Some days Wes Carlton wants to turn off his phone. The calls from developers wanting to buy pieces of his four large cattle ranches in central and south Florida roll in almost constantly.

“Imagine you have something your grandmother gave you,” he says, “something precious and dear to your heart, and people are calling you all the time asking, ‘Can I buy it? Can I buy it?’ It’s like, ‘Quit calling me.’”

A fourth-generation cattle rancher, Mr. Carlton is a firm advocate for the Florida beef industry. He and his family have won awards for good environmental stewardship of their land. He has no plans to sell it off. But he understands the pressure that virtually all Florida ranchers are under from developers and why many ranchers choose to sell.

Land values have been rising for decades as more and more people move to the state. In 1960, Florida was home to fewer than 5 million residents. In 2022, Florida’s population was 22 million – and growing fast. More people in the United States moved to Florida than to any other state in 2022. Demographers liken the growth to adding a city about the size of Orlando every year.

Haoyu Li/Courtesy of Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch/File

Cattle dot the landscape in a scenic view of Archbold Biological Station's Buck Island Ranch in Lake Placid, Florida, January 2019.

Florida’s wild landscapes are vanishing as developments spring up to accommodate these new residents. Vast expanses of prairie, forest, and wetlands have now been converted to large-scale housing developments or entirely new planned cities and towns. And ranchlands, which encompass large swaths of these natural habitats in the north and central part of the state, are being swallowed up as well.

But these lands are necessary to the state’s future viability, providing benefits that lawmakers now realize can’t be ignored: Ranchlands produce food and clean water for Floridians; they offer critical habitats for wildlife; they even serve as buffer zones for military bases. And they are necessary for the restoration of the Everglades, a project expected to cost more than $23 billion in government funds and upon which much of Florida’s future water supply depends.

In June, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis approved one of the Legislature’s largest-ever investments in land conservation. Nearly $1 billion has been earmarked to protect Florida’s natural and agricultural lands from development, including ranches, timberlands, and croplands. And in 2021, in a rare unanimous vote, Florida lawmakers passed the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act, which set aside $400 million to preserve nearly 18 million acres of wildlife habitat, 7 million of which are working ranchlands and timberlands.

Julie Morris, a wildlife ecologist and director of the Florida Conservation Group, says she is “cautiously optimistic” that funding for land conservation will continue in the coming years. But she worries that in the race against development, conservation efforts will continue to lose ground.

“We have a very time-limited opportunity to protect these lands,” she says. “And the development pressure is very, very intense.”

Haoyu Li/Courtesy of Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch/File

Gene Lollis (left), ranch manager, and Mary Margaret Hardee, the ranch and research resource coordinator for Archbold Biological Station, ride at Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch, in Lake Placid, Florida, July 2019.

“Myth-busters” on a cattle ranch

In Florida’s Kissimmee River Valley, where the headwaters of the Everglades begin their southward flow, a 10,500-acre working cattle ranch also serves as a living laboratory for scientists. The partnership between Buck Island Ranch and the Archbold Biological Station (which owns the ranch) represents a unique collaboration between ranchers and scientists, one that has yielded surprising discoveries about the environmental benefits of ranchlands.

“We are kind of like myth-busters,” says Elizabeth Boughton, senior research biologist and program director of agroecology at Archbold, a nonprofit that studies the ecology of working lands. “People have this preconceived notion that cows are bad, ranching is bad, agriculture is bad, but we’re looking at ways where we can minimize the tradeoffs and understand the benefits of ranching to nature, water, and carbon.”

Dr. Boughton and her colleagues have experimented with ranching practices that benefit both the cattle operation and the environment. For one research project, they tested growing and harvesting forage for cattle as a way of removing from pasture soils the nutrient pollution derived from past fertilizer use. Growing their own hay reduces ranchers’ reliance on imported feed and helps prevent excess nutrients from entering the watershed, where they feed the state’s smelly, toxic algae blooms.

The natural wetlands and flood plains comprised in ranchlands help capture and filter water as it moves through the landscape, which means better flood protection for urban communities and improved water quality – including drinking water from aquifers. The native vegetation does such a good job of filtering water and absorbing toxic fertilizer runoff, that regional water management authorities have experimented with programs that essentially pay ranchers to maintain their wetlands.

Much of Florida’s native wildlife also depends on ranchlands for survival. Florida ranches allow space for large mammals like the endangered Florida panther and the Florida black bear to roam. And they provide habitats for many other species, from wading birds and bobcats, to wild turkeys and otters. For some at-risk species that have lost most of their native Florida habitat to development, like the burrowing owl and the Florida grasshopper sparrow, ranches represent some of the last scraps of habitat for them.

Haoyu Li/Courtesy of Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch/File

Archbold Biological Station's Buck Island Ranch is a working ranch that is home to 2,800 head of cattle that feed on grasslands and share habitat with native Florida wildlife.

How the state protects ranchlands

The threat to Florida’s rich biodiversity has helped scientists target high-risk areas for conservation – and helped lawmakers justify spending on it.

“Florida is number one in the nation for science-based land conservation,” says Ms. Morris, the wildlife ecologist. “We know where our important areas are.”

That includes privately owned lands. Without the cooperation of landowners, conservation efforts will not keep up with the pace of development in Florida, she says.

In recent years, conservation easements have emerged as the primary mechanism for protecting private lands from development in Florida. Conservation easements mean the government buys the rights to develop land from the landowner, but the landowner retains ownership. Landowners can continue to raise cattle or timber or crops, but they can’t turn the land into houses or roads, or sell to a developer who would. (Florida is unusual in that the largest easement holder in the state is its own government. In most other states, the largest easement holders tend to be the federal government or nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy.)  

Conservation easements will become a lifeline for Florida agriculture in the years to come, predicts Tom Hoctor, director of the Center for Landscape Conservation Planning at the University of Florida. “I suspect there will be a day in Florida,” he says, “when all agricultural lands or the vast majority of agricultural lands, if they still exist, will be protected by some form of easement.”

The alternative, he says, is “to have most ranches disappear over the next 50 or so years because of development.”

Courtesy Archbold’s Buck Island Ranch/File

Archbold agroecology research assistants Lydia Landau (left) and Emily Anderson sample vegetation under a rainout shelter on Buck Island Ranch, September 2022.

Tough choice for ranchers

Florida’s ranching history stretches back 500 years, to when Spanish colonists first introduced cattle to America. Travel into the heart of Florida ranchlands, and the landscape still looks much as it did then. Ancient cypress swamps, moss-draped oak hammocks, sunbaked prairies, and freshwater marshes where tall grasses rustle in the wind and alligators glide through narrow waterways: These scenes still form the backdrop of ranching in Florida, and they are beloved by many ranchers.

“Ranchers, in my mind, are the original conservationists,” says Gene Lollis, manager of Buck Island Ranch. Mr. Lollis says that most ranchers feel a responsibility toward their land and the diverse ecosystems and wildlife it supports. They are also proud of, and want to protect, their role in domestic food production.

But ranching is not an easy business. Profits are chipped away by the costs associated with animal care, land management, and taxes. Beef prices fluctuate. Recovery from hurricanes and extreme weather eats up even more income. And in some cases, the younger generations of old ranching families are not willing to stay in the business.

Meanwhile, developers are knocking at the door.

“The ranchers that I work with love what they do, but it is a very, very slim profit margin,” says Ms. Morris. “And often what happens, you know, you have a kid who needs to go to college or somebody gets sick. ... People are forced to sell off bits and pieces [of their land], to cover expenses.”

Conservation easements can provide a much-needed source of income for ranching families, as well as some security for the future, she says.

But will that easement money carry landowners through lean times? Entering into a conservation easement is a decision that ranchers must make not only for themselves, but also for their children, grandchildren, and so on – unless they or their heirs decide to sell the land, at which point it will be worth less than if it were not under easement.

Florida’s two state-funded conservation easements programs, Florida Forever and the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, typically offer landowners 40 to 55 cents on the dollar of their property value, which is determined by an appraiser and based on the land’s development potential. Under state law, the government can’t offer more.

But developers can, and do.

“When it comes to conservation, it really depends on an individual and their willingness to perhaps take less than the actual value of a said piece of land,” says Mr. Lollis.

Courtesy of Carlton Ward Jr/Wildpath/File

Riders herd cattle on Doyle Carlton's Horse Creek Ranch, which spans DeSoto and Hardee counties in central Florida, August 2017. The ranch is protected by a conservation easement.

Ranchers can wait years for funds

Despite increasingly attractive offers, more ranchers are seeking to put their land out of developers’ reach. Both state conservation easement programs have seen an influx of applications from landowners in recent years.

Asked if there is enough funding to buy the development rights of every landowner looking to sell them, however, Ms. Morris says, “Absolutely not.”

“I think we could get a billion dollars next year for Rural and Family Lands and Florida Forever and spend it,” she says. “And that’s not a number I’m throwing out. That’s a number based just on lands that are on the [application] list.”

True, the state’s new budget does set aside nearly $1 billion for land conservation. But most of that is for land acquisition, though $100 million is going to Florida Forever, which also handles easements. Conservationists were disappointed that Governor DeSantis vetoed another $100 million for agricultural easements via the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program. (The governor’s office maintains there are unspent funds that can still be used.)

Currently, more than 1 million acres of private land sit on the application lists for Florida Forever and the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program. And while those landowners wait – for years, in some cases – for their applications to get approved, more and more green space is vanishing beneath new subdivisions, apartment complexes, strip malls, big-box stores, and roads.

The University of Florida’s Center for Landscape Conservation Planning projects the loss of more than 150,000 acres of ranchland by 2030, under what it calls a “business as usual” scenario. Taken together, that’s a swath of land about twice the size of the city of Orlando. And that does not include other types of agricultural lands, or natural lands.

“We need consistent, robust funding for a dedicated number of years to get these lands protected,” says Ms. Morris. With steady funding, she adds, “There is an opportunity for us to save what’s so precious and unique in this state.”

On the day its lights went out, The Kashmir Walla’s newsroom was busier than it had been in months.

The embattled news site’s remaining six staffers gathered Monday at their apartment-turned-office, joined by former colleagues and fellow journalists looking to bear witness to the end of an era. After a round of tea, the group began loading furniture into a pickup truck.

Three framed pictures of founding editor Fahad Shah – who has spent more than a year and a half in prison – were tucked carefully into a cardboard moving box.

Over the weekend, the Indian authorities blocked access in India to the paper’s website and social media accounts, effectively closing down one of the last few independent media outlets in Indian-controlled Kashmir. At the same time, the staff’s office landlord evicted them.

The Kashmir Walla’s closure is both shocking and expected. Shocking because the final blows came quickly, without warning or explanation. But expected because it also marked the culmination of a harassment campaign stretching back to 2019, which included the arrest of two staffers, regular police questioning, and a newsroom raid.

The story of The Kashmir Walla is the story of press freedom in Kashmir and, media watchdogs say, in India more broadly. The fall of yet another outlet – one that had become known for its staffers’ feisty resilience and courage – has fueled concerns that Indian democracy is in retreat.

Blocking the paper’s website and social channels “marks a new low for press freedom in the region,” says Beh Lih Yi, Asia program coordinator at the Committee To Protect Journalists.

Aakash Hassan

Yashraj Sharma, the interim editor of The Kashmir Walla, sits under a framed picture of imprisoned editor Fahad Shah in their newsroom. Mr. Shah founded The Kashmir Walla more than a decade ago as a blog, and has spent the past 18 months in jail.

“It is so harsh and jarring,” adds Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of the Kashmir Times, one of the oldest and most respected English-language newspapers in Kashmir. “It is also to set an example for the rest of them [critical media], not just in Kashmir but in India, where a similar experiment is being emulated,” she says.

From startup to stalwart

The Kashmir Walla began life more than a decade ago as a blog, and evolved into a respected online newsmagazine where young journalists could cut their teeth reporting on everything from outbreaks of political violence to local rugby games.

Covering Kashmir was never easy – the disputed, majority-Muslim territory has long been one of the most militarized places in the world. But the challenges facing local media grew exponentially in 2019 when the Indian central government revoked Kashmir’s autonomy and imposed a monthslong communications blackout.

A slew of policy changes suddenly made it even riskier to criticize the government, and many prominent news outlets shuttered or self-censored.

Yet under Mr. Shah’s mentorship, The Kashmir Walla staff beat on, capturing stories it often had no means of publishing. Eventually, staffers found ways of bypassing the blackout, and when the lockdown eased, they formally relaunched – albeit with a slower internet connection.

The Kashmir Walla’s profile grew as it became a regional stronghold for independent news, and in 2022, when Mr. Shah was arrested for allegedly publishing “anti-national content,” The Kashmir Walla team remained on task. Yashraj Sharma, the paper’s 23-year-old interim editor, has spent the last year coordinating Mr. Shah’s legal battle while managing The Kashmir Walla through financial struggles and ongoing harassment. He is also facing legal charges over an article he wrote about the Indian army.

“The Kashmir Walla was a rare news portal, among some other small portals, which have still been reporting,” says Ms. Bhasin of the Kashmir Times. But that reporting was “reduced to a trickle” compared with the website’s heyday, she points out.

Now, that trickle has dried up.

While the outlet’s Facebook, Twitter, and webpage are visible outside the country, they have all been blocked in India, cutting the paper off from its primary audience and effectively barring The Kashmir Walla from publishing. The newspaper’s service provider says the order came from the government under the Information Technology Act, 2000.

This is “probably the first case of how IT rules have been used to put off a news website and its social media in India,” says Ms. Bhasin, author of “A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370.”

A broader loss

When she heard that The Kashmir Walla was closing, journalist and author Seema Chishti says she experienced a “mix of feeling sad and suffocated.”

“There’s a fellowship we feel with any website trying to tell a story honestly,” says the editor of Delhi-based news site The Wire, adding that the crackdown on The Kashmir Walla drove home the vulnerability of all independent media in India.

Aakash Hassan

Staffers of The Kashmir Walla remove the paper's signboard from their balcony. The Indian government blocked the independent news organization's website and its social media accounts over the weekend, effectively closing the paper down.

India dropped to 161st out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index this year, putting it in the red zone along with North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. Throughout the country, journalists have been questioned, arrested, and put under surveillance in retaliation for critical reporting.

Justifications for these attacks vary – authorities have at times cited national security, tax, and IT laws – but rights experts say the real reason is clear. In the words of Ms. Chishti, “The charge is journalism.”

“We cannot afford to drop the ball on what’s happening in Kashmir,” she says. “Information is key to the quality of democracy,” and when it’s compromised, Indians lose “the biggest roadblock” to authoritarianism.

In Srinagar, readers of The Kashmir Walla are feeling that loss sharply today.

“The work The Kashmir Walla did was exceptional,” says Tauseef Ahmad, a student at a local university. “They were bringing to us stories which other media organizations did not dare to cover.”

After 2019, he says that other Kashmiri media became timid at best, government mouthpieces at worst. But he could trust The Kashmir Walla to report bravely on human rights abuses throughout the region.

“Their ground reports would be full of detail,” he says. “It was one of the last news outlets in Kashmir where one would expect some truth and real reporting.”

The government has so far seemed impervious to inquiries into its press freedom record, but Ms. Bhasin believes that international criticism can still make a difference.

“The voices have to be much more consistent; they have to be louder,” she says, adding that the crackdown in Kashmir should matter to any governments or individuals “who believe in democratic and liberal values.”

Editor’s note: Fahad Shah is a regular Monitor contributor. We, along with other news outlets, are advocating his release. You can find our joint statement here.

Charles Krupa/AP/File

After the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions in June 2023, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, axed optional essay prompts and added five 200-word mandatory questions.

The college essay may never be the same. Thank the Supreme Court.

After the high court struck down race-based college admissions in June, one sentence in the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts has sent many schools scrambling.

Justice Roberts wrote: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” 

Changes have been swift. Harvard University, central to one of the two Students for Fair Admissions cases, axed optional essay prompts and added five 200-word mandatory questions. The first reads that Harvard recognizes the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. It asks applicants to share a life experience that shaped them and will contribute to the university.

“What we’re advising schools to do is to take a look at their university’s vision and mission statement or strategic plan and align their questions with the characteristics that fulfill the individual institution’s vision and mission,” says Jill Orcutt, global lead for consulting at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. The association has consulted with schools since the court’s decision. It is telling them to tailor prompts to the characteristics of students they are seeking, whether it be students from diverse communities or low-income and first generation college students.

“For example, we’re talking about lifetime challenges or opportunities that students have had, how do their personal characteristics reflect the institutions?” adds Ms. Orcutt, who worked in college admissions for the University of California, Merced, where affirmative action was banned in the 1990s after voters passed Proposition 209. 

For its part, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst introduced a new supplemental essay question. It urges students to consider that at UMass no two students are alike and talks about how communities or groups shape worlds. Race and ethnicity are characteristics that UMass says shapes an individual’s character and they urge students to pick a community and describe its importance in 100 words. 

“We believe the responses by students to this new prompt can certainly broaden the scope of information we have as it relates to the holistic review process that UMass Amherst has been using very effectively in admissions for about the past 10 years,” writes Ed Blaguszewski, executive director of strategic communications, via email.

Mr. Blaguszewski says that the court’s ruling on affirmative action prompted the university to give applicants an additional opportunity to help the school understand their background. He points out that the court said that, “A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.”

Hannah Schoenbaum/AP/File

Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – the institution at the center of one of the recent Supreme Court cases – voted July 28 to bar consideration of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” in both admissions and hiring decisions.

Other public universities, meanwhile, have dropped diversity initiatives entirely in the wake of the court ruling. Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – the institution at the center of the other Supreme Court case – voted July 28 to bar consideration of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” in both admissions and hiring decisions.

How to prevent “racial gamification”?

It’s one thing to invite students to talk about race in an admissions essay, but how do people coach them to present their best selves? 

Tyler Harper attended graduate school at New York University several years ago. He tutored high school students in Queens who wanted to attend America’s best colleges. He helped them find the right voice via essays and personal statements. It confounded him when Asian students wanted to seem less Asian in their essays, but then he saw that despite great grades and résumés, some got in and some didn’t.

After the Students For Fair Admissions cases, he and other educators – some of whom expressed concern in amicus briefs filed to the Supreme Court – worry about what will happen to other students of color. If precedents hold true, enrollment could drop dramatically. He doesn’t want Black and Latino students to experience the pitfalls of racial gamification in essay writing.

“Many of the Black and Brown students that I tutored, some of them were from upper-class backgrounds, and those students were talented jazz pianists or whatever. But they had the sense that ‘I probably shouldn’t write about jazz piano for my college essay because they want me to show that I’m a disadvantaged minority,’” Dr. Harper, now an assistant professor at Bates University, recalls.

Racial gamification is the idea that some identities can help people get opportunities, or keep them from succeeding, and that they have to position how they present themselves in a certain way. When he tutored Black and Latino students he says students knew that colleges were looking for diversity, but that if they didn’t present it in the right way it could hurt their chances of getting into a top tier school.

“This is bad for minority kids who feel like they can’t talk about jazz piano and instead have to talk about when they got pulled over by the cops,” Dr. Harper says. He adds that it is equally bad for white kids who don’t want to come off as upper class and lean into trauma, about an alcoholic parent or personal struggles with depression and anxiety.

Tell your own story

Freshmen moving into dorms this month at America’s most selective schools were the last class to have the option to check a box on race as part of their admissions process. Some have tips for students in the future. 

“Don’t do it in a disingenuous way,” says Sean Vereen, co-president of Heights Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization that helps Black and Brown students and first generation college students make connections for college and professional careers. They specialize in creating pathways for students of color to matriculate into college, with more than 3,000 students from middle and high schools involved annually.

Dr. Vereen says that the advice to students remains the same: Tell their stories in an original way, whether or not they want to lean in on tough times that they overcame. 

That can look like a high school student having to take care of a sick relative, or a student without many extracurriculars talking about working in a family restaurant 30 hours a week. He says that students are worried because the essay is a big part of the application, but he stresses that it is not the entirety of it. Other things like test scores, grades, and community service also weigh heavily.

But reference to race in an essay does change things, and students will feel it, he says.

“There are things where I think now that this was explicitly stated in this decision, and it’s a big part of the conversation, kids feeling like they’re being pigeonholed into talking about their race in a college essay,” he says. 

“What we’re trying to think about more is this lived experience,” he adds, “versus you spend the whole time telling everybody that you’re this or that.”

Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir is both a moving personal narrative and an enlightening account of the transformative political and social forces that impacted her as she came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s an apt combination from an acclaimed historian who’s also a powerful storyteller.

“Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury” describes Dr. Faust’s upbringing as a privileged white girl in segregated Virginia, where she chafed at constraints placed on her because of her gender and was outraged by the racial discrimination she saw around her. (The book opens with a copy of her handwritten letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, penned at age 9, asking him to end school segregation.)

By the time “Necessary Trouble” concludes in 1968, with Dr. Faust’s graduation from Bryn Mawr College, she had rejected the culture in which she was raised, embracing the civil rights and anti-war movements and daring to imagine a different future for herself. She went on to become a scholar of the American South and, later, the first woman president of Harvard University, a position she held from 2007 to 2018. She recently spoke with the Monitor. 

What led you to write this book now? 

As a historian, I’ve spent so much time listening to voices of the past, be they the voices of bereaved people in the Civil War [in 2009’s “This Republic of Suffering”] or others in the South. I decided it was time for me to be a voice instead of a recorder of voices.

How did you go about balancing the personal and the political? 

I was influenced by my work to think that I could explain my life better by situating it within the context of its times and seeing how my choices as an individual had been structured by the events and social expectations that surrounded me. Even as a child I was very concerned about the world beyond my little Virginia farm.

How did the social expectations you describe set you up for conflict with your family?

I hope I paint a sympathetic picture of both my mother and my grandmother. I wanted to show how limited their choices were. They both ended up as unhappy people even though one could say that everything was available to them. They came from very privileged backgrounds, and yet the limits on their ability to pursue meaningful work and make meaningful choices in their lives were enormous. In my lifetime, things were beginning to change in ways that enabled me to find paths that they had not been able to. 

As a young girl, you rejected notions of racial hierarchy. How do you account for your keen sense of justice?

I think my awareness of race grew out of my own resentment about the limitations on me for being a girl. I had three brothers, and they could do certain things while I had to do other things. The expectations of us were very sharply different. I was suffused with a sense of “this isn’t fair.” But when I looked around me, I saw social structures that were even more unfair in the ways that Black people were treated in segregated Virginia in the 1950s.

How did books help you see beyond the limitations placed on you?

Nancy Drew and Anne Frank and “To Kill a Mockingbird” and other books showed tough young women who were forging their own paths. They empowered me in ways that continued to influence me into high school and college.

You write that from an early age you recognized “the force and the burden of history.” Can you say more about that elegant phrase?

I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in the years leading up to the Civil War centennial, so the war was very much around me, and it was very much a hagiographic approach to the "Lost Cause." Understanding that this event that had happened 100 years ago was still something people felt so vividly was part of my learning about the sense of history. 

Then I came to understand that what that war had really been about was slavery. [In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, when there had been] a rather genteel approach to race relations on the part of white Virginians, where race was not much talked about, race was suddenly talked about constantly, with a need to resist the mandated integration of schools. I could see links between this Civil War heritage and this [challenge to integration]. So in that sense, history was always present, and its implications were essential elements of my life. 

Your title was inspired by U.S. Rep. John Lewis. What did he mean to you?

I had the great privilege of getting to know him during my years as Harvard president. He agreed to speak at my last commencement. Before he started speaking, he turned to me and said, “Thank you, Madam President, for making necessary trouble.” That moved me greatly. 

When I was thinking about this book, it seemed to me that that was absolutely the right phrase for my childhood, that in a way I had no choice: If I was not going to be miserably unhappy like my mother and grandmother, if I was going to lead a life that seemed just and fair, I was going to have to make trouble. And so it was necessary trouble for me.  

When I set out to ride my bicycle from Ontario to my home in Rhode Island, I knew very little about the Erie Canal.

I didn’t know that it was considered an engineering feat when it was completed in 1825, or that it changed the economy of the region by allowing faster transportation of goods from Buffalo to New York City. And I surely did not know how the canal transformed towns along its 339 miles, not unlike the Interstate Highway System more than a century later. 

What I do know is that I love to travel by bike. I love the pace that cycling allows. In a way, it’s not too different from the pace of the motorized boats that replaced the original barges, which were towed by mules. A guide at the Old Erie Canal Heritage Park in Port Byron, New York, told me that the canal cut the travel time across the state from three weeks to a single week. 

As I rode along the canal’s towpaths, stopping to watch the locks in action, visit historic sites, and talk to people, I was transported to a time when this thoroughfare facilitated economic and – just as important – cultural and social interactions.

The photos in this essay were taken from my bike on the Erie Canalway Trail and are a small portion of the visual treats I found along the way.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A view of a section of the original Erie Canal and its towpath during early morning hours near Fairport, New York.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A boat enters Lock 8 Park along the Mohawk River in Schenectady, New York. A retractable dam next to it controls the river's water flow.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

My bicycle leans against an overpass at a section of the Erie Canal between Rochester and Syracuse during a rest stop.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A boat waits to be scrapped at the dry dock in Lyons, New York. The facility maintains and overwinters canal boats, dredges, and barges.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A church perches above the canal bank in Little Falls, New York. This section of the Erie Canal was built to bypass the falls on the Mohawk River.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

A horse-drawn buggy uses a designated parking spot outside a bank in Canajoharie, New York.

AP

A man hugs a child during a May 4 prayer service at a church in Belgrade, Serbia, a day after a 13-year-old killed eight fellow students and a guard.

Perhaps the most enduring streets protests of 2023 have been in Serbia, a country of nearly 7 million in southeast Europe. Since early May, after 19 children and young people were killed in two unrelated mass shootings just a day apart, tens of thousands of Serbs have rallied weekly in major cities under the slogan “Serbia against violence.”

Incredibly, 1 in 4 citizens has joined the protests and about half support them, according to one poll. And this is in a country with the world’s third-highest rate of gun ownership – after the United States and Yemen – and with relatively strict gun laws.

The staying power of the protesters reveals a society seeking solutions to the root causes of violence. “Serbia needs to stop and ask itself how far it has come and where and how it should go after this,” declared the country’s teachers union in June.

The government’s initial response to the mass killings was to order anyone with unregistered weapons and ammunition to hand them over to the police by June 8. More than 100,000 guns were turned in. Sales of guns were also banned for two years. Yet protest leaders know more must be done. An American expert on the Balkan countries, Eric Gordy, wrote in The Atlantic that a critical mass of Serbs wants “institutions that are truthful and responsible” and “a culture that is, if not tolerant and understanding, then at least relatively nontoxic.”

The protests have been partly aimed at mass media that promote hate speech or fictional depictions of aggression. One TV broadcaster has already canceled a show that condoned verbal and physical violence. They are also aimed at reforming the police, who are widely seen as corrupt.

Yet for all the outward focus of the protests, many Serbs have looked inward. “We will fight for Serbia without violence only if each of us rolls up our sleeves and makes our contribution. No one else can do that work but us,” Dragana Rakić, a leading politician of the Democratic Party, told the news site Danas.

Self-reflection on each person’s role in violence – watching it on TV, for example, or implying harm to political opponents – may now be more common in Serbia. “Serbs have stopped shoving, they say thank you and pardon more,” one grandmother in Belgrade told The Economist. She said the country is “rediscovering kindness” after the shootings. Such gestures are no longer seen as a weakness, she added.

As one pollster told Euractiv media, “There has been an awakening of citizens who were apathetic.” Each week, many of them are on the street protesting. Others are bringing peace into their daily lives. Both may help silence the guns.