heard to this day.

Descendants processed sugar cane, fished, oystered, and tended hogs. They ran cattle and grew vegetables – a vibrant makeshift economy scattered across a handful of villages with names like Hanging Bull and Timber Landing.

At its peak, Sapelo had over 500 Gullah Geechee residents. Today, Hogg Hummock is the only neighborhood that remains, with a small convenience store, a bar, two Baptist churches, and some short-term rentals. It is set not on the beach, but on a raised hummock on the marsh side of the island. 

David Goldman/AP/File

A parishioner exits a church service for the 129th anniversary of St. Luke Baptist Church on Sapelo Island, Georgia, on June 9, 2013. At its peak, Sapelo had over 500 Gullah Geechee residents. Today, Hogg Hummock is the only neighborhood that remains, with a small convenience store, a bar, two Baptist churches, and some short-term rentals.

About 30 descendants have persevered and still live here full time, fewer than the white, nondescendant population. (One descendant was Ahmaud Arbery, the Brunswick, Georgia, jogger whose murder by three white men in 2020 sparked nationwide protests.) 

The original, hand-hewn houses are small, sturdy, and easy to repair if a hurricane floods them. But they are ringed by larger, newly built houses – the bulk of which are summer homes for white Southerners, the construction of which largely ignores the environmental realities of life on a barrier island.

The shrinking of the Black footprint on Sapelo is part of a stubborn phenomenon nationwide. In 1910, Black people owned 14 million acres along the Southeast U.S. coast; today, they own a sliver of that, according to Mr. Kahrl. Hogg Hummock represents the last 400 or so acres of historically Black-owned land out of nearly 16,000 acres on Sapelo, the bulk of which was bought by the state from a North Carolina tobacco heir. 

“A big, fat bull’s-eye” 

Even though it is part of the 425-mile-long congressionally designated Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, Hogg Hummock remains under siege from largely legal yet corrosive land use practices that disproportionately impact poorer Americans. Issues include deceptive practices, poorly kept deeds, and a legacy of multilayered family ownership.

The loss of Black-owned land is baked into a coastal economy where the main industry is, in fact, “the real estate and the value coming from it,” says Mr. Kahrl, a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. When you factor in ways in which race and poverty make people “more subject to discriminatory forms of taxation,” he says, ordinary real estate calculations wind up putting “a big, fat bull’s-eye on African American landowners.”

This is not unique to Sapelo. A 2020 report from the Federal Reserve Bank found that Black and Hispanic homeowners in the U.S. paid 10% to 13% more in property taxes than white people for homes with comparable public services. And 30 U.S. states, including Georgia, allow tax liens on properties to be sold, a practice that, in Sapelo, has enabled prospectors to pick up descendants’ homes cheaply and then convert them into expensive real estate. Hogg Hummock has seen properties sold for pennies on the dollar. White as well as Black bidders have then turned around and sold that land for profit.

Mr. Hall’s ultimate goal is to prove in the courts that much of the land on Sapelo Island was taken by “deceived means,” whether by exploiting complicated titles or forging signatures. 

This summer saw progress in that pursuit.

Righting past wrongs

In 2015 descendants sued both the state of Georgia and McIntosh County on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. Five years later, the state agreed to make improvements, including upgrading the ferry and bringing it and its related infrastructure into compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The agreement also guaranteed Hogg Hummock residents a voice in decision-making concerning the island, and required the state to pay $750,000 for the plaintiffs’ damages, legal fees, and civil action costs. 

Then, this summer, a U.S. district court judge oversaw a settlement agreement against McIntosh County, which confirmed that “dramatically rising property tax assessments against Sapelo Island properties in recent years have threatened the viability and survival of [the Hogg Hummock] community,” according to a Georgia Public Broadcasting report. Better emergency fire and medical services, as well as road maintenance, must now be provided. Taxes will be stabilized for three years, and the county must pay $2 million to cover the plaintiffs’ damage claims and legal fees in what the plaintiffs’ lawyer called the first-ever federal lawsuit challenging the government’s treatment of the Gullah Geechee people.

This latest settlement came the same summer as other restorative actions involving Black Americans, suggesting to some a shift in attitudes about the government’s role in the way land is obtained, transferred, and transformed.

In Manhattan Beach, California, a parcel of land named Bruce’s Beach was returned to descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce, the Black couple who purchased the land and built a resort there in 1912. The city illegally seized it in 1924, claiming eminent domain. Nearly a century later, the vote by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to return the property was unanimous. 

Closer to Sapelo, off St. Helena Island, South Carolina, a barrier island named Bay Point Island that had been slated for a global ecotourism resort will remain untouched. Following an outcry led in part by a local Gullah Geechee community, a judge upheld a zoning board’s earlier ruling against the development. The decision on behalf of the Gullah Geechee was in support of the land as well.

The Bay Point decision suggested that “the native communities ... are more in touch with the natural cycle of the system, and they don’t try to change it or manipulate it,” says Jessie White, the south coast director of the Coastal Conservation League, in Beaufort, South Carolina. “They meet it where it is.”

David Goldman/AP/File

Sapelo Island descendant and land owner Reginald Hall speaks at a news conference outside federal court in Atlanta, Dec. 9, 2015, the year descendants sued both the state of Georgia and McIntosh County on 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. In 2020, the state agreed to make improvements. This summer, the county did as well.

Marquetta Goodwine, a Gullah Geechee activist and spokesperson, argues that her people know not only how to live in sync with the coastal climate but also how to restore it. Known as Queen Quet, Ms. Goodwine sees Gullah Geechee reclamation of the land and the land’s survival as one in the same. 

Her argument for environmental and wildlife restoration through reclamation finds precedent in the return of Montana’s bison range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in 2020. Other Native American tribes across the Great Plains are also stewarding bison herds and the land they roam. 

For the Gullah Geechee, the focus is on water and fish, not land and bison. “Let’s let the people who have been here for hundreds of years stay and let them live and build the way the ancestors did,” Ms. Goodwine told the Savannah Morning News. “And let’s see if this coast doesn’t restore itself.”

A debate over the town’s name

While descendants are largely unified around lawsuits seeking equity, agreement on how to move forward can be hard to find. Some believe residents should work with the state to maintain Hogg Hummock instead of continuing to sue for what Mr. Hall calls “recovery.” If Sapelo were to be restored to those it was deeded to after the Civil War, the saltwater Gullah Geechee would own land worth billions.

Mr. Hall says ownership would also encourage more Gullah Geechee families to come back to Sapelo, noting that several of his cousins have already returned. Attempts to rebuild the island’s economy include efforts to restart a sugar cane refinery. Tourism, including kayaking and fishing, could be expanded as well.

To many nondescendants, on the other hand, Mr. Hall represents a fundamental problem, with his resistance to the rhythms of island life where, as one white resident says, “a lot of things go under the radar – and that’s how the island folk like it.”

The Gullah Geechee lawsuits are “making us not want to be loving,” says Tony Thaw, a white resident.

A former county commissioner in nearby Glynn County, Mr. Thaw says he “grew up on the river” and has lived on Sapelo Island for years. When a family of descendants decided to sell and move to the mainland, they approached Mr. Thaw, who says he bought their land at a fair price.

But Mr. Thaw isn’t as welcome in Hogg Hummock as he’d like to be. He has requested a burial plot at Behavior Cemetery, the local Black burial ground, but descendants have said no. Mr. Thaw says he may have to request a special dispensation from the state in order to find a final resting place on Sapelo.

To Mr. Hall, that kind of request exemplifies a system of white power where a handshake allows connected newcomers to circumvent laws. Among the laws often sidestepped is the 1,400-square-foot limit to the size of houses, which in turn drives up values and taxes – and litters the land with houses not suited to a barrier island climate. Owners of these oversized homes include a former football coach, a friend of the state’s governor, and a Black nondescendant who owns the largest home on the island. 

Indeed, while descendants point to “white developers” shouldering out the native population, Black residents have also bought tax liens on courthouse steps and turned a profit when selling the land to outsiders building second homes. 

The struggle, to Mr. Hall, is summed up in the debate over names. A white resident paid for a sign that welcomes people to “Hog Hammock.” Descendants say a new sign is coming that spells it the original way: Hogg Hummock.

A similar struggle is playing out in slow motion between a new structure and nature itself. In a corner of Hogg Hummock stands a massive, unfinished house that ran afoul of local zoning laws – violations brought to the county’s attention by descendants. The structure can now barely be glimpsed through the maritime forest reclaiming the land, a hard-to-miss reminder of the economic, cultural, and environmental forces at play as the Gullah Geechee persist in their own reclamation efforts.

Caspar Hare/Courtesy of Riverhead Books

Kieran Setiya is the author of “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.”

Defining what entails a meaningful life has preoccupied philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Murdoch. Surveying centuries of thoughtful chin-tugging about the human condition, Kieran Setiya identifies a broad trend: “an affinity with ‘the power of positive thinking’ that implores us not to dwell on trials and tribulations but to dream of the life we want.”

He offers that critical appraisal early in “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way,” his latest book and a meditative antidote to the “best life” orthodoxy that fuels the sprawling, insatiable self-help industry.

Tacking away from both magical thinking and soothing rationalizations, Professor Setiya, who teaches philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, urges us to look straight at hardship and uncertainty as part of “living well.” He argues that only through a candid reckoning with the darker side of human experience – grief, failure, loneliness, injustice – can we arrive at a hard-earned hope that counters denialism and defeatism alike.

He takes readers on an engaging journey through ancient and contemporary philosophy,  literature and film, and personal experience and reflection. We hear from René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and Simone Weil; from William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Joan Didion; and from the author himself about his struggles, doubts, and qualified optimism.

Professor Setiya spoke to the Monitor about the power of compassion, the pitfalls of life narratives, and the ability to sustain hope in the moment and for the future. This interview has been edited and condensed.

How are unhappiness, anger, grief, and other painful emotions part of “living well,” as you define it?

There’s a big-picture thought that came into focus [while I was] writing the book. It's about an abstract distinction between happiness as a state of mind and living well as meaningful engagement with what’s actually around us. The task is finding a path between unrealistic visions of an ideal life and a kind of detachment or acceptance.

It’s very clear to us that there are many forms of unhappiness. Grieving about individual loss is one; grief or anger about injustice in the world is another. Certain kinds of negative emotions are part of living well – the task is to say, “We can’t just accept things as they are. We have to make the best of a bad lot.” In trying to make the best of it, there’s a tolerance for our own and other people’s frailties that is part of philosophical wisdom.

In what ways can compassion for others help us cope with our own burdens?

My sense is that often the experience of suffering involves an oscillation between being very self-focused and, other times, having the revelation that everyone is going through their own difficulties. There’s the possibility of leveraging our own difficulties into the realization that other people have difficulties and having empathy for them. There’s a confluence between thinking about others and living well in a way that answers our own needs. Those two things are not incompatible.

When we look at issues like climate change, economic inequality, and social injustice, how can empathy motivate us to act?

There’s the moment of hopelessness, the moment of thinking, “There’s nothing I can do.” The response to that is simple but it’s hard to hang on to, which is that the difference between doing nothing and doing something is the key. The fact that we’re relatively limited – we can’t change everything – doesn’t mean that the little differences we can make count for nothing and we should just forget it. We have to try to live up to the obligation to do something about the injustice we’re entangled with.

But how do we overcome a sense of resignation when those problems can feel insurmountable?

The danger is a certain kind of black-and-white thinking. If you look at what’s happening with climate change or the faltering of democracy or women’s rights, there’s an inclination to say, “Should I be hopeful or should I despair?” – as if those are the only two options.

The option we should be taking is almost always, “What should I realistically hope for, and what can I realistically do about it?” We’re not living in the black-and-white world. We’re living in shades of gray, and that is uncomfortable. You’re forced to face the questions, “Could I be doing something more? How much does the world demand of me?” I don’t think there’s a simple rule for adjudicating those questions. All you can say is, if you’re asking those questions, you’re in the right place – it’s a sign of what living well has to look like in conditions where there is grave injustice.

In warning against viewing our lives as narratives and dwelling on success vs. failure, you suggest that we emphasize “process” over “projects.” What’s the purpose of that shift in thought?

There is a temptation to picture oneself as the hero of a Hollywood movie: “So what’s the plot? What’s the great challenge facing this hero?” The more you think of your life in those terms – as defined by a central project – the more you risk mortgaging your life to that project. You may succeed. But if you fail, it won’t be just that something went wrong. You’ll be inclined to see yourself as a failure.

Everyone’s life is a mess of little successes and failures and attachments. Focusing on one big project – one kind of defining narrative – is a blinkered way of approaching life. That’s something we should resist – to not see ourselves through the lens of failure and success, and thinking instead of the ongoing process that accompanies those particular achievements or failures.

How can that framework help us confront injustice and inequality writ large?

When we engage in protests, for instance, we’re not sure it’s going to make a difference. [But] there’s value in the process. There’s value in standing up against injustice and trying to make a difference, even if we fail. That can play a role in giving us a healthier perspective on what to expect and demand of ourselves as people who are responsible to some degree for making the world a better and more just place.

Near the end of the book you write, “To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear.” Is there a way to envision the future that helps us navigate the present?

When you’re looking at the next 50 years, it’s going to be very tough, even in the best-case scenario. When I take a longer view, it’s not unreasonable to hope that we’ll have a green economy, we’ll have more sustainable economic practices, people will be living on better terms.

It may not happen, but we don’t know. And hope thrives on not knowing. To fully feel the force of that, you have to think, “I care about humanity in 2100 or 2150.” Caring about the future is a source of consolation for dealing with the sense of despair and anxiety in one’s own life now. That’s one of the ways in which compassion for others can be a source of solace for us, too.

Reuters/file

Girls walk in the old quarter of Sanaa, Yemen,

After eight years of war that took more than 377,000 lives, Yemen has enjoyed eight months of relative peace under a cease-fire brokered in April. Poverty remains high and the economy is in shambles, yet the war has had one salutary consequence. It has led to a shift in the way one of the world’s most male-dominated societies values women.

In August, for example, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), an interim governing coalition set up under the truce, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Judicial Council, the highest court authority. Last week, two Yemeni women were recognized by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington for their success in rights advocacy and peace building.

“Yemeni society’s view of women today is completely different from what it was before,” Ahmed Ghaleb, an education official in the city of Ibb, told The National, a media outlet based in the United Arab Emirates. “It used to be an unforgivable crime for women to work, but now society is more aware.” Participation for women in civic leadership roles, he added, is “one of their legitimate rights and not a favor.” 

Women have, in fact, been a persistent force in Yemen’s pro-democracy and peace movements. They helped secure a 2015 draft constitution that would have required that 30% of all governing bodies be filled by women. Three years later, women helped produce a cease-fire in the port city of Hodeidah.

Even so, women still face harsh restrictions. In areas controlled by the Houthi rebels, they are prohibited from traveling without a male escort. The PLC includes no women.

But even as the war has compounded the dire conditions Yemeni women face, it has also created new necessities for their inclusion. As men have gone to war, women – and a growing network of organizations created by them – have stepped in. They are learning to tap the very cultural traditions that shaped their exclusion.

In the southwest city of Taiz, for example, a local female civil society leader rallied the town’s male elders behind her effort to restore water resources co-opted by the military. “On first reception, [the military] wouldn’t accept me negotiating as a woman,” Ola Al-Aghbari told the United Nations, “but when they saw all the local leaders in the city in the alliance, all religious men and local authorities from the city, they agreed to talk.”

A future for Yemen “built on equal citizenship, democracy, and national reconciliation,” argued Nadia Al-Sakkaf, director of research at the Arabia Brain Trust, in an October interview with Institut Montaigne, “has to emerge from the ground up by empowering the local communities, especially women and youth, giving them something to care about rather than engage in the armed conflict in search of a source of income or empty ideology.” 

From Iran to Sudan in recent years, democracy movements have poured into the streets to challenge the restrictive rule of male-dominated regimes. Those open protests are more visible expressions of the quieter revolutions taking place within Middle Eastern societies – waged, as they are in Yemen, by recognizing women as equal with men in creating just, peaceful societies.