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As a recent Government Accountability Office report detailed, federal standards required the National Use-of-Force Collection program to obtain data from groups representing at least 60 percent of all law enforcement officers across the country — or else cancel the program by the end of 2022. As of 2019, The Post’s Tom Jackman reported, the data reflected collection from agencies representing only 44 percent of local, state, federal and tribal officers. This number increased to 55 percent in 2020 and stands at 57 percent this year so far. Because of the low response rate, the Justice Department has yet to publish any report.
In the unsettling aftermath of high-profile use-of-force incidents — such as the killings of Eric Garner in New York and Tamir Rice in Cleveland — many police agencies and major law enforcement organizations acknowledged that reliable data collection might result in new strategies and better outcomes. Meanwhile, it is clear existing reporting systems are anything but reliable. The Post in 2015 began tracking fatal police shootings through media reports and information police released publicly, finding that there were more than twice the number of shootings than law enforcement agencies were reporting through the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, a separate data reporting program that the National Use-of-Force Data Collection unit was supposed to supplement.
Some police departments say they lack the resources to compile the data. Others simply do not consider reporting to be a priority, and they are not required to disclose use-of-force incidents. Congress should mandate this reporting, tying federal funds to compliance and offering assistance to departments short on resources. And states should follow the example set by New Jersey, which requires law enforcement officers to report detailed information to a statewide portal within 24 hours of using force against a civilian. In 2020, law enforcement agencies representing 100 percent of sworn New Jersey law enforcement officers submitted use of force data to the FBI. That must be the goal — accurate, timely and complete information that will help the nation better understand how, when and why police use force.
The debate about whether and how to reform policing in the United States often seems hopelessly divisive, pitting Americans who see criticism of police as dangerous against those who believe the police themselves are the danger. Without real numbers to cut through these passions, the debate will continue uninformed, and the nation will struggle to establish policies that promote public safety and equity.
Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Washington Post Editorial Board | Sen. Manchin
Is Wrong on Inflation and Build Back Better
Will he watch the world burn for the sake of civility?
When Manchin announced his firm opposition to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill this weekend on Fox News, he mumbled a string of justifications so incoherent that I suspect he wasn’t really trying very hard. “The inflation that I was concerned about, it’s not transitory, it’s real, it’s harming every West Virginian… And you start looking at — then you have the debt that we’re carrying, $29 trillion, you have also the geopolitical unrest that we have,” he said. “You have the Covid — the Covid variant, and that is wreaking havoc again… if I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it. And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t.”
What?
“We have many different problems, and therefore I will not support a bill that might help to solve them,” he might as well have said. Or, being more candid, “My concern for ‘the people of West Virginia’ extends only to the people who own coal mines.” Subsidizing social goods for needy people is unlikely to fuel rampant inflation. Geopolitical unrest has little to do with the BBB bill, except that the bill might help reduce it by making America itself less prone to social unrest. And the bill’s social spending would certainly help those who have been made needy by the pandemic. Manchin reportedly told colleagues that he suspected poor people would spend subsidy payments on drugs, a canard so old and dreary and disproven that it is difficult to imagine that anyone with access to economic research would actually buy it. So what is Manchin’s deal? Is he a shrewd negotiator, a dumbass, or a monster?
The most logical, if cold-blooded, explanation is that he simply has a good understanding of his leverage here. Democrats need his vote. For as much as the party has been trying to move him on the bill, he doesn’t have to move. Declaring his opposition to the bill can be a way of ending the game of chicken. For months, it has been reported that Manchin was comfortable with a bill in the $1.5 trillion range — so this could all be a way of ending the haggling with the White House over the last half-trillion or so. If the choice is between no bill and an inadequate, Manchin-approved bill, the rational outcome would be to simply hand Manchin a pen and have him write down what he will vote for, and then put only those things in the bill. With the clock likely ticking on Democrats’ control of Congress, and with Manchin having no fear of attacks from his left, this would be an effective way for him to wrestle absolute control of the bill away from his clamoring colleagues and make it exactly what he wants.
And so, if you assume that Joe Manchin is a rational politician, that is what will happen now: the Build Back Better bill will end up being just another “better than nothing” bill that does a little good but not a lot, perhaps with a few million bucks to build grand statues of Joe Manchin thrown in. Close, but no cigar, on transformational change, my fellow Democrats — come back again in a decade or so when you have a bigger majority in Congress, if our democracy survives that long.
But Manchin’s behavior has been strange enough to make another, darker possibility seem increasingly likely. The Hill reported that Manchin was engaged in negotiations until a White House statement last week mentioned his name in what he perceived to be a rude manner, thereby offending his sense of “civility.” And in a radio interview on Monday, Manchin said that he decided to oppose the bill after members of the White House staff did unnamed things that offended him. This would imply that Manchin is, in fact, a man self-centered enough to place his own ego over the needs of 300 million people — a man who believes that it is more important that everyone in D.C. scrape and bow to him than it is to, for example, help prevent children from starving. This sort of politician is infinitely scarier than one who simply has bad beliefs. This is the sort of person unable to conceptualize the existence of a public good. It is someone who engages in politics not as a public servant, or even as a servant of special interests, but as a king, who demands to be served above all. It is, put more bleakly, a moral monster.
Progressives in Congress seem to be drawing this conclusion about Manchin, talking more about executive actions than they are about renegotiating the BBB bill. Letting Manchin dictate the final terms of the bill is now the plainly rational course — unless he is just going to continue dragging his feet and kill it once again months from now, when time is even shorter. That would, of course, be a monstrous thing to do. But it also seems like the sort of thing that someone who believes civility is more important than the needs of dying coal miners just might do. If everyone wants to yell at him, Joe Manchin will be happy to retreat to his yacht in peace.
National Guard members near the White House. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The generals – Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson – made their case in a recent Washington Post Op-Ed. "In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time," they wrote.
Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army major general and a senior adviser to VoteVets, spoke with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly earlier this week.
Below are the highlights of the conversation.
Edited for brevity and clarity.
How could a coup play out in 2024?
The real question is, does everybody understand who the duly elected president is? If that is not a clear cut understanding, that can infect the rank and file or at any level in the US military.
And we saw it when 124 retired generals and admirals signed a letter contesting the 2020 election. We're concerned about that. And we're interested in seeing mitigating measures applied to make sure that our military is better prepared for a contested election, should that happen in 2024.
How worried is he on a scale of 1 to 10?
I see it as low probability, high impact. I hesitate to put a number on it, but it's an eventuality that we need to prepare for. In the military, we do a lot of war-gaming to ferret out what might happen. You may have heard of the Transition Integrity Project that occurred about six months before the last election. We played four scenarios. And what we did not play is a U.S. military compromised – not to the degree that the United States is compromised today, as far as 39% of the Republican Party refusing to accept President Biden as president – but a compromise nonetheless. So, we advocate that that particular scenario needs to be addressed in a future war game held well in advance of 2024.
Can the current Pentagon leadership handle it?
I'm a huge fan of Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin, a huge fan of the team that he has put together and the uniformed military under General Milley. They're just superb. And I am confident that the best men and women in the U.S. and in our military will be outstanding. I just don't want the doubt that has compromised or infected the greater population of the United States to infect our military.
What should the military do?
I had a conversation with somebody about my age and we were talking about civics lessons, liberal arts education, and the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution. And I believe that bears a re-teach to make sure that each and every 18-year-old American truly understands the Constitution of the United States, how we got there, how we developed it and what our forefathers wanted us to understand years down the road. That's an important bit of education that I think that we need to re-address.
I believe that we need to wargame the possibility of a problem and what we are going to do. The fact that we were caught completely unprepared – militarily, and from a policing function – on January 6, is incomprehensible to me. Civilian control of the military is sacrosanct in the U.S. and that is a position that we need to reinforce.
Are civics lessons 'weak tea' to stave off an insurrection?
A component of that – unsaid – is that we all know each other very well. And if there is any doubt in the loyalty and the willingness to follow the Oath of the United States, the support and defend part of the U.S. Constitution, then those folks need to be identified and addressed in some capacity. When you talk to a squad leader, a staff sergeant, a nine man Rifle Squad, he knows his men and women very, very well.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs asylum-seeking migrants as they line up along the border wall after crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft, in Penitas, Texas. (photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters)
The administration's best-case scenario is a "totally mixed bag," said Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council. "And worst case is an effective continuation of what Trump wanted."
Immigration has been a politically perilous issue for Biden, whose approval rating has sagged. During an influx of unaccompanied migrant minors in the spring, Biden tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to address root causes of migration -- an intractable issue that's dogged previous administrations. While Harris has announced private-sector investments in Central America, she's largely kept the situation at the US-Mexico border at a distance.
ublicans have continued to seize on the record number of border arrests and have filed lawsuits challenging policy changes, hampering the administration in its attempt to execute some of its pledges.
Most notably, a federal judge in Texas blocked the termination of a Trump-era border policy forcing non-Mexican migrants to stay in Mexico until their US immigration court dates and required the administration to bring back the controversial program it opposes and still seeks to end.
Another Trump-era border policy that immigrant advocates and the United Nations have urged the Biden administration to ditch also remains in effect. A public health authority, invoked at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, allows authorities to turn away migrants encountered at the US southern border, effectively barring them from claiming asylum.
When asked about the authority, known as Title 42, the Biden administration has referred to the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, which, according to a White House spokesperson, deems it necessary given the Delta and Omicron variants.
There's also been frustration internally over immigration policy. "There's been disillusionment with immigration policy and lack of follow-through on principles espoused in executive orders issued earlier in the year," said one administration official said.
Immigrant advocates -- who expected significant changes after four years of curtailed immigration under then-President Donald Trump -- have welcomed the unwinding of some Trump-era policies but also have increasingly voiced concern and disappointment to officials over the administration's actions in numerous discussions.
"The Biden campaign promised to welcome people with dignity, and instead we have returned to Trump policies," said Karen Tumlin, attorney, founder and director of Justice Action Center, in a call with reporters. "This is not the change millions sought when Biden was elected."
The White House defended the administration's actions and reversal of Trump-era immigration policies.
"The President has made clear that restoring order, fairness, and humanity to our immigration system are priorities for this Administration. Our immigration system is outdated and in bad need of reform; But this Administration is committed to working day in and day out to provide relief to immigrants and bring our immigration system into the 21st century," a White House spokesperson said in a statement.
Treatment of migrants
Tumlin, among others, is suing the administration over the treatment of Haitian migrants who amassed at the US-Mexico border this fall.
In a December letter directed to Biden and Harris, dozens of immigrant advocacy groups urged the administration to ditch Trump-era border policies, calling them "harmful" and "illegal."
"Nearly eleven months since taking office, this administration continues to violate U.S. asylum law and evade U.S. treaty obligations by blocking and returning asylum seekers to places where their lives and safety are in peril," the letter reads.
The United Nations refugee agency has also repeatedly chimed in, lambasting the use of the public health order.
The continued use of the public health order is an example of the unique position the Biden administration finds itself in: tackling a pandemic and wrestling with a growing number of migrants at the US southern border, many of whom are fleeing conditions at home that were exacerbated by the pandemic.
Early on in Biden's presidency, officials grappled with a record number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the US-Mexico border that stretched thin resources and overwhelmed border facilities. While slightly fewer migrant children have arrived in recent months, other flows, like those stemming from South America, have presented new challenges.
"The volume and emergencies have had us in a defensive posture rather than reforms and a proactive agenda," an administration official told CNN.
Reuniting children separated during Trump years
Despite various setbacks, the Biden administration has made some inroads on its immigration agenda, including changing enforcement guidelines to prioritize certain undocumented immigrants for arrest and deportation, ending mass worksite enforcement, halting border wall construction and no longer applying controversial rules, like the Trump-era public charge regulation that made it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they used some public benefits.
Biden also established a task force to reunite families who had been separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration. Last week, the task force -- led by the Department of Homeland Security -- reunited the 100th family separated under the Trump-era "zero tolerance" policy.
Even so, for parents who experienced their children being taken from them -- with no hint of where they were going -- it's been difficult to trust the federal government, regardless of who's president. And the recent fallout over settlement talks strained that already-fragile relationship.
Lawsuits have stemmed from the zero-tolerance policy and separation of families. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit in 2019 seeking damages for the toll the separations took on families, and attorneys for families have filed separate claims.
After a steady drumbeat of criticism from Republicans about the ongoing settlement negotiations, the Justice Department this month broke off the talks with attorneys for separated families.
Next year is expected to bring more court hearings, including in the class-action lawsuit seeking damages, and additional immigration policy changes, like building out asylum capacity.
Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, have pledged to continue to fight for immigration revisions -- an effort that's dogged Congress for decades. The Senate parliamentarian this year rejected multiple attempts to include immigration provisions in the massive spending bill, a setback to getting changes passed without Republican support.
Those efforts are likely to keep facing the same uphill battles in the coming year.
"They have to win on this because they're in such a bad place with advocates and immigration broadly," a source close to the White House told CNN, referring to immigration restructuring. "Not delivering on this issue will be terrible for them politically."
An employee collects newly-manufactured pills from a machine at the tablet production plant at Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (photo: Adam Reynolds/Getty Images)
A separate trial will follow to determine what Teva will have to pay in the case, in which New York state and two Long Island counties took on a swath of drug companies.
In Thursday's verdict, a Suffolk County jury found the drug company played a role in what is legally termed a public nuisance but had lethal consequences — an opioid use epidemic linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the U.S. in the past two decades.
"Teva Pharmaceuticals USA and others misled the American people about the true dangers of opioids," James, a Democrat, said in a news release. "Today, we took a significant step in righting the wrongs this country has collectively experienced over the last two decades."
Israel-based Teva, which makes medications using the powerful opioid fentanyl, said it "strongly disagrees" with the verdict and plans to appeal.
"The plaintiffs presented no evidence of medically unnecessary prescriptions, suspicious or diverted orders, no evidence of oversupply" by Teva and didn't show that Teva's marketing caused harm to New Yorkers, the company said in a statement. It is also arguing for a mistrial, based on various issues.
The price of Teva's U.S.-listed stock fell after the verdict was announced, ending down 6.3% at $7.90.
Around the country, state and local governments, Native American tribes, unions, school districts and others have sued the drug industry over the painkillers.
The lawsuit targeted several drug companies
New York's lawsuit, filed in 2019, targeted several opioid producers and distributors, companies that buy medications in bulk and sell them to pharmacies.
The suit accused drug companies of breaching their legal duties "to profiteer from the plague they knew would be unleashed." The state and counties said that drug manufacturers collaborated to mislead people and downplay the serious risks of opioid addiction, and that drug distributors skirted systems meant to limit orders for painkillers.
Teva is known for making generic drugs, but the lawsuit focused on Actiq and Fentora, two brand-name fentanyl drugs approved for some cancer patients. Teva repeatedly promoted them more broadly for other types of pain, in a "deceptive and dangerous marketing strategy," the lawsuit said.
"They try to say they're selling legal products. The only problem is: They're selling them illegally," lawyer Hunter Shkolnik, who represented Nassau County, said at a virtual news conference Thursday. "The jury saw that what they're doing is wrong."
Teva said Thursday it "continues to focus on increasing access to essential medicines to patients" and believes a national settlement of opioid issues is in patients' best interest.
New York said the conduct of the various opioid companies named in the suit cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in addiction treatment bills and other expenses. Lawyers for the counties suggested the Teva could be held liable for tens of billions of dollars, or more, in damages.
"The numbers are staggering, what it has cost our communities and what it will continue to cost our communities" in emergency services for overdose victims, drug rehabilitation programs and more, Suffolk County's lawyer, Jayne Conroy, said at the virtual news conference.
Teva was the sole manufacturing defendant left in the suit after others settled, most recently Allergan Finance LLC in December. The various settlements have netted New York up to $1.5 billion.
The trial started months ago. The jury began deliberating Dec. 14, taking some days off for Christmas.
Elsewhere, only a few opioid cases have gone to verdicts to date, with no clear consensus on outcomes.
An Oklahoma judge ruled against drugmaker Johnson & Johnson in 2019, but the state's supreme court overturned that decision in November. A week earlier, a California judge in ruled in favor of drugmakers — including Teva.
Then, late last month, a federal jury in Cleveland sided with two Ohio county governments that had claims against pharmacy chains.
Some observers thought the California and Oklahoma rulings doomed the idea of using state public nuisance laws to pursue opioid suits, said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who is following the litigation nationwide.
"But now we're really seeing that that's not true," at least in some places, Tobias said. He suggested Thursday's ruling could reinvigorate such suits.
A trial has been completed but a judge has not yet ruled in a West Virginia case, and a trial is ongoing in Washington state. Thousands of other cases are in the process of heading to trial.
There have also been settlements. Some of the biggest industry names — such as distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson and drugmakers Johnson & Johnson, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals — have reached nationwide settlements with a cumulative value potentially well over $30 billion. Most of the money is being directed to fight the epidemic.
But most of those deals have not been finalized, and there has been one very big reversal. In mid-December, a federal judge rejected OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma's sweeping deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids.
Chilean president Gabriel Boric speaks to supporters during a political rally in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Javier Torres/Getty Images)
Gabriel Boric’s presidential victory and a new constitution are the crowning achievements of Chile’s broad socialist movement. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling a vision of working-class prosperity that stretches back to Salvador Allende and beyond.
Boric may take some solace in knowing that his victory is the latest in a centuries-long struggle to make Chilean society a place of working-class well-being and prosperity. That was the dream of Salvador Allende when, in 1939, the still fresh-faced socialist physician assumed the role of health minister for the left-wing governing alliance of Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front administration.
Allende would go on in 1970 to become the famed leader of the “Chilean path to socialism”: an unprecedented thousand-day-long experiment in popular governance that included nationalizations of key industries, the creation of working-class institutions of representation, and, perhaps most controversially, a program for radical, accelerated agrarian reform.
By some accounts, it was actually the agrarian reform program that triggered the 1973 coup against Allende’s Popular Unity government: his push to redistribute land, place food distribution under worker control, and create worker-regulated food markets was a bridge too far for Chile’s landed elite, midsize business owners, middle-class consumers, and their military and political allies.
In his new book Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile, historian Joshua Frens-String shows that underlying the drive for agrarian reform and consumer protections was a vision of working-class abundance — what Allende called the “Revolution of Wine and Empanadas” — that had deep roots in Chile’s century-old socialist movement. In fact, in Frens-String’s account, the Chilean path to socialism was as much about creating a vibrant consumer society as it was democracy, albeit a socialist consumer society.
Frens-String traces the history of Allende’s 1970 government all the way back to the 1910s and ’20s, when working-class nutrition became the banner of a fledgling Chilean socialist movement; he follows that story through to the 1930s, when the left-wing Popular Front government put “food politics” at the heart of its campaign to define the good life as one of both prosperity and nutritional equality. And he shows how debates around food production shaped the thinking of Chile’s economic planners trying simultaneously to overcome underdevelopment while guaranteeing adequate caloric intake for the Chilean masses in the 1950s and ’60s.
Hungry for Revolution is a unique and necessary history of the Chilean left, and has a great deal to say about the future of Chilean socialist and progressive politics. Today, amid calls to include a clause in Chile’s new constitution that would protect the right to healthy and sustainable nutrition and against the backdrop of a growing food crisis in which working-class Chileans are taking on unprecedented household debt just to fill their pantries, Hungry for Revolution is as much a book about the past as it is the future.
Jacobin contributing editor Nicolas Allen spoke to Frens-String to learn more about how the working-class dream of “wine and empanadas” became the basis for a political revolution, and how that dream can be revived amid a left-wing resurgence in Chile today.
NA: Speak about the initial inspiration for your book. On the surface, it seems to be about a fairly niche topic, “food politics” and history of popular consumption in Chile. But as you read on, you realize that it’s actually a retelling of the history of the 20th-century Chilean left that touches on almost every issue imaginable: agrarian reform, development, state planning, markets, worker control, democracy, popular power — really, the issues that the Chilean left spent decades debating and arguing over.
JF-S: Yes, my goals in writing the book were, first, to show how food politics and the food system offer a window into the history of these various issues. But second, I wanted to show that the struggle over how food was produced, how it was distributed, and how it was consumed during the twentieth century actually drove political and economic change in Chile. In many ways, the battle over the food system came to define the meaning of and set the parameters for a more inclusive state and a more capacious, social understanding of citizenship.
Apart from that, one thing that fascinated me personally and really inspired my research is the fact that a democratically elected socialist government — Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition (1970–73) — was followed immediately afterward by the global premiere of neoliberalism in 1973. In Hungry for Revolution, I try to think about how those two diametrically opposed systems of economic organization could coexist in the same country within a roughly ten-year period of one another.
Scholars and activists have highlighted that a defining feature of the Chilean neoliberal experience has been how it became a uniquely consumer-driven society, where consumer freedom is often held up by promoters of neoliberal policies as the metric by which citizenship should be measured. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and after, notions of robust social and economic citizenship were replaced by an idea of a society of consumers who express their preferences and act in the marketplace rather than, say, through mass political organizations.
As I began to try to understand how those two apparently incongruous political tendencies could follow one another in rapid succession, I went back in time and realized that there was no necessary or logical association between the political right and a “consumer society.” In fact, the Right didn’t even talk much about consumption during the early or mid-twentieth century. If anything, the language of consumption and a consumer society was something associated with progressive movements going back to the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s, all the way up to the revolutionary years of the 1970s. It was the Left that was arguing all that time that citizens deserved a basic right to consumption.
Granted, it was a different type of consumption than the neoliberal version, and I make a careful distinction in the book between a consumption politics that emphasized consumption as a right of citizenship and neoliberal consumerism, which suggested that consumption was a market-based privilege rather than a guaranteed right. The former was a hallmark of the labor movement and of the Communist Party, as well as middle-class reform movements throughout the twentieth century: making sure that Chilean citizens had a basic right to consume a whole host of goods that were considered subsistence goods or staples. As the movement grew, the list of what were considered “staples” also grew.
By the mid-twentieth century, this left-wing emphasis on consumption led a host of actors — economists, scientists, and state officials — to think critically about how to produce consumer goods, how those goods should be distributed throughout the economy, and how the whole orientation of economic development could be geared toward realizing an “abundant” modern society.
Another thing that interested me about Chile is the origins of the Popular Unity revolution in the early 1970s. There’s a traditional narrative, especially in the United States, that places that revolution within the global Cold War context as a satellite struggle for the larger global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. If you take the history of the Popular Unity revolution back three or four decades, you find a more interesting domestic story about the origins of the Popular Unity government that reaches back to political organizing in the 1930s through the Chilean Popular Front.
The Chilean Popular Front was a historic coalition that for the first time anywhere in the Americas brought together the Socialist Party and the Communist Party in a broad governing coalition. When we tie together those two historical moments in the 1930s and ’40s and the 1970s, we gain a new perspective for thinking about the Popular Unity years as more than a simple footnote to the Cold War. The struggle over food as a right of citizenship certainly illuminates this longer history of what the Popular Unity revolution was all about.
NA: You mention in the book that Salvador Allende was minister of health in the Popular Front government in 1939. In a way, that’s one of the most interesting contrasts between Chile and, say, Brazil or Argentina. In the 1930s or ’40s, many of Latin America’s populist governments had a similar agenda of pursuing redistribution policies and explicitly trying to tackle the issue of working-class nutrition and consumption. But Chile seems unique in that the issue of working-class nutrition was — and remained for decades — a banner of the socialist left.
JF-S: That’s right. If you look at Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico in the 1920s and ’30s, the story of the state’s trying to protect or guarantee popular consumption looks similar throughout Latin America. What happened in Chile is somewhat distinct in that, as you say, it was the political left — socialists, communists, progressive Catholics — that adopted these sorts of demands and put them at the center of their political programs.
Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil had more traditionally populist programs — they didn’t identify with the Left so much as they did with a more ambiguous nationalist agenda. By contrast, there was a much stronger ideological component to consumption demands in Chile, because movements like the Communist Party and Socialist Party very deliberately understood these issues to be part of their organizing efforts and their vision of a socialist society very early in the twentieth century.
The idea of guaranteeing a basic right to food or protecting popular nutrition may not itself be an inherently “leftist” idea, but leftist parties in Chile made it so by using consumption demands to reach both the growing urban working class and those in an even more precarious position. Many rural workers in the 1930s moved from the Chilean countryside to the cities, and consumption politics became a way of attracting them into the broad tent of the political left as well.
NA: Before we get deeper into the history of the Chilean left and how it made popular nutrition its flagship cause, there’s a particular idea in Hungry for Revolution that resonates powerfully today. Food, as your book shows so well, is an unusual commodity in that it is strongly associated both with social necessity and economic freedom: there are all kinds of twentieth-century policies like state planning, price controls, and production quotas aimed precisely to guarantee basic food access for populations. But food is also at the center of powerful ideas about consumer choice, pleasure, and basic market freedoms.
JF-S: The anthropologist Sidney Mintz wrote about this when he argued that food was an interesting lens to look at society through because it puts into relief two tensions. On the one hand, people want state regulations to protect their physical health, safety, and the affordability of basic foods. At the same time, food also highlights the issue of individual choice: consumers don’t want to be told what to eat and how to eat. People often think that the kitchen table is a protected private space, and any state attempt to tell people what to eat or how to eat has, in different moments, been met with protest.
Food historian Rachel Laudan uses the idea of “culinary modernism” to refer to a similar tension between need and choice; her concept emphasizes how general living standards and consumer well-being has improved when states have harnessed modern technology to make the food more accessible and food production less laborious. This is basically the story of the first five chapters of Hungry for Revolution, where all the different left-wing Chilean political movements throughout history were trying to regulate the economy and adopt new technological and scientific understandings of nutrition to meet working people’s basic needs and demands.
At that point, from the 1930s to 1970s, there was not a huge debate about providing a wide array of consumer options to people. It was really about establishing quantitative or measurable metrics, and making sure workers had access to, for example, enough calories, proper sources of protein, and eventually things like fruits and vegetables and milk — things that fell under the broad category of what were called “protective foods”.
If we look at Salvador Allende’s nutrition policies, his focus on food during the Popular Unity years was very much a continuation of this tradition. He made milk accessible to Chilean children, and famously, when there were beef shortages in Chile, Allende asked people to eat fish instead because it was a simple way of substituting one protein for another.
In practice, the politics of this proved more challenging. During the Popular Unity revolution there were also major food protests over shortages of very specific types of goods. Though there was not famine like you could see in other parts of the world in the early twentieth century, when goods that consumers had learned to associate with a “good life” were in short supply, they became objects of protest. People had come to expect beef and didn’t want to eat a substitute, even if nutrition scientists said a substitute like fish was just as good, if not better.
Hence, many of the anti-Allende protests were organized around the idea of choice. Protest leaders began to emphasize that choice and the ability to have consumer options should be the new metric by which the proper functioning of a consumer society should be measured. And that mentality highlights the formation of a social base that was opposed to Allende and that later, in the post-Allende period, supported the policies of neoliberalism.
By focusing on struggles around consumption during the Popular Unity revolution, you begin to see how a base of support for what would become neoliberalism came into existence — not necessarily among workers and the urban or rural poor, but that message really resonated among middle-class sectors. It’s also there that we find society turning away from thinking about collective needs and focusing on government policies that emphasize choice as the be-all and end-all of the economy.
NA: Perhaps we should take a step back and review the long history of the Chilean left leading up to the Allende years. Why was hunger such an issue in early twentieth-century Chile in the first place? How did hunger become not just a social issue, but a left-wing one?
JF-S: I spend the first couple chapters of the book really addressing that question. As the book argues, hunger was a central way in which political movements articulated the “social question” and made their demands on the state.
It’s important to understand that this idea of hunger is really a social or political construction. It’s not necessarily an objective or static condition that people were experiencing in any one moment so much as it became a political language that was constructed based on perceived experiences.
Chile had very interesting connections to the global economy at the turn of the twentieth century: it was actually the provider for much of the mineral fertilizer that fueled the rise of agricultural — and, by extension, consumer — abundance in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chilean nitrates mined from the Atacama Desert were a fuel for the rise of intensive agricultural practices, especially in the United States and Europe at that time.
There, in the Atacama Desert, Chilean nitrate miners came to understand their poor living and working conditions in relation to the abundance they were producing. They saw their own experience of exploitation in the scarcity and high cost of foodstuffs, and time and again pointed this out through protests against the state and private capitalists.
When the nitrate economy went bust, initially after World War I and then definitively after the Great Depression, those workers ended up migrating to urban areas of Chile, particularly the capital Santiago. And hunger quickly became a rallying cry for some of the first social and political movements that took center stage in those developing urban environments. There’s a fascinating political movement that emerged right after World War I, the National Workers’ Assembly for Nutrition (Asamblea Obrera de Alimentación Nacional, AOAN), which mobilized against high food prices and, among other things, called for state-backed price controls on key consumer goods. These demonstrations were some of the largest in twentieth-century Chilean history.
The AOAN went beyond this, though. It was one of the first movements to make political demands for comprehensive agrarian reform, for major tax reforms so that certain scarce goods could enter Chile more easily from abroad, and so that basic consumer goods would not leave Chile as exports but rather be diverted to urban consumers. Many of those demands were actually met in 1932, when Chile became the first country anywhere in the hemisphere to establish a permanent national price control office. This predates, for example, the Office of Price Administration in the United States, which was the price control office created as part of the New Deal in 1941, as World War II was kicking into high gear.
I argue in the book that the AOAN was the movement that provided both the political and economic model for the Popular Front in the 1930s — which, later in the book, I try to show was the precursor to Allende’s Popular Unity coalition. The AOAN was a place where socialists, communists, and anarchists all joined together for the first time.
NA: This is a bit tangential, but since you mentioned the New Deal: some of the things we’re talking about remind me of policies proposed by Henry A. Wallace, the progressive politician who served as secretary of agriculture during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Is that just a coincidence?
JF-S: Actually, I think Henry Wallace’s vision of a global New Deal was similar to what many Chileans in the Popular Front period were calling for in the late 1930s and early 1940s: a kind of hemispheric New Deal. Many Chilean reformers — especially given their support for US war efforts — even expected something like that to happen after World War II.
Even if that didn’t happen, I like to think that what did happen in Chile — especially from the 1960s forward, and particularly with agrarian reform and then Allende being elected — as really the fulfillment of Henry Wallace’s vision: a system rooted in economic democracy, where there’s increased popular participation by both rural and urban workers to ensure that every Chilean had, to paraphrase Wallace’s words, a quart of milk each day. Wallace’s dream was deferred and ultimately eclipsed in the United States, but one could argue that it lived on in interesting ways through the mid-century Latin American left.
Wallace in fact did make a fascinating visit to Chile in 1943 and was greeted like a king. The historian Jody Pavilack has a chapter on this in her book Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War, which is about coal miners during the Popular Front period. Wallace was beloved by the political left in Chile, and Wallace actually held up Chile during the Popular Front years as a symbol of what social and economic democracy could look like in the Americas.
NA: Getting back to Chile and the early twentieth century: I know during that period there were episodic instances of working-class activity focused on consumption and reproduction — the 1907 tenant strike in Buenos Aires is a famous example. But the Chilean movement seems exceptional both for its intensity and durability.
JF-S: Yes, there were all types of different consumer leagues that started in the 1930s in Chile and around the Americas. Again, those were the years leading up to the election of the Chilean Popular Front, a period when militants of different left-leaning political parties, and women in particular, went out to survey the consumer marketplace to make sure that price controls were being followed by shopkeepers. In certain instances, they themselves actually expropriated and redistributed goods that were being hoarded or not sold at the proper prices by shopkeepers. These actions represented one model of participatory or direct economic democracy.
Later, approaching the mid-twentieth century, as Chile’s developmental welfare state took shape, state officials began to work with scientists, engineers, and agricultural experts to implement food and nutrition policies. These welfare and regulatory policies were a response to earlier citizen mobilizations, but at the same time, they were an attempt to contain the power of social movements that had organized around issues of food justice and equity.
In a sense, the Popular Unity years were proof that citizen mobilization around food had not subsided or been wholly contained. This was most evident in the 1970s with the creation of neighborhood price inspection boards, known as Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (Committees of Supplies and Prices), or JAPs. The JAPs were exemplary of what was known as “poder popular” or popular power during the Popular Unity revolution, and it’s important to see the origins of those left-wing experiments with direct economic participation and forms of consumer-based economic democracy in the prior decades. It was then that consumers first took on the role that they wanted the state to handle.
NA: As you said, by the time we reach the 1950s and the heyday of the Latin American developmentalist state, that regulatory role for nutrition and food access had been reabsorbed by the Chilean state. It also seems like it was in that period that we find the first explicit recognition — at least by the Chilean state — of a strategic connection between agrarian reform and improved living standards of the urban masses.
JF-S: Yes, I think the history of food and consumption gives us a new historical understanding of why and how the developmentalist state, or social welfare state, emerged as it did in Latin America. Still, food policies and consumer regulation were explicitly understood, at least by agents of the state, as a way to contain potential popular political unrest that had already been made very evident by earlier political mobilizations in Chile.
It’s against that background that we find in Chile the creation of numerous state agencies whose purpose was to calculate how many calories, proteins, fruits, vegetables, and milk that different sectors of the population needed to consume. It then became the job of other agencies to implement productive policies that made it more possible for Chile to meet those nutritional needs through domestic production, as opposed to depending on food imports from abroad.
Similar to the containment efforts targeting urban social movements, by the 1950s and early ’60s, the push for agrarian reform — at least as far as the state was concerned — was seen as a way of containing rural working populations that were beginning to exercise greater and greater political power through unionization drives and land occupations.
To be sure, rural workers’ mobilization helped bring the need for agrarian reform center stage. But urban reformers, following the work of structuralist economists in the 1950s and early 1960s, were also adamant that land redistribution would improve domestic food production. And more efficient domestic food production meant lower food prices and less dependence on foreign food imports.
The structuralist economic interpretation of underdevelopment began to hinge on making the rural countryside more productive, producing enough food for urban consumers so that foreign exchange could buy other industrial technologies in the international marketplace. Food sovereignty was a prerequisite for greater economic sovereignty and economic modernity.
That’s one way to think about agrarian reform. There was also a debate taking place among structuralist economists in the 1950s and ’60s about the origins of consumer inflation. Inflation is this kind of boogeyman throughout twentieth-century Chilean history, and the economists who were gathered at places like the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) were arguing that inflation is primarily driven by a low supply of food and rising demand; that is, that the disequilibrium between those two is making food and other consumer goods increasingly expensive, and that there was a necessity to increase supply to bring it closer in line with growing urban demand.
NA: It’s also in that part of the book that you show how Chilean state agencies began to talk about consumer behavior and population statistics in a more technocratic way, using terms like “model consumers” that, to my ears, sound a bit like the language of the World Bank.
JF-S: Absolutely, and they used that kind of language especially when talking about women as consumers. Many reformers saw women, as the heads of households, as the cause of nutritional problems. The Popular Front and its supporters were certainly also guilty of using some very gendered, heteronormative language in their pursuit of better nutritional outcomes.
In fact, as the Cold War began, around 1946 or ’47, women began to be seen pretty much exclusively as a problem, so that the state’s goal was to alter women’s consumer habits: what they buy, what they feed their families, and so on. In resolving that problem, it was thought, you could get the country on better developmental footing. Obviously, that’s a very limited and depoliticized vision of women’s political agency, and ultimately, it proved to be an attempt to demobilize women politically after a Popular-Front-style Chilean feminist movement had organized them in the late 1930s and ’40s.
NA: Although they would recover some type of agency again in the Allende years, through women-led popular institutions like the Price Boards, right? As you already alluded to before, the long arc of Chilean socialism comes into particularly sharp relief when we follow the specific theme of food and nutrition politics.
JF-S: That’s right. The various dimensions of Chile’s food struggles set the stage for Allende’s Popular Unity revolution. With the benefit of historical distance, we might even say that the early 1970s were a kind of culminating moment in Chilean history. When viewed through the lens of food, you really see how these different economic justice struggles came to a head. I like to think of the Popular Unity period as an attempt to resolve some of the earlier contradictions that had built up throughout the history of the Chilean left.
Allende’s acceleration of agrarian reform was a case in point. Building on the work and ideas of his predecessors, Allende tried very concertedly to meet demands of urban consumers while at the same time meeting the demands for land and better working conditions being raised by rural peasants. Guaranteeing better living conditions, better working conditions, while also trying to ramp up economic production in the countryside so urban consumers have enough to eat — that’s a very difficult balancing act to pull off.
So, Allende was trying to resolve a whole series of things at once, and actually, for the first year of his government, he had considerable success, at least economically. There was a year of tremendous abundance that is too often forgotten, or overshadowed, by the difficult months that preceded the 1973 coup. During the Popular Unity’s first year in power, Allende successfully raised working-class wages and raised agricultural production when it came to Chile’s most essential goods. The supermarkets were well-stocked and other stores selling consumer goods were abundantly supplied — people were generally quite happy. For these reasons, 1971 is sometimes referred to as a “fiesta de consumo” (consumer party).
Popular Unity ran into trouble as its second year in power began. Inflation started to creep up again; there were increasing shortages for essential goods like beef, but also a lot of imported goods; and the United States was blocking Chile’s access to new credit, making it much more difficult to import goods from abroad. There also were growing tensions within Allende’s coalition about the best way to push the revolution forward: whether it was better to radicalize the revolution and give political power to its grassroots base, or to consolidate at the top by making gestures of peace and reconciliation to middle sectors — the Christian Democrats, in particular — and push forward with a more sort of top-down revolution.
Again, the history of food offers an interesting window to think about that tension between a top-down revolution and a bottom-up revolution. But even more than that, the struggle for food fueled this tension — or at the very least was an arena in which this tension played out.
The primary example in the Popular Unity years was the JAPs — the neighborhood price and supply boards — that carried out similar functions of neighborhood consumer inspection as the consumer leagues of the 1930s and ’40s. The JAPs diverged from the Popular Front experience in that they were not only monitoring things that were going on in the consumer marketplace but actually directed distribution channels as well. Food from agrarian reform settlements was being given to these boards by state distribution companies to distribute directly to peripheral or underserved urban communities.
Through the price and supply boards, Popular Unity militants were actually rethinking the logistical system or supply chain by which food and consumer essentials moved through the economy. They were reconsidering the relationships that connected production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. But as these groups gained more power and independence, Allende and his top officials became concerned that they were losing their grip over the speed and direction of the revolution.
NA: That vacillation between a top-down and bottom-up revolution seems to have been a tragic hallmark of the Popular Unity government. Do you think that indecisiveness was his Achilles heel, that is, Allende’s indecision about whether to expand the ruling coalition toward the Christian Democrats or give more power to independent working-class institutions like the ones we’re talking about?
JF-S: I think that there was a belief on the part of Allende and his closest advisers that economic change or structural reform alone could produce all the other changes that society needed; that he could just fulfill these pent-up demands for consumption and material security and then that would pave the road to more profound social changes at some point down the road.
But Allende struggled to understand the necessity of implementing major political changes too. He never dismantled the political power held by opposition sectors in the Congress; the landowner interests still had an incredible amount of power there, as well as in the judiciary, and he was very hesitant to embrace popular power and give more decision-making power to local communities, workers, grassroots organization, and so on. Allende was very intent on maintaining the political and constitutional architecture of the country intact while he focused instead on economic restructuring.
NA: And then, of course, there was the political opposition. Your book is interesting because it sets aside the familiar actors — the Chicago Boys, Henry Kissinger, the CIA, trucker strikes, hoarders, economic saboteurs — to put the spotlight on Chilean middle sectors and show how their ideas of consumption fed directly into the coup and its aftermath.
JF-S: The counterrevolutionary actors that became well known during the Pinochet dictatorship really began to organize in the final years of the Popular Unity revolution. It was then that right-wing middle- and upper-class women, as consumers and guardians of the household economy, began to make demands for Allende to step down from office. It was also the moment when middlemen and distributors became very upset with alternative channels of food and consumer distribution, and they too began to call for Allende to be removed from power. And then there were the landowners, who were very upset about their agricultural lands being expropriated by the state and redistributed to small landowners.
So, there was a confluence of consumers, distributors, and producers cohering into an oppositional bloc against Allende, and it was that social base that Pinochet and the Chicago Boys, his neoliberal economic advisers, came to rely upon after the coup in an attempt to legitimate their program. They provided economic ideas and a new program to this already existing constituency of disillusioned, very frustrated social and political actors in Chile.
This is all meant to complicate a bit the more simplistic narrative about an omnipotent United States in the broader Cold War context, coming in and simply toppling a popular, democratically elected government in Chile without Chilean actors playing a key role. The government of Allende was certainly popular at different moments, and it was certainly democratically elected. But as a historian, I think it is important to also recognize that Allende faced a sizable domestic opposition — and we need more research about the ideas around which that opposition organized and united itself. Having women homemakers, small and large distributors, shopkeepers, and landowners in the same political coalition was quite unprecedented for the time.
NA: One thing that has stuck with me throughout our discussion is how slippery the idea of “abundance” really is. Capitalism teaches us that our idea of abundance should be as boundless as our wildest consumer desires; meanwhile, Allende tried to convince Chileans that a nutritious meal was its own form of abundance — even if steak was not on the menu. Now that the Left is back in power in Chile and Gabriel Boric has promised to turn a set of basic social and economic goods into inalienable rights, do you think it’s important to look back at what Allende did right or wrong?
JF-S: I think Allende’s vision of socialism remained overly rooted in a belief that economic change was all that was needed to set the stage for broader social or political changes. When it came to food, Allende didn’t fully appreciate how both hunger and abundance were shaped by more than just economic factors; the meanings of both hunger and abundance were constructed through political struggle and evolved over the course of the twentieth century.
Allende sometimes had a static understanding of abundance as this thing out there that one could eventually reach or obtain. For food, it was about reaching satisfactory levels of caloric intake, satisfactory levels of protein consumption, and so on. He rarely considered the importance of culture in food politics — that certain foods have social significance or that taste can become political.
I think some of Allende’s critics on the Left — people who often were a part of the revolutionary Left, as well as progressive Catholics — had begun by 1973 to be critical of the idea that consumer abundance was achievable in the short term, or that this should be the primary focus of the revolution. Some on the Left began to talk about how the revolution needed to think about a new ethics of consumption that focused on other things like restraint and sacrifice.
The Christian Left as well as the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, MIR), which was not part of the Popular Unity coalition, began arguing with increasing force that Allende needed to also focus his attention on dismantling the sources of political power that stood behind the old system — that economic change alone would not be sustainable as long as the political power and influence of those who controlled the economy were allowed to persist.
One could argue that this was a tragic lesson of Allende’s overthrow: that unless you think about the political and economic dimensions of a revolution together, the old system will remain intact, in one way or another.
Today, I think that many on the Chilean left — particularly those who first coalesced in the Apruebo Dignidad coalition before the October 2020 plebiscite to rewrite Chile’s constitution and who have now elected Gabriel Boric as president — have learned some important lessons from the Popular Unity years. Most notably, Chile today is in the process of writing a new constitution. This is something that Allende always hesitated to pursue.
If you go back to the 2011 student movement in Chile, or even before, with the high school student movement of 2007, you can see the emergence of a politics oriented around decommodifying education, health care, and housing, and a growing awareness that none of that can be accomplished in a lasting way under the current political system.
There’s a real understanding on the contemporary Chilean left that the political architecture of the country needs to change so that economic reforms can be sustained and consolidated. The historic nature of what we’re seeing right now in Chile should not be underestimated.
The soaring, centuries-old Sitka spruce is spared, for now. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)
This tree’s erect bearing — a 1917 publication called the Sitka species “the autocrat of timbers” — is what helps give it such extraordinary commercial value. Musical instrument makers covet its fine grain, as do builders whose clients want old-growth wood that’s increasingly scarce. In a world whose ancient forests have largely disappeared, this grove holds a sliver of what remains.
Even when the top and branches are lopped off, a tree this size would yield at least 6,000 board feet of lumber, said industry consultant Catherine Mater, who assessed the spruce’s potential market value for The Washington Post. It would fetch around $17,500 on the open market.
But there’s another value the spruce holds: the carbon dioxide locked inside its fibers, in its roots, in the soil and in the vegetation that clings to it from its branches to its base, where berry bushes proliferate. The miraculous process that sustains life on Earth is embedded within its vast trunk, a reservoir for the greenhouse gases that now threaten humanity. The spruce draws in carbon dioxide through the tiny holes in its leaves, known as stomata, and water through its roots. The sunlight it absorbs fuels a reaction that splits the water and carbon dioxide into glucose, which traps the carbon, and releases oxygen into the atmosphere.
The spruce would hold nearly 12 metric tons of carbon, says forest ecologist Beverly Law, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University. Its roots and the soil below would hold another 1.4 tons. And while roughly a third of the tree’s carbon would stay locked in the logs being shipped to mill, the rest would escape to the atmosphere.
This mammoth tree plays an outsize role in the Tongass National Forest, which holds the equivalent of 9.9 billion tons of CO2 — nearly twice what the United States emits from burning fossil fuels each year.
Walking around its 15-foot-wide base, Marina Anderson, the Organized Village of Kasaan’s tribal administrator, pointed out a plethora of plants her ancestors, the Haida and Tlingit peoples, have used over the centuries.
“There’s watermelon berries, Jacob’s berries, blueberries. There’s fiddleheads,” said Anderson, whose people made their homes here before this spruce arose from the soil. There are the spruce needles she makes into syrup and adds to salt, and butter. The devil’s club she dries for tea, and for medicine.
Covered in a riotous mix of pale lichens and deep-green moss, the tree’s flaky bark is marred by a long, electric-blue slash of spray paint running across one side of its wide trunk. Many months ago, the U.S. Forest Service chose the spruce to be cut down and extracted by helicopter — an elaborate process reserved for only the finest trees on this rugged hillside. In the words of loggers, “You cut the best, so the best is always left.”
The spruce’s fortunes as ever, are bound in the politics of timber and climate change thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. Its blue death mark might as well be a question mark: Is this tree worth more to us alive? Or dead?
Anderson knows what her answer is.
A seed takes root
As Magellan sailed around the world and Copernicus planted the sun at the center of the solar system, seeds from a grown Sitka spruce landed on the remains of a mature tree that had toppled over. So did the seeds of a western hemlock, the species that dominates the forest in this archipelago.
It was the early 1500s. The colony established here at the tail end of the 18th century, dubbed “Russian America,” did not yet exist. The Industrial Revolution had not begun. The spruce took root long before the timber wars of the 20th century and the climate wars of the 21st.
Together, the two saplings began to grow, aided by the scattering of soil on the decrepit root mass and circumstances set in motion long before their birth. When the glaciers covering Prince of Wales melted more than 14,000 years earlier, the retreat triggered a landslide, depositing chalky material right at the toe of that cascade — where the young trees took root. The calcium carbonate nurtured their growth, even during a relatively cold period on the island.
Prince of Wales is the largest island along Alaska’s panhandle, spanning 2,577 square miles. It lies within an archipelago of 1,100 islands, on the state’s southeast stretch near Canada’s British Columbia. A coastal temperate rainforest, it is often wet, with average temperatures hovering between 40 and 51 degrees Fahrenheit.
The spruce began to rise, sending its roots into the soil where it could steel itself against the strong winds that buffet the island. Underground, the roots found fractures in the limestone-rich soil, drawing in nutrients and moisture. It shed the limbs on its lower stem as it grew, leaving its lower trunk bare of branches.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 282 parts per million.
Already, there were people in the forest. The Tlingit had settled this part of Alaska long before, surviving off the sea as well as the woods. Thousands probably lived on Prince of Wales, given its vast resources, in communal settings divided by clans.
By 1700 the Haida — another oceangoing people, who lived in Canada and had journeyed as far south as Peru in their massive canoes — began to settle here. They traveled in the largest dugout canoes in the world, more than 50 feet long and seven feet wide, made from long-lived red cedars. They erected totem poles in front of every family home, noted Michael Jones, historian for the Organized Village of Kasaan.
The Little Ice Age had enveloped the island, making the winters colder and the snowpack heavier. The greater snowfall insulated the tree’s roots, helping ensure its survival. As it became the dominant tree, it flourished further in the forest’s open space. And the site’s southern exposure bathed it in light on all but a few of the darkest winter days.
Russians arrived in Alaska in the late 1700s. Illustrations depict a trading company headquarters in Sitka, circa 1827; an expedition led by the first Russian governor, Alexander Baranov, arriving at Sitka in 1804; and members of the Tlingit nation performing a war dance in 1802, before they wiped out most of the Russian-American Company's original settlement at Sitka. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
By the latter part of the century two Spaniards, Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra and Francisco Mourelle, explored villages not far away for a month in 1775. The Russians came shortly afterward, established a trading company by 1799, and focused on killing sea otters for their pelts.
When the United States bought Alaska from Russia on Oct. 18, 1867 — over the objections of the Tlingit — it had more to do with asserting U.S. influence in the Pacific than commandeering the riches of its forests.
Soon enough, officials such as J.W. White, a captain in the U.S. Revenue-Marine Service, began to eye Alaska’s trees, writing in 1876, “When the forests of Oregon and Washington are gone, Alaska will be our permanent supply.”
As timber became more valuable, federal officials fought to claim the forest as their own. Between the 1930s and 1960s, they repeatedly burned cabins and smokehouses at Indigenous fish camps. While Alaska Natives returned year after year to these sites, to catch salmon and herring they relied on year-round, Forest Service officials referred to them in disparaging terms such as squatters.
The year 1951 could have augured the death of the spruce. That was when Ketchikan Pulp & Paper Co. and the Forest Service signed a 50-year contract to cut down 8.25 billion board feet — enough to fill 1.6 million log trucks. It ranked as the largest timber sale in the agency’s history. A second 50-year contract with Alaska Lumber and Pulp Co. followed five years later.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen to 315 parts per million.
At the time, Forest Service researchers called old growth in the Tongass “decadent climax forest stands.” The spruce tree growing on central Prince of Wales already fit that description. As it climbed, it acquired several of the hallmarks of what naturalist Richard Carstensen lovingly calls “age and decrepitude,” including delicate plants hanging off its branches. These epiphytes ranged in texture and color, from the orange moss known as Antitrichia curtipendula to the light-green lichens belonging to the genus Usnea, known more commonly as old man’s beard and witches’ hair, respectively.
To harvest big trees more easily, however, the government had to build roads across Prince of Wales. In the mid-1960s it constructed one about 200 yards away from the old spruce, paving it with shot rock from a quarry.
For companies seeking to supply the growing market for paper and for rayon, made from cellulose, these large trees were ideal.
And Alaska Native corporations, the companies established in 1971 after receiving a small portion of their original homelands, also chopped down old growth. Within three decades, just a fraction still stood.
By 1975, timber had become a major economic force in Alaska, after oil and seafood. In search of high-paying jobs, men from all over the country began to arrive in a seasonal migration of loggers that would bring Americans from Oregon and Maine to the great state. The industry continued to boom through 1980, with logging and sawmill jobs averaging roughly 1,100 in the winter and 2,300 in the summer. International wood exports in fiscal 1981 totaled nearly $270 million, and shipments to the East Coast netted tens of millions more.
A land for loggers
Michael Kampnich, who grew up in dairy country in Upstate New York, found work as “a feller” in 1980 on Prince of Wales.
“I was 21, and single and this sounded like a terrific adventure,” recalled Kampnich, 62. “I just fell in love with the place. I loved working in the woods. I still look back on those days fondly. It was kind of an exciting time.”
Kampnich and other loggers, who were earning between $180 and $200 a day, felled trees in units. While many measured about two to two-and-half feet in diameter, some were much more massive. Risks were everywhere, from the dead or broken branches that could fall from the canopy — dubbed “widow makers” — to rotting trees that could collapse without warning.
“You’ve got a few of these dominant spruce that were, eight, nine feet. I cut a few like that. You know, it was a thrill to cut timber, especially big trees. It’s challenging. It’s very hard work. There’s a fairly high degree of danger to it.”
The island took center stage in the state’s timber industry. Companies set up enormous floating logging camps on Thorne Bay, complete with bunkhouses for loggers and a cookhouse for meals. The year Kampnich arrived, production was at its peak in the Tongass, at more than half-a-billion board feet — enough to fill at least 100,000 log trucks.
Other trees were bigger and more accessible than the Sitka spruce that had survived for more than four centuries. Its roots, by this time, had spread out at least 20 feet in every direction — perhaps much more. The tree’s circumference measured 15.7 feet.
Scenes from the Tongass National Forest in July: Downtown Juneau, Alaska's capital; the shoreline of Prince of Wales Island; and visitors to Nugget Falls at the Mendenhall Glacier, near Juneau.
Kampnich stopped logging in 1986. “The primary thing for me was danger. You know, I had a couple of close calls, where I literally thought I was going to be killed — that’s part of the job. I had a number of friends who were seriously injured, I had a few that were killed. And once I started a family, I wanted something different.”
But others kept coming, especially as logging became more difficult in the Pacific Northwest. Keith Landers had worked in Oregon for two decades, taking the leftover timber for shingles, but the old growth was running out.
“It has to be old timber,” he explained. “I mean, we can cut second growth, but the people on the other end are not going to like it. It’s just not going to last.”
Broader economic forces started to reshape logging in Alaska. Federal regulations, such as the Clean Water Act, had made it more expensive for pulp mills to operate. Nylon and polyester were replacing rayon in the global marketplace. Sawmills in Haines, Seward and Klawock closed in 1991, and the big pulp mills soon followed.
Landers was undeterred. He heard about a small mill for sale near Thorne Bay, and in 1994 decided it was time to move.
Public officials made it clear that they wanted loggers like Landers to reap the island’s bounty. A few years after his arrival, they paved the road running past the massive spruce to make it even easier to transport the giant logs.
Not long after Landers bought his mill, President Bill Clinton’s deputies took a hard look at road-building in federal forests. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck halted construction because Congress slashed the budget, but he decided he wanted a permanent halt to new roads. A lecture from his boss when he was a young field biologist in Michigan’s Hiawatha National Forest in the ‘70s echoed in his head: “The most significant thing we do on the forest to change the land is to build a road.”
Still, Clinton was worried about including Alaska in a proposed road ban; there was already pushback from Alaska Republican Sen. Ted Stevens, who chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. Dombeck briefed Clinton as they flew aboard Marine One to survey fire damage in Idaho. The president had a single question: How many jobs would banning roads cost in Alaska? The answer: 383.
“Well, I don’t know what Ted Stevens is worried about,” the president remarked.
The roadless rule was published on Jan. 12, 2001, right before Clinton left office. It set off a bitter battle, pitting conservationists, many Alaska Natives and Democrats on one side against timber companies, the Alaska political establishment and Republicans on the other.
Barack Obama’s administration tried to forge a compromise, to shift over time to logging “young-growth” trees that were half-a-century old. But once Donald Trump was elected, it was clear the plan would be scrapped.
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) cheered. “Thankfully, the Obama administration has only weeks left in office, after which we can turn this decision around and bring active management to our federal forests for the benefit for Alaska and America’s economy.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 405 parts per million. And the spruce on Prince of Wales faced the prospect of the ax once more.
Reclaiming the forest
Marina Anderson’s father made his living off logging. The family’s native corporation, Shaan Seet, clear-cut much of the old growth on its land before she was born, and her dad helped build many of the roads crisscrossing Prince of Wales.
By the time Jimmy Anderson died in 2014, attitudes about logging had begun to change. Marina emerged as the one who would uphold her family’s Haida and Tlingit traditions, reviving a way of life.
Along with her brother Cole, Anderson, 28, catches salmon from the Tongass’s rivers and harvests berries and other plants from the forest. On a hot day in late June — it reached 80 degrees, a nagging reminder of how climate change had already shifted conditions in this temperate rainforest — she headed to the shores of Port Saint Nicholas Bay to teach a group of Native teenagers how to spot plants ripe for picking.
“It’s so hot,” she groused, twisting her long auburn hair into a bun and placing a broad-brimmed cedar hat atop her head.
Marina Anderson, a member of the Haida and Tlingit nations, teaches members of the Alaska Youth Stewards about foraging traditions like harvesting rice from the roots of chocolate lilies.
Wearing clamdiggers and a black tank top, Anderson easily navigated her way through a thicket of old-growth forest. She dodged devil’s club — coveted for food and medicinal purposes, whose stem is loaded with prickly spikes that can embed in the skin — and clambered over mossy logs.
Making it out to the beach, she guided the teenagers to some chocolate lilies — their bright-green pistils and mustard-yellow stamens peeking out from the rich brown petals — and urged the kids to take a whiff. One of them, Joel Alejandro, inhaled before staggering back.
“Kinda stinky, right?” she asked, smiling before ripping it out of the earth to show them the small grains sticking to the roots. “You see that? It’s all rice. We all know how much of a bummer it is if you’ve got fish and no rice.”
Walking through the forest, Anderson stopped to marvel at the power of old growth, the ancient trees above her, the rich and spongy ground beneath her feet.
The notion of cutting them down for high-end houses infuriates her.
“We have to stop,” she said. “There is not enough left for everybody, and we’re not going to let any go.”
Her generation is intent on mastering the native skills driven underground decades earlier, knowledge that draws on the resources of the forest, rivers and sea to withstand the disorienting present. The past, almost invisible now, provides a path forward.
Her friend and colleague, wood carver Michael Chilton, hovered so closely to watch as his father carved wood that it amounted to an implicit ultimatum: “It was either teach me, or I’ll get myself cut.”
Chilton, now 30, began carving at the age of nine. His dad, now 56, had done the same, pestering his uncles as a kid in Juneau to teach him even the basics of the craft.
Anderson, who became Kasaan’s tribal administrator at the start of the pandemic, joined other Alaska Native leaders fighting to preserve the roadless rule even as the Trump administration sought to get rid of it. They filed administrative petitions, arguing that old-growth forests were critical to the forest’s survival and their way of life.
A tattoo on her rib cage captures one of her father’s favorite sayings: “Being Haida is not about the things that you do. Being Haida is about the way you do things.”
In January, Sealaska made a pivotal decision. The regional tribal corporation that had cut much of the old growth on its land officially stopped logging. Instead, under California’s emissions trading system, Sealaska sold carbon credits for its trees to the oil and gas company BP, making $100 million. It has offered $10 million of those proceeds to help raise money to invest in new businesses and generate jobs for local Alaska Natives.
A broad coalition, including outdoor recreation and environmental groups, argues that a different kind of forest-based economy has already emerged. Tourism accounted for 18 percent of southeast Alaska’s jobs in 2019, according to the business group Southeast Conference, while the seafood industry generated 8 percent. Timber, by contrast, accounted for just 337 jobs, or 0.7 percent — and that was before Sealaska stopped logging.
The pandemic hammered the region’s leisure and hospitality industry last year: As the cruise industry skidded to a halt, the sector’s employment dipped by 45 percent. But small-scale tourism boomed this year, as Americans headed outdoors once coronavirus vaccines became widely available.
Wildlife and nature are a major driver of the economy in the Tongass, from tourism at the Mendenhall Glacier to whale watching off Juneau and fish processing in the city, as Martin Shelton unloads Taku River salmon for Yakobi Fisheries.
Sitting outside at a beer garden in downtown Juneau, Dan Kirkwood, general manager of Alaska Seaplanes Adventures, gestured toward the crowd. “These people are all here because they want to see glaciers, whales, bears and Alaska Native culture,” he said.
For $850 a person, Kirkwood’s company takes guests to a pristine spot on the archipelago’s Admiralty Island, where they gaze from a distance at brown bears as they grab salmon, graze on vegetation and amble about. Only 24 people are allowed to touch down by float plane at Pack Creek each day, minimizing the tourists’ impact.
This is the sort of small-scale employment that Meredith Trainor, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, sees as sustaining the shift away from logging.
Rather than depending on a single commodity such as timber, she argued, the region can draw on diverse businesses that are interconnected. Juneau’s Amalga Distillery ages its whiskey in big barrels that are rolled down the street so that Barnaby and Devils Club Brewing can barrel-age its beer. Juneau Composts picks up the distillery’s spent grain, along with its napkins, paper towels and garnishes, and sells it back to the community as fertilizer. Strictly Local Gallery in the town of Craig on Prince of Wales is buying handiwork from artists across the region.
“The answer is that it’s many things that get stitched together,” Trainor said. “And that makes us safer.”
Kampnich, who once reveled in felling massive trees here, used to dismiss environmentalists’ objections that clearing the forest would have unintended consequences. He wrote a piece in the 1990s in the Juneau Empire saying just that. But 15 years ago, Kampnich — who is still wiry and fit but now has white, bushy eyebrows spilling over his clear blue eyes — noticed how trees coming up at the exact same time created a biological desert that harms deer, salmon and other wildlife.
“Some of what they were saying, I saw it happening,” he said. “The conservationists were right.”
Kampnich knows that on Prince of Wales, many people are wary of stopping logging altogether. But he thinks there is room for small operators like Landers to stay in business.
Landers — whose beaten flannel shirt and jeans are covered in wood dust — takes pride in the wood he cuts. His mill’s yellow cedar graces the ceiling above passengers’ heads as they traverse N gates at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, an undulating emblem of the rainforest. One of his hands bears the scars of working with heavy equipment, and he describes his economic aspirations in blunt terms. “All I want to do is make enough money until I’m dead.”
When it comes to Trainor and her allies, Landers has little patience. “You want to stop logging in the Tongass, tell your friends to quit buying our product. Because they love red cedar. We’re in love with their money, period. And that’s the truth about the matter.”
His anger is palpable as he walks through his small mill, past a $100,000 saw he bought recently. Landers has little respect for politicians who have instituted policies from thousands of miles away. “You know, we need a plan. And that’s what we don’t have in the Tongass. We change our underwear every four years.”
‘You want to hold on to that carbon’
Bryce Dahlstrom is an owner of Viking Lumber, a family-owned firm that started up as the pulp mills were shutting down in the 1990s. In November 2019, he stood before the city council in Craig, the island’s biggest town, urging its members to reconsider the idea of moving away from old-growth logging.
Council members had gathered to discuss a letter they planned to send to the Trump administration endorsing the idea of eventually transitioning to cutting young growth. As the owner of the last major sawmill in southeast Alaska, with about 40 employees, Dahlstrom commanded the members’ attention.
“Viking is a big supporter of the city of Craig,” he reminded them. “We provide them with heat for their middle school, and elementary and swimming pool. The reason we can do that is because we’ve got a high-value log.”
“You don’t force business into doing something different because it’s socially unacceptable,” Dahlstrom argued.
Viking Lumber Co. is the only major sawmill operating on Prince of Wales, near the town of Klawock. It focuses on harvesting old-growth trees.
Dahlstrom had an ally in Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who was born in nearby Ketchikan. In 2017, she wrote legislation to authorize the exchange of thousands of acres of U.S. Forest Service land in the Tongass with land held by the Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority, an independent state agency. The Tongass property held more old-growth forests, so after the swap the state agency was able to auction off 4,000 acres of forest. Viking won the bid, paying close to $5 million so far to log the old-growth trees there.
The clear cuts on land that once belonged to U.S. taxpayers on Prince of Wales, near the town of Naukati, are visible from the road. They amount to desiccated tree graveyards, littered with slashed branches and stumps whose rings attest to their advanced age.
Transferring federal land to state control represents the industry’s best shot at cutting down more old growth, the Alaska Forest Association associate board member Eric Cole posted in May to a private Facebook group. But, he wrote on the Alaskan Loggers page, “the odds of that happening are very slim.”
In September 2020, after losing a timber sale challenge brought by the law firm Earthjustice, the Trump administration proposed harvesting old-growth trees in what it dubbed the Twin Mountain II sale. The lofty Sitka spruce off Highway 43 stood within the sale’s boundaries. The blue slash was spray-painted on its 500-year-old trunk.
But when Joe Biden won the presidency in November, it was clear the roadless rule would be back. And Forest Service officials on the ground, for their part, are exploring what the agency can do to support the economy beyond holding timber sales.
Delilah Brigham, the deputy district ranger for Thorne Bay, said that many people don’t realize the agency is upgrading the spartan recreation area surrounding El Capitan Cave. The work will make it easier for tourists to visit the karst formation and archaeological trove.
“They just see the timber,” she said. “They don’t see all the other projects.”
Maybe, instead of taking the trees, the Tongass could be a climate sanctuary whose carbon stores would buy Americans time as the nation transitions away from fossil fuels, suggested scientists such as Beverly Law and the Earth Island Institute’s Dominick DellaSala.
Biologists John Schoen and Dave Albert estimate that about half of the Tongass’s biggest old-growth stands have been clear-cut since the start of industrial forestry in the 1950s. Roughly 5 million acres of commercial-quality old-growth habitat remains, only about 537,000 acres of which are large trees.
Scenes of logging operations in the Tongass National Forest, in July. Debris remains after clear-cutting on Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority land, while a truck carries timber from old-growth trees on a road through the forest.
Walking around the ancient spruce this summer, DellaSala heard the songs of the birds he began studying three decades ago: the single, melodious note of the varied thrush, the high, three-part tweet of a Pacific-slope flycatcher and the rapid-fire, descending chatter of a Wilson’s warbler. These creatures need this forest, he argued, but so does the climate. Younger trees take up carbon faster, but they’re not storing as much as old trees.
“In a climate emergency, you want to hold onto that carbon, you don’t want to put it into the atmosphere,” DellaSala said. “You want to absorb it, but you want to hold onto it as well.”
In mid-July, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called all three members of the Alaska delegation as he worked remotely in Iowa. He told them all that not only was he reversing Trump’s policy but also was ending all old-growth harvesting except by Alaska Natives and small local operators such as Landers.
Anderson heard the news that same day, in a conference call between the Forest Service’s Regional Forester David Schmid and tribal officials. She was walking between her kitchen and her smokehouse, where she had been curing king and dog salmon. She listened as Schmid explained that the tribes would get cultural priority in selecting the red cedars to use in their most monumental works.
The magnitude of the moment stunned her. Alaska’s ancient trees would be spared. And she rejoiced.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 412.5 parts per million and rising.
Several miles away, the battered crown of the spruce towered over the landscape. The blue death mark remained, but under the new policy, the timber sale that signaled its demise was canceled.
The venerable tree was safe. For now.
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