Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 290

“The storm reveals who you are”: Domestic violence in the hurricane aftermath

"Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away: A Memoir" by Alice Anderson (Credit: St. Martin's Press)

The storm wasn’t the worst of it for Alice Anderson and her children. After Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi, her physician husband’s already precarious mental health went into freefall. What followed was an ordeal that tested her physical, emotional and financial resources, and brought with it a lifetime’s worth of lessons in what it takes to survive.

Now Anderson, a poet and former model, has released “Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away,” her account of, as she puts it, building chapels out of the scars. Anderson spoke recently to Salon about rebuilding, both inside and out.

The book feels extremely topical in so many different ways right now. The book is really so much about the psychological aftermath of mass traumatic events.

In Mississippi, they always say, “The storm doesn’t change anyone. The storm reveals who you are.” When you see the coverage of a natural disaster of that size on the news and you read about it, there’s no way to really understand how it keeps impacting, how that storm keeps hitting both in large and small ways and how it continues to affect the family.

It feels like over the past decade that there’s been a different understanding of the impact of trauma.

It’s interesting to me because largely “Some Bright Morning” is about the storm and catastrophe, and then also the catastrophe of an abusive relationship.

Just like a storm, the catastrophe doesn’t end the day that the storm goes back out to sea. There is a very long tail. In fact, what happens after can be as or more dangerous as the original events.

What is it like for your children now?

Well, I’ve chronicled in the book, our living arrangements now are that we are a family of four. They lived for ten years going back and forth with shared custody, supervised visitation. It was like this terrible cycle.

But with the last final violent episode, now, we arrived at our “finally.” Everybody lives without that specter of what’s going to happen next. We have a lifelong, renewable for life, protective order for all of us. He really isn’t in our life at all now. I didn’t want to write a book that was about just how we survived. The whole point of surviving was to get to this point, to this “finally.”

Were you concerned, though, when you were writing it, about not just stirring up the presence of this person again in your life, but what did you have to do in terms of protecting yourself legally, physically? Were you thinking about those things?

I thought about them as I was writing. But I kept writing anyway. Of course, we changed names. We made sure that we were covered legally. At a certain point when I was writing this book, I stopped and it was because I realized I didn’t know how my story ended. Then one terrible July night, I’m driving in my car and I’ve got two of the kids in the car with me and we’re following the third in the ambulance. As terrible as the night was, I had the thought, “You’re driving through the end of the story.”

As traumatic as it was, it was the beginning of the end of the story. I think once that played out and their father was convicted and we got a lifelong protective order, it gave me a sense of safety. But even so, people will ask me, “Are you worried about stirring him up? Are you worried that his makes it more dangerous?” But I fell back on, “Your silence will not protect you.” It would be dangerous no matter what I did. That’s the reality when people ask, “Why did she stay?” The reality is the leaving is oftentimes the most dangerous thing.

The danger is there. But I just choose not to live in it.

What do you want people to understand from reading this book about the nature of abuse, particularly when it involves a family when there are children at stake?

I felt very desolate as I went through it. When the first incident happened and I was attacked with my children there, I had this naïve notion that this was obvious. I would go to family court. Of course, the family court would protect all of us. Then I descended into that system and realized, “That maybe that isn’t as simple as it seems.” But I didn’t want to write a book that had an ax to grind. I wanted to write a book that was about finding the beauty in the calamity.

The first line of the book is “We make chapels of our scars.” I was thinking about it the other day and I thought about a lot of times the scars, those wounds, whatever they are, physical, emotional within an abusive relationship, they become part of the dance. To me, when you’ve finally left and when you are finally free, those are yours and you make what you want of them. We can be stuck in where we were or we can reclaim the narrative and write the story.

It gets very, very complicated and very tangled, especially when you’re dealing with domestic and family violence, because also you have relationships with these people. You have had loved these people. It’s not like you’re walking on the street and a stranger punches you in the face.

Exactly. If my son was attacked in the way he was by his father by a stranger, they would be in jail in a heartbeat. But it’s not that simple when it’s a family.

My agent really helped me as I was writing the book. She said, “Alice, you’re gonna have to write the love story.” Of course, at that time, I was, “Ugh!” I so don’t want to write that love story. But it really is important to tell the whole story because these are people that you have loved and you have lived with, that you’ve had a life with.

When we look for reasons why these things happen, it’s really important to understand that abusers are often very attractive people. There are often very interesting.

A lot of times abusers are charming and highly intelligent and well-loved in their community. From the outside [looking] in, other people don’t understand the true danger of it. Yeah.

What do you think we as fellow bystanders, as neighbors, can do for each other? How can we help end this cycle?

I think as we go forward people become more and more aware about domestic violence and how it works. I’ll never forget one day shortly after the court, still in Mississippi, the court removed my ex from the house and we were back living in the house. Our driveway was next to our neighbor’s driveway. The woman who lives next door to me said, “Well, it can’t be all that bad. People love him.” I said, “Well, actually, he tried to kill me,” and she said, “But that was one night.”

If you know someone in your life, whether it’s a neighbor or a friend, it’s never one night. It’s ongoing and it stops and starts.

I’m wondering what you think when you see these stories in the news of very high profile, very successful men who are winning Grammys and who are playing in the NFL and are directing films and starring in films. It is very well documented that they have abused their partners. That seems to somehow get forgiveness. That seems to somehow get a pass. What do you think when you see that?

First of all, whenever those stories rise up, it’s like the storm coming. It’s like a hurricane coming in. The first few stories are allegations that maybe this happened. Then it really will reach a crescendo and there are stories about exactly what they did, but are almost in the next moment simultaneous about what is wrong with the person who was the victim. 

And that’s exactly what happens in courts with domestic abuse survivors and victims. I think that people are able to allow that forgiveness because they don’t or they can’t acknowledge the real danger. When you hear people talking about domestic violence in a famous NFL player, you never hear someone say, “Well, this could lead to him killing her.” You’re not allowed to say that. But for my perspective, I always see that.

I’m wondering now in the aftermath of these most recent terrible storms and those still to come, what do you want people to know about these kinds of events and the relationship between them and family violence?

Well, it’s almost like the storm becomes a holiday. Everybody knows about intimate partner violence, that the holidays are often a perfect storm. Emotions are heightened, everything feels very do or die, and the storms are similar to a holiday in that kind of relationship.

If there is a hint of violence, if there has been the kernel of violence, then when that storm hits, it’s all going to be amplified and explode and it becomes a very dangerous time. It can also be very isolating. Sometimes people feel like when the catastrophe around them is so great, that their crisis is small, and it’s not. No matter how they feel it’s small in comparison, they deserve to find safety. They deserve to be taken seriously. They deserve to find shelter.

Portions of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity.

The most depraved things Sarah Huckabee Sanders said at today’s press briefing

Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

Today’s White House press briefing featured a storm of questions about former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling protests that have spread throughout the NFL, interspersed with inquiries about North Korea and Jared Kushner’s private email server. Here are some of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ most depraved responses from today’s briefing.

When asked if President Trump had gone too far by calling NFL players “sons of bitches” who should be fired, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“I think it’s always appropriate for the president of the United States to defend our flag, to defend the national anthem and to defend the men and women who fought and died to defend it.”

Huckabee Sanders mentioned several times that the NFL protests and Trump’s responses to them have nothing to do with race. It was brought to her attention that Colin Kaepernick’s purpose was to protest racial inequality and police brutality, but it has instead been interpreted as disrespectful to our troops and our flag. However, white supremacist protestors claimed their protests were about heritage and not hate, which Trump was more inclined to accept. When questioned about this disparity, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“I think if the debate for them is really about police brutality, then they should protest the officers on the field that are protecting them instead of the American flag.”

She later said that wasn’t what she meant, and that she was “kind of pointing out the hypocrisy in that, if the message is police brutality, which they’ve stated, then that doesn’t seem very appropriate to protest the American flag. I’m not sure how those two things would be combined.”

When asked if Jared Kushner’s emails from his private server would be released, Huckabee Sanders said that she did not have information regarding that issue.

When asked about why Trump made the speech that he made at the United Nations after being warned not to provoke North Korea, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“That’s a false narrative. The national security team was involved and engaged throughout the speech-writing process and was very happy with the president’s speech at the UN.”

When asked about Tom Price’s travel in a private aircraft, spending $400,000 in taxpayer money since May, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“This wasn’t White House–approved travel. This was done through the general budget at the Department of HHS and I think Secretary Price addressed this over the weekend; they’re conducting both an internal and IG review and all travel on private charter has been suspended until that’s completed.”

When asked about Secretary Carson’s disagreement with the president and vice president regarding the runoff Senate election in Alabama — Carson has endorsed Christian Supremacist Roy Moore, while Trump endorsed his opponent Luther Strange — Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“The president has a lot of people with a variety of backgrounds and certainly with a variety of opinions. He always welcomes them voicing those.”

Trump has, however, made it clear that he does not welcome NFL players voicing their opinions. When asked if President Trump has an issue with the First Amendment, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“Not at all. The president is simply stating that pride in our country is a good thing. It’s something we should all celebrate; it’s something that frankly should bring us together, not divide us. Standing up for the national anthem he feels is a symbol of that.”

When asked if the president was waging a culture war, Huckabee Sanders’ response was:

“Not at all. The president’s not talking about race; the president’s talking about pride in our country.”

“I think Ivanka is much better-looking than her”: 15 hours of Donald Trump with Howard Stern

(Credit: Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)

In over 15 hours of previously unreleased taped interviews, Donald Trump reveals to radio shock jock Howard Stern exactly how he sees all women, including various celebrities, his wife, and his daughter. Proving, once again, that the president has long behaved in private life as he has in public, the newly transcribed interviews are most notable for his admissions about wife Melania and daughter Ivanka.

“Have you ever felt her up in public,” Stern asked Trump of his third wife in 1999.

“Yeah,” Trump admitted.

Stern had refused to rebroadcast the interviews, which originally aired between 1993 and 2015, arguing that would betray the free environment in which Trump was his guest.

“I never anticipated running for office or being a politician, so I could have fun with Howard on the radio and everyone would love it,” Trump explained while campaigning last year. “People do love it … I could say whatever I wanted when I was an entrepreneur, a business guy.”

Aside from confessing to groping his wife in public — presumably playfully, but let’s be real! — much of Trump’s on-air appearances revolved around objectifying female celebrities by their physical attributes.

“Oh, you are—there are gonna be smaller bathing suits,” Stern asked Trump after the real estate mogul bought the Miss America pageant.

“Very tiny,” Trump promised.

“I love her upper body,” he commented of Halle Berry. “She’s got a huge trunk,” he astutely observed of Kim Kardashian.

“She had the best body. She had the best face. She had the best hair I’ve ever seen,” Trump said of Anna Nicole Smith.

When asked about Charlize Theron, Trump replied: “To be honest, I think Ivanka is much better-looking than her.”

But Trump later admitted in another interview, “I think my daughter looks down on me.”

Check out Factba.se archive of 15 hours of Trump’s appearances on the “Howard Stern Show” dating back to 1993 here.

 

 

Ivanka Trump used personal email for government business

(Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump delighted in leading his supporters to chant choruses of “lock her up,” his slogan marking his belief that Hillary Clinton should have been jailed over her use of a private email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state.

One wonders if President Trump feels like a hypocrite after today’s revelation, scooped by Newsweek, that presidential daughter Ivanka Trump used her personal email account to correspond with government officials after her father took office.

This report comes on the heels of last week’s scoop that Ivanka Trump’s husband and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also used private email for government business.

Today’s Newsweek report noted that Ivanka Trump emailed several government addresses in February 2017, after her father had taken office but before she became an “unpaid federal employee” in March 2017. Via Newsweek:

On February 28, [Ivanka] Trump—identifying herself as Ivanka Kushner—emailed Linda McMahon, the administrator of the United States Small Business Administration, from a personal domain. At the time, Trump was operating inside the White House in a non-official capacity. She wrote that she wanted McMahon’s agency and her staff to “explore opportunities to collaborate” on issues related to “women’s entrepreneurship.” She copied on the correspondence the government email addresses for two other federal employees, Dina Powell and Julie Radford.

Ivanka Trump may be in a legal gray zone regarding when, and under what circumstances, her work constituted “official” government business. After all, she was attending official White House meetings, including one with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, back in February — before she was officially an (unpaid) employee of the White House.

Removing the estate tax means keeping dynasties of wealth

(Credit: AP)

White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, said recently that “only morons pay the estate tax.”

I’m reminded of Donald Trump’s comment that he didn’t pay federal income taxes because he was “smart.” And billionaire Leona Helmsley’s “only the little people pay taxes.”

What Cohn was getting at is how easy it is nowadays for the wealthy to pass their fortunes to their children, tax-free.

The estate tax applies only to estates over $11 million per couple. And wealthy families stash away dollars above this into “dynastic” trust funds that escape additional taxes.

No wonder revenues from the estate tax have been dropping for years even as wealth has become concentrated in fewer hands. The tax now generates about $20 billion a year, which is less than 1 percent of federal revenues. And it applies to only about 2 out of every 1,000 people who die.

Now, Trump and Republican leaders are planning to cut or eliminate it altogether.

There’s another part of the tax code that Cohn might also have been referring to – capital gains taxes paid on the soaring values of the wealthy people’s stocks, bonds, mansions and works of art, when they sell them.

If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, the tax code allows their heirs to inherit them without paying any of these capital gains taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this loophole saves heirs $50 billion a year.

The estate and capital gains taxes were originally designed to prevent the growth of large dynasties in the U.S. and to reduce inequality.

They’ve been failing to do that. The richest 1 tenth of 1 percent of Americans now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Many of today’s super rich never did a day’s work in their lives. Six out of the ten wealthiest Americans alive today are heirs to prominent fortunes. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined.

Rich millennials will soon acquire even more of the nation’s wealth.

America is now on the cusp of the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth in history. As wealthy boomers expire, an estimated $30 trillion will go to their children over the next three decades.

Those children will be able to live off of the income these assets generate, and then leave the bulk of them – which in the intervening years will have grown far more valuable – to their own heirs, tax-free.

After a few generations of this, almost all of the nation’s wealth will be in the hands of a few thousand families.

Dynastic wealth runs counter to the ideal of America as a meritocracy. It makes a mockery of the notions that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them.

It puts economic power into the hands of a relative small number of people who have never worked, but whose investment decisions will have a significant effect on the nation’s future.

And it creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy that is antithetical to democracy.

The last time America faced anything comparable to the concentration of wealth we face now, occurred at the turn of the last century.

Then, President Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy.

Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916 and the capital gains tax in 1922.

But since then, both have been eroded. As the rich have accumulated greater wealth, they have also amassed more political power, and they’ve used that political power to reduce their taxes.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, helped create a movement against dynastic wealth. Trump and today’s congressional Republicans will not follow in his footsteps. I doubt even today’s Democrats would do so if they had a chance. Big money has become too powerful on both sides of the aisle.

But taxing big wealth is necessary if we’re ever to get our democracy back, and make our economy work for everyone rather than a privileged few.

Maybe Gary Cohn is correct that only morons pay the estate tax. But if he and his boss were smart and they cared about America’s future, they’d raises taxes on great wealth. Roosevelt’s fear of an American dynasty is more applicable today than ever before.

Irma and Harvey teach us that a military is quite important

(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had sent members of the state National Guard to devastated Houston, anxiously recalled them while putting in place emergency measures for his own state. A small flotilla of naval vessels, originally sent to waters off Texas, was similarly redirected to the Caribbean, while specialized combat units drawn from as far afield as Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island were rushed to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, members of the California National Guard were being mobilizedto fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record.

Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name — not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. “The firepower of the federal government” was being trained on Harvey, as William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), put itin a blunt expression of this warlike approach. But don’t expect any of the military officials involved in such efforts to identify climate change as the source of their new strategic orientation, not while Commander in Chief Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming or its role in heightening the intensity of major storms; not while he continues to stock his administration, top to bottom, with climate-change deniers.

Until Trump moved into the White House, however, senior military officers in the Pentagon were speaking openly of the threats posed to American security by climate change and how that phenomenon might alter the very nature of their work.  Though mum’s the word today, since the early years of this century military officials have regularly focused on and discussed such matters, issuing striking warnings about an impending increase in extreme weather events — hurricanes, incessant rainfalls, protracted heat waves, and droughts — and ways in which that would mean an ever-expanding domestic role for the military in both disaster response and planning for an extreme future.

That future, of course, is now.  Like other well-informed people, senior military officials are perfectly aware that it’s difficult to attribute any given storm, Harvey and Irma included, to human-caused climate change with 100% confidence. But they also know that hurricanes draw their fierce energy from the heat of tropical waters, and that global warming is raising the temperatures of those waters. It’s making storms like Harvey and Irma, when they do occur, ever more powerful and destructive.  “As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating,” the Department of Defense (DoD) bluntly explained in the Quadrennial Defense Review, a 2014 synopsis of defense policy. This, it added, “may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities” — just the sort of crisis we’ve been witnessing over these last weeks.

As this statement suggests, any increase in climate-related extreme events striking U.S. territory will inevitably lead to a commensurate rise in American military support for civilian agencies, diverting key assets — troops and equipment — from elsewhere. While the Pentagon can certainly devote substantial capabilities to a small number of short-term emergencies, the multiplication and prolongation of such events, now clearly beginning to occur, will require a substantial commitment of forces, which, in time, will mean a major reorientation of U.S. security policy for the climate change era.  This may not be something the White House is prepared to do today, but it may soon find itself with little choice, especially since it seems so intent on crippling all civilian governmental efforts related to climate change.

Mobilizing for Harvey and Irma

When it came to emergency operations in Texas and Florida, the media understandably put its spotlight on moving tales of rescue efforts by ordinary folks.  As a result, the military’s role in these operations was easy to miss, but it took place on a massive scale.  Every branch of the armed services — the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard — deployed significant contingents to the Houston area, in some cases sending along the sort of specialized equipment normally used in major combat operations.  The combined response represented an extraordinary commitment of military assets to that desperate, massively flooded region: tens of thousands of National Guard and active-duty troops, thousands of Humvees and other military vehicles, hundreds of helicopters, dozens of cargo planes, and an assortment of naval vessels.  And just as operations in Texas began to wind down, the Pentagon commenced a similarly vast mobilization for Hurricane Irma.

The military’s response to Harvey began with front-line troops: the National Guard, the U.S. Coast Guard, and units of the U.S. Northern Command(USNORTHCOM), the joint-service force responsible for homeland defense.  Texas Governor Greg Abbott mobilized the entire Texas National Guard, about 10,000 strong, and guard contingents were deployed from other states as well.  The Texas Guard came equipped with its own complement ofhelicopters, Humvees, and other all-terrain vehicles; the Coast Guard supplied 46 helicopters and dozens of shallow-water vessels, while USNORTHCOM provided 87 helicopters, four C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft, and 100 high-water vehicles.

Still more aircraft were provided by the Air Force, including seven C-17 cargo planes and, in a highly unusual move, an E-3A Sentry airborne warning and control system, or AWACS.  This super-sophisticated aircraft was originally designed to oversee air combat operations in Europe in the event of an all-out war with the Soviet Union.  Instead, this particular AWACS conducted air traffic control and surveillance around Houston, gathering data on flooded areas, and providing “situational awareness” to military units involved in the relief operation.

For its part, the Navy deployed two major surface vessels, the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship, and the USS Oak Hill, a dock landing ship. “These ships,” the Navy reported, “are capable of providing medical support, maritime civil affairs, maritime security, expeditionary logistic support, [and] medium and heavy lift air support.”  Accompanying them were several hundred Marines from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, along with their amphibious assault vehicles and a dozen or so helicopters and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

When Irma struck, the Pentagon ordered a similar mobilization of troops and equipment.  The Kearsarge and the Oak Hill, with their embarked Marines and helicopters, were redirected from Houston to waters off Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.  At the same time, the Navy dispatched a much larger flotilla, including the USS Abraham Lincoln (the aircraft carrier on which President George W. Bush had his infamous “mission accomplished” moment), the missile destroyer USS Farragut, the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima, and the amphibious transport dock USS New York.  Instead of its usual complement of fighter jets, the Abraham Lincoln set sail from its base in Norfolk, Virginia, with heavy-lift helicopters; the Iwo Jima and New York also carried a range of helicopters for relief operations.  Another amphibious vessel, the USS Wasp, was already off the Virgin Islands, providing supplies and evacuating those in need of emergency medical care.

This represents the sort of mobilization you would expect for a small war and is characteristic of how, in the past, the U.S. military has responded to major domestic disasters like hurricanes Katrina (2003) and Sandy (2012).  Such events were once rarities and so weren’t viewed as major impediments to the carrying out of the military’s “normal” function: fighting the nation’s foreign wars.  However, thanks to the way climate change is intensifying the weather, disasters of this magnitude are starting to occur more frequently and on an ever-larger scale.  As a result, the previously peripheral mission of disaster relief is threatening to become a primary one for an already overstretched Pentagon and, as top military officials are aware, the future only holds promise of far more of the same. Think of this as the new face of “war,” American-style.

Redefining homeland security

Even if no one else in Donald Trump’s Washington is ready or willing to deal with climate change, the U.S. military will be. It’s already long been preparing in its own fashion to take a pivotal role in responding to a world of recurring natural disasters. This, in turn, will mean that in the coming years climate change will increasingly dominate the domestic national security agenda (whether the Trump administration and those that follow like it, or even admit it) and such domestic emergencies will undoubtedly be militarized. In the process, the very concept of “homeland security” is destined to change.

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in November 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, its principal missionsincluded preventing further terrorist assaults on the country as well as dealing with drug smuggling, illegal immigration, and other similar issues.  Climate change never entered the equation.  Even though FEMA and the Coast Guard, major components of the DHS, have found themselves dealing with its increasingly disastrous effects, the department’s focus on immigration and terrorism has only intensified in the Trump era.  The president has ensured that this myopic outlook would reign supreme by, among other things, calling for a sharp increase in the number of Border Patrol agents (and greater infusions of funding for border control issues), while working to slash the Coast Guard’s budget.

He has also, of course, ensured that all parts of the government other than the military that might in any way deal with climate change were staffed and run by climate-change deniers. Only at the Department of Defense do senior officials still describe climate change in a more realistic fashion, as an observable reality that will pose new dangers to America’s security and create new operational nightmares.

“Speaking as a soldier,” said former Army Chief of Staff General Gordon Sullivan back in 2007, “we never have 100 percent certainty. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield.” The same, he continued, was true regarding climate change. “If we keep on with business as usual, we will reach a point where some of the worst effects are inevitable.”

General Gordon’s comments were incorporated into a highly influential report that year on “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” released by the CNA Corporation (formerly the Center for Naval Analyses), a federally-funded research center that aids the Navy and Marine Corps.  That report focused with particular concern on the risk of an increase in overseas conflicts from the impact of climate change, particularly if prolonged droughts and growing food scarcity inflame existing ethnic and religious schisms in a range of poor countries (mainly in Africa and the Greater Middle East).  “The U.S. may be drawn more frequently into these situations, either alone or with allies, to help provide stability before conditions worsen and are exploited by extremists,” the report warned.

The same climate effects that could trigger a more embattled world would also, military analysts came to believe, produce increased risk for the United States itself and so generate a greater need for Pentagon involvement at home.  “Extreme weather events and natural disasters, as the U.S. experienced with Hurricane Katrina, may lead to increased missions for a number of U.S. agencies, including state and local governments, the Department of Homeland Security, and our already stretched military,” that CNA report noted a decade ago.  In a prescient comment, it also warned that this could lead to clashing strategic priorities.  “If the frequency of natural disasters increases with climate change, future military and political leaders may face hard choices about where and when to engage.”

With this in mind, a group of officers — active duty as well as retired — endeavored to persuade top officials to make climate change a central focus of strategic planning.  (Their collective efforts can be sampled at the website maintained by the Center for Climate and Security, an advocacy group former officers established to promote awareness of the issue.)  These efforts achieved a major breakthrough in 2014, when the Pentagon released a Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, a blueprint for Pentagon-wide remedial action in a warming world.  Such an effort was needed, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel explained in his foreword, because climate change was sure to generate more conflict abroad and more emergencies at home. “The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters.” As a consequence, the DoD and its component organizations must begin “integrating climate change considerations into our plans, operations, and training.”

For a time, the armed forces embraced Hagel’s instructions, taking steps to reduce their carbon emissions and better prepare for just such a future.  The various regional combatant commands like NORTHCOM and the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which covers Latin America and the Caribbean, responded with increased training and other preparations for extreme storm events and for sea-level rise in their areas of responsibility, a change reflected in a 2015 DoD report to Congress, “National Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate.”

In the past, such efforts, only beginning, were never allowed to distract the services from their main presumed function: contesting America’s foreign adversaries. Now, as with Harvey and Irma, the military’s domestic responsibilities are on the rise just as the president is assigning them yet more (or more intensified) missions in the never-ending war on terror, including a stepped-up presence in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq and Syria, more intense air campaigns across the Greater Middle East, and a heightened pace of military maneuvers near North Korea.  As shown by a series of deadly collisions involving Navy vessels in the Pacific, this higher tempo of operations has already stretched the military to or even beyond its limits in various conflicts it has proven incapable either of winning or ending.  The result: overworked crews and overstretched resources. With the massive response to Harvey and Irma, it is being pushed yet further.

In short, as the planet continues to heat up, the armed forces and the nation at large face an existential crisis.  On the one hand, President Trump and his generals, including Secretary of Defense Mattis, are once again fully focused on the increased use of military force (and the threat of more of the same) abroad. This includes not only the wars against the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their numerous spin-offs, but also preparations for possible military strikes on North Korea and perhaps even, at some future date, on Chinese installations in the South China Sea.

As global warming intensifies, instability and chaos, including massive flows of refugees, will only grow, undoubtedly inviting yet more military interventions abroad.  Meanwhile, climate change will increase chaos and devastation at home and there, too, it seems that Washington will often see the military as America’s sole reliable response mechanism.  As a result, decisions will have to be made about ending American conflicts abroad and refocusing domestically or that overstretched military will simply swallow even more of the government’s dollars and gain yet more power in Washington.  And yet, whatever else the armed forces might (or might not) be capable of, they are not capable of defeating climate change, which, at its essence, is anything but a military problem. While there are potential solutions to it, those, too, are in no way military.

Despite their reluctance to speak publicly about such environmental matters right now, top officials in the Pentagon are painfully aware of the problem at hand.  They know that global warming, as it progresses, will generate new challenges at home and abroad, potentially stretching their capabilities to the breaking point and leaving this country ever more exposed to the ravages of climate change without offering any solutions to the problem.  As a result, the generals face a fundamental choice.  They can continue to self-censor their sophisticated analysis of climate change and its likely effects, and so remain complicit with the administration’s headlong rush into national catastrophe, or they can speak out forcefully on its threat to homeland security, and the resulting need for a new, largely non-military strategic posture that puts climate action at the top of the nation’s priorities.

Yes, the government can steal your stuff

(Credit: Getty/amphotora)

Editor’s note: Should someone wearing a badge have the power to relieve a suspected drug dealer of his Maserati on the spot without giving him an opportunity to flee or liquidate and launder his assets? Known as civil asset forfeiture, this practice might sound like a wise policy.

But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress are challenging the Trump administration’s embrace of the arrangement, which strips billions of dollars a year from Americans – who often have not been charged with a crime. Law professor and criminal justice expert Nora V. Demleitner explains how this procedure works and why it irks conservatives and progressives alike.

What is civil asset forfeiture?

Civil asset forfeiture laws let authorities, such as federal marshals or local sheriffs, seize property — cash, a house, a car, a cellphone — that they suspect is involved in criminal activity. Seizures run the gamut from 12 cans of peas to multi-million-dollar yachts.

The federal government has confiscated assets worth a total of about US$28 billion this way over the past decade.

In contrast to criminal forfeiture, which requires that the property owner be convicted of a crime beforehand, the civil variety doesn’t even require that the suspect be charged with breaking the law.

Three Justice Department agencies — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — do most of this confiscating. Most states also permit state and local police to take personal property from people who haven’t been charged with a crime.

Even when there are restrictions on when and how local and state authorities can seize property, they can circumvent those limits if the federal government “adopts” the impounded assets.

For a federal agency to do so requires the alleged misconduct to violate federal law. Local agencies get up to 80 percent of the shared proceeds back, with the federal agency keeping the rest. The divvying-up is known officially as “equitable sharing.” Crime victims may also get a cut from the proceeds of civil forfeiture.

In most years state and local police received more money under equitable sharing than crime victims.

Can people get their stuff back?

Technically, the government must demonstrate that the property has something to do with a crime. In reality, property owners must prove that they legally acquired their confiscated belongings to get them returned. This means the burden is on the owners to dispute these seizures in court. Court challenges tend to arise only when something of great value, like a house, is at stake.

Unless an owner challenges a seizure and effectively proves his innocence in court, the agency that took the property is free to keep the proceeds once the assets are liquidated.

Many low-income people don’t use bank accounts or credit cards. They carry cash instead. If they lose their life savings at a traffic stop, they can’t afford to hire a lawyer to dispute the seizure, the Center for American Progress — a liberal think tank — has observed.

And disputing civil forfeitures is hard everywhere. Some states require a cash bond, others add a penalty payment should the owner lose. The process is expensive, time-consuming and lengthy, deterring even innocent owners.

There’s no comprehensive data regarding how many people get their stuff back. But over the 10 years ending in September 2016, about 8 percent of all property owners who had cash seized from them by the DEA had it returned, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Who opposes the practice?

Many conservatives and progressives hate civil asset forfeiture. Politicians on the left and right have voiced concerns about the incentives this practice gives law enforcement to abuse its authority.

Critics across the political spectrum also question whether different aspects of civil asset forfeiture violate the Fifth Amendment, which says the government can’t deprive anyone of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” or is unconstitutional for other reasons.

Until now, the Supreme Court and lower courts, however, have consistently upheld civil asset forfeitures when ruling on challenges launched under the Fifth Amendment. The same goes for challenges under the Eighth Amendment, which bars “excessive fines” and “cruel and unusual punishments,” and the 14th Amendment, which forbids depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Some concerns resonate more strongly for different ideological camps. Conservatives object most strongly about how this impounding undermines property rights.

Liberals are outraged that the poor and communities of color are often disproportionately targeted, often causing great hardship to people accused of minor wrongdoing.

Another common critique: The practice encourages overpolicing intended to pad police budgets or accommodate tax cuts. Revenue from civil asset forfeitures can amount to a substantial percentage of local police budgets, according to the Drug Policy Alliance study in California. This kind of policing can undermine police-community relations.

What is the scale of this confiscation?

The federal revenue raised through this practice, which emerged in the 1970s, mushroomed from US$94 million in 1986 to $4.5 billion by 2014, according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian public interest law firm that litigates property rights cases and researches civil forfeiture.

The Justice Department says it has returned more than $4 billion in forfeited funds to crime victims since 2000, while handing state and local law enforcement entities about $6 billion through “equitable sharing.”

Only 14 states and Washington, D.C. publish forfeiture data. But the Institute for Justice estimates that in 2012 state police and sheriffs in 26 states and D.C. reaped about $252 million from civil asset forfeitures.

Local authorities also seize assets this way, but no one tracks that data.

What did the Obama and Trump administrations do?

Under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, the Obama-era Justice Department determined that civil asset forfeiture was more about making money than public safety. It then ended the most disputed aspects of asset adoption and sharing in 2015, exempting joint state-federal task forces.

In July of this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration was resurrecting equitable sharing. Following bipartisan backlash, he publicly defended it.

“I love that program,” Sessions said recently. “We had so much fun doing that, taking drug dealers’ money and passing it out to people trying to put drug dealers in jail. What’s wrong with that?”

How are Congress and the states responding?

Less than two weeks later, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted for an amendment that would restrict civil asset forfeiture adoption.

It’s likely that the Senate could follow suit. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Sessions a memo about how the federal funds obtained from seizures were wasted and misused. In some cases, Grassley wrote, the government provided “misleading details about some of these expenditures.”

State governments have also tried to discourage this kind of confiscation. New Mexico and Nebraska have banned civil forfeiture. Michigan made it easier to challenge these seizures. California limited equitable sharing, and other states are also considering reforms.

In a forthcoming Georgia Law Review article, I gave examples of other ways to keep departments funded, such as increasing fines and fees.

Unless the police pursue some alternatives, funding woes will continue to contribute to abusive practices that fall most heavily on those who can the least afford them: the poor and communities of color.

Nora V. Demleitner, Professor of Criminal and Comparative Law, Washington and Lee University

California rewrites the GOP’s climate playbook

(Credit: AP Photo/John Antczak)

For the past decade, Democrats hoping to pass a big climate law have played Charlie Brown to the Republicans’ Lucy. Despite the GOP making it clear it has no intention of holding the ball for a global warming kick, the left routinely convinces itself that their counterparts will kneel into position once it gets a running start.

In 2010, Senate Democrats appealed to Republicans to pass federal climate legislation, only to see almost every conservative bail on them. Since then we’ve seen the old pattern repeat in statehouses and ballot boxes around the country: Democrats ask the GOP to hold the ball then go flying head-over-heels.

But then in July, a cadre of eight California Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats and pass that state’s cap-and-trade law.

The partisan space-time continuum shuddered — and this was before back-to-back superstorms, Harvey and Irma, buffeted the United States. Had the well-worn GOP force field stymieing progress on climate change begun to crack at the far-western edge?

While an enraged right planned the ouster of its leader, Chad Mayes, California Governor Jerry Brown praised him and the others who’d broken ranks. As did former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wrote: “I hope Republicans around the country can learn from the example.”

In statehouse testimony, speeches that would typically build to Republicans stridently aligning against carbon pricing went off script. “First thing I want to make clear, I personally think cap and trade sucks,” California Assemblyman Devon Mathis said at the beginning of a short speech. As he spoke, he came close to tears while urging his compatriots to vote “yes” for the program he’d just disparaged. So what the heck was happening there?

Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale who studies the way tribal identity affects how people think, has long argued that Republicans will become more willing to engage on climate change as constituents begin asking them to bring home money to adapt to a warming world. “The sooner the issue becomes one about dollars and cents for the districts,” he says, “the more quickly the logjam we have now will break loose.”

For years, journalists and activists have said that wholesale Republican opposition to climate action can’t last forever. Now, with millions of Americans soaked in floodwaters from never-before-seen storms, that ideological logjam shows signs of breaking up. Case in point, the ol’ maverick John McCain: The one-time cap-and-trade supporter is suddenly, once again, looking for “common sense solutions” to climate change. And the Trump administration might even be flip-flopping on its decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement. (Though we advise against holding your breath.)

Moving forward, there are three primary paths for Republicans to choose from as they debate climate legislation — three paths that three California GOP legislators traveled as they mulled cap and trade. The paths each legislator picks, combined with the reaction of their constituents, will determine how quickly the nation will react to a climate change-effected future that appears to already be here.

GOP option 1: Dig in

So far, most Republicans have bet that the political costs they will pay for engaging on climate policy are worse than the costs their constituents will pay as a result of climate change. This could shift, as Kahan suggests, if the damages from coastal erosion, drought, and flooding begin to spiral over the next decade or so. And any more Harveys, the bill from which is estimated at just under $200 billion to the U.S. economy, should hasten that move.

But for now, GOP politicians are still calling climate action prohibitively expensive. That’s the reason California Assemblymember Melissa Melendez gave for opposing cap and trade, asserting that her constituents didn’t feel climate change was imminent. “While they care about the environment and they want to protect Mother Earth, they do not feel,” she explained, “that Southern California will burst into flames if we don’t pass this bill.”

Texas Congressman Lamar Smith, head of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, went a step further. He went on what Buzzfeed called a “secret tour of the melting Arctic.” When he got back, he wrote that rising greenhouse gas levels were “indisputable.” Then he added, “The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched.”

But the classic Republican gambit is to simply ignore the issue. And some politicians go to absurd lengths to avoid addressing the environmental elephant in the room. That seems to be Florida Governor Rick Scott’s preferred move. He has censored the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” in state agencies, forcing public servants into comical verbal gymnastics during legislative hearings. Even after Hurricane Irma ravaged his state, including compromising infrastructure and flooding parts of 22 counties with sewage, Scott saw no reason to change course.

“Clearly our environment changes all the time, and whether that’s cycles we’re going through or whether that’s man-made, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one it is,” Scott said last week, according to a Politico report.

The reinforcement of head-in-the-sand views for Republicans who want to hold the line comes from the top. The Trump administration is starting to employ Scott-style tactics in directives issued by its Cabinet departments.

GOP option 2: Strike a deal

Bargaining seems like an obvious choice for Republicans. By making a deal on the California bill, Republicans came away with spoils: They got $260 million a year in tax cuts for business and agriculture. They got another tax — a landowner fee to fund wildfire prevention — eliminated completely. And they got a market-based, industry-friendly version of cap and trade that the Chamber of Commerce and agricultural interests supported.

What did Republicans give in return? Not much. The Democratic majority in the State Assembly had already passed a law that committed the state to squeezing carbon out of its economy. As Devon Mathis said, this bill was an “opportunity to make something many of us think is horrible a little bit better.” By helping it to pass with the two-thirds majority that Governor Brown wanted, Republicans helped protect the legislation from legal challenges — including from groups that would want it to be more harsh on fossil fuel companies.

But there’s a reason Republicans, despite being the party of Trump, don’t like deal-making: It’s dangerous. The California GOP immediately booted Chad Mayes from his perch as the party’s Assembly leader for working with Brown. Mayes’ fate recalls what happened to South Carolina Congressman Bob Inglis when he voted for climate legislation in 2012: He lost his seat to a primary challenger.

For his constituents, Inglis talking about climate change was like dressing in the opposing team’s jersey. “I think his constituents saw that as a sign that he really didn’t share their values,” Kahan says.

That same feeling of betrayal coursed through an agricultural exhibition center where Mathis held a town hall meeting. “You are supposed to stand up for those who voted for you,” said one speaker, the Valley Voice reported. Another told Mathis he’d “stamped a ‘D’” at the end of his name.

Mathis defended himself by pointing out that pure tribal loyalty isn’t politically effective: “If you want to rebuild the Republican Party, then you need to be more than the party of ‘no,’” he told his constituents. By being at the table, he reminded them, the GOP was able to move cap and trade to the right.

Still, almost every idea dreamed up for climate change mitigation requires some centralized regulation and introduces new spending — issues conservatives tend to see in black-and-white absolutes. “For Republicans to say, ‘We voted for this because it could be worse,’ is like saying, ‘It’s better to drown in 10 feet of water than 20 feet of water,’” former California Republican Assemblyman Dan Logue tells me.

GOP option 3: Embrace change

Rocky Chávez is a bull-necked marine colonel who, though he’s a Republican, feels no need to toe the party line on climate change. The GOP can’t go on protecting people from the truth for the sake of cohesion, he told me.

“It’s like Elvis — Elvis is not alive anymore, people, I got news for you,” he says, equating his party’s collective climate denial to the outlandish headlines seen on National Enquirer covers. “We did go to the moon, those aren’t fake pictures taken out in the Arizona desert. There is no Sasquatch; he’s not running around in the forests of California.”

Chávez has previously come under fire for his liberal positions on gay marriage and immigration. But all the sound and fury has cost him little, politically. After all, he represents a coastal district near San Diego that narrowly favored Clinton in 2016.

“People are going to say, ‘Oh, he’s that idiot who doesn’t hate gays, doesn’t hate immigrants, and actually wants to protect the environment,’” Chávez says. “You know what? I’m OK.”

There are other California Republicans, he adds, who want to take a more proactive position on climate change. But they are scared to stick their necks out on issues like cap and trade. “I can tell you that it was much more than the seven who voted for it who believed in it,” Chávez tells me.

Tom Del Beccaro, former chair of the California Republicans, says it doesn’t make sense for most GOP politicians to follow Chávez’s example. “A party does not gain any voters by adopting the position of the opposition,” he explains. “There’s no reason for a Democrat voter to vote for a Democrat-light.”

Because Republicans haven’t defined their own path on climate change, they can’t use the issue to hold onto districts like Chávez’s when incumbents bow out. Case in point, U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen from South Florida, who has advocated for a climate-mitigation strategy. She isn’t running for reelection in 2018, and a Democrat is poised to take over her seat.

Similarly, when California first passed its climate change law in 2006, just one Republican voted for it: Shirley Horton, a politician from a relatively liberal district that flipped to blue as soon as she termed out of office.

So you can see Beccaro’s point. Republicans have to provide voters a clear choice, he says: “They have to pick some issue where things are breaking down, where the majority party isn’t providing a solution, and offer a plausible alternative.”

Climate change could actually be such an issue, Beccaro says. Republicans could, for instance, convince voters that they could combat it more affordably. It’s a sentiment echoed by Bob Inglis, who believes conservatives have the best tools needed to address climate change. Republican constituents, he explains, just need to hear their leaders discuss climate policy in a language they understand and respond to.

“What we deeply believe as conservatives is that free enterprise is far more creative than government mandates — and if you simply level the playing field by eliminating all the subsidies for all the fuels, then the free enterprise system can deliver the solutions,” he says. “That includes the biggest subsidy of them all, which is being able to belch and burn into the trash dump of the sky without accountability for the health and climate damages you are causing.”

* * *

According to Inglis, Republicans would be foolish if they wait to act until sentiments on climate change shift. “Leadership is defined as helping to see what is coming,” he says. “Sure you risk your seat by leading, but isn’t that what it’s all about?”

His former colleagues may already be taking his advice. Politicians like Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo — a Grist 50 member — are starting to address climate change by introducing bills to protect against floods and voting to ensure the Defense Department keeps adapting to a warming world. Curbelo, who last week connected Irma and Harvey to climate change, is part of a new bipartisan climate caucus in Washington with 28 Republican members.

#Climate Caucus’ @RepCurbelo on #Irma: “Climate change without question contributes to strength and factors that lead to these events.” pic.twitter.com/gyCQEJoMiO

— CitizensClimateLobby (@citizensclimate) September 13, 2017

And in California, though Mayes was ousted from his leadership position, his replacement praised him for the cap-and-trade negotiations. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, probably the most popular Republican in the state, recently said it was time for his party “to stop ignoring climate change.”

These are perhaps the first signs of evolution. As Politico writer David Siders put it recently, “If the Republican Party is undergoing a shift on climate, it is at its earliest, most incremental stage.” The California GOP may be furthest into that transformation thanks to plummeting Republican registration in the increasingly diverse state.

“Today just 26 percent of California voters are registered Republicans,” reports Laurel Rosenhall at CALmatters. And “7 percent of state Republicans are considering abandoning the party because of its stance on climate change.”

California conservative voters could decide how far the GOP will tack nationally, in part by either rewarding the bargainers and change agents for bringing home the bacon or throwing them out of office for breaking ranks.

Eight Republicans isn’t a big number. But it’s a fifth of the GOP caucus in the California state legislature. In the past, climate bills might pick up one or two maverick conservatives — one or two drops of water seeping through an imperceptible crack in the dam. This time it was the Republican leader of the Assembly, plus seven others. The drops have become a trickle.

Due to global warming, changing Kodiak bear diets could wreak havoc for all

(Credit: Getty)

After several years of studying brown bear ecology on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, I grew used to walking up streams into scenes of carnage. Where bears had killed and eaten spawning sockeye salmon, streambeds were littered with fish heads, jaws and whole carcasses, and plants on the stream banks were flattened. But at the peak of the stream spawning run in 2014, I was puzzled to find no bears or salmon parts. Salmon were dying naturally after spawning and piling up in streams, intact.

I’ve spent the last three years trying to solve this ecological puzzle. After extensive field and lab work along with researchers from Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, Flathead Lake Biological Station and Oregon State University, we arrived at a fascinating conclusion.

In warm years, another favorite bear food — red elderberries — ripened early enough to overlap with the salmon season. This forced bears to choose between the foods. Surprisingly, almost all bears opted for berries over salmon. This choice has likely altered food webs, and will become increasingly common with expected climate warming.

Our team was struck by the bears’ seemingly counterintuitive switch. Why would bears stop eating a high-protein food loaded with energy? Quickly, though, we realized that our work was an example of a more global concern: What happens when climate change alters nature’s schedule?

Timing is everything

Among the most apparent consequences of a warming climate are shifts in phenology — the timing of key biological events like hatching, blooming or migration. Researchers have found that timing is changing in all types of organisms, but some species are more sensitive to temperature changes than others.

As a result, nature’s timetable is slowly becoming scrambled. Some species that have evolved together, such as songbirds and caterpillars, are drifting apart in time. Others, such as elderberries and salmon, are drifting together. Species which once were temporally separated are now able to interact, with unpredictable results.

In a typical year on Kodiak Island, the bears we study eat spawning salmon in small streams during midsummer, shift to berries in late summer and finally switch back to catching salmon in rivers and lakes in fall. This pattern provides bears with a continuous supply of high-quality foods. The bears can be in only one place at a time and can eat only so much each day, so they benefit when their resources are spread through time. When their key foods overlap in time, they must choose which to eat and which to skip.

Tracking bear diets

Each year, a team including myself, Kodiak Refuge biologist Bill Leacock, field technician Caroline Deacy and several volunteer crew members contended with swarming insects, rain and thick brush to collect data on salmon runs, berry crop timing and bear behavior. We worked out of a remote field camp accessible only by float plane, without phone reception or internet access.

We developed multiple data sources on bear feeding habits, each of which filled in part of the ecological puzzle. First we placed 12 time-lapse cameras along streams to see how bears responded to salmon runs before and after berry ripening. Next we used GPS collars to track female bears before, during and after the red elderberry season.

To make sure that we were not just witnessing a local phenomenon, we analyzed data collected during aerial surveys of bears fishing at streams and rivers across southwestern Kodiak Island. Finally, we conducted a scat survey to make sure that bears were eating elderberries instead of some mystery food. Together, our data showed that bears switched to eating red elderberries even when streams were packed with spawning salmon!

Why swap fish for fruit?

Why this happened is still an open question, but evidence suggests the bears were responding to protein content in their food choices. In captivity, bears offered a buffet of foods will not simply choose the most energy-rich option – that is, food that is 100 percent fat. Instead, they select a balanced diet that includes a moderate amount of protein, or around 17 percent of their total caloric intake. We don’t know exactly why 17 percent is a magic number, but it maximizes the rate at which bears gain weight.

Spawning salmon have burned through their fat stores, and their bodies are about 80 percent protein. Most common berries, such as blueberries, contain very little protein, but red elderberries are about 13 percent protein, so they help bears fatten quickly.

The main worry with respect to bears’ health is that increasing overlap between foods will force bears to choose between them. This would be like having to choose between eating breakfast and lunch, both served at 8:00 a.m., and then going hungry until dinner. Luckily Kodiak is a bear paradise with many suitable foods, including genetically diverse salmon populations that spawn at different times in different habitats. Bears that skip early runs of stream-spawning salmon can still catch salmon that spawn later on rivers and beaches. Diverse salmon runs ensure that bears will always have something to eat.

However, in the northwest United States, once-robust salmon populations are now dominated by homogeneous hatchery populations. Here, increasing overlap between foods would likely have a larger impact on predators such as bears. The key lesson for conservation is that disruptions caused by climate change will be less harmful to the species we care about if we keep nature complex and intact.

Impacts beyond streams

What about the rest of Kodiak’s ecosystem? Salmon accumulate nutrients in their bodies as they grow in the ocean and then deliver these nutrients into fresh water when they head upstream to spawn. When they die after spawning, their bodies provide fertilizer for plants and tasty snacks for scavengers.

Bears spread the bounty onto land by carrying fish from streams and leaving partially consumed carcasses far from water. This makes salmon available to smaller animals that cannot capture fish themselves, and fertilizes plants far from spawning streams. When bears ditch salmon, this carcass distribution stops, potentially harming species that depend on bear-caught salmon.

Rescheduling nature

When people think about how wildlife is impacted by a warmer world, they often think of overheating animals or polar bears standing on melting icebergs. We discovered a more subtle effect of warmer temperatures: By rescheduling bears’ feeding options, climate change dramatically altered bear behavior, halting an iconic predator-prey interaction. Scientists, naturalists and even gardeners are seeing changes in biological timing throughout nature, so we should expect to witness more surprising species interactions in the future.

Why your kid should read banned books

(Credit: tunart via iStock)

What do “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Native Son,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “The Adventures of Captain Underpants” have in common? At one time or other, someone has tried to ban them from classrooms and public or school libraries.

The American Library Association (ALA) — champions of free access to books and information — launched Banned Books Week in 1982 to celebrate the freedom to read. Libraries, bookstores, publishers, and teachers across the country use the week — this year it’s Sept. 24-30 — to highlight great books that people have banned and to spark a discussion about censorship. At Common Sense Media, we think reading banned books offers families a chance to celebrate reading and promote open access to ideas, both of which are keys to raising a lifelong reader.

Why do people ban books? Often it’s for religious or political reasons: An idea, a scene, or a character in the book offends their religion, sense of morality, or political view. Some folks feel they need to protect children from the cursing, morally offensive behavior, or racially insensitive language in a book. Or they think a book’s content is too violent or too sexual.

The American Revolution novel “The Red Badge of Courage” has been banned for its graphic depictions of war. The edgy teen best-seller “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (Stephen Chbosky) has been banned for its descriptions of sexual behavior and alcohol and drug use. Profanity and an explicit scene featuring oral sex got “Looking for Alaska” (John Green) on the banned list. And Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” has been banned for religious irreverence, discussion of masturbation, and offensive language, including the N-word.

Who’s challenging these books? Parents, school board members, individuals, groups — yet what’s considered offensive may depend on the era or specific community. As the ALA argues, these challenges pose a threat to freedom of speech and choice — freedoms that Americans hold dear and are worth standing up for.

Here are five good reasons for kids to read banned books:

Today’s edgy is tomorrow’s classic. Original work pushes boundaries in topic, theme, plot, and structure. What’s shocking today may be assigned in English class five or 10 years from now if it has true literary merit. “The Great Gatsby” is high school staple today, but was shocking when its gin-soaked pages were published in 1925.

There’s more to a book than the swear words in it. Many books have been banned for language that your kid has encountered before or will soon. Even potty humor (like in “Captain Underpants”) has caused people to call for a ban. A character’s language may add realism to the story, or it may seem gratuitous or distracting — your kid can evaluate.

Kids crave relatable books. Banned books often deal with subjects that are realistic, timely, and topical. Young people may find a character going through exactly what they are, which makes it a powerful reading experience and helps the reader sort out thorny issues like grief, divorce, sexual assault, bullying, prejudice, and sexual identity. The compelling teen rebels story “The Outsiders” has been banned, yet many middle schoolers cite it as the book that turned them into a reader.

Controversial books are a type of virtual reality. Exploring complex topics like sexuality, violence, substance abuse, suicide, and racism through well-drawn characters lets kids contemplate morality and vast aspects of the human condition, build empathy for people unlike themselves, and possibly discover a mirror of their own experience. “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” is an eye-opening story of an African-American family facing racism in 1930s Mississippi, yet it’s been banned for having racial slurs.

They’ll kick off a conversation. What did people find so disturbing in a book that they wanted to ban it, and to what extent was it a product of its time or did it defy social norms of its era? For example, “Harry Potter” was banned by people who felt it promoted magic. Reading a challenged book is a learning experience and can help your kids define their own values and opinions of its content.