Wong Maye-E/AP/File

Poll workers sort out ballots at the Kenosha Municipal Building on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Four of Wisconsin’s last six presidential contests were decided by less than a percentage point, making it a perpetual – and crucial – battleground state.

Recriminations from 2020 cast a long shadow here. Republican leaders feuded with both supporters and Democrats over how to handle then-President Donald Trump’s claims of a rigged vote after losing to Joe Biden by fewer than 21,000 votes. Recounts, audits, and court cases found no significant evidence of electoral fraud, but failed to quell the distrust among many Trump voters. 

As Wisconsin gears up for another presidential contest involving Mr. Trump, election officials are braced for what could be a bumpy ride. Holding an orderly election with results accepted by all is particularly challenging in a state deeply divided politically and socially. That makes Wisconsin a microcosm of a broader struggle to restore confidence in a bedrock of U.S. democracy: the casting and counting of votes. 

Like other states roiled by Mr. Trump’s allegations, Wisconsin has seen partisan jockeying over the rules governing elections, particularly for mail-in ballots, whose use soared in 2020. In Georgia and Nevada, GOP legislators have since tightened the rules for voting by mail and in person, and made it easier to challenge voter registrations, among other changes. By contrast, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has vetoed GOP election security bills. 

Proponents of GOP-authored electoral reforms say they will prevent fraud and ensure that all legal votes are counted properly; critics say the aim is to suppress votes for Democrats and lay the groundwork for postelection lawsuits. Mr. Trump has said he will win unless Democrats cheat, and repeatedly voiced concerns about election interference or “rigging.” In a recent CBS interview, he said he would accept the outcome of a “free and fair” election, which he defined in part as counting votes and not changing rules and regulations without proper authority – adding that a lot had been done over the past four years to address “problems” in the last election. 

For months, Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have poured resources into election integrity programs to monitor voting in critical states in November. The Republican National Committee said in June that it aimed to recruit 100,000 volunteers as poll-watchers – double its goal four years ago. 

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, says it’s important to be prepared for poll-related disputes: “After the election, it’s like spitting in Lake Michigan,” he quips.

But he sees little upside in rehashing fraud allegations from 2020, reflecting an intra-GOP split over how best to ensure victory. “If you have concerns about past elections, focus on winning this one,” he says. 

A complicated farm state, now roiled over vote “fraud” and audits

Wisconsin has a proud tradition of self-governing and building social programs under leaders like Robert La Follette, a GOP progressive from the early 1900s known as “Fighting Bob.” It’s also a farming state steeped in ideals of personal responsibility, and was the birthplace of the Republican Party in 1854. These traditions, which coexist somewhat uneasily, have become a source of greater turbulence since Mr. Walker’s 2010 election. 

He pushed through landmark legislation that rolled back organized labor’s collective bargaining rights and workplace representation. Democratic resistance to this legislation and a tumultuous recall election that Mr. Walker won in 2012 only deepened partisan divisions. 

Paul Sancya/AP

Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is seen during the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024, in Milwaukee.

That split is on full display in Washington, says Anthony Chergosky, a politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “I don’t know that there is a stranger combination of U.S. senators in the nation than Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin,” he says. Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is an outspoken Trump ally; Ms. Baldwin is a Democrat who was the Senate’s first openly LGBTQ+ member. She faces a Republican challenger in November.  

After Republicans redrew Wisconsin’s electoral boundaries to partisan advantage in 2011, Democrats were effectively boxed out of state policymaking. When Mr. Evers, a former schools superintendent, was elected as governor in 2018, Democrats won the popular vote but couldn’t break the GOP’s hold on the legislature. The result has been a power struggle in the statehouse. 

This standoff, and a sense of dysfunction in state government, fed public mistrust in 2020 when Wisconsin held a pandemic election. The rules on who could cast a mail-in ballot were relaxed by the bipartisan election commission in ways that GOP critics called unjust. That criticism then became a rearguard fight to stop Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes going to Joe Biden, a fight that has never really ended.

“The results should never have been certified. There was pure unadulterated fraud,” says Jefferson E. Davis, a Republican activist. 

This “fraud” included the completion or correction by municipal clerks of address information on absentee ballots, a practice known as “curing” ballots. Another allegation is that the election commission improperly allowed voters to claim “indefinitely confined” status and vote by mail. Both issues were raised by the Trump campaign postelection and dismissed by a federal court headed by a Trump appointee.

Mr. Davis has spent three years trying to “audit” and overturn the election results and bring lawsuits against public officials whom he accuses of breaking electoral rules, so far without success. His ad hoc group in Wisconsin is part of a network of pro-Trump legal activists working to monitor and challenge how election officials do their job. 

That effort includes turning out poll-watchers, typically volunteers, who are allowed by law to monitor polling stations and locations where ballots are processed and counted. 

In July, police were called to eject two poll-watchers challenging every absentee ballot in Glendale, a Democratic-leaning suburb of Milwaukee, during a special primary election. Mayor Bryan Kennedy described it as a “practice run” for the presidential election, potentially intimidating Democratic voters.  

Dennis McBride, the mayor of another Democratic suburb, Wauwatosa, says Mr. Kennedy told him, ‘“You’ll be next.’”

“Frankly, I expect problems in November,” says Mr. McBride. “That’s the story in America right now.” 

Election workers under threat

Wisconsin’s elections are highly decentralized: Voting is overseen by 1,922 election clerks, from rural townships to cities. Turnout is usually far higher than the national average, reflecting a strong civic culture. For example, turnout by registered voters in Wauwatosa was 91% in 2020, says Mr. McBride – well above the 66% nationwide – yet that was only the fifth-highest turnout in the state. 

But the job of election clerks has become more fraught. A national survey of election officials this year found that nearly 4 in 10 had experienced threats, harassment, and abuse. The result has been higher turnover and early retirements. 

Kathy Bernier, a former election clerk and former Republican state senator who clashed publicly with lawmakers in her caucus who spread unfounded electoral fraud conspiracies, said the threats had to stop. 

“We all deserve to feel safe and protected in our positions of carrying out electoral laws,” said Ms. Bernier at a July 9 panel in Milwaukee.

At the same event, nonpartisan state election chief Meagan Wolfe, who has been the target of right-wing conspiracies about 2020, said voters should see for themselves how elections are administered. “Go watch for yourself. You don’t have to take our word for it.”

Bill would have cut down on misleading “red mirage” 

The Trump campaign alleged widespread ballot irregularities in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia, all Democratic cities with large Black populations in battleground states won by Biden. None of the allegations stood up to legal scrutiny.  

In the run-up to Election Day, Mr. Trump assailed mail-in ballots as untrustworthy and part of a Democratic plot to stop his reelection, even when it became clear that some Republican voters were also worried about in-person voting in a pandemic. 

Most Republicans have since abandoned this rhetoric about mail-in ballots – as has Mr. Trump, in recent speeches – and urged supporters to vote in advance where possible. “You can have a bad-weather day on Election Day,” says lobbyist Bill McCoshen, who served as chief of staff to former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.

But misinformation about elections persists in Wisconsin, a Midwestern state better known for cheese curds than for controversy – until recently.   

Kayla Wolf/AP

A cyclist rides past the Wisconsin State Capitol, July 30, 2024, in Madison.

Many Republicans here continue to cast doubt on the reliability of voting rolls and vote counts in Milwaukee. Activists claimed in 2020 that tens of thousands of Democratic ballots had been “found” overnight in Milwaukee and cried foul. 

But a similar pattern played out in Wisconsin’s governor’s race in 2018 – and is likely to do so again in November, given Democrats’ preference for mail-in ballots and the fact that Milwaukee has a central processing facility for absentee ballots, which are counted much later. That creates a “red mirage” of an early GOP lead that is later overtaken.

Earlier this year, Wisconsin’s legislature tried to address this issue. A bipartisan bill that passed the lower house would have allowed election officials to process absentee ballots in advance, so that results could be released sooner after polls close. But Senate Republicans declined to put the bill to a vote. 

In Pennsylvania, another battleground state that Mr. Trump lost, GOP lawmakers also blocked an effort to speed up the processing of mail-in ballots. Democrats say Republicans have a partisan interest in allowing chaos to sow distrust in the process – and the results.

[Mr. Trump] can “point to irregularities to say that he is the rightful winner, when in fact he’s lost,” Sharif Street, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party chair, told The Associated Press. 

Voters approve constitutional amendment after “Zuckerbucks” controversy

While Wisconsin’s divided government has deadlocked on legislative reforms, there have been changes made to election law. 

In April, voters approved a constitutional amendment that bars the use of private money to fund election administration following the “Zuckerbucks” controversy.  

In 2020, two nonprofits backed by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company, made donations to election administrators in Wisconsin and 48 other states, representing nearly 2,500 electoral jurisdictions. The money was provided to offset the costs of staging an election during a pandemic, including plexiglass dividers and ballot counting machines for mail-in votes. 

In Wisconsin, the bulk of the grant money – around $10 million – went to five large Democrat-leaning municipalities, including Milwaukee and Green Bay. Republicans allege that the money paid for a covert Democratic get-out-the-vote operation that swung a narrow election to Mr. Biden.

This summer, Mr. Trump threatened to put “Election Fraudsters” including Mr. Zuckerberg in jail. “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” he wrote on Truth Social.

Courts in Wisconsin ruled, however, that no laws were broken by election officials who accepted the donations. A recent study of states that accepted the grants, conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles, found a small effect on turnout that didn’t affect the overall election results.   

Mr. Davis, the Republican activist, claims without evidence that Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t want Mr. Trump to win a second term in 2020 because he feared federal regulation that would affect Facebook’s profits. He says he wants Wisconsin to hold an election in November in which all the laws are followed. “Let’s just administer our elections with integrity,” he says. 

Another revision to Wisconsin’s election law concerns drop boxes – secured boxes in public spaces where voters can drop off ballots, which Republicans broadly oppose. In 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled that they were unconstitutional. But after a liberal judge was elected to the court last year, the issue was relitigated and in July the ban was lifted. 

Even MAGA Republicans have changed their tune

How much these rule changes will affect the election is unclear. Nor is it a pressing issue for most voters in Wisconsin, polls suggest. Republicans continue to claim that greater vigilance is needed to stop electoral fraud, even though proven incidents of fraud are exceedingly rare and almost never consequential. 

Earlier this month, senior Republican officials held an election integrity rally in Waukesha, a Republican-leaning suburb of Milwaukee.

Lara Trump was among the speakers under a “Protect the vote” banner, where volunteers were invited to sign up to be poll-watchers. “We will never allow an election like 2020 to happen ever again,” said Ms. Trump, a co-chair of the Republican National Committee.  

But the messaging at the rally, held on the eve of this year’s Republican National Convention, was about election procedures and didn’t repeat all the baseless claims about 2020, says Ms. Bernier, the former GOP state senator. Calling for an election in which all eligible voters participate and all votes are counted may indicate a less confrontational approach. 

“We all want a high-quality election,” she says.

Lenora Chu

Natalya Kubenko (rear center) fled Ukraine to resettle in Tallinn, Estonia. She says that she has found friends and purpose through weaving camouflage nets for Ukrainian forces.

After Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine, Natalya Kubenko fled to this Baltic capital, and found herself depressed and anxious. “I watched the news every day, and for the first eight months, I did not want to live,” she says.

Ms. Kubenko found healing via a twice-weekly pastime: hand-weaving camouflage nets to send to the front lines in Ukraine. Meeting like-minded volunteers gave Ms. Kubenko a community – and a purpose.

“Here there are Ukrainians, Estonians, a few Russians who support us. I came here and found a new family for me. It became easier to live here,” says Ms. Kubenko, who fled Bila Tserkva, a city 80 kilometers (50 miles) outside Kyiv.

Now, most Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she travels to an old office building in downtown Tallinn, to join fellow volunteers at the nonprofit Aitan Kaitsta, which means “I help to defend.” The mostly female group spends hours hand-tying scraps of discarded clothing to industrial fishing nets. Their handiwork will eventually morph into camouflage nets, which will help shield Ukrainian tanks, military equipment, trenches, and snipers from being spotted by Russian drones and guided missiles.

Now Aitan Kaitsta has 18 locations across Estonia, operating on a shoestring budget, in donated space, and with discarded clothing and fishing nets. Over the last two years they’ve sent several football fields’ worth of nets to Ukraine. Volunteer efforts like theirs have been critical to assisting Ukraine’s military, says Kusti Salm, permanent secretary of the Estonian Ministry of Defense.

“The Russians get aerial pictures, and if you have covered your unit, machines, vehicles, and even kitchens, they cannot see it from the sky,” says Mr. Salm. “The utility of that is extremely high; it’s nonlethal ... and something that everyone can do. It’s of course a lot of time and effort. But, you know, I don’t think that there is a single family that hasn’t donated something to Ukraine.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian armed forces gunners, defending themselves against Russian forces, use a camouflage net to hide their gun from reconnaissance drones.

Shrouding Ukraine’s troops

At the Tallinn location, volunteers gather in a large space fringed with fabric scraps in the hues of nature: woody greens, dark browns, light tans. The place looks like an indoor forest. Some cut clothing into long pieces, while others weave the strips onto nets.

Anu Lensment, one of the group’s co-founders, says the work is a source of therapy during a time of war. “It’s easier to act, to move, than to sit still and hope it will be OK,” she says.

It’s an all-volunteer effort for a critical piece of military defense, and the handmade versions are superior to the machine-made kinds, which are more uniform and more easily detected by the enemy.

“The Ukrainians are keeping the war there and we have to help,” says Ms. Lensment, who works as a costume designer and has clothed the Estonian first lady. “These kinds of things really help there. This isn’t just a nice blanket – really it’s saving lives and millions [of euros’ worth] of military equipment.”

“Sometimes we get orders from Ukraine, and we have to make them very quickly,” says Jaana Ratas, an archaeologist and textile conservationist by trade, and the other co-founder of the group. The women sometimes receive photos from military contacts to illustrate how the landscape changes over time. “Is it spring? Which colors are in nature? We have very good consultants such as snipers who have given us very good advice.”

Lenora Chu

Anu Lensment (left) and Jaana Ratas co-founded the nonprofit Aitan Kaitsta, which organizes volunteers to weave camouflage nets to send to the front lines in Ukraine.

Camouflage nets can even change the appearance of smaller buildings, says Marek Kohv, a security expert at Estonia’s International Centre for Defence and Security. “They can also cover the lines of trenches, so that drones don’t see them,” he says.

The volunteers’ work is mission-critical. “They say 80% of success on the front line depends on the support from the rear,” says Ms. Ratas. “You can’t do everything when you’re a fighter. You need somebody feeding you, somebody bringing you ammunition, somebody dressing you.”

Memories of the Soviet era

For the co-founders, the work is punctuated by memories of living through Soviet times. Both Ms. Ratas and Ms. Lensment were teenagers when Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991; Ms. Lensment’s grandmother had been sent to Siberia during the 1949 Stalin-ordered mass deportation of people from the Baltic states, and one of her grandfathers served in World War II. During her own teenage years under Soviet rule, Ms. Ratas remembers lacking toilet paper and menstrual pads, and having to be very careful with whom she shared thoughts critical of the government.

They never forgot the “nervousness” of those times. “We have had ... freedom and peaceful times” since then, “but there’s always this feeling that something can happen,” says Ms. Lensment. “If it happens here, it will be totally different from Ukraine, because Estonia is so small.”

“We have our own history with Russia, and we can’t even imagine not doing anything. It’s so natural,” says Ms. Ratas. “If you see that somebody’s being bullied, then you need to go and help.”

The women have pulled together instruction booklets to standardize the net-making process, and translated them into four languages – English, Finnish, Ukrainian, and Estonian. Should Russia invade, both women have also quietly forged plans to send their children out of Estonia while they stay and fight.

Mr. Salm, at the Defense Ministry, commends their efforts and explains that the spirit of volunteerism is something that’s ingrained in the Estonian consciousness, in part because it’s a small country that wouldn’t function well otherwise.

“This tradition goes back to the first independence time during the ’20s and ’30s, and we reconstituted it after regaining independence,” says Mr. Salm. “And if you don’t have meaningful resources, you can contribute time and you can make a huge effort and impact.”

In December 2016, William Akley sat down in his sprawling headquarters for the biggest gas utility in Massachusetts, Eversource. Across the table were three women from a group that had become increasingly troublesome to his company. 

The group was Mothers Out Front, and it had been doing things like dressing up in orange costumes depicting gas flames and putting big signs where the company’s natural gas lines leaked into the air. Mr. Akley’s crews were scrambling to answer calls to fix hundreds of what they considered minor gas seepages. 

An avalanche of letters from grandmothers organized by Mothers Out Front had convinced Mr. Akley, the president of gas operations at Eversource, to meet. It might be ugly. His aides asked if he should bring bodyguards or lawyers, he recalled later. 

But as the meeting started, Zeyneb Magavi and each of the other mothers calmly explained their passion to Mr. Akley: “I have three kids,” Ms. Magavi said. “I’m worried about climate change. And I’m worried about their future.” 

When the women finished, there was a pause. Mr. Akley broke the silence. “I have three kids, too. I’m worried about climate change. And I am also worried about their future.”

“That was our little sliver of common ground that we started to grow,” recalls Ms. Magavi. 

Mr. Akley agrees. “They came into that first meeting reaching across with their hands. It was about respect,” he marvels.

It was the start of an unlikely partnership that eventually became an audacious idea: to use heat from underground – instead of natural gas – to both cool and heat homes and buildings. 

The test of that idea is now blinking on in Framingham, Massachusetts, 25 miles west of Boston. Eversource workers have buried a mile-long loop of plastic pipe underground and drilled 90 holes hundreds of feet deep to collect geothermal energy. They are now connecting the loop to heat and cool 36 buildings – homes, a fire station, and businesses. 

It is the first U.S. trial of this innovative technology being provided to an entire neighborhood by a major utility. It’s the kind of scaled-up model that could bring a wholesale change to the nation’s infrastructure, replacing natural gas just as natural gas supplanted coal and oil in much of the United States.

Doug Struck

Carol Canova, a retired schoolteacher, has an insulation-wrapped ground-source heat pump in her basement. It's ready to be hooked up to pipes that are buried in the ground in order to bring constant-temperature water into her Framingham, Massachusetts, house, Aug. 3, 2024.

“If we are really serious about decarbonization, we need to study all the possible options,” says Sergey Paltsev, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The trial in Framingham is “the right thing to do,” he says, and will be crucial to determine if the heat-pump system works well and is economically sensible for large numbers of consumers.  

The Greeks and Romans used geothermal heat from the ground, and thousands of years earlier, Indigenous groups gathered around natural hot springs. But recent technology – primarily heat pumps – has made it possible to utilize a constant temperature collected by even shallow-buried pipes to both heat and cool. The development comes at an opportune time: Society is faced with urgent deadlines to stop burning fossil fuels.  

“Utilities are reading the room and seeing a lot of excitement” about geothermal, says Ania Camargo, a senior manager for Building Decarbonization Coalition, a nationwide nonprofit seeking ways to limit carbon emissions. About 20 states have climate mandates to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, she says, and about a third of those emissions come from buildings. 

Nationally, 28 utilities have formed a coalition to study geothermal’s prospects, and 19 projects are in various stages of planning by utilities around the country, Ms. Camargo says. While the rush is on to create alternative sources of electricity, from renewable wind, solar, hydro and nuclear, geothermal and air heat pumps can replace old fossil fuel furnaces and costly air conditioners, supporters say. 

Carol Canova looks at two pipes sticking through her basement concrete wall, a few feet from a new device the size of a furnace wrapped in silver insulation. “Everything’s ready to go,” says the retired schoolteacher in Framingham. “We are helping the environment tremendously.”

It started with a children’s book

Those involved say the pilot also shows another success: “It’s not just the technology,” says Ms. Magavi. “The magic of what we are doing is that groups are working together.” 

It started, really, with a children’s book. 

Kelsey Wirth remembers exactly the moment in 2010. She was sitting in bed with her daughter, then 5 years old, looking through a book on coral reefs and marine animals that they had picked up at the New England Aquarium. 

“I realized that I was showing her things that she is unlikely to see as an adult,” because of the massive die-off of coral reefs from climate change, Ms. Wirth recalls. “I was so horrified for the very first time to really view the climate crisis through the lens of being a mom.” 

Ms. Wirth wondered what she could do with her sense of despair about the future. She concluded, “My No. 1 job is to protect my children, so I can’t stay out of the fray.”

At a climate rally, she met Vanessa Rule, another mother, and their strategizing over coffees led to the first meeting of Mothers Out Front in Ms. Wirth’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, living room. The organization, vowing to combat climate change, exploded: It now has 45,000 members working on local issues in five states.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Audrey Schulman, co-founder of HEET (the Home Energy Efficiency Team) and now executive director of HEETlab, poses by Cambridge Public Library’s Valente Branch, which uses geothermal energy from ground-source heat pumps, July 25, 2024, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ms. Magavi and other mothers around Boston joined forces with HEET, the Home Energy Efficiency Team. That nonprofit was cofounded by Audrey Schulman, who temporarily set aside her work writing adventure novels to advance the new cause. She had seized on a 2014 Boston University study that found vast leaks from the aging network of underground natural gas pipes in Boston, a problem for many old cities.  

Ms. Schulman and volunteers pored over hundreds of pages of data in tiny type to create a Google map in 2015 with red dots showing all the leaks in Massachusetts. The map was jammed with thousands of red dots, showing seeping gas from cast-iron pipes often 100 years old. 

Natural gas is primarily methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and the mothers began demonstrating for action to fix the leaks. The utilities ignored them. But soon the publicity over HEET’s maps and the Mothers Out Front protests “had their absolute horrified attention,” Ms. Schulman says. Eversource agreed to talk to the women. 

While Mr. Akley says he was surprised at the mothers’ cooperative attitude at the meeting, Ms. Magavi says the mothers were thrilled by the end to have Mr. Akley’s agreement to seriously study the problem. Two other gas utilities joined the study. 

“He took a leap of faith in us,” Ms. Schulman says. “He didn’t have to, in any way at all. And he did.”

Why can’t a utility deliver geothermal energy?

With Eversource’s cooperation, the mothers donned construction helmets and followed the gas utility crews around Boston to see how they work and collect data on leaks. They finished with a summit of 300 people that included the state’s three major utilities and top state officials. 

“We had people in the room who have been arrested protesting gas pipelines and people who are constructing gas pipelines,” Ms. Magavi recounts. Eventually they agreed to jointly back state regulations to speed repair of the biggest leaks, which would significantly cut the methane emissions.

Doug Struck

Eversource, Massachusetts' largest gas utility company, is running the first pilot program in the United States in which a major utility uses geothermal energy to power a neighborhood, in Framingham, Massachusetts, Aug. 3, 2024.

But even that would be enormously expensive. Ms. Schulman and Ms. Magavi realized replacing old iron pipes to fix just the worst leaks would cost billions of dollars. Ms. Magavi took the problem home and pondered. She has a physics degree, and she knew the difference in temperature from the ground to the air could be harnessed for energy.  

Why, she wondered, couldn’t a utility deliver that kind of thermal energy rather than natural gas? “It just fit in,” she reasoned. “Why hasn’t anyone done it?”

She was relieved to find out others had used this geothermal system – most notably Colorado Mesa College. But no one had asked a utility to do it for a whole neighborhood of customers. She called up Mr. Akley. “I think our relationship is at a point where I can make another proposal to you,” she told the utility chief. “But you gotta take a deep breath.”

The key to the concept is a heat pump, a mechanism that can take air – or in this case water warmed in the ground – to warm a refrigerant gas inside the heat pump. The gas is then compressed to make it much hotter, to heat air circulating in the home during the winter. 

In the summer, the refrigerant can be sprayed from a valve – with the same effect as a lawn sprinkler on a hot day – to cool air circulating through a home’s ducts. Many homeowners have bought air heat pumps to convert the temperature of air from outside, but using the constant temperature of the ground – about 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit in New England – works much more efficiently. 

The setup could provide both heat and air conditioning, crucial in the warming summers, while lowering customers’ utility bills and cutting greenhouse gases. 

There are drawbacks. Heat pumps alone cost $4,000 to $10,000 or more, not including the underground system. They may require air ducts in a home and can erase the gas bill but require using more electricity, which can be costly and is not carbon-free unless the electric supply is renewable. Proponents say to make sure this works for everyone, a utility-wide system is needed, perhaps with government subsidies or spread-out payments. 

The concept seems promising for gas utilities, which already know how to construct heating systems, bury pipes, deal with thousands of customers, and spread the costs over time to ratepayers. 

Mr. Akley listened to Ms. Magavi’s pitch. “I think she was shocked I was not running away,” he says. “I was really intrigued. I see this as being a huge game changer if we can make it affordable.”

But it was bold. When he, with HEET’s support, proposed a test site in 2019 to the state’s Department of Public Utilities, Mr. Akley says he was surprised it got approval. National Grid, another regional gas utility, has followed with plans for two other pilot projects in the state. 

Doug Struck

Eric and Jennifer Mauchan, posing in their basement Aug. 3, 2024, say they were thrilled to be included in the test geothermal project. This furnace will be replaced by a ground-source heat pump that will use the Earth’s temperature to heat and cool their Framingham, Massachusetts, home.

Geothermal “is a solution that a lot of different parties are very excited about, including labor,” says Caitlin Eichten, a senior policy assistant at Fresh Energy, a nonprofit that studies ways to end carbon dependence in Minnesota, which is a national leader in renewable energy policy. “We’re really hoping to build off of the work that’s being done in Massachusetts to advance thermal energy networks.” 

Picking a test site 

In 2021, Jennifer Mauchan, a financial planning manager, noticed two men from an Eversource car scoping out her Framingham neighborhood. They said they were looking for a test geothermal site. 

They said they would need to dig trenches. “Dig away,” Mrs. Mauchan said. 

The environmental benefits are attractive to her and her husband, Eric Mauchan, and there is a sweetener: For this pilot project, Eversource is paying for the heat pumps and all the home ductwork – worth about $120,000 just in his home, Mr. Mauchan says. 

“We thought we had hit the house lottery,” says Mr. Mauchan, a biomedical salesperson, as he showed off the old furnace that will be replaced in his basement. Residential customers will pay from $7.30 to $9.75 per month for the geothermal energy. 

The loop of pipe, buried 5 to 10 feet underground, was finished in June. Eversource and its contractors now swarm over homes and buildings in the neighborhood to equip them to turn on the connection, which the utility says will happen after testing in August. The test neighborhood was picked partly because it is an “environmental justice” community with a 57% minority population and an average household income of $20,400. 

The state utility department wants to see if a utility-run network can bring geothermal heating and cooling to both low-income and other users, spreading out the high costs of drilling, pipes, and heat pumps.  

Mr. Akley, who spent 40 years in the gas utility business, retired shortly after the June ceremony marking the completion of the underground infrastructure. 

“I put it in the top of the list of the highlights of my career,” he says. “It’s a proud moment.” He says working with the activist mothers was special. “It brings some optimism for the future.” 

Expanding the model 

Richard Donnelly, who is director of energy innovation at the gas company Vermont Gas Systems, says many utilities understand they are in a fading business, and need to meet state climate goals that will phase out fossil fuels.

“If you are a gas utility and if you’re not at the table discussing this with the environmentalists, the policymakers, your customers, then you will probably be on the menu eventually,” he says.

Internationally, an arm of the World Bank has decided to fund a 30,000-home test and brought Ms. Magavi and an Eversource official to Turkey to talk about it there. 

Ms. Magavi, now executive director of HEET, isn’t done. She’s dreaming on a large scale. Climate change has meant the seas have absorbed tremendous significant heat from burning fossil fuels. Why not use that heat – just as the heat beneath Framingham is being used – to warm and cool all of our cities? she asks. 

“Right now we’re calculating how many large industrial heat pumps we’d have to put under the docks in Boston Harbor to restore it to a temperature the lobsters like, and how much of Boston could we heat with that?”

Audacious? Yes, she admits. But so was asking a gas utility to dig for heat in the ground.

“Why not,” she says, “go for it all?”

Editor's note: Audrey Schulman's title has been corrected to list her as a co-founder of HEET.

When I learned that a statue of John Lewis would replace a Confederate monument in downtown Decatur, I knew I had to see it, and not just because of my own battles with hate-filled artifacts. In many ways, the late congressman was the personification of the famous hymn “Amazing Grace.” It is fitting that a community would replace something representing a “lost cause” with a dedication to empathy. 

“I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see.”

The congressman was a mythical figure, even before he posthumously defeated the Confederacy in front of the Historic DeKalb Courthouse. He was one of the bruised heroes of Bloody Sunday. Mr. Lewis suffered a fractured skull when police attacked marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. Some 58 people were beaten for peacefully protesting for voting rights. Years before that, Mr. Lewis spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King Jr., on behalf of civil rights. Georgia first elected him to Congress in 1986. He would serve until his death in 2020. In later years, the congressman became a comic book hero. His last address was published in one of the newspapers of record.

The new statue is befitting Mr. Lewis’ legacy. It is larger than life and unmistakably in his likeness. Including the granite pedestal that it sits on, the sculpture is 12 feet tall. It seems like it’s larger, however. Even when standing in a nearby gazebo, onlookers are still not at eye level with the civil rights icon.

How John Lewis’ former staffer thinks about continuing his work

Sunday, the day after the unveiling of the Lewis statue, a Black woman in a white flowing dress takes pictures alongside the sculpture. Her glasses are black-rimmed – taking on the likeness of a Möbius strip, which speaks to a sense of timelessness.

Ken Makin

Former John Lewis staffer Tuere Butler stands in front of the new sculpture after its unveiling in Decatur, Georgia.

There are also strong emotions behind those frames.

“It was just a very emotional time just to see everyone who was able to gather and pay homage to a man who dedicated his life and his work for building the beloved community,” said Tuere Butler, a former staffer for Representative Lewis who ultimately became his longest-serving employee. “I had the privilege and the honor to serve Congressman Lewis for 22 years.”

For the trained ear, “beloved community” is the tell. It is the language of Kings, of a movement that would change the world. It is a message of hope which endures, even in times where the political and social landscapes are unsure.

“There’s still work to be done. That’s one of the charges that Congressman Lewis left with us. ... There’s still work to be done, and we can’t give up just because it gets challenging or hard, because the community and people are worth it. We’re all in this together,” Mrs. Butler said.  “And so, if we’re not willing to roll up our sleeves and fight not only for ourselves, but for our fellow man and woman, what’s the point of us being here on this earth? 

“We have to look out for one another and we have to go about this life picking someone up or encouraging someone or pushing them forward so that they can be their best selves,” Mrs. Butler adds. “And in turn, you’re gonna be your best self.”

Even with Mr. Lewis’ likeness and towering presence, however, this statue isn’t just a story about the man who was known for stirring up “good trouble.”

It is decidedly diasporic, thanks to the contributions of Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson, whose description of his approach to art aligns with notions of empathy: “I am inspired by the heroic in mankind, and am moved to express the vitality, beauty, grace and strength of the human figure in its varied shapes, sizes, abilities and functions,” he says on his website. “The spirit that motivates it is limitless in its grandeur.”

When Mrs. Butler took pictures by the statue, the foot traffic nearby was minimal, as if a higher power allowed her space to commune quietly.

Minutes later, a steady wave of onlookers appeared, laughing and taking pictures of their own.

“This man helped us get to where we are today”

Among those passersby were two of Mr. Watson’s compatriots, Sharon Thompson and Rose Douglas. The latter had just recently walked the fated Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of Bloody Sunday.

“Seeing what’s happening now and knowing that [Mr. Lewis] was trying so hard to unify a country that is so divided,” Ms. Douglas says, “I just wanted to pay respect because we do stand on their shoulders. ... Look around, you can see the diversity right here. This man helped us get to where we are today.”

Ms. Thompson notes that her friend’s previous works include sculptures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt.

“[Mr. Watson] represents Jamaica, and the world, really. He’s done so many sculptures, but John Lewis is super special,” she says. “It gives me a sense of pride knowing that my countryman did this.”

But the final word belongs to Malcolm Williams, an Afrofuturistic artist who also journeyed to see the new statue. He found meaning not only in the artwork, but in what it replaced.

“Being an artist, I wanted to see another medium like this, and how it really captured the emotion of someone who really lived and loved what he was doing,” Mr. Williams says. “The more that we uproot seeds of hate, the more that we can allow love to blossom.”

Ann Noble has lived in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester for 11 years. Her third-floor condo lacks the space to garden. And, until recently, she didn’t know any of her neighbors.

Looking for a way to get her hands dirty, she signed up for a Boston Food Forest Coalition (BFFC) cleanup day near her home. She not only found a place to garden, she says, but also met her neighbors for the first time at the Savin Hill Wildlife Garden.

“For me, it’s served two purposes, which is giving back to my community,” says Ms. Noble, “but also meeting some new people who live in my community, who share my values in terms of … having a green footprint.” 

Where the Savin Hill food forest stands today used to be an empty lot. The site took five years to build and officially opened to the public in 2022. “The difference is unbelievable,” Ms. Noble says. “You never would have set foot in this property as a person who didn’t want to get mugged … or step on a needle,” she says. Now, it’s full of life, and as it matures, she adds, it will become even more beautiful. 

Urban food forests serve a unique role. They aren’t large – the footprint is roughly the size of a housing lot – but they can host over 100 species of plants and trees on an acre. Many BFFC sites have been built in neighborhoods that are lower-income and lack green space. The sites require maintenance – although the goal is for them to become self-sustaining over time. Food forestry differs from community gardening because the space is open for anyone to come in, spend time, harvest, or plant. Most BFFC sites contain plants that produce herbs, berries, fruit, and food for pollinators. In Boston, the network of these tiny forests collectively provides climate resiliency and spaces to forge connections among neighbors. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Ann Noble stands in the Savin Hill Wildlife Garden on a newly constructed patio on a rainy summer day in Boston.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A bud on a hibiscus plant in the Savin Hill Wildlife Garden.

“What we plant in our gardens is really a reflection of our family background … and who we are as a people,” says Dr. Cara Rockwell, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Florida International University. She adds that food forestry, or the urban agroforestry system, has been around for a very long time.

BFFC was born out of community organizing. In 2010, a group of neighbors came together to transform its first vacant lot in Jamaica Plain. Today, BFFC has worked with neighborhoods to complete 10 sites, with two more under construction. The organization aims to establish 30 food forests across Boston by 2030. This summer, crops include seaberries, honeyberries, currants, alpine strawberries, and annuals like lettuce, parsley, and collard greens. With high demand from communities for more public green spaces and the City of Boston trying to transform empty lots deemed unsuitable for development, BFFC says it is confident it can reach this goal.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Clockwise from upper left: immature hazelnut, berries on an American cranberry bush, a bee on an apple mint plant, and raspberries at Boston Nature Center’s food forest.

Each site is unique – from neatly pebbled paths to brambles of local wildflowers and shrubs. “I think what makes a food forest is truly the community owning the space and growing and transforming with those spaces,” says Liz Luc Clowes, BFFC’s community engagement and food forest construction director.

The goal for the spaces, she adds, is to support the land’s healing, follow permaculture principles, and be “welcoming and really a third space for people to gather.” 

On a July afternoon, Declan Devine weaves through bushes at the Boston Nature Center food forest site, looking for anything edible. He grabs a handful of currants – light pink, tart, and crunchy – and moves on to the black raspberry bush. This urban oasis, with its towering growth designed to mimic forest ecosystems, not only provides shade and relief from the summer heat but also is teeming with life. A few steps down the path, tucked into a small tree, rests a bird’s nest. In the late 1800s, the land was a psychiatric hospital. Eventually, that was torn down and turned into a wildlife sanctuary. About an acre is now home to the Boston Nature Center food forest, established in 2013.

Mr. Devine is a steward for the forest. Here in Mattapan, there are more than 100 species of plants such as bee balm, sweet goldenrod, Siberian peashrub, pear trees, and brightly colored lupines to support pollinators and birds. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Volunteer steward Declan Devine listens during a meeting before starting work in the garden at Boston Nature Center’s food forest site in the Mattapan neighborhood.

“There’s so much life, like blasting out of every square inch of it,” Mr. Devine says.  

Climate resilience, trust, and community are core to building a food forest, says Hope Kelley, BFFC's communications manager. 

“We say that each project moves at the speed of trust,” Ms. Kelley says. “Building a food forest has to do with planting trees, putting in a landscape, and remediating soil. … But none of that can happen until there’s trust established between BFFC staff and city officials and neighbors who are leading these projects.” 

On a recent Wednesday, 15 volunteers, most of whom were new to BFFC volunteer days, got to work removing mugwort, a pesky medicinal and aromatic weed, from around a pear tree. This also helped make room for volunteers to plant native bee balm. Once the weeds were pulled, volunteer stewards used a natural weeding process that would suppress the plant’s return by laying the picked mugwort back down in thick mats and placing big sheets of cardboard on top. The cardboard acts as a new soil layer. It’s called repurposing, and it is how many BFFC sites transform from abandoned plots.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Volunteer Natali Rabichev picks a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace at Boston Nature Center’s food forest.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Maintenance coordinator Emily Carvalho brings wood chips to a path being created in the garden at Boston Nature Center’s food forest.

Ms. Noble, now a steward, has made it a hobby to visit Boston’s various food forests. She explains that she never feels unsafe when she goes to the BFFC sites.  

“Our gardens tend to be little gems in a neighborhood and someplace where people can enjoy just going in,” she says. “All the ones I’ve been to have nice little seating areas where you can just sit and rest your feet for 10 minutes. Plus the bigger ecological picture ... we need more green space.”

Reuters

An employee with Mexico's federal judiciary dresses as "Lady Justice" during a Aug. 25 protest against court reform in Ciudad Juarez.

Autocrats need friends. Venezuela’s strongman is finding it harder to find them.

Last week, the country’s highest court affirmed that President Nicolás Maduro – who holds “undue influence” over the court, according to the United Nations – won a third term in the July 28 election. Reaction was swift.

Ten governments in Latin America as well as the United States jointly rejected the ruling. Two of Mr. Maduro’s most sympathetic neighbors, Brazil and Colombia, had already expressed “grave doubts” about the official outcome. Only his fellow authoritarians in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Bolivia have stood by him.

Mr. Maduro’s growing isolation in the region fits a trend. In one election after another, voters throughout Latin America have tossed out incumbents in a restless search for honest governance. Their frustration over corruption and impunity may be the force behind a renaissance in judicial independence.

In recent years, “authoritarian leaders have had a hard time getting their way, as the judiciary in several Latin American countries has proved itself to be the best line of defense against democratic backsliding,” noted Rebecca Chavez and Taraciuk Broner in Americas Quarterly last September.

Integrity on the bench has become a political hot button across the Americas. In the U.S., Democrats seek to impose term limits and congressional oversight on the Supreme Court to counter what they see as ideological drift and unethical conduct by some justices. In Chile, as the U.N. noted, judges have acknowledged a need for greater equality in the way courts handle cases for richer and poorer defendants.

Battles over legal reforms elsewhere show the depth of public concern for the role of courts in protecting democracy. In Mexico, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has proposed a constitutional amendment that critics say would make courts and judges vulnerable to political patronage. The reforms have sparked a broad public backlash. In Peru, legislators are locked over a bill that would put judges under congressional oversight. Last week, courts in Guatemala rejected a third attempt by a notoriously corrupt chief prosecutor to oust the democratically elected president.

These debates mark a welcome shift in direction after decades with “little to no track record of independent Latin American judiciaries that stand in the way of authoritarian governments,” noted a Stanford study published in the Journal of Democracy in January. The authors wrote that in recent years, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia “have produced robust institutions able to check leaders with authoritarian tendencies, with high courts playing a fundamental role.”

Something similar may now be gathering momentum in Venezuela. Last week, a U.N. fact-finding mission said that Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice and the National Electoral Council lack independence and impartiality. The latter institution called Mr. Maduro the winner on election night. Neither the court nor the council has released ballot tallies.

But citizens have. In a plan carefully coordinated by opposition leaders, citizen monitors collected and posted on social media the official counts from nearly every polling station on election night. Those figures, widely viewed as accurate, showed that Mr. Maduro lost the election by a wide margin.

Autocrats strengthen their grip on power through institutional armor. In a decade of rule, Mr. Maduro has co-opted the courts and appointed military brass to Cabinet posts. One member of the electoral council, Juan Carlos Delpino, has rejected the verdict of his peers. “This decision is based on my commitment to electoral integrity,” he said.

In their joint rejection of the court’s decision last week, the regional governments stated that they “continue to insist on respect for the sovereign expression of the Venezuelan people.” As more citizens embrace rule of law, their demands for integrity may be cracking the edifice of an autocrat’s dishonesty.