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12 February 22
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The idea of history keeps pulling at me.
For one thing, I have seen much of what is now considered “the past” unfold before my eyes. And that makes particularly resonant the fact that our historical reckonings are one of the biggest battle lines of our current time.
The stories we tell of our past, to ourselves, each other, and especially our children, are the seeds that will grow to shape our future. This is not unique to our time or place. Wrestling over who controls historical narratives, and thus controls what a society views as its origins and values, can be found across the ages and around the world.
But in this vulnerable moment in our country, at a time of the “Big Lie” and schisms over how we view the fundamental definition of our nation and its fate, we can see the acrid smoke of the cultural battlefields hovering overhead.
One particularly egregious example comes out of Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis has tethered his political fortune to strumming the cacophonic notes of white grievance. A bill being moved through the Florida legislature would, according to the Washington Post, give “parents and state regulators considerable authority to ban books or teachings that cause discomfort, including carefully reviewing lessons about ‘the Civil War, the expansion of the United States … the world wars, and the civil rights movement.’”
The number of outrages this provokes are almost too many to count. And it points to a very dangerous reality that has existed for a long time, one that has only metastasized in the Age of Trump - a misplaced sense of white victimhood. It’s not just Florida. This struggle for the narrative of our nation is happening all across the country. It’s a big reason why reactionary candidates are trying to take over school boards.
The imbalance of feelings in this law over who might be hurt by the way we teach our history is stunning. Nevermind, apparently, the amount of “discomfort” non-white Americans have been subjected to over the course of this nation’s history. To deny telling the hidden stories of their central part in the building of this nation, or the stories of slavery, Jim Crow, the extermination of Native Americans, Japanese internment camps, the Chinese Exclusion Act, redlining, and all the other governmental and social actions that were meant to make sure those who were non-white didn’t feel welcome, often violently so, is to deny the truth about the United States. And let’s be clear, whitewashing our history hurts everyone because it is an attack on the truth, and the truth must be the basis for the foundations upon which we build our nation going forward.
For a political movement that likes to boast about how tough its members are, how Democrats and liberals are all a bunch of “snowflakes,” this represents a blizzard of “snowflakery.” But of course the intent is obvious. It’s a natural outgrowth of the misrepresentation and demonization of Critical Race Theory, or the attacks on “woke” culture.
This is not about the past as much as it’s about the future. It’s about a group that has had an unquestioned hold on power due to privilege, obfuscation, and being the unchallenged majority in a nation that is undergoing rapid change.
There are very ugly chapters in American history. Yes, they can cause “discomfort,” and they should. But they can be a path to pride. Even the founders believed in the pursuit of “a more perfect union.” At least that’s how I see it. Look at what this nation was, the chasm between its ideals and its truth, and look at how it has been able to evolve during its short history. We cannot be content with where we are, of course, not by a long shot, but we can take some comfort in how far we have come and what that means about where we can go.
This is a narrative where we can show that progress is possible, and that progress is not the purview of any one segment of society. Benefit cannot be seen as a zero-sum game. Our nation is stronger, more dynamic, and more resilient when it is more just and more equal.
But this view of American history, where we acknowledge openly our faults and how many of the problems of the present can be traced to the actions taken in the past, is a threat to those whose narrow self-interests are bolstered by telling myths. And it is a reminder that we never have fully contended with our past.
History is always open to debate. There is no view of the past that is completely unbiased from the present, or who is doing the interpretation. It is healthy to have disagreement, to seek new perspectives. But that cannot be an excuse for ignoring what is known and documented.
Those who seek to keep our history classes the realm of comfortable fairy tales rather than hard truths are not trying to wrestle with the past in good faith. They don’t care about what really happened. They don’t want to know about it. And they don’t want anyone else to know about it either.
What we are seeing, however, is also a broad recognition by millions of Americans of the dangerous game these people are playing. We are also getting a much fuller accounting of our history than most of us received in school. We should remember that those who are working to suppress this trend towards more context and knowledge are threatened by it. Theirs is an act of fear masked as bravado. That doesn’t make it any less perilous, but it does mean that the more truth that is out there the more they will lose control of the narrative they seek to force upon the country.
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
A heavily redacted letter from Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M) revealed Thursday that the CIA has been doing some sort of bulk collection of Americans' data. We don't really know the details — those parts are blacked out in the redactions, natch — but it was enough to alarm the senators, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "These documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans," they said in a joint statement.
This is an old problem, but one that was supposed to have been reined in. It's been nearly a decade since whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency had bulk collected records of Americans' phone calls and emails. Federal courts later found the practice was illegal, and Congress tightened up the laws to end the snooping. (Here's a good Twitter thread detailing the state of the law.)
The CIA, however, literally plays by a different set of rules. The agency's program exists "entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight," Wyden and Heinrich wrote.
That's an obvious problem. Even if bulk collection is somehow justifiable — and that's a big "if" — it's dangerous in a democratic society to let an agency like the CIA hoover up Americans' personal info without some form of outside scrutiny. That power is easily abused, and indeed the data has been misused in the past: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found in 2018 the FBI had regularly used NSA information to check up on potential informants who weren't suspected of criminal or national security violations. The FBI blamed the transgression on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how the data could be legally used. Funny how that happens.
Snowden, still living in exile after fleeing the United States when he turned whistleblower, had something to say about all of this. "You are about to witness an enormous political debate in which the spy agencies and their apologists on TV tell you this is normal and okay and the CIA doesn't know how many Americans are in the database or even how they got there anyway," he tweeted on Thursday. "But it is not okay."
He's right. It's a dangerous world, sure, but Americans have every right to be left alone unless there's a reasonable, evidence-based belief they're up to no good. Mass surveillance generally fails that test. But because the details are so fuzzy, it might be difficult for the new revelations to make a splash. That would be unfortunate. When it comes to snooping, the government keeps showing us it doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Demonstrators hold up signs in solidarity with Amir Locke, who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police's SWAT team. (photo: Renée Jones Schneider/Star Tribune)
“A no-knock warrant enables officers to execute the warrant more safely by allowing officers to make entry into the apartment without alerting the suspects inside,” Officer Daniel Zebro wrote in the warrant application. “This will not only increase officer safety, but it will also decrease the risk for injuries to the suspects and other residents nearby.”
“Officer safety” is the same reason Derek Chauvin claimed he had no choice but to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.
And so even after some of the largest civil rights protests in U.S. history, after steadfast promises from politicians for change, in the same city where George Floyd was killed, another man is now dead — and for the same reason.
It isn’t at all clear that no-knock raids are actually safer for police than other tactics. The police seem to think so. But breaking into a home while its occupants are sleeping creates violence and confrontation where there was none. It elicits a primitive flight or fight response, and if you’re in your own home, flight isn’t an option. By design, these tactics also disorient and confuse the people inside. They offer very little margin for error.
The officer safety justification would also seem to be belied by the fact that, according to a member of the Minneapolis City Council, sister city St. Paul hasn’t executed a no-knock warrant since 2016. Over the same period, Minneapolis police have executed more than 800.
But even if it were true that no-knock raids offer additional protection for police, that protection comes with a cost: the rights and safety of the people whose homes they’re raiding. If the suspect is in the process of committing a violent crime, the trade-off is justifiable. If it’s someone suspected of a violent crime and there’s reason to think someone is in imminent danger, the trade-off is at least arguable. But when police are searching for evidence of nonviolent drug crimes, as is the case in the overwhelming majority of these raids, it isn’t a close call at all.
We now know that the police didn’t raid the apartment where Locke was sleeping because they believed the murder suspect they were looking for was inside. The police knew the suspect had a key fob for the apartment building and hadn’t used it since January. Instead, they raided the apartment to find evidence. They raided two other apartments for the same reason. They didn’t merely put a murder suspect at risk, they also risked the lives of the suspect’s friends and family, anyone who happened to be in those apartments at the time, and any bystanders who happened to be nearby, including in the surrounding apartments. Raids like this have ended with police bullets lodged in the walls of neighboring apartments, and even in neighboring houses.
The typical fallout after police kill an innocent person during one of these raids goes like this: A subsequent investigation determines the officers followed policy, that the warrant was legal, and that the judge wasn’t at fault for signing the warrant. Law enforcement officials then determine that the policies that allowed it all to happen shouldn’t be changed either. The takeaway is that to protect themselves, the police will occasionally kill innocent people and that we should be okay with that. We should not.
As police advocacy groups themselves often tell us, when a police officer puts on a badge, they accept a certain amount of risk. No-knock raids — and forced entry raids in general — project that risk back onto the public, on people such as Amir Locke, Breonna Taylor, David Hooks, Duncan Lemp, and far too many more to count.
This tendency in policing to project the risk officers willingly accept back onto the public isn’t limited to no-knock raids. As I and my Post colleagues have recently reported, while some law enforcement leaders and reformers are pushing deescalation and conflict resolution training, a large and growing faction in the profession preaches a very different approach: Police shouldn’t accept the idea that the job comes with some risk. Instead, they should be shooting people more often, more quickly and exercising less restraint.
We see that approach in action when officers kill people carrying knives and sticks or children with pellet guns and are then cleared of any wrongdoing. We see it in the endless stream of stories about cops shooting dogs and then being cleared because even the slightest perceived threat to an officer — real or imagined — justifies killing the animal. And we see it in versions of the mantra, “Whatever I have to do to make it home at night,” an increasingly common sentiment in law enforcement that reveals a battlefield mentality.
Supporters of this approach celebrate the bravery of law enforcement officers. But it takes less courage to quickly shoot someone from 20 feet away because they might pose a threat than it does to wait a few seconds, just in case the object your suspect is reaching for might not be a weapon, the gun you see in the kid’s hand might actually be a toy, or the motorist you’ve just pulled over might be a legal gun owner who isn’t a threat at all. And it certainly isn’t courageous to kneel on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes while he is handcuffed and lying face down.
Which brings us back to Derek Chauvin. In a profound twist, the judge who presided over Chauvin’s trial is the same judge who approved the no-knock warrant that led to Amir Locke’s death — another tragedy where no one is to blame. All in the name of “officer safety.”
A Starbucks barista. (photo: USA TODAY)
In response to Starbucks’ union-busting in Memphis, firing seven workers who were organizing a union there, the American labor movement should organize protests at Starbucks locations throughout the country. The coffee giant can’t get away with this.
It mystifies and disturbs me that regional and national labor bodies that ought to be pulling out all stops for these baristas, retail workers, and others don’t seem to recognize that this moment demands their full energy and focus.
Last week, Starbucks workers in several New York City stores petitioned for union elections, bringing the number of unionizing stores to seventy-two since the fall. The weekly spate of new Starbucks election filings represents a breakthrough for labor with potentially historic implications.
The executives are counterattacking: last week, they fired seven Memphis baristas who had led the organizing in that city. Yet the AFL-CIO’s pinned tweet in the aftermath blathered on about “another victory for working people today with the release of the first report from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.”
Victory? Really? It’s a report. But this is the most important thing the AFL-CIO leadership wants us to get animated about — not the bravery of low-paid workers taking on the billionaire class.
Local rallies and press conferences are a good step. I attended one a few weeks ago in Seattle, organized by Starbucks Workers United, socialist city councilmember Kshama Sawant, and a bunch of local unions that stepped up (but notably not the central labor council, unfortunately). It was exciting to hear from Starbucks workers who had flown in from the East Coast and to see the local solidarity from other unions.
Yet scattered local efforts will not be sufficient to force the companies to pull back on their union-busting. The shameful but not surprising firing of the seven Memphis Starbucks workers and the aggressive REI anti-union captive-audience meetings this past week confirm that the bosses have run the calculations and determined that any reputational harm they suffer from these over-the-top tactics is a price worth paying if it stops union momentum. They are okay with maybe being required by the labor board to make back pay settlements to fired workers — in two years? three years? — because a slap on the corporate hand is a pittance to pay for tactics that cast widespread fear throughout the workforce and deter other workers from standing up.
We won’t win unions at places like Starbucks and REI simply by reacting with outrage to the bosses’ attacks on workers. Absent union escalation, there will be more firings, more shakedowns, more union-busting. We, the labor movement, must escalate the fight and demonstrate that when workers in Memphis, or New York, or Arizona are under attack, then workers from California to Maine will fight back.
There’s no better way to ramp up than with demonstrations at Starbucks stores in every state in this country. From there, we should organize escalating actions that create a crisis for the CEOs who try to stymie the workers’ democratic decisions.
Years ago, in my hometown of Seattle, professional union musicians struck the 5th Avenue Theatre after eighteen of them were fired during contract negotiations. It was a tiny walkout. The local Jobs With Justice coalition and labor council mobilized more than a thousand people nightly to attend rallies in front of the struck theater. Boeing machinists, longshore workers, city employees, health care workers, construction workers, tugboat operators, grocery workers, university workers, teachers, and more — all joined in to block the downtown street in front of the theater and prevent the show from opening with scabs.
Within a week, the musicians won full reinstatement and a new contract. It was not just a musicians’ win — it was a win for the entire working class.
The 5th Avenue Theatre strike is hardly unique. Think about what the West Virginia teachers did, on a much larger scale, just four years ago, and how their leadership and sacrifice inspired educators throughout the country to stand up and fight for public education. Or recall how the 2019 sickout by a handful of air traffic controllers, on top of strike calls by the flight attendants’ union, forced the end of Donald Trump’s national government shutdown.
What the Starbucks workers need now is to see that the entire US labor movement has their back. We need a decisive national demonstration of class solidarity — one that sends a message to bosses everywhere that in 2022, when you mess with a single barista, you mess with all of us.
Natchez police and agents from the FBI inspect the truck that exploded in a bomb blast and killed Wharlest Jackson on February 27, 1967. (photo: AP)
This month marks 55 years since the assassination of an NAACP leader. The new documentary “American Reckoning” seeks justice in the cold case of murdered civil rights activist and local NAACP leader Wharlest Jackson Sr. in Natchez, Mississippi. No one was ever charged with his 1967 murder, despite evidence pointing to the involvement of the inner circle of the local Ku Klux Klan. It’s one of many unsolved crimes targeting civil rights activists. “The fact that no one has been indicted for Wharlest’s case or for these other cases shows the limits of the justice system,” says co-director and co-producer Yoruba Richen. Wharlest Jackson Sr.'s daughter, Denise Ford Jackson, recalls how her mother received redacted documents when trying to get to the bottom of her husband's murder. We also speak with Brad Lichtenstein, the film’s co-director.
It’s Black History Month. This month marks 55 years since the assassination of an NAACP leader in the city of Natchez, Mississippi. On February 27, 1967, Wharlest Jackson Sr. died when a bomb attached to his car exploded. At the time, Jackson was the treasurer of the NAACP in Natchez. He died on his way home from working, his first day of work at the Armstrong Tire and Rubber plant. He had just been promoted to a job never held by a Black man before. Wharlest Jackson Sr. was 36 years old, the father of five. The FBI suspected the assassination was carried out by the inner circle of the Ku Klux Klan, known as the Silver Dollar Group, but no one was ever charged in his murder.
This tragic story is told in a new documentary that examines the civil rights struggle in Natchez. It’s called American Reckoning. This is an excerpt from the film featuring Wharlest Jackson Sr.'s son, Wharlest Jackson Jr., who recalls his father's assassination. At the time, he was just 8 years old.
WHARLEST JACKSON JR.: I stood right here, working on my bicycle in front of my house. I was trying to get my banana seat right, and I had a big, nice, big fat tire on the back of it. I used to see those guys riding those choppers. Man, I wanted to make my bike like that, too, a little 20-inch bicycle.
I heard the explosion. My mind went, “What is that?” I never heard anything like that before. I jumped on my bicycle. I shot right down there and shot straight to this here street here. You can look straight down the street to MLK. I’m noticing people outside of their houses, you know, and I just rode up there and started looking, and — I saw a gentleman laying in the street, not knowing who he was, and seeing the truck, knowing whose truck that was and not being able to connect the dots together.
I saw a shoe that he was wearing. And I grabbed that shoe and came to the house. And later, I heard from my mother, as I grew up, I had come back with his flesh in his shoe.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the new documentary American Reckoning. The film goes on to look at how the community in Natchez, Mississippi, responded to the assassination of Wharlest Jackson Sr.
REPORTER 1: Nearly 1,000 Negroes are marching silently through the center of Natchez, protesting the bomb slaying Monday night of civil rights leader, father of five, Wharlest Jackson.
REPORTER 2: Jackson, an official of the local NAACP, had left his new job last night at the Armstrong Rubber Company, presumably en route home. The cab and the truck were completely demolished.
WHARLEST JACKSON JR.: My father looked out for the Black community in this town. And, believe me, this community loved my father. He was just a god to me.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: My father sacrificed his life so that we can have a better community and you don’t have to be afraid. But will we ever get justice?
UNIDENTIFIED: They’ve been killing us here for 400 years.
UNIDENTIFIED: Right.
UNIDENTIFIED: It’s got to come to a head. And we’re sick and tired of that. We done built this country.
CHARLES EVERS: The sooner the white people realize that we aren’t going nowhere, the better it’s going to be for all of us.
UNIDENTIFIED: Wake up, white people, before it’s too late.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from the new documentary, Frontline and Retro Report’s new documentary American Reckoning, premiering Tuesday, February 15th, on PBS and online at PBS.org/frontline, YouTube and in the PBS video app. The project is supported by WNET’s Chasing the Dream.
We’re joined now by three guests. Denise Ford Jackson, the daughter of Wharlest Jackson Sr., as well as the film directors, Brad Lichtenstein and Yoruba Richen.
It’s great to have everyone with us, and, Yoruba, a former producer at Democracy Now!, a great honor to have you back, as well. Yoruba, I want to begin with you, talking about this just devastating story, that is many storylines put together. It is the story of a city in this country where, at the highest levels, the conspiracy of the government against the Black population of Natchez, and the fact that we did not — many people in this country, I should say, have not heard of Wharlest Jackson, let alone his assassination, his murder.
YORUBA RICHEN: Absolutely. Thank you, Amy, for having us on.
It’s a story that, when Brad told me about — Brad had been developing it, and he’ll tell you about that, for a couple of years before asking me to partner with him on this project. But when he told me about it, I was immediately intrigued and interested in this story that I had never heard of. I always love projects where I am learning something and uncovering a story that hadn’t been told. And then, when I saw the trailer that Brad initially made, and I saw the amazing archival footage that really documented what was happening in Natchez and the murder of Wharlest Jackson Sr. — I had never seen this archival footage. I had never seen a — you know, the documentation of the story that was happening, like, in real time. His —
AMY GOODMAN: Let me — let me say something about that, and I want to bring Brad in. I mean, this is so astounding, the level of detail of footage you have from over half a century ago documenting the movement in Natchez. And you have a direct link to this story, as well, as you were an intern with John Lewis when he was running for Congress. And John — Congressmember John Lewis, the civil rights icon, figures into this story.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Yes. Good morning. And thank you for asking me, because I love to remember my relationship with Mr. Lewis, who I met when I was 15 years old, and I worked on his campaign, and then we became lifelong friends. And he’s the author of the Emmett Till Act. And that’s really how this project got started. I was visiting him in his office in Washington, and we were talking about different ideas for films. And [inaudible] secretary, Brenda Jones, told me about the cold cases that were being reexamined under the Emmett Till Act and that that might be a thing to focus on.
And then I learned about the story of Wharlest Jackson Sr. and then discovered that filmmaker Ed Pincus and his filmmaking partner David Neuman had actually been in Natchez at the exact same time, making the movie Black Natchez, and that there were hours and hours and hours of outtakes, and that they had returned right after the assassination of Mr. Jackson and started to try to make a sequel. And so, there’s something like 30 hours of footage that never saw the light of day. And then we discovered that that footage had been collected into a collection at the Amistad Research Center and was actually going to be available to use, which is what gives us the ability to tell this story in real time, even though, as you pointed out, it happened over half a century ago.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to bring Denise in, but first to the documentary again, American Reckoning. This excerpt begins with an archival clip from 1965 in Natchez.
PETITIONER: Under the school board for the Natchez-Adams County public schools, the undersigned hereby petition your board to initiate racial desegregation of the public schools under your jurisdiction and control.
STANLEY NELSON: By late August, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the schools for segregation.
PETITIONER: We would fully request that the names of those signing this petition not be made public in order to protect the signers from possible reprisals and harassment.
TONY BYRNE: There was a fear and a resentment of desegregation of the schools at the time in the white community. There was just wild rumors of what was going to happen if the Blacks took over.
UNIDENTIFIED: My dad and the Klan didn’t want Black people in our schools, offices, anything. They wanted to get it stopped at all costs.
REPORTER: George Metcalfe, president of the Natchez chapter of the NAACP, was critically injured in Natchez this afternoon when dynamite, hidden beneath the hood of his car, exploded when he turned on the ignition.
WHARLEST JACKSON JR.: When the bomb went off under the hood of his vehicle, a lot of that metal and brass just went back into his face.
AKINYELE UMOJA: After the bombing of Metcalfe’s car, the Black community explodes.
AMY GOODMAN: After the 1965 bombing of the car of the Natchez NAACP leader George Metcalfe, who did survive that, civil rights activists organized a massive boycott against white-owned businesses. This clip features Charles Evers, the brother of Medgar Evers, who was assassinated two years earlier, in 1963, at his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
CHARLES EVERS: You tell the good mayor that I said he can get all the injunction, conjunction and somejunction he want to get, we’re not going to spend our money with him anymore, until he hire people and give them decent jobs and recognize them as individuals and human beings.
We decided we were going to embargo every white store in Natchez.
REPORTER: Downtown Natchez is under a strict boycott by nearly half the population. The boycott began when the Negroes failed to get their 12 demands from city officials.
CHARLES EVERS: The mayor at the time had a whole shopping center, Mayor Nosser. We shut his whole damn shopping center down.
JAMES STOKES: Keep the white man’s dollar out of his pocket, and you can control him instead of him controlling you.
AMY GOODMAN: That last speaker was James Stokes, a spokesperson of the armed African American self-defense group Deacons of Defense. Now let’s turn to another clip of American Reckoning about the protests in Natchez in 1965.
UNIDENTIFIED: There are these marches at night that are taking place. Three hundred marchers are arrested for parading without a permit.
J.T. ROBINSON: I’m the chief of police, J.T. Robinson. If you don’t disperse and go home, I will have to put you under arrest, parading without a permit, which is in violation of the city ordinance.
UNIDENTIFIED: At another attempted march, 150 are arrested. And then, yet another march is attempted.
POLICE OFFICER: Step back on the other side, please!
EXERLENA JACKSON: We walked about a block before the police stopped us. They had buses come in and picked us up and took us to Parchman, Mississippi.
UNIDENTIFIED: Once they’re at Parchman, it’s cold. They were stripped naked. They were given a laxative.
EXERLENA JACKSON: They made us all drink about an eight-ounce glass full. They said, “Well, you’re going to drink this medicine or else get beat to death.”
AMY GOODMAN: Again, a clip from American Reckoning. And now we’re going to Denise Ford Jackson, featured in the film, the daughter of Wharlest Jackson Sr., the treasurer of the NAACP chapter in Natchez, who was assassinated two years later, from what we saw in that clip, in a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan. Denise, it’s 55 years later, but our deepest condolences go to you and your family as you live this every day of your lives. It is so clear in this documentary.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Yes, it is. And thank you for having me this morning.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about — I mean, the story of Parchman. Your mother was in Parchman, right? Your mother was one of those arrested. She, like your dad, would — was unrelenting in trying to challenge the racist system. And they describe this horror of being put in these cold cells, stripped naked and forced to drink laxatives, so that — and they, obviously, had no access to bathrooms. I mean, this is pure torture. What happened to your mother after this?
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Well, she became ill. She formed an illness that kept her bedridden. And me and my dad had to take care of the five children, cook for us, comb our hair. And then, once she was able to — she came up with a sickness called lupus, which nothing kept her down, but she was able to, you know, regain her strength back, and she was able to do what she needed to do for the family.
AMY GOODMAN: So, she’s ill. She’s come out of Parchman. Your father is continuing to organize. That was '65. Your father is assassinated in ’67. Tell us what happened. And did you — I mean, you're a little kid at the time, but this ominous sense of the targeting of your family.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: The only thing I can relate to was that I know that my dad was under a lot of pressure, being threatened with, you know, being able to — he wanted to accept a promotion at Armstrong. He discussed it with my mom. My mom told him not to accept the position. But he was a man that didn’t take “no” for an answer. They were trying to make a stand here in the county, in the city of Natchez, so that people know that, you know, we, as a Black, was just as capable of handling the supervisor positions as the white man, even though they said these positions were for white only. But my father took a stand to make our — wanted to make our community better. And my mother was one who was objecting to it, but he wouldn’t take “no.” He wouldn’t accept the word “no.” He said, “I’m going to take this thing in,” because it was — it gave him a five-cent raise, that helped him with the five children that he was trying to raise.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Frontline and Retro Report, this documentary that Brad and Yoruba have made, also taps into the groundbreaking reporting of Stanley Nelson — another Stanley Nelson, of the South — who investigated the allegations of the involvement of this Ku Klux Klan — you can’t really call it an offshoot, I think, the inner circle of, you know, sort of the white collar of the white sheets, known as the Silver Dollar Group. This clip begins with Leland Boyd, the son of a Klan member.
LELAND BOYD: I think my dad was probably on the foundation of the formation of the Silver Dollar Club. But we would go in a restaurant. There would be several people sitting in there. And my dad walked up, and he dropped a silver dollar on the table and says, “Does that have a familiar ring to it?” And the guy sitting at the table said, “Yeah, that sounds like freedom.”
STANLEY NELSON: I don’t know how to term them, and this is like a crude term, but if you had an all-star Klan team, that would be it. They would be in the Pro Bowl. A Silver Dollar Group member would be the kind of guy that thought wearing a robe was silly, who thought burning crosses was silly, who rejected the old Klan because they weren’t achieving anything.
UNIDENTIFIED: He kept his dynamite and hand grenades in the house, so I saw them. You’d just hear little things about, “We gotta take care of business,” kind of thing.
UNIDENTIFIED: In the record, you would have some of these members of the Silver Dollar Group going back and forth across the Mississippi River supporting each other with these very nefarious activities.
CYNTHIA DEITLE: They were very quick to extreme violence. They felt very comfortable slaughtering people and knowing they could get away with it.
AMY GOODMAN: In that clip, we heard from the children of two Silver Dollar Group members. The last speaker was Cynthia Deitle, who is the former FBI civil rights unit chief charged with trying to solve some of these cold cases that dated back decades. Brad Lichtenstein, let’s go back to you. What you learned, what the family learned — I mean, this amazing meeting that, Denise, you and your brother and sister had with Stanley Nelson, the white reporter in Natchez, who really took on these cold cases. Brad?
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Right. Stanley actually started writing about these cold cases in 2008, right at the beginning of the Till Act. And it really was because he realized he lived — not lived, I’m sorry, he worked across the street, practically, from where a different murder had taken place in — right across the river in Vidalia and Ferriday, Louisiana. And he got curious, and he realized that if he didn’t know anything about it, at least probably most white people didn’t know the stories. And he started digging into the cases, and, of course, he met the Jackson family and, you know, had to talked to them some over the years. And really, he provided the full story, which the family never could get from law enforcement, whether it was local law enforcement or federal, or the FBI.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us, Denise, about that meeting that you have with Stanley Nelson, with your brother Wharlest and with your sister, as he lays out for you who exactly he believes killed your father and how he did it.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: It was one of the most amazing meetings that we’ve had, because back in '67, when we tried — when my mom was living and tried to find out information, she was given documents that had been redacted. Everybody's name was scratched out. She kept going back to the law enforcements. Even the FBI came and told her that they — they came to assist the local police. And from there, we never received any names or anything. But meeting with Stanley Nelson, he was able to give us — he was able, to me, to give me more closure to my daddy’s death than the people here in Natchez, Mississippi, were able to give. And hats off to Stanley for the job that he had done, even though documents that we received from the FBI, you know, was redacted and we still didn’t know anything. So, I just appreciate the work that he did, because he gave us insight.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about —
DENISE FORD JACKSON: And hope.
AMY GOODMAN: — who you understand killed him. I mean, there’s a broader question, like it’s not one person, but the person who put the bomb on the left clicker of his car so that when he turned left — they knew, when he came from the factory, he would have to make a left turn into the Black community. And it was set for — they believed he’d be going home at a time when all the kids were outside, and would have killed so many, but he had to work overtime, so it was like 8:00 at night. And so, when he makes a left turn, the kids aren’t out. It just kills him. Who that man was of the white dollar — of the Silver Dollar Group?
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Stanley found out it was Ed Glover.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Red.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Red Glover.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Yes.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Somebody that we didn’t know, I don’t know.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Someone who’s dead.
AMY GOODMAN: Who later died, of course.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: Right.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: Right, who later died. Right.
BRAD LICHTENSTEIN: He had been dead for a while, even before the Emmett Till Act was passed. He had been dead.
AMY GOODMAN: And I want to go to the Emmett Till Act, because now we’re talking about the closure of all of these cases. This is a clip from American Reckoning about the FBI closing its investigation into your dad’s murder, into the murder of Wharlest Jackson Sr. This is your brother, Wharlest Jackson Jr.
WHARLEST JACKSON JR.: It was an FBI agent that knocked on the door. I opened the door. He said, “I’m looking for Wharlest Jackson Jr.” He went back to his vehicle and gave me that letter.
DENISE FORD JACKSON: I received this letter in the mail, and it was a slap in the face. I felt like the FBI brought all this attention out to make themselves look good, and, you know, our family still suffered. I often tell myself nothing will ever survive over here because of the prejudiceness that happened in this building, and a lot of sadness, a lot of hurt.
ROY AUSTIN: People are going to be frustrated if someone isn’t convicted, if someone isn’t arrested. But at some point a determination has to be made to close the case. We’ve talked to everyone who could possibly have any real information. How many times are we going to reinvestigate? There’s no more value in asking more questions.
AMY GOODMAN: Yoruba Richen, we’re going to end with you. So, you have this Emmett Till law that John Lewis really authored and pushed through. A hundred fifty cases, 125 of them closed, with not one indictment. And this goes right to Natchez, which is the microcosm of what we’re seeing today. If you could talk about whether in fact this really ends things, or isn’t this the case for reparations or for a kind of lawsuit that is a conspiracy of the entire state? I mean, Parchman was not one guy putting a bomb in a car. It was the state going after all those who protested injustice in Natchez.
YORUBA RICHEN: Yes. I think that the fact that no one has been indicted for Wharlest’s case or for these other cases shows the limits of the justice system in holding people accountable for crimes that happened many years ago.
I think it’s important to note that we found out that Congressman Lewis, he wanted a larger — a larger thing, not just for the Justice Department to open up these cases, but he was really looking for a truth and reconciliation commission that would — in the vein of South Africa, where all these crimes would come to light, where people had to come and talk and air what happened and get at the truth. Of course, he wasn’t able to do that. I mean, we live in an extremely polarized country, where, you know, talking the truth about this stuff is — you know, that people don’t want it to happen. We see that now with what’s going on with this critical race theory ridiculousness.
But all that to say is that I think this does open up a case for reparations, which we are now talking about in a real way for the first time, and looking at what these families deserve. What is justice for these families? Reparations, mental health — mental health — you know, stuff to make them able to deal with this trauma that has happened, that we see with Denise, that we see with Wharlest Jr. What kind of services can we provide? So we really need to have that conversation. Because it’s true: These people are dead, you know, for the most part, I mean, for the crimes that were committed long ago. So, how else can we repair the damage that was done and that generational damage? And I think that is about reparations and other services that can provide hope and help for these families.
AMY GOODMAN: Yoruba, you’re premiering this film at the Laemmle in Los Angeles, and then next week it’s going to premiere on PBS. And I’m wondering what you want people to take away from this?
YORUBA RICHEN: I want people to take away, to understand that — first off, we didn’t get to talk much about the Deacons for Defense, but that the civil rights movement, or the Black freedom struggle, as I say, is not just reduced to a nonviolent strategy, and that the Deacons for Defense were one of many organizations that fought back and protected their community. And that is also how rights were won in many different communities. So I want people to understand that. And I want people to take away and to find out more about the history that has been erased or —
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds.
YORUBA RICHEN: Yes, to find out more about the history that’s been erased, and also white people especially, because we’re at a critical moment in this country where they’re trying to erase our history.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us, Yoruba Richen, Brad Lichtenstein and Denise Ford, Wharlest —
Maya Q'eqchi' women. (photo: Mark Stedman/Trócaire)
After a decades-long fight against transnational mining interests and state repression, the community’s case could set a new precedent for Indigenous land and resource rights.
It’s a lucha that took one of Tot’s sons, Edin Leonel Tot Sub, in October 2012, when he was killed in a staged robbery in the presence of his 9-year-old child. “I’ve received countless threats, but the most painful loss was my son. He is who I think of to keep fighting,” said Tot, a Q’eqchi’ elder and leader. “My son’s murderers thought I’d stay silent. But what’s motivated me the most is that since my son’s assassination, more leaders have stepped up, like me, to fight for our land.” Another one of his sons, Wilfrido Rodrigo Tot Sub, was terribly injured in the same attack.
On February 9, Tot, who was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2017, testified in front of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica, in a historic land rights case against the Guatemalan state. The court’s ruling could force the Guatemalan government to finally recognize the Q’eqchi’ people’s collective rights to their ancestral lands and their right to protect their natural resources from exploitative megaprojects—including the destructive open-pit Fénix nickel mine that stands on the banks of Lake Izabal. This is the first time the Guatemalan state has faced judgement in an international court for violating the ancestral land rights of Indigenous communities.
A ruling in favor of Agua Caliente would be a victory for all 16 Q’eqchi’ communities in the municipality of El Estor, whose demands to be consulted on the Fénix mine and other megaprojects have been repeatedly ignored. Their resistance has historically led to deadly repression at the hands of the Guatemalan government, whose longstanding priority has been to protect foreign investors and Guatemala’s business and political elite. A win would also set a precedent for Indigenous communities across Latin America and have monumental implications in the fight to protect the environment and the safety of communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
“The scientific community, conservation organizations, and many governments of the world have agreed that securing collective land ownership for Indigenous peoples is the best strategy to…fight climate change,” said Leonardo Crippa, an attorney with the Indian Law Resource Center and a member of Agua Caliente’s legal team. “The court can also set rules [for] Guatemala to prevent human rights abuses [from continuing] to occur in a country where the majority of the population is Indigenous, and where all of the land conflicts are somehow involved with mining and other [transnational] operations.”
Land Claims Long Ignored
With the legal backing of the U.S.-based Indian Law Resource Center and the Defensoría Q’eqchi’, a Q’eqchi’ rights group based in El Estor, the case is spearheaded by Tot and other residents of Agua Caliente who have been fighting for formalized titles for their lands for over four decades. Tot is one of the few residents of Agua Caliente who speaks Spanish, and he has been crucial in keeping the community informed and organizing meetings to collect evidence and consult local residents.
This land has belonged to Q’eqchi’ people for centuries, but the colonial Guatemalan state requires documentation to legitimize ownership. The Agua Caliente community began their land titling process in 1974. “Since then, [the community] began to meet all the requirements imposed by law, in order to achieve the legal certainty that would allow residents to continue living in community, in full harmony with the environment and free from any external threats from state and private actors,” legal documents said.
A provisional title was issued in 1985 for the Lote 9 lands, and the community began making payments to the Guatemalan government. But then, in the midst of Guatemala’s brutal U.S.-backed civil war, records of Agua Caliente’s land ownership disappeared, according to the Indian Law Resource Center. Official documentation crucial for the land titling agency to complete the process was cut out from a registry book. Decades later, in 2002, Agua Caliente issued its final land payment, but a permanent title has yet to be granted. Although a government agency, FONTIERRAS, was created after the 1996 peace accords to facilitate land access for rural communities, in practice very little has been done to address the gaping land inequality that sparked the armed conflict, leaving communities like Agua Caliente vulnerable.
Without a response from FONTIERRAS, the community took its fight all the way to Guatemala’s highest court. In a landmark 2011 ruling, the Constitutional Court recognized the Q’eqchi’ community’s collective land rights. It also ordered the Guatemalan government to replace the missing registry documents and issue land titles to the residents of Agua Caliente. The community had built its case using jurisprudence on collective Indigenous land rights from other countries, including the historic 2001 Inter-American Court ruling that ordered the Nicaraguan government to issue land titles for Awas Tingni, a Mayagna (Sumo) community in the Miskito Coast. This was the first time an international tribunal, with legally binding authority, found a government in violation of the collective land and resource rights of Indigenous people. The Indian Law Resource Center was also part of the legal team in that case.
The Guatemalan government hasn’t enforced the Constitutional Court’s 2011 ruling. This is a familiar pattern in Guatemala, where the interests of multinational corporations and the country’s business and political elite often take precedence over people’s rights, particularly in Indigenous and Black communities. “This is an example of a community that has been consistently believing in the rule of law,” said Crippa. “Unfortunately, this case shows that the rule of law doesn't exist for a community.” Having exhausted legal options in Guatemala, Agua Caliente turned to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which referred the case to the Inter-American Court in 2020. “This is the final stage in the international litigation,” Crippa noted. “The decision that the court will issue will be final and binding.” A ruling in the case is expected in March.
A History of State Violence
From Agua Caliente, residents can see black smoke rising from the Fénix nickel mine’s processing plant across Lake Izabal. The mine’s pollution has stained the clear blue sky, contaminated the air, poisoned the water, and impacted crop growth, threatening the livelihoods of Q’eqchi’ community members who rely on agriculture and fishing for work. “Our community believes mother nature is very important,” Tot said. Don Rodrigo, as he’s called by many, has lived in Agua Caliente since he was 12 years old, when he moved in with uncles and aunts after his parents passed away. He’s now in his 60s. “This is where we grew up and we’ll be here defending our territory.”
The Fénix mining project, previously known as the EXMIBAL mine, is operated by Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel, now a subsidiary of the Switzerland-based Solway Investment Group, which also has ties to Russia. Its destructive presence in the region dates back decades, starting in 1965—in the initial years of Guatemala’s civil war—when the U.S.-backed military regime took advantage of the violent instability and rising global nickel prices to introduce a new mining law and begin issuing permits to multinational mining companies. EXMIBAL was granted a 40-year lease in the area between Chichipate and the town of El Estor in the department of Izabal.
At the core of Guatemala’s war were government efforts to steal Indigenous lands and grant free rein to foreign investors and their allies in the Guatemalan elite. As the war intensified, so did the violent conflicts over Indigenous territories. The Fénix mine offers one example of how the Guatemalan government historically has collaborated with multinational corporations by providing military and police forces that essentially function as companies’ private security and hitmen.
In 1978, EXMIBAL—at the time a subsidiary of a Canadian mining company—was involved in an armed attack against a group of farmers in the village of Chichipate. The farmers were shot at by assailants riding in an EXMIBAL vehicle. That same year, in the neighboring department of Alta Verapaz, soldiers and EXMIBAL employees executed four people in the village of Santa María Cahaboncito, according to Guatemala’s Truth Commission. Then, in 1981, Chichipate community leader Pablo Bac Caal was abducted by police officers traveling in an EXMIBAL vehicle. Caal was later found murdered. Perhaps one of the most gruesome attacks around this time was the 1978 massacre of Panzós in Alta Verapaz, where the Guatemalan army opened fire on dozens of Q’eqchi’ people who had led a protest demanding their land rights be respected and denouncing the disappearance of community leaders taken by soldiers. Although EXMIBAL temporarily left Guatemala in the 1980s, the Fénix mine resumed operations in 2014 after a spate of violent attacks that are now the subject of a set of precedent-setting civil lawsuits against a mining company in Canada.
“This is what the community has faced for years,” Tot said in a press conference ahead of the Agua Caliente Inter-American Court hearing. “In the years of the armed conflict, our leaders suffered. Many were disappeared fighting for their rights.”
It’s been 25 years since the signing of Guatemala’s so-called peace accords, but the same genocidal, oppressive mechanisms are still in place. Like all Indigenous communities across Guatemala, Q’eqchi’ land and water defenders continue to face abductions, arbitrary imprisonment, violent evictions, and extrajudicial killings by Guatemalan security forces and private security personnel working as the lapdogs of multinational corporations. Last October, Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei issued a state of siege in El Estor in response to Q’eqchi’-led protests and roadblocks. The demonstrators had cut off access to the Fénix mine and its processing facility to reiterate their longstanding demands for consultation. Soldiers and police in riot gear flooded El Estor, carrying out dozens of raids and arrests.
“The protests and the roadblocks should give the understanding that our people do not support what’s happening to their lands,” Tot said. “The Guatemalan government is quick to issue [a state of siege] in response to the demands of Indigenous communities, but when it comes to our actual demands [on the land], they give us no answer.”
In December, just weeks after the violent crackdown, Prensa Comunitaria reported the Fénix mine’s consultation process with the El Estor community had ended—a fraudulent process since dozens of Q’eqchi’ leaders were excluded and the consultation itself took place under a state of siege, which suspends civil rights. The completion of the process cleared the way to reactivate the mine’s license, which the Constitutional Court had suspended in 2019 pending consultation. A union of fishery workers, the Gremial de Pescadores Artesanales, had secured the halt through a legal battle over the government’s failure to conduct an environmental impact study and consult communities affected by the mine. However, communities maintain that the Fénix mine ignored that ruling and never paused its operations.
Now, the Agua Caliente case being heard by the Inter-American Court has brought hope that things could change. And a judgement in favor of the plaintiffs could offer not only reparations for Agua Caliente, but also new legal tools for Q’eqchi’ communities in the region in their fights against other catastrophic megaprojects and monocrops, including African palm plantations.
“The community has decided to fight, and that’s why I’ve given my life to fight for them,” Tot said. “I want Guatemala to recognize the harm it’s caused us. And I want to ask [Indigenous] communities, not only in Guatemala but in other countries, to unite. This is a valuable struggle that’s worth fighting for.”
A gray wolf. (photo: National Geographic)
The gray wolf gained the protections of “endangered” status in 1974 but lost them in 2020 when the Trump administration removed the animal from the list. The Biden administration defended the removal in court, but a federal judge overturned it on Thursday and restored protections for the species across much of the US. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the Biden administration now have 60 days to decide whether or not to appeal.
Environmental groups applauded US District Judge Jeremy White’s ruling, which comes less than a year after hunters in Wisconsin killed more than 200 wolves in three days, exceeding the limit set by state officials. Lawmakers in Montana and Idaho have also passed a suite of bills that allow hunters to kill more wolves with tactics that conservation groups have called cruel. But White’s decision will not affect all of these populations: It only applies to wolves that live outside of the Northern Rockies (Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming) and New Mexico, where they were already protected.
But what is an endangered species, anyway? The answer is surprisingly complicated, said John Vucetich, a renowned wolf expert and professor at Michigan Technological University. Vucetich led one of the longest-running research projects of any animal, in Isle Royale National Park, a set of islands in Lake Superior. He told Vox that wolves deserve to be protected — but they’ve gotten caught up in the culture wars, which gave them the reputation as one of the nation’s most controversial species.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Sibling rivalries and food fights: Wolf packs are like human families
Benji Jones
What’s it like to get to know a wolf?
John Vucetich
Wolves live in families. We call them packs, but it is literally a family — typically a pair of parents and their offspring. Sometimes there’s an uncle or cousin or grandparent.
The nature of our fieldwork allows us to follow individual wolves from one day to the next. During our field season, which lasts about seven weeks, we get a really intimate view of what the wolves are doing and how they’re relating to one another. We get to know them as individuals. And all wolves are individuals.
If you think the dynamics within a human family or between human families are interesting and complicated — think of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story — the same complexities occur within and between wolf packs. I’m not exaggerating. Sibling rivalries, parent-offspring conflicts, and then conflicts between families ... it’s mostly focused on access to reproduction or food.
Their lives are really difficult because of how difficult it is to get food. The lifespan of a wolf is about 12 years, but in the wild, it’s about four. The most common causes of death are starvation and wolves killing one another, and when they’re killing one another, they’re typically fighting over food.
When is an animal endangered?
Benji Jones
Gray wolves received federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Then wolves in most states lost protection under the Trump administration. This new ruling restores those protections. How did we get here?
John Vucetich
The big picture is pretty simple. We, as an American people and the Fish and Wildlife Service, haven’t figured out what it means for a species to be endangered or not. And if you don’t understand what it means to be endangered, then you can’t reliably rule whether particular species like wolves are endangered or not.
We know, very clearly, that gray squirrels and rabbits are not endangered. We know that tigers are endangered. The question is really about where the boundary lies.
That’s what was at stake in the court case — and that’s what’s at stake with any future decisions about wolves. In a very narrow sense, wolves are re-listed because of a judge’s decision. That’s because a few environmental organizations sued to restore the protections.
Benji Jones
How do we still not know where to draw that line? The Endangered Species Act has been around for nearly half a century.
John Vucetich
From one perspective, it’s absolutely baffling. When the Endangered Species Act was created in 1973, among the first things it did was list species that had already been considered endangered for a long time. It just created a category for them. Many of these species were in such a dire condition that there wasn’t really a need to know where the line was.
Benji Jones
How do you understand the question of what makes a species endangered? And where do wolves fit in?
John Vucetich
In the last couple of hundred years, in particular, humans have not done well by quite a few species. So, the question is: When have we done enough harm to say, “That’s enough, and corrective action is required”?
The slightly more technical aspect here involves a debate about the legal definition of an endangered species. It is, verbatim, “a species that is at risk of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” It’s this phrase that has really captured a lot of attention.
Over the past 15 to 20 years, the Fish and Wildlife Service has made decisions that hinge on its interpretation of that definition. And this lawsuit’s concern was basically that the FWS hasn’t yet answered the question: What is an endangered species? This court decision reinforces the need for that.
Benji Jones
Do you think that the gray wolf is still at risk of extinction?
John Vucetich
Wolves absolutely do not fit the definition of a recovered species. Wolves, unquestionably, are to be considered legally endangered.
There are a lot of wolves in the world, and a good number of them are in the Lower 48. But a species isn’t considered endangered only if it’s at imminent risk of extinction. It’s about when have humans done enough damage to a species that corrective action is required.
Go back to that legal definition — that language, “throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” It’s the basis for asking the question: How much damage is too much? In the Lower 48, wolves currently occupy about 15 percent of their historic range. It’s really hard to imagine that you could lose 85 percent of the species’ range and say, “That’s no big deal.”
How gray wolves divided America
Benji Jones
It seems like few animals are as controversial as gray wolves in the US these days. How did they become so politicized?
John Vucetich
If you look at sociological data, wolves are not controversial. The Endangered Species Act is also not at all controversial. Even people who self-identify as Republicans or politically conservative have really strong, positive views about the Act.
The controversy does not come from constituents. It comes from special interest groups leaning hard on members of Congress. One would be gun rights advocates. They’ve decided that wolf recovery is a bad idea. Land rights advocates, too, have tended to take a strong position against the Act, more so than wolves alone. Farmers and ranchers also have a strong lobbying group.
Benji Jones
Why are these groups so against wolves?
John Vucetich
The intensity and the vitriol doesn’t match anyone’s real-world experience of what wolves actually do. Wolves have long been symbols for all that’s good — and all that’s evil — in the world.
I think they may have been co-opted into the culture wars. The boundaries don’t always make sense — what do abortion, immigration, climate change, and wolves have in common? There’s also the so-called rural-urban divide. Rural people have a tendency to be less supportive of wolves, which maps onto some elements of the culture wars as well.
Benji Jones
What has working with wolves taught you about saving species?
John Vucetich
My greatest understanding of humans is through and about wolves. Some people love them and some people hate them, and my greatest interest is to understand why we are the way we are. But I’ve learned that no matter what side you’re on, we have a deep inability to explain ourselves to each other.
Benji Jones
Has that made you rethink the larger goals of nature conservation?
John Vucetich
Without a doubt. There are two big shortcomings in conservation, and one is that not even conservation professionals agree about what it means to conserve nature.
Some people are interested in conservation for its own sake: There are species out there that we’ve done poorly by and we should conserve them no matter what value they are to humans, even if it means impairing human value. In contrast, there are people who believe we need to conserve nature because our well-being depends on it.
Other people want to conserve nature but don’t want to harm any individual animals to get there. This becomes important when it comes to invasive species. A lot of invasive species management is about killing them. There’s no agreement about what conservation means and what ultimately motivates it.
Benji Jones
Is there a “right” reason to conserve nature? Where do you fall?
John Vucetich
I haven’t decided. If you are inflexible and say human well-being should always trump conservation, the future is very bleak for biodiversity. Whereas if conservation should always trump human well-being, there’s an extraordinarily bleak future for human well-being.
Benji Jones
If wolves recover across their historic range, there will likely be even more backlash. How do we learn to live with these predators?
John Vucetich
Most people don’t have to do anything. Even if you live in wolf country, you’re not likely to see one or be directly impacted by one. And if you are among the few people who do have a chance of encountering them, either through livestock depredation or through the loss of a pet, you just have to know a few things.
There’s extremely good advice for how to take care of your pets, such as keeping your dog on a leash. There are also lots of husbandry practices that are known to reduce the risk of losing livestock. You can’t make it zero in all cases. We just have to decide to create systems that compensate farmers in a reasonable way.
We live on a very crowded planet. That crowding creates conflicts between humans, and between humans and biodiversity. We have to learn how to coexist and give up some of the things that we want so that other people can get by.
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