The unrest that has set cities across France ablaze has taken shape as one of the most significant social justice protests in the country in years, perhaps decades.

For more than six days, many French fell asleep to sirens, gunfire, and fireworks, and woke up to charred cars, pillaged stores, and city halls and schools set on fire. Mayors’ homes have been attacked. 

Everyone from politicians to French footballers has appealed for calm. The government has deployed 45,000 police officers every night since Friday to quell the violence.

By Monday, rioting had largely abated. Yet a three-word message scrawled onto walls across the country points to an anger that has not: justice for Nahel.

Nahel, a Franco-Algerian teen whose last name has not been publicly disclosed, was 17 years old when he was killed by a police officer last Tuesday during a traffic stop. The interaction was filmed by a bystander and has since brought a nationwide reckoning.

At issue is a 2017 law that gives police officers greater authority to use force. Activists say it has dramatically increased the number of deadly shootings during traffic stops. More broadly, Nahel’s death is the latest in a series of flashpoints kindled by claims of endemic racism across French society against ethnic minorities. Particularly in Paris’ underserved suburbs known as banlieues, minority groups and immigrants have long felt marginalized and discriminated against by the state. The riots after Nahel’s death have held a clear message, especially among French youths: no more.

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

A French firefighter works to extinguish a burning car in Tourcoing, France, on July 2, the fifth day of protests.

“Dignity is really central to what’s happening,” says Mounira Chatti, a professor at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne who studies integration. “Right now, these youth feel discriminated against at school, at work. ... They’re victims of racial profiling by police.

“If we’re going to get out of this situation, the government needs to send a very strong signal to young people from immigrant backgrounds: You belong to this country; you have your place here.”

Echoes of the past

Many observers have compared the situation to 2005, when two teenage boys were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Their deaths set off a wave of riots that lasted three weeks and cost the state an estimated €200 million ($218 million).

To those in immigrant banlieues, Nahel’s death points to a marked lack of progress.

“Since 2005, nothing has changed! The police are still targeting our kids in the banlieues. It’s intolerable,” says Laurence Bedé, a Franco-Algerian mother of three girls living in a suburb near Nanterre, where she came to attend a march for Nahel last Thursday.

“We’re fed up,” says her teenage daughter Maissane, breaking down in tears. “We just want to be given a chance.”

The French government has denied racism in its police force. But a January 2017 report by Jacques Toubon, France’s independent human rights defender, showed that North African and Black men were 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than the rest of the population.

Colette Davidson

People march in Nanterre, France, on June 29, days after a French police officer killed 17-year-old Nahel in this suburb of Paris.

In February 2017, in response to public pressure to appear tough on crime and terrorism, the government passed a law offering police officers more rights to use their service weapons. Previously, police had to justify legitimate self-defense. The new law allows them to fire on motorists they deem a potential threat to the general public.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the law has not affected officer behavior. But data compiled by researchers shows that deadly shootings during traffic stops have increased sixfold since 2017. In 2022 alone, 13 deadly shootings were registered – an unheard-of number in France – with three this year. Those numbers are independent of any overall rise in crime.

“We saw a massive, indisputable effect of the 2017 law,” says Sebastian Roché, a policing expert at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, who was part of the research team on police violence.

The law was passed on Feb. 28, 2017, and in the year that followed, five motorists were killed by police, says Mr. Roché. During the previous five years, that number had been zero.

“These were the same police officers with the same weapons,” adds Mr. Roché. “The only thing that changed was the law.”

French police union officials could not be reached for comment, but Mr. Roché argues the law left no time for training. And he points to other concerning trends within French policing. Independent of the 2017 law, a 2022 report by France’s public auditor, the Cour des Comptes, showed that 40% of officers had failed to complete their required basic shooting training.

Roots of mistrust

Minority groups in the banlieues have long expressed a deep mistrust of the police. The officer who shot Nahel initially suggested that the teen had been driving toward him, posing an immediate threat. But the video posted online showed him questioning Nahel at the driver’s-side window before Nahel sped off. The officer has since been charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Cara Anna/AP

Graffiti reads "Without video, Nahel would be a statistic for the Interior Ministry" on a monument commemorating Holocaust victims and members of the French Resistance, on July 2 in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Vandals painted anti-police slogans including "Police scum from Saint-Soline to Nanterre" and "Don't forget or forgive."

“The video is a very important component in all this. Normally you have several versions of events that contradict each other, but with this incident, that wasn’t possible,” says Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research. “It allowed indignation to build. [Young people in struggling suburbs] already feel that the police kill and lie, but now they have proof.”

This mistrust is now boiling over.  

“These young people rioting have watched their parents, their older siblings be discriminated against time and time again, and they’ve had enough,” says Naima Iratni, president of Maison d’Algérie, a Paris-based nonprofit that promotes cooperation between youths in France and Algeria. “This generation – they’re 14 to 18 years old – is saying, ‘Stop.’ They will not accept it anymore.”

Ms. Iratni says much of the discrimination against second- and third-generation North African and sub-Saharan African young people is a result of France’s inability to shed colonial ways: “Now the colonizer is colonizing at home instead of abroad.”

Objects, not subjects

Numerous studies have shown that visible minority groups face more discrimination in French schools than other students, a discrimination that follows them into the workplace. A 2020 study found that candidates with Arabic names had 25% lower chances of getting a positive response during a job search.

“These young Arab and Black people are always the objects of public discourse and not the subjects,” says Ms. Chatti. “What these young people need right now is intermediaries who can reason with them. They don’t want to listen to the government.”

France has periodically had to face such existential questions about national identity and integration. In 2018, former centrist Minister Jean-Louis Borloo produced an ambitious 60-page report on how to restructure and revitalize France’s struggling banlieues. But the report was largely ignored, and many experts say that today’s unrest has a direct link to the government’s failure to implement Mr. Borloo’s recommendations. 

On Thursday, politicians from the far-left La France Insoumise party proposed a different first step. They introduced draft legislation that would abolish the 2017 police law and, perhaps, provide a sense of justice. 

“I look at what happened to Nahel and I think, he could have been my little brother,” says Ben Abdallah Adem, a teenager from the Paris suburbs. “There’s no respect anymore when it comes to how police treat us. When they stop us, it’s harsher than ever. I just want the police to offer a sense of protection. We shouldn’t be afraid of them.”

Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters

Electric lines in Houston, as power demand surges during a period of hot weather, June 27, 2023. A proposed EPA emissions rule aims to help the United States achieve goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

During a cold spell on Christmas Eve, Ohio’s Buckeye Power Inc. came very close to rolling blackouts that would have left its 1 million mostly rural and lower-income customers without heat. 

Now, as the air conditioning season heats up, CEO Patrick O’Loughlin recently told Congress he is facing another hurdle: a rule proposed in May by the Environmental Protection Agency that would require plants like his to cut carbon emissions substantially by the 2030s. 

His company has already spent more than $1 billion over the past two decades to comply with previous environmental regulations and to implement “state of the art” emission reductions technology. But this rule, he testified June 6, involves unrealistic timelines for implementing technology not yet proven at commercial scale, and would force Buckeye to shut down its coal plants with “nearly no hope” of replacing that power by the EPA deadlines.

“It’s going to force the retirements of several units like ours that right now provide the backbone of a reliable electric system,” said Mr. O’Loughlin. His company also generates electricity from natural gas, hydropower, biogas, and solar, but 80% comes from coal, he said. 

The debate over how to move America – and the world – toward cleaner energy without leaving customers in the dark has become increasingly urgent in recent years. Now it’s coming to a head over this proposed rule.

If implemented, this EPA regulation would for the first time set legally enforceable deadlines for carbon emission reductions in the electricity sector, which is the No. 2 source of emissions in the United States. Advocates say the rule is crucial to America meeting its emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, and that it is based on technologies that are cost-effective and have been “adequately demonstrated.” 

“We simply can’t meet our climate goals without substantial reductions from this sector,” says Andres Restrepo, senior attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. Noting that a significant transition toward more green energy has been occurring over the past five to 10 years, he adds, “This rule will help speed that along.”

Indeed, most proposed new projects are zero-emissions. But there’s a backlog in getting them approved and online – and their solar and wind power is intermittent rather than continuous like coal and gas. To be sure, fossil fuels also have reliability issues; recent emergencies like the 2021 Texas winter storm outages, which left 210 dead and more than 4.5 million without power, were due in part to natural gas fuel supply issues. Still, industry stakeholders and their GOP allies say that an overly hasty green transition could strain a grid already beset by rising demand, extreme weather events, and coal plants retiring faster than renewables can reliably provide a similar amount of electricity.

The comment period for this EPA rule, which ends Aug. 8, has therefore become an outlet for a broad range of concerns about electricity affordability and grid reliability. As for the rule specifically, critics say the EPA’s modeling has overestimated the potential for emissions reduction and based its requirements on technology whose commercial viability has yet to be proven in the power sector.

“There are fundamental questions about how economically feasible this technology could be at scale,” says Devin Hartman, director of energy and environmental policy at the R Street Institute, a think tank.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Men work in the generator room at Longview Power, a coal-powered energy plant, Jan. 23, 2020, in Maidsville, West Virginia. Longview is one of the most efficient coal plants in the U.S.

How much difference would the rule make?

Scientists have estimated that in order to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels – the target of the Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change that the U.S. rejoined under the Biden administration – the world will need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% compared with 2019 levels by the end of the decade. Many climate scientists believe the world will miss that target. 

The EPA has regulated greenhouse gases in cars as well as oil and gas production, but has yet to do so in the electric power sector. The Obama administration had tried to cut emissions in the sector with its 2015 Clean Power Plan, which was later withdrawn by the Trump administration. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down a key principle of the plan in West Virginia v. EPA.

Still, the sector has substantially decreased its emissions over the past decade, down to 1980 levels. Under this new rule, the EPA projects annual reductions of 0.6% to 5.7% compared with current levels during the period 2028-2042, with a cumulative reduction of 617 million metric tons. 

To achieve that, the EPA is using its authority under the Clean Air Act to propose new limits on how much carbon can be emitted by existing and new coal- and gas-fired power plants. It would apply a sliding scale of percentages and timelines depending on the type, age, and output of plants. To meet the targets, most would have to utilize carbon capture and storage technology or begin co-firing with cleaner fuels.

Carbon capture and storage has become more affordable, due to $12 billion worth of incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress last year. And the technology has been used in other types of plants, including oil refineries, cement plants, and ethanol plants. Carbon capture has been used to cut carbon emissions by as much as 90% in a number of small-scale projects, and was first deployed at scale in the U.S. on a coal-fired power plant in 2017. That plant, Petra Nova in Texas, has since been idled. The EPA says that a Canadian coal-fired power plant, Boundary Dam, also demonstrates the scalability of such technology, which the plant is using on one of its units with demonstrated capture rates of 90%. 

In an email to the Monitor, EPA said the agency “may determine a control to be ‘adequately demonstrated’ even if it is new and not yet in widespread commercial use” – something it did with sulfur regulation in the 1970s. The agency said it can also “reasonably project” how quickly technologies will improve, and set timelines accordingly.

After the comment period closes, the EPA will finalize the rule, incorporating feedback as it sees fit. Once implemented, it will likely be challenged in court. But the EPA has sought to base the rule on solid legal footing by only regulating emissions, rather than by directly requiring certain types or proportions of electricity generation.

“This is its latest try at trying to stay within the mercurial boundaries of the Supreme Court,” says John Larsen, who leads U.S. energy system and climate policy research at the Rhodium Group, an independent research provider.

Paul Ladd/Reliant/AP

Then-Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (right) joins NRG Energy CEO Mauricio Gutierrez at Petra Nova's carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery system near Houston, April 13, 2017. The plant has since been idled.

The broader issue: a stressed grid

The new rule comes against a backdrop of increasing concern about grid reliability as coal plants retire, extreme weather events stress the system, and overall demand rises, due in part to a move toward electric vehicles and new power-intensive sectors like cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

“I would probably put [the rule] in the top three of challenges to grid reliability,” says John Chiles of GDS Associates in Marietta, Georgia, a consulting and engineering firm. Mr. Chiles is an expert on transmission services who has worked in different aspects of the industry for decades.

While even some supporters say there are significant operational challenges in implementing the rule, which could affect reliability if not managed well, some say it’s not as difficult as the industry is making it out to be. The rule will not affect the plants used at crunch times – so-called peaker plants. In addition, if a plant announces it plans to retire and a grid operator determines that will undermine reliability, the operator can require the plant to stay online for a time – preventing a sudden drop-off in electricity supply.

Some of the key challenges with reliability are unrelated to this rule, including the backlog of new green energy projects trying to win the various approvals needed to get up and running. The patchwork of federal regulations, state policies, and NIMBYism can draw out the process for years.  

Part of the challenge is that no one government agency was designed to manage a major energy transition like this, leaving jurisdictional gaps and overlaps that Congress has not tried to clarify since a failed clean energy bill in 2009. 

The responsibility and requirements for pollution, grid operations, reliability rules, and incentives for clean energy technologies are spread across federal and state agencies. 

“There’s no central coordination,” says the Rhodium Group’s Mr. Larsen, who formerly worked for the Department of Energy.  

Jay Duffy, litigation director for the advocacy group Clean Air Task Force, calls for a “whole of government” approach that draws on the expertise of the various agencies to achieve the clean energy transition. 

But industry also needs a nudge, he testified on June 6.

“History shows that pollution control options can be developed, available, and cost-reasonable, yet sit on the shelves gathering dust until some regulation or incentive pushes or pulls an industry to reduce their pollution.”

Editor’s note: A paragraph in this article has been updated to reflect additional information, provided by the EPA after publication, on current deployment of carbon capture technology.

Matt Courtman was 8 years old when he first saw an ivory-billed woodpecker, possibly the most famous and controversial bird in American history. It happened not in some deep Southern swamp or lonely river-bottom forest, places where ivorybills once flourished, but in the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The museum holds one of the largest university-based collections of bird specimens in the country and, in Mr. Courtman’s memory, smelled heavily of formaldehyde. There, on a Saturday evening after an LSU football game, the museum’s director showed the young bird lover a pair of ivorybills that had been shot and stuffed more than a half-century before. 

“I was awestruck,” Mr. Courtman says. 

The years since have only deepened his regard for a bird many experts think is extinct. Mr. Courtman disagrees. He’s one of a small but determined group of conservationists, ornithologists, and bird lovers engaged in a decadeslong search for the ivorybill – and in an equally long and contentious debate over its status. Is the bird truly extinct, or does it still survive in the remnants of Southern forests?

The ivorybill was no ordinary bird. It was the largest woodpecker north of Mexico, prized by Native Americans and Europeans alike. At one time it ranged from the Carolinas to Texas and as far north as southern Illinois. But hunting, logging, and even the collecting of museum specimens made it scarce by the end of the 19th century. By the time Mr. Courtman saw two stuffed birds in 1969, most experts thought the ivorybill had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the great auk.

Jim McKnight/AP/File

A stuffed male ivory-billed woodpecker is on display at the New York State Museum in Albany, May 2, 2005.

Yet somehow the bird keeps showing up, defying scientific judgment and suggesting it may not be gone after all. Reports of new sightings keep trickling in. Some come from hunters and other accidental observers. Many come from ornithologists and experienced birders taking part in organized searches. Despite all the doubts, these reports keep alive the hope that the ivorybill may have been tougher and wilier than we thought, and that maybe, at least sometimes, nature can be, too.

The ivorybill is the reason Mr. Courtman returned to Louisiana four years ago to search for the bird full time. It’s the reason he and his wife, Lauren, started Mission Ivorybill, a campaign not only to search but also to build public support for the bird. And it’s the reason he often rises before dawn to search the bottomland forests near his home in Monroe, as he did one recent spring morning, following an old, overgrown logging road into the deep woods of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge, slogging through mud and water in knee-high rubber boots, and swatting with a stick at the tick-infested grass, hoping to scare off any venomous snakes. He’s convinced ivorybills are out there, and he’s determined to find them.

“Who knows?” he says, pausing to gaze up at the oaks, sweet gums, and other trees that rise above him in the dark. “Maybe we’ll have a contact.”

The question of the ivorybill’s status came to a head in late 2021, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed striking the bird from the list of endangered species, making its extinction official, at least in the eyes of the government. The proposal drew protests from those who said they had seen the bird and who pointed to a long history of purported sightings. Even the more skeptical worried that declaring the bird extinct was premature. There were so many places that hadn’t been searched. The Fish and Wildlife Service put off its decision and has yet to reach a final determination.

Meanwhile, a May report in the journal Ecology and Evolution challenges the Fish and Wildlife proposal. In it, a group that has carried out perhaps the most intensive search yet offers new evidence that the ivorybill still lives in the Louisiana woods. The evidence includes photos from cellphones and trail cameras, drone videos, and audio recordings from a decade of searching.  

“We’re confident in our data, in our interpretation of the data,” says Steven Latta, director of conservation and field research for the National Aviary, the Pittsburgh-based group behind the search.

The new report seems to have changed few minds. The problem all along has been that the evidence consists mainly of grainy videos and blurry photos taken from a distance and requiring interpretation. Stories abound of ivorybill hunters stumbling through the underbrush, fumbling for their cameras, or simply having no time to do anything but watch in helpless astonishment as the bird disappears.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Pat Haberman walks toward a shelter in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge as he helps Matt Courtman search for signs of ivorybills.

Searchers say this is unsurprising, since the ivorybill is not only rare but also very shy, all the more so because it was hunted so intensively in the past. It may have learned to be warier. Or maybe just the wariest survived. Moreover, they say, the ivorybill lives in swampy habitats so remote and difficult to access that few care to spend much time exploring them. 

Skeptics remain unconvinced. 

“I know folks will say there are a lot of fairly hard-to-get-to forests in the Southeast,” says David Wilcove, a conservation biologist at Princeton University. “But I personally would be astonished if the ivorybill existed in the United States. I just feel there are enough people out looking for the bird, long enough, that if it were around, it would have been recognized and rediscovered and confirmed with an unambiguous photograph.”

Still, it’s difficult to prove that something doesn’t exist. The major birding guides deem the ivorybill extinct and yet still hedge. As Audubon’s “Birds of North America” puts it, “Most experts concede the species is probably extinct.” Probably.

The story of the ivory-billed woodpecker is a familiar one. It’s about the ongoing destruction of the natural world – the cutting of forests, the plowing of prairies, the filling in of marshes and wetlands, the elimination of whole species. 

But it’s more than that. It’s about a love of nature and the stubborn persistence, even obsessiveness, of some of its most fervent acolytes. To skeptics, the determination to find the ivorybill only adds to the confusion. “If you go out wanting to see it, you are very likely to see it,” says Jerome Jackson, an authority on the ivorybill.

The ivorybill may also suggest something about the limits of our understanding. “I never say never,” says Jeff Hoover, an avian ecologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “I’ve learned that the natural world can trick and fool you when you say that something can never happen. I’m still hopeful.”

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Matt Courtman (left) and Pat Haberman point out potential woodpecker activity high up in a tree in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Haberman came down to Louisiana from Minnesota to help look for ivorybills.

The ivorybill would not be the first bird to have been thought extinct, only to be rediscovered years later. The Bermuda petrel was hunted by Spanish sailors for food and last seen in the 1620s. It reappeared in 1951. Two American birds thought extinct since the 1960s – the Eskimo curlew and Bachman’s warbler – have been the subject of later, unverified sightings.

But the ivorybill is different and has been for a long time. It was a charismatic bird that stood out because of its size, its brilliant black and white feathers, its jaunty crest and pronounced bill. Long before Europeans arrived on the continent, Native Americans were trading ivorybill heads and bills. Later, rural people in Louisiana bestowed on the ivorybill names like the “Lord God Bird” and the “Good God Bird.” 

The ivorybill has been rediscovered before. Many thought it was extinct when two were seen, then shot, in Florida in 1924. In the 1930s, ivorybills were again found near the Tensas River, the area where Mr. Courtman searches today. A study there yielded the most detailed account of the ivorybill ever, complete with photographs and audio recordings. Soon afterward, the demand for lumber during World War II led to the destruction of much of that forest – and to the disappearance of the ivorybill again.

DAVID TIPLING/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

A stuffed male ivory-billed woodpecker (right) and female (left), with a male pileated woodpecker, are on display at the Natural History Museum at Tring, England.

Everything seemed to change in 2005, when an article in the journal Science announced that an ivorybill had been found. Searchers affiliated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology said they had seen the bird in the Big Woods of southeastern Arkansas, in a backwater called Bayou DeView. And they had video to prove it.

The report sent a shiver of excitement through the ornithological world – and beyond. The ivorybill made newspaper headlines and earned a slot on “60 Minutes.” Ornithologists recall it as a time of “ivorybill fever.” But a backlash soon followed. Experts like Dr. Jackson questioned whether the bird in the video was really an ivorybill, or just the more common pileated woodpecker. And when searchers could not find the bird again, more doubts arose.

Still, the 2005 report gave new energy to the quest. Scientists and amateurs alike descended on river-bottom forests across the South, hoping for a glimpse of the bird. 

Geoffrey Hill, an ornithologist at Auburn University in Alabama, was one of them. Dr. Hill and a handful of assistants spent two years searching along the Choctawhatchee River in the Florida Panhandle. It was a place no one had bothered to look before, he says. They reported sightings.

“I think there are still birds there,” he says. “There is no reason the birds would have disappeared.”

Other searches proved less fruitful. Dr. Hoover had spent years studying birds in the southern Illinois swamps and adapted easily when government agencies asked him to add the ivorybill to his research. He and his students set up trail cameras, did vegetation assessments, and studied trees for woodpecker cavities, bark scaling, and other signs. But they didn’t find any ivorybills and couldn’t verify any of the sightings amateurs claimed to have made. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Matt Courtman holds a book called “Louisiana Birds” by George H. Lowery, Mr. Courtman’s mentor, May 5, 2023, in Monroe, Louisiana.

Eventually, when the excitement died, no one felt the disappointment more acutely than the people of Brinkley, Arkansas, near the sighting written up in 2005. After that report, visitors descended on the town to catch a glimpse of the bird, and local businesses responded. A salon even offered ivorybill haircuts. Some hoped the tourism might lift the struggling economy, but that hope proved as elusive as the ivorybill. 

For some, though, the 2005 report and other sightings around that time rekindled a long-smoldering fire. Mr. Courtman had first taken part in a search on the Pearl River in 1999, followed by others. He had a few glimpses of the bird, he says. And in 2019, he reported his best view of it since he held the two stuffed birds in Baton Rouge.

It was March. He was pushing through a holly thicket when he heard what sounded like an ivorybill’s call. He knew the call from recordings – the naturalist John James Audubon had compared it to the bleat of a tin horn. He waited. Finally, he moved toward the sound. Suddenly, two birds exploded in front of him. He recalls seeing all the important markings: the pale iris, the bright white on the wings’ trailing edges, and the prominent ivory-colored bill, sitting on the bird’s face like a smashed ice cream cone.

Then they were gone. Everything happened so quickly that he never thought to take out his cellphone for a picture. But there was no mistaking what he saw, he says. “From that point on, that’s when my life was committed to whatever I could do to make sure we searched systematically.”

It’s still dark when Mr. Courtman turns off Interstate 20 and goes south, following an empty two-lane road through the flat Louisiana countryside. The full moon casts a dim light over the fields. This is old plantation country, a part of the Mississippi Delta, where settlers and slave owners long ago cleared the forest to plant cotton. Today corn, not cotton, is king.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A framed photo from 1938 of birder J.J. Kuhn with a fledgling ivorybill named Sonny Boy sits on a shelf in Matt and Lauren Courtman’s home.

After a while he turns east toward the Tensas, a sluggish, meandering tributary of the Mississippi. Here, not far from Vicksburg, Mississippi, lies one of the largest expanses of bottomland forest left in this part of the country. The road narrows, blacktop turns to gravel, and the fields give way to thick woods. At last he pulls off to the side and gets out. At this hour the air is cool and still. In the grass, the eyes of spiders shine like stars in the light of his headlamp. A barred owl hoots in the distance.

Most searching for the ivorybill happens in secret, largely to protect the bird, if found, from unwanted attention. Mr. Courtman’s approach is different. He has opened his quest up to anyone who wants to help. And people come from all over the United States to join him – even one from Canada. With him this morning is a Minnesotan named Pat Haberman, a man of deep reserve who nonetheless shares Mr. Courtman’s intense love for birds.

Mr. Courtman also holds twice-monthly Zoom calls with Mission Ivorybill supporters. These events offer a glimpse into the small community of ivorybill enthusiasts that he and his wife are cultivating. On a recent call, a local hunter describes how he saw an ivorybill fly past as he drove down a road in the Tensas River area several years ago looking for a place to hunt doves. A man from Arkansas chokes up as he recounts how an ivorybill crossed the road as he drove out of the Tensas forest after a day of searching. “I didn’t sleep for three nights,” he says. 

Mr. Courtman and his companion walk through the dark until they reach a small creek where the land dips and the forest opens up. Mr. Haberman continues down the creek a distance while Mr. Courtman pulls on a camouflage mask and leans up against a tree. His method is to enter the forest before first light and simply wait for an hour or so, watching and listening. He might hear the ivorybill’s distinctive call – or maybe a blue jay’s imitation of it. The day before, he says, he heard what sounded like an ivorybill’s “double knock,” a distinctive quick rap against a tree.

After a while the sky grows light. Birds awaken, filling the air with their songs. Woodpeckers of different sorts – the pileated, the redheaded, the red-bellied, and more – add their percussive rapping. Finally, as the first sunlight hits the treetops, Mr. Courtman and his companion trudge off through the forest. They scan the treetops. They look for dead and dying trees, and evidence on them of large woodpeckers, including roosting cavities and places where the woodpeckers have stripped the bark to get at the insects and larvae underneath. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Evidence of woodpecker scaling is seen in a tree in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge. The markings may have been made by a pileated woodpecker, a prevalent species in these woods.

Mr. Courtman is built like a football player, tall and husky, with a neatly trimmed beard and a strong hint of Louisiana in his speech. His nature is outgoing and gregarious, more grackle than ivorybill. He grew up in Monroe, the son of a surgeon, a product of both the Louisiana woods and Phillips Exeter Academy, the elite New England prep school he attended. After college, he studied law and worked as a lawyer in Louisiana. But that didn’t last, and he moved to Ohio to research mineral rights for the oil industry. Then the ivorybill called.

To him, the search is both the fulfillment of a boyhood enchantment and a tribute to the museum director who showed him his first ivorybills, ornithologist George Lowery. But Mr. Courtman’s love for the bird, as for nature itself, is as much spiritual as ornithological. “The bird belongs to all the people as stewards of God’s heritage,” he says.

Likewise, Mr. Courtman believes that building public support for the ivorybill is more important than getting a good photo of it. “The evidence is not the primary thing,” he says. “Conservation is the primary thing.”

Some ivorybill skeptics worry that bestowing so much attention on a bird so rare, and possibly not there at all, hurts conservation by detracting from more pressing needs. Ivorybill searchers disagree.  

“Many of us like to call it a beacon of hope,” says Dr. Latta of the National Aviary. “It’s encouraged so many people to become engaged in conservation efforts.” He thinks documenting the ivorybill’s survival will inspire people to care not just for the bird itself but also for the many other plants and animals that share its river-bottom habitat.  

Dr. Latta’s colleague in the search, Mark Michaels, says the possibility of the ivorybill’s survival suggests a toughness and adaptability we didn’t know was there. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Mr. Courtman holds his phone with an app he uses to mark locations he has scouted that show signs of roosting holes or scaling that could be from ivorybills.

“I think part of the reason people get as passionate about the ivorybill as we do is a question of resilience,” he says. He adds, “That’s where the hope is. Maybe there is a greater resilience than many of us believe.”

At the same time, he says, the ivorybill also suggests the need for humility in the face of the natural world. “We as humans like to think we know it all,” he says. “I think the ivorybill is a constant lesson that you just don’t know.” 

For Dr. Jackson, the ivorybill appears less a beacon of hope than the flickering of illusion and disappointment. The ornithologist, who taught for many years at Florida Gulf Coast University, once wrote, “My years of following tantalizing leads and probing Florida’s remaining wild areas have thus far been fruitless. Sadly, with each return visit to once prime ivory-bill habitat I find increasing evidence of human activity and fragmentation of forest habitats.” 

Dr. Jackson, too, once felt the allure of the ivorybills. He spent two years looking for them – and even saw one, he thinks, flying away from him while he watched from a canoe on the Noxubee River in Alabama. Now retired in Naples, Florida, he still hears about other people’s ivorybill experiences. 

But he worries that “the heady wine of ivory-bill dreams,” as he once called it, has misled experts and amateurs alike. To Dr. Jackson, the ivorybill saga is a reminder that science is a human endeavor and subject to ordinary human shortcomings, including self-deception and wishful thinking.

Still, when he’s out in the Florida woods, Dr. Jackson can’t help himself. He, too, looks for signs that ivorybills might be out there yet, however unlikely he thinks that is. “I would love it if they were,” he says.

And so the search goes on. Just after noon, Mr. Courtman and his companion emerge wearily from their long morning in the woods. The pre-dawn coolness is gone. So are the day’s high expectations. It’s getting hot. Mosquitoes swarm. 

“It’s hard and boring, to be honest,” Mr. Courtman says later. “It really does beat you down. It’s muddy and it’s wet. The first hour of the day, you’re thinking this is the greatest thing ever. By the thousandth hour, you’re thinking of other things you might be doing. It’s not a lot of fun.”

But when it comes to the ivorybill, hopes die hard. He was out the next week, searching again.

San Francisco Chronicle/AP/FILE

People gather at a house to watch the Fourth of July Parade in Alameda, California, on July 4, 2022.

I love the red, white, and blue bunting that adorns homes in the United States in early July as our nation’s Independence Day approaches. I enjoy the parades with decorated tricycles and high school marching bands. And then there are fireworks! 

But in recent years, I’ve pondered whether Independence Day needs an upgrade. It’s so 1776. Perhaps we need to repurpose this holiday. Perhaps we need a day that helps us imagine a different future. Perhaps it’s time for Interdependence Day.

Back when we were fighting for independence from another country, our bluecoats were fighting its redcoats. Today, we live in red states or blue states – and we fight each other. Back then, the 13 Colonies were on the same side. Today, big cities and their suburbs compete with rural regions over the nation’s appropriations and moral code, and which parts of our history to include in school textbooks. Such divisiveness causes self-inflicted wounds that leave us open to attacks, both foreign and domestic.  

Interdependence Day wouldn’t erase the history of Independence Day. Instead, it would give us time to reflect on what we want our tomorrow to be. We’d look back on our past to discover why this democratic republic was formed in the first place. The goal was that the union would let us carefully debate and balance ideas. The hope was that this would lead to a government that continuously worked to do the greatest good for the greatest number of its people. 

Since our nation’s birth, we’ve struggled with this ideal. During our 247 years, we’ve seen peaceful and not-so-peaceful insistence that the freedoms cited in the document approved on July 4, 1776, be available to all. 

We’ve been moving toward the need for this name change for several years now, and I don’t think our Founding Fathers would mind. They would have been familiar with the concept of interdependence from Christian Scripture. It’s expressed in biblical phrases such as “love one another,” “encourage one another,” “build up one another,” and many more that focus on working out life together with the welfare of all in mind.

The announcement in 1776 of the “unalienable” right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” wasn’t a win for a “me.” It was a win for a “we.” A lot of people had to trust each other, believe that they had each other’s backs, and be willing to fight and die with each other so that subsequent generations could build a nation where there is “liberty and justice for all,” as our Pledge of Allegiance says. Proclaiming our interdependence would be a way to promote an understanding that this nation’s – and any nation’s – power comes from finding unity, not sowing discord. 

Poets, presidents, and preachers have invited us to consider our interdependence. English poet John Donne shared the sentiment when he wrote, “No man is an island.” When Nelson Mandela wanted to bring fractured South Africa together, he emphasized the Zulu concept of ubuntu. It means “I am because you are,” acknowledging the humbling need I have for you and you for me. 

Martin Luther King Jr. also called attention to our connectedness. “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he said in 1965. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  

Interdependence invites us to be unselfish with our resources, helping to ensure that everyone flourishes. Interdependence causes us to reject myths of scarcity, theories of one race replacing another, and zero-sum approaches to life that argue the only way for “us” to win is for “them” to lose. We are more than the sum of our parts. We can do more together than we can apart. 

We’ve enjoyed Independence Day. It has served us well. A celebration of our interdependence, however, is what will ensure our future. In “How the Word Is Passed,” author Clint Smith puts it this way: America is “not so much a place to be in but an idea to believe in.” Let’s believe in and celebrate our interdependence. ρ

On the battlefield at Gettysburg in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln made a plea for which he would later give his life: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

He was talking about something more than American democracy. Look at these photographs beautifully chosen by Monitor photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman. They tell a unique story.

There are other nations as wealthy as the United States – others as large, as free, as diverse. But there is no other nation that is all of these things together.

That makes the United States an unprecedented experiment for the human race. Can a nation that reflects the world in all its diversity cohere? Can it thrive and remain free and grow?

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Immigrants take the oath of allegiance to the United States at a naturalization ceremony at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 2018.

The United States alone offers an answer. And for that reason, the U.S., with its “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” does not matter merely as a global power or a financial engine or a national identity. It matters because in its success or failure is a referendum for the world.

The historical tricorn hats. The patriotic hay bales. The trumpet player. The farm. The new citizens. The nostalgic diner. The Boy Scouts. The bold belt buckle. The Azalea Festival princess. In each of these powerful images are forces that would both bind and divide Americans. Differences of culture or region or race. Mutual pride or fellowship or joy.

In a profound though imperfect way, the founders made a statement that still echoes down the centuries: that devotion to larger ideals – of justice and freedom – can forge common cause even over deep and unyielding differences. Lincoln is almost universally viewed as the greatest American president for the conviction and humility of his devotion to this idea. To break apart – to say our differences can defeat our union – is to make a grave statement about more than a nation, but a hope of all humanity.

Independence Day is a time for Americans to blow on the coals of their mutual love and loyalty and recognize something larger than themselves. In its highest sense, a nation is not an expression of a single ethnicity or of a thousand clamoring political wills, but of the incomparable power of finding an ascending “us.” 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

The American flag is proudly displayed near a barn and silos at a farm in Wisconsin.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A young princess with her tiara attends the Azalea Queen’s coronation at the Azalea Festival in 2015 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Maverick Club Rodeo queen Sierra Pillmore wears a belt buckle emblazoned with her title during the Maverick Ranch Rodeo on Aug. 3, 2013, in Cimarron, New Mexico.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Arnold’s Drive-In still had servers on roller skates bringing food to your car in Decatur, Indiana, in June 2009.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

A member of the Jeanerette Senior High School Tiger Marching Band performs at an annual Sugar Cane Festival parade on Sept. 28, 2014, in New Iberia, Louisiana.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Hay bales spell out “God bless America” at a dairy in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, in 2020.

Reuters

Flags fly at Union Station in Washington D.C. ahead of the Fourth of July holiday.

Across the United States on the Fourth of July, communities will gather to mark Independence Day with dazzling displays of pyrotechnic beauty. Yet the real light of American liberty and patriotism shines elsewhere – in salving the fireworks of political and social division with the same ideals that drove the 1776 revolution.

One place to find that glow is Akron, in northeast Ohio. Last year, a week before the July Fourth holiday, a Black resident named Jayland Walker was fatally shot by police during a traffic stop. The incident aggravated racial tensions, leading officials to cancel the city’s Independence Day celebrations for the sake of public safety.

A year later, this community of 200,000 residents offers a model of the slow, hard work of reconciliation – and, because of the tragedy’s proximity to the Fourth, a measure of the unique bonds and sacrifices of American patriotism. It is a city not changed but changing, drawn into unresolved conversations about unity by what Deputy Mayor Clarence Tucker calls “the imperative of dignity and respect.”

As has happened in other cities faced with similar incidents, Mr. Walker’s death has resulted in vigorous legal activity. In April, a state grand jury found no cause to indict the eight officers involved. Mr. Walker’s family brought a $45 million lawsuit against the city for damages.

Within Akron, however, residents are feeling their way beyond adversity. City and private leaders have held public meetings and prayer circles to engage business leaders and school officials, interfaith clergy and health practitioners, police officers and ordinary citizens.

The goal, says Robert DeJournett, a resident pastor helping to forge those dialogues, “is not to be dissuaded or persuaded one way or another, but really listening with a healing heart. That’s what folk need – not just to be tolerated, but really heard, to have their perspective be considered.”

That process reflects what Steven B. Smith, a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University, calls the “evaluating and ennobling” currency of American patriotism – which, he wrote in a 2021 book, “at its best does not rely on indoctrination but on teaching and supporting the virtues of civility, respect for law, [and] respect for others.”

Deante Lavender, pastor of The Remedy Church in Akron who is working with Jewish and Islamic leaders in the city to promote community healing, describes that work this way: “We are coming together to gain a relationship to figure each other out, so that when it’s time to come together, we don’t have to figure each other out.”

American patriotism has deep roots and many branches, from its Indigenous people to recent immigrants. It ranges from George Washington crossing the Delaware to 9/11’s first responders working valiantly. One historic immigrant, John Winthrop, described the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 this way: “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”

At a time when polls show Americans faltering in their trust of one another, the residents of Akron show that the work of liberty goes on.