26 September 21
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Some of the plots to overturn the election happened in secret. But don’t forget the ones that unfolded in the open.
Pence apparently took the idea seriously—so seriously, in fact, that, according to Woodward and Costa, former Vice President Dan Quayle had to talk him out of it. Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.
1. Trump tried to pressure secretaries of state to not certify.
Trump held early leads in vote counts in several states—not because he was ever actually ahead but because of discrepancies between when states count mail-in ballots and Election Day ballots. This so-called blue shift was written about long in advance of Election Day, and was partially the result of Trump’s own attacks on voting by mail. Nevertheless, Trump made this a key part of his election conspiracy theories (as many predicted he would), insisting that Democrats were somehow inserting fraudulent ballots into the vote count in the presidential election (something they apparently forgot to do in close House and Senate races, in which Democrats did worse than polls had anticipated). To help substantiate these falsehoods , the Trump campaign attempted to pressure secretaries of state to either not certify the results or “find” fraudulent ballots. In some states, spurred by the president’s fictions, pro-Trump mobs showed up at vote-counting sites and attempted to disrupt the proceedings.
2. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures to overturn the results.
Trump personally attempted to coerce state legislators to overturn election results in a few states that voted for Biden, on the dubious legal theory that such legislatures could simply ignore the results of the popular vote in their own states. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, Trump publicly urged Republican-controlled statehouses to “intervene to declare him the winner” and tweeted, “Hopefully the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself.” As my colleague Barton Gellman reported last year, the Trump campaign discussed “contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”
3. Trump tried to get the courts to overturn the results.
The embattled attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, filed an absurd lawsuit demanding that the Supreme Court void the election results in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, four states Biden won. The large majority of the Republican delegation in Congress, as well as nearly 20 Republican state attorneys general, supported this attempt to get the conservative-controlled Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 election results by fiat. The justices declined to crown Trump—but the amount of support this bid received from Republican elected officials is itself alarming.
As part of this effort, we can include the baseless “Kraken” lawsuits, filled with conspiracy theories about vote changes. Trump attempted to coerce the Justice Department into providing him with a pretext to overturn the results, but his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to do so. Had DOJ leadership acquiesced, it would have lent credibility to Trump’s other corrupt schemes to reverse his loss. In a meeting with the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Rosen’s deputy, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me.”
4. Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the results.
It is hard to pick the most ridiculous means of executing a coup, but insisting that the vice president has the power to unilaterally decide who won an election is up there. Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress, and Pence reportedly took that demand seriously enough to seek advice from Dan Quayle on the matter, “asking if there were any grounds to pause the certification because of ongoing legal challenges,” according to Costa and Woodward. That this got so far is profoundly disturbing, but even more disturbing is Eastman’s memo, which shows that the Trump team had thought very deliberately about how this scheme would work.
According to the memo, Pence could refuse to certify the results in particular states, giving Trump more electoral votes than Biden, and Pence would declare Trump the victor. If Democrats objected (as surely they would), the vote would then go to the House. Because the Constitution gives one vote to each state in disputed presidential elections, and the Republicans were the majority in 26 of 50 state delegations, the Democratic House majority would be unable to prevent Republicans from throwing the election to Trump. The election-law expert Ned Foley writes that the scheme would likely not have prevailed, given the Democrats’ ability to prevent a joint session, but that seems almost beside the point, which is that a sitting president and vice president were considering how to keep themselves in power following an election they lost.
5. When all else failed, Trump tried to get a mob to overturn the results.
At the rally prior to the vote count in Congress, Trump urged the crowd to act, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The explicit goal of the rally and subsequent riot was to pressure Congress, and Pence in particular, into overturning the election results. Trump told his followers, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”
This scheme didn’t work on its own, but it certainly could have helped one of the others: Imagine if Pence had gone along with Eastman’s absurd plan, and a mob had been present at the Capitol to help enforce the decision and menace lawmakers who tried to oppose it—then what? As it stands, the mob ransacked the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee. Had the mob succeeded at reaching any actual legislators, the consequences could have been catastrophic.
Trump was impeached for his incitement of the January 6 mob, but Senate Republicans dutifully prevented him from being convicted and barred from holding office ever again.
Those who attempted to subvert democracy have faced few political or legal consequences. As is typical, some rioters are facing prosecution while the elites who tried to overthrow the election through more bureaucratic or procedural means remain in good standing with their peers. The failure to impose accountability for an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order will encourage further such efforts.
Meanwhile, those rare Republicans who did stand up against this attempt to destroy American democracy are the only ones dealing with real political consequences from their party, facing primary challenges, being forced into retirement, or being stripped of their leadership positions. Republican officials who were unwilling to use their office to overturn the election results are seeing challenges from Trump devotees who will, should the opportunity arise again.
If Trump had succeeded, many of those downplaying the former president’s actions would today be rationalizing an American coup. No, you see, George Washington and James Madison intended for Donald Trump to be president for life. Read the Constitution.
At the core of these attempts is a dangerous ideology—the presumption that because Trump supporters represent “Real Americans,” the will of democratic majorities can be disregarded. This does not mean that the Republican Party is incapable of winning majorities, but that winning them is irrelevant to whether or not the party’s Trumpist faithful believe they are entitled to wield power. Win or lose, their claim to be the sole authentic inheritors of the American tradition means they are the only ones who can legitimately govern and are therefore justified in seizing power by any means. This is the modern incarnation of an old ideology, one that has justified excluding certain groups of Americans from the suffrage on the basis that their participation is an affront to the political process.
American traditions of unfreedom always represent themselves as democracy’s protectors, rather than its undertakers, and this one is no different. If Biden were allowed to take office, Eastman insisted in a longer version of his memo, “we will have ceased to be a self-governing people.” The catastrophe is not only that Trump tried to overthrow an election. It is that so many Americans were cheering him on.
Ryan Lackey, a Facebook customer who found out years later that the company's Law Enforcement Response Team turned over data to prosecutors years ago and didn't notify him. (photo: Angel Valentin/Washington Post)
Microsoft, Google, Facebook and other tech firms are pressing lawmakers to stop prosecutors from secretly snooping on private accounts
Even weirder, the email said Facebook had been forced to keep this intrusion secret. Six months later, Lackey, a computer security consultant in Puerto Rico, still has no idea what Facebook turned over to an FBI investigation that he believes may have started as early as 2019.
“My online life, at least half of it touches Facebook in some way,” said Lackey, 42.
Every year, Facebook, Google and other technology companies receive hundreds of thousands of orders from law enforcement agencies seeking data people stash online: private messages, photos, search histories, calendar items — a potentially rich trove for criminal investigators. Often, those requests are accompanied by secrecy orders, also known as nondisclosure or gag orders, that require the tech companies to keep their customers in the dark, potentially for years.
Concern about the practice spiked this summer after journalists at The Washington Post and the New York Times learned that the Trump Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed their email account data in an effort to identify the source of classified leaks early in President Donald Trump’s term. Federal prosecutors also targeted Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, their aides and even family members.
But those requests were just a tiny fraction of the orders prosecutors secure annually to stealthily snoop through the data of ordinary users like Lackey.
In the last six months of 2020, Facebook received 61,262 government requests for user data in the United States, said spokesman Andy Stone. Most — 69 percent — came with secrecy orders. Meanwhile, Microsoft has received between 2,400 and 3,500 secrecy orders from federal law enforcement each year since 2016 — or seven to 10 per day — according to congressional testimony by vice president of customer security and trust Tom Burt.
Google and Apple declined to disclose the number of gag orders they’ve received. But in the first half of 2020, Google said U.S. law enforcement made 39,536 requests for information about 84,662 accounts — with many of the requests targeting multiple accounts. Apple said it received 11,363 requests.
The Trump administration is hardly the first to use gag orders for tech-company searches. Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, federal prosecutors are required to seek digital information from tech companies, not their customers. Since then, prosecutors have routinely used gag orders to prevent the companies from spilling the beans to suspects who might destroy evidence, go into hiding or threaten someone’s life.
But the practice has mushroomed over the past two decades, part of a broader surveillance ramp-up following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, lawyers said. As the orders have proliferated, privacy advocates and the tech companies themselves have become increasingly concerned.
Some tech company officials have accused prosecutors of reflexively requesting gag orders for routine investigations, regardless of whether the cases actually require such secrecy. And an array of company officials and legal experts argue that the practice robs tech company customers of their constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Across all the rest of society, it’s understood that government doesn’t get to take your stuff, doesn’t get to come in and into your house, doesn’t get to break into your file folders or your lock box at the bank without a warrant. And you get to know about that warrant and you get to exercise your legal rights,” Microsoft’s Burt said in an interview. “Someone cannot exercise their Fourth Amendment rights when their data has been taken in secret.”
With lawmakers in both parties considering reining in the practice, the Justice Department is reviewing its policies regarding nondisclosure orders that delay notification of tech company customers, said spokesman Joshua Stueve.
“The Department is committed to properly balancing legitimate needs for confidentiality in criminal investigations with the public’s interest in understanding how investigative authorities are used,” Stueve said in an email, though he declined to specify what changes are under consideration.
The proliferation of gag orders mirrors the explosion of electronic evidence as the world has become more digital, said Ed Kim, a former prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, who is in private practice in New York now.
“That’s led tech companies to get more vigilant,” Kim said.
When prosecutors obtain warrants for physical evidence, they rarely need a gag order. That’s because the person who owns the objects — a weapon used in a crime, for example, or a box of documents — is often present when the evidence is seized. And if the evidence is seized improperly, either because the dragnet is overly broad or because of outright investigative abuses, the target of the search typically has an opportunity to challenge it in court.
It’s different with digital evidence, which is often kept on the servers of tech companies. That evidence can include highly sensitive details about a person’s entire life, including photos, text messages and phone records that could be used to establish their relationships, describe their motives or even place them at the scene of a crime.
But when investigators serve tech companies with subpoenas or search warrants for this information, the target of the investigation has no idea their data is being seized. And if investigators obtain a gag order, the records must be handed over without the person’s knowledge or consent — depriving the person of an opportunity to challenge the seizure in court.
Justice Department officials argue there are legitimate reasons to request secrecy orders, especially during complex investigations targeting drug dealers or crime bosses. They note that secrecy orders require judicial approval, providing a check on their investigative powers.
But the bar is often low for investigators to prove the need for secrecy, said white-collar defense lawyer Robert Mintz, a former deputy chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force Division of the U.S. attorney’s office.
“Judges are in a difficult position of having to gauge the necessity of having subpoenas being secret at the beginning of an investigation,” he said. “Historically, judges have given great deference to prosecutors.”
Over the years, tech companies such as Google have increasingly tried to challenge gag orders that appear to be unnecessary, said Albert Gidari, a former lawyer for Big Tech and telecommunications firms who later served as director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Where possible, he said, they also have sought to alert users to the search warrants and share details in so-called “transparency reports.”
But tech company officials said it is often difficult to tell which orders are worth fighting. The orders are often vague — sometimes just email addresses — and the owner of the account isn’t always obvious.
Microsoft provided two secrecy orders to The Post with the names of the customers redacted. Each is only about four paragraphs long and declares that notifying the customer about the existence of the data request could lead to evidence tampering or flight from prosecution.
Neither order offers any support for those claims, or any details to indicate why secrecy is necessary. Microsoft complied with both orders and notified customers of the seizure only after the orders expired.
Microsoft said it generally complies with secrecy orders because it is legally required to do so. At Google, director of law enforcement and information security Richard Salgado said the company will challenge nondisclosure orders if there are “external signals” that the orders lack merit. For example, email addresses can indicate who the subjects or their employers are, providing an avenue for the company to argue against secrecy, said Salgado, a former federal prosecutor.
Google’s decision to challenge the gag order on the Trump Justice Department’s subpoena for email data belonging to four reporters at the New York Times, which uses Google’s mail service, offers a rare example of such a challenge becoming public. Google won, and was able to share details of the subpoena — initially only with a Times lawyer.
Often, however, the orders “are rather generic,” Salgado said, providing too little information for Google to mount a case.
“These nondisclosure orders are issued more routinely than makes sense,” he said.
Consider the case of Lackey. A former Defense Department contractor, Lackey now runs a security consulting business that has handled matters involving cryptocurrency and ransomware. Lackey acknowledges that work could conceivably place him in the crosshairs of law enforcement.
But Lackey says it’s not at all clear why prosecutors would sift through his data on Facebook, where he oversees several groups, including one focused on cat photos.
Was the FBI after basic subscriber information, such as his name and when he created the account? Or did they seize something much more problematic, such as personal photos, private messages or a history of his movements at home and abroad during 15 years of logging into the app? The latter, he said, would be a “severe violation of my expectation of my privacy.”
It’s unclear even when the secrecy order was first issued, though Lackey said clues from legal documents he has since obtained suggest that he was kept in the dark for at least two years before Facebook sent him that March email.
“I’m pretty confident that I’m a fairly boring person. I haven’t done anything that I would consider worthy of the FBI’s time or interest,” Lackey said.
Stueve, the Justice Department spokesman, declined to comment on Lackey’s case, as did Stone, the Facebook spokesman. Stone pointed to Facebook’s transparency report, which notes that it complies with government requests for user information when required by law and that it turns over data “narrowly tailored” to each request.
In an emailed statement, Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said Facebook officials “push back against government overreach and challenge nondisclosure orders in court when necessary.” He added: “Our policy is to notify people who use our platform of requests for their information unless prohibited by law or in exceptional circumstances.”
After receiving the March email, Lackey asked Facebook what information it had handed over and what time frame the request covered. In an emailed response reviewed by The Post, the tech giant wrote that it couldn’t give him “legal advice” and suggested that he “consult with an attorney.”
Lackey said he has been left with “low-level anxiety” and lots of unanswered questions.
“I’m not opposed to helping law enforcement with a legitimate investigation,” he said. “But if it’s a civil liberties violation or a fishing expedition, I don’t want to help them in that.”
As privacy advocates and tech company officials press prosecutors for more transparency, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are beginning to sift through their options for reining in the practice. One idea: Require tech companies to preserve digital files that are the subject of court orders and permit customers to challenge the orders in court before the information is turned over to prosecutors.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is drafting a measure that would require government investigators to tell the targets of surveillance what data they gather from the tech companies within a reasonable time, much as they already do for more traditional wiretaps and bank-record subpoenas. The measure would cover demands for location records, stored emails, social media photos and other data, said a Wyden aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal bill-writing process.
The measure also would require federal courts to publish, for the first time, basic statistics about surveillance and secrecy orders. But it would continue to permit the orders to be issued.
Wyden is hoping the measure will attract bipartisan support. While Democrats have expressed outrage over the Trump administration’s leak investigation, Republicans have accused President Biden and former president Barack Obama of snooping on conservatives.
“The United States of America should not spy on its citizens,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said during a June hearing on the issue. “This process is in need of reform.”
Nancy Pelosi arrives for a news conference on Friday. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Calling Friday 30 September “a date fraught with meaning”, Pelosi said: “This week, we must pass a continuing resolution, Build Back Better Act and the” infrastructure deal.
Government funding will run out at midnight on 30 September. Pelosi did not mention legislation to extend the debt ceiling and prevent a US default, another flashpoint with Republicans.
The letter came against a backdrop of unified Republican opposition and bitter splits between Democratic moderates and progressives which threaten to sink Biden’s first-term agenda.
One Washington Post reporter wrote: “Well, this is raising the stakes.”
During an unusual Saturday session at the Capitol in Washington, Democrats pushed the $3.5tn, 10-year spending bill through the House budget committee. At the same time, leaders tried to resolve internal divisions.
Approval by the Democratic-chaired panel was assured, a necessary but minor checking of a procedural box, edging the mammoth bill a step closer to debate by the full House. The committee was not allowed to significantly amend the 2,465-page measure, the product of 13 other committees.
More important work was happening in an opaque procession of calls, meetings and other bargaining sessions among leaders and lawmakers.
Biden, Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, must resolve differences among Democrats over the package’s final price tag, which seems sure to shrink. There are also disputes over which initiatives should be reshaped, among them expanded Medicare, tax breaks for children and healthcare, a push for cleaner energy and higher levies on the rich and corporations.
Wafer-thin majorities in the House and Senate mean compromise is mandatory. Before the measure the budget committee considered on Saturday even reaches the House floor it is expected to be changed to reflect whatever accords are reached.
“The next few days will be a time of intensity,” Pelosi wrote to Democrats on Saturday, adding that the spending plan, the Build Back Better Act, would “make sure the wealthiest and corporations pay their fair share”.
Corporate lobbying against the plan has been widely reported.
The bill embodies Biden’s top domestic goals. The Democratic budget chairman, John Yarmuth, cited “decades of disinvestment” on needs like healthcare, education, childcare and the environment as the rationale for the legislation.
“The futures of millions of Americans and their families are at stake,” Yarmuth said. “We can no longer afford the costs of neglect and inaction. The time to act is now.”
Republicans say the proposal is unneeded, unaffordable amid federal debt exceeding $28tn and reflects Democrats’ drive to insert government into people’s lives. Its tax boosts will cost jobs and include credits for buying electric vehicles, they say, purchases often made by people with comfortable incomes.
“This bill is a disaster for working-class families,” said Jason Smith of Missouri, the top Republican on the budget committee. “It’s a big giveaway to the wealthy, it’s a laundry list of agenda items pulled right out of the Bernie Sanders socialist playbook.”
A moderate Democrat, Scott Peters of California, joined all 16 Republicans on the committee in opposing the legislation on Saturday. His objections included one that troubles many Democrats: a reluctance to back a bill with provisions that will be dropped by the Senate.
A collapse of the measure at the hands of Biden’s own party would be a wounding preview to an election year. Biden conceded on Friday that talks were at a “stalemate”. Pelosi and Schumer were more positive.
To nail down moderate support for an earlier budget blueprint, Pelosi promised to begin consideration of the $1tn infrastructure package by Monday 27 September. The speaker reaffirmed this week that debate would begin on time. As the House convenes late on Monday it would seem likely that a vote will come on Tuesday.
Many moderates who consider the infrastructure bill their top goal want to cut the $3.5tn spending package and trim or reshape some programs. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have been among the most visible centrists. Progressives are threatening to vote down the infrastructure bill.
Compromise is a requirement. Democrats can lose no votes in the Senate and a maximum of three in the House. Biden met with more than 20 congressional Democrats this week. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said such meetings would continue.
In her letter, Pelosi insisted she had “never seen as big a consensus as we have around the Build Back Better initiative”. To her party’s warring factions, ahead of a caucus meeting on Monday, she said: “Thank you for your leadership For The People.”
Derek Gow wants his farm to be a breeding colony, a seedbed for a denuded island. (photo: Jonny Weeks/eyevine/Redux)
Curlews are Europe’s largest wading bird. They used to be a common sight in British marshes and meadows during the summer but have all but disappeared from the south of the country, which is intensively farmed. Gow, who is fifty-six, has experimented with breeding animals since he was a teen-ager. For decades, he worked on conservation projects, mostly to restore almost-extinct British wildlife, while looking after his sheep and cows and also running an ecological consultancy. He called a friend at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to tell him about the curlews. “Derek, they’re in their late twenties, early thirties,” Gow remembered his friend saying. “They’re just having one final look before they die.” The curlews left a day or two later; Gow has not seen any since. “These old, old birds coming back to this landscape to see if there was any possibility of breeding, to see if there were any mates left, to see if there was any hope of life,” he recalled. The departure of the curlews caused Gow to rethink how he used his land. “That began the whole pain of bringing the farming to an end,” he said.
When I visited Gow, in August, the last of his sheep were grazing, penned on a slope, awaiting their sale at auction in the coming weeks. We drove past them in his white pickup truck. “I don’t look at the sheep anymore,” he said. “I don’t come here. I don’t want to see them.” Gow has spent the past decade building a different kind of farm, emptying his fields of routine livestock and restocking them, at much lower densities, with the ancestral inhabitants of the northern European landscape: enormous cattle, wild boar, water buffalo, Exmoor ponies, and mouflon, a type of feral sheep. A digger was arriving that afternoon to bust up drains, tear up holes, and allow Gow’s fields to flood and fill up with water in interesting ways. Gow likes the word “contusions.” Some life was beginning to return. Greylag geese had noticed that Gow’s land was more accommodating than before, and dozens swung across the sky above us. At one point, we looked up and there were two white geese among the gray—escaped farm birds flying neatly in a skein.
Much of the unwinding of the old farm has been prosaic: removing fences and gates, to allow the new animals to move freely; repurposing sheds; retiring the dogs. This winter, Gow plans to erect two large catching pens, so that his new livestock can be examined by vets and, at least in theory, remain subject to his control. “We can have hiccups and we can have things that are tricky, but we can’t have no ability to manage this. It’s like ‘Jurassic Park,’ ” Gow said, in a way that made me feel unsure that he has seen the movie.
In its way, what Gow is doing is similar to other “rewilding” projects across Britain—a term that has become faddish and covers everything from letting a few fields go to seed, for tourist purposes, to major conservation projects, such as breaching a seawall along the Lancashire coast to restore salt marsh that had been claimed for agriculture. But what is different about Gow’s farm is that he wants it to be a breeding colony, a seedbed for a denuded island. “The outreach, if we can get this right, is going to be much bigger,” he told me. Gow is a disciple of Gerald Durrell, the writer and conservationist. In 1990, when Gow was working at a country park in Scotland, he attended a summer school at Durrell’s zoo, on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, about the captive breeding of endangered species. In the book “The Stationary Ark,” which Durrell wrote in 1976, he argued for the creation of small, specialized zoos dedicated to propagating “low-ebb species” that were vulnerable in the wild. Such “zoo banks” would be motivated by saving animal populations rather than attracting human visitors. “The whole organization would act not only as a sanctuary, but as a research station and, most important, as a training ground,” Durrell wrote.
Gow’s farm is a zoo bank. The first enclosure that we passed held a pair of common cranes, which were hunted to extinction in Britain in the seventeenth century. In the next were black storks, which have been scarcely present since the Middle Ages. I sensed only a vague outline through the vegetation. “We’re not in the least bit interested in displaying these to people,” Gow said cheerfully. Small, whitewashed farm buildings held multitudes. One workshop was stacked with cages for young water voles, the population of which has fallen by around ninety-seven per cent this century. Gow breeds around three and a half thousand of the creatures a year. No one else does this. Cages for wildcats stood on a hillside; Gow is aiming to produce forty kittens a year. If he wants to get hold of a species, he has found that there is usually someone he can call. The problem is infrastructure for reproducing the animals: tanks, cages, food, skilled staff. “We stripped these life forms from the whole island,” Gow told me. “Replacing them is going to be an industrial process and it will go on for generations.” There are limits to what Gow will undertake. He has three lynx on his farm, and he does not want to breed them because there is no realistic prospect of their being welcomed back to the land. But pretty much everything else is there to be multiplied. When people ask Gow where his animals are supposed to live—the boar, the cranes, the pine martens, the snakes—he replies: everywhere. “That has to be an ambition for all the animals that were once here,” he said. “We should start a conversation about the wolf.”
In conservation circles, Gow is known for his impatience. The work that he does, particularly around the reintroduction of formerly native species, is a slow, vexing process. The farming lobby is strong. Politicians are unreliable. Scientists like to model things. Conservation people are too polite. Gow is done with all of that. “History is full of nice, ineffectual people that create catastrophes,” he said. Britain’s departure from the European Union and the bloc’s agricultural-subsidies program has led to the biggest reform of the country’s farming sector since the Second World War. New environmental incentives, which will come into effect next year, should in theory assist Gow, but he didn’t seem terribly interested. When I visited, he had plans to invite officials from Natural England, a public conservation body, to inspect his farm in a few months’ time. “If you get a decent person who’s keen, enthusiastic, they will try to help,” Gow acknowledged. “And, if you get a rodent, they will be no fucking use to you at all.”
Alastair Driver, the director of Rewilding Britain and a former head of conservation for the Environment Agency, the national resource regulator, has known Gow since the mid-nineties. “To be honest, a lot of people have called me a maverick over the years,” Driver said. “But, you know, I’m not anything like as maverick as he is.” Gow expresses his indifference to bureaucrats and rules in an age of ecological collapse with a rare rhetorical force. He is an autodidact from Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland, and there are times when he sounds like a preacher, both of his time and others gone before. “Everything is engineered to our whim and bequest,” Gow said, of the view from his truck. During my tour, Gow quoted from a Siegfried Sassoon war poem and recalled the defeat of three Roman legions in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in Germania, in 9 A.D. He spoke of returning stones to his fields, to encourage lizard populations, which would undo the labor of medieval farmers and their “poor, dribbly, poverty-stricken children.” More than once, Gow referred to the “perfect circle of death” that has devastated the populations of virtually all British wildlife which has had the temerity to encroach on farmers’ crops or to prey on their livestock. He is millenarian and can-do at the same time. “We’re probably finished as a species, anyway. We’ve done way too much damage to this earth,” Gow said, at one point. “But the only way to forge a future that is going to be different is to start to look at where we are and reconsider our position.”
He has made mistakes. In the nineteen-twenties, a pair of German brothers—Heinz and Lutz Heck, the directors of the Munich and Berlin zoos, respectively—set out to recreate the aurochs, a lost species of wild European ox. Inspired by notions of biological purity, the Heck brothers worked from cave paintings, woodcuts, and contemporaneous descriptions of aurochs, including a few lines in Julius Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars: “In size these are somewhat smaller than elephants; in appearance, colour, and shape they are as bulls. Great is their strength and great their speed, and they spare neither man nor beast once sighted.”
One of the project’s patrons was Hermann Göring. The brothers succeeded, after a fashion. (Each used his own combination of bloodlines, which included Scottish Highland cattle and Spanish fighting bulls.) A handful of the ersatz aurochs survived the war. In 2009, Gow imported thirteen Heck cattle from Belgium. His herd grew to around twenty animals. When we pulled into a field on the corner of his farm, a group of around a dozen muscular, long-horned cattle, tan stripes down their backs, scattered sharply to the edges. “They are fantastic-looking creatures, but they are seriously bloody dangerous,” Gow said. The cattle were intended to break up the soil, bash their way through the woods, and distribute their body weights in dung across the fields. But they were also aggressive. In 2015, Gow was forced to cull his most violent animals. The herd settled down after that, and there was a time when Gow could walk safely among the Heck, but after he let them run free through his woods, a couple years ago, something changed. A wildness returned.
A tall bull eyed us across the field. The last time that Gow tried to feed the bull, he only just managed to make it back to the safety of his pickup. The herd was back up to sixteen. “They operate as a unit now,” he said. “So, when one decides to do something, everything else follows it really fast. They’ve got big horns and they are fast as Satan.” The first two Heck had been shot the previous week and the rest of the cattle would be steadily slaughtered during the fall. “I’ve tried and I have failed,” Gow said. “That’s what an end looks like. We won’t be filming it and there won’t be anything on Instagram.” I asked Gow whether losing control during a rewilding project is a form of success. “It’s a version of success,” he replied. “But my career started in farming. And I would like to think that I’m still a fairly practical person.”
Gow’s triumph has been the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver. He parked his car by a reed-lined pond, near the base of a small valley. A family of four beavers lives in this part of his farm (three or four families and around a dozen penned beavers live on Gow’s land over all) and they had blocked a stream and rerouted the flow of water around an old levee and flood defenses, to Gow’s obvious satisfaction. “Every single one of these medieval gutters is blocked, many, many times over,” he said. British place names are strewn with beavers: Beverston, Beaverdyke, Bevercotes, Beverbrook. John Bradshaw, the judge who presided over the trial and execution of King Charles I, in January, 1649, wore a bulletproof beaver-skin hat. But the animals were killed off by the early nineteenth century. One of the last records of their existence is a bounty of two pence paid for a beaver head in Bolton Percy, near York, in 1789.
There was a sudden downpour and we sheltered under a tree. Before Gow released beavers on his farm, rainwater poured off his fields and coursed through ditches. Around us, the ponds made by the beavers shimmered but lay still. “There is pond after pond after pond,” Gow said, “with hobbies hunting over here last week, fish swimming at the top, amphibians everywhere, dragonflies everywhere. It’s a no-brainer.” He loves beavers. “They are the most amazing architects of life.”
In “Bringing Back the Beaver,” which was published last year, Gow describes his twenty-five-year—and mostly quixotic—quest to return the animal to Britain’s waterways. Although there was progress in Scotland, experiments in England went nowhere until 2014, when an amateur wildlife cameraman filmed a family of wild beavers playing on the River Otter, in Devon, about fifty miles east of Gow’s farm. Last summer, after a five-year study, which showed that beaver dams help to alleviate flooding and filter pollutants, the government gave the animals permission to stay. I asked Gow whether he knew where the escaped beavers came from, and he named an estate near Ottery St. Mary, which has kept beavers in enclosures since 2007. But he admitted that another colony found on the River Tamar probably came from his land. “A badger let them out. It was an act of God,” Gow said, insisting that there was no legal case to answer. “You are getting to a place where many people view that the system has been profoundly broken. And, if they can get the creatures, they’re going to do it. They’re not going to fill in forms.”
There are now around eight known populations of wild beavers in England. Their return delights Gow and unnerves him, too. He is sometimes known as “Beaver Man,” and landowners often call him to see if he can obtain animals for them. Gow’s farm has a quarantine facility, for imported beavers, and he has the capacity to distribute around fifty animals per year. (I watched a beaver, known as Brian, while away a few minutes of his six-month quarantine by chewing on some willow and flopping about in a steel bath.) But there is a growing resistance to their reintroduction and signs of political unease. In Scotland, farmers have been granted licenses to cull beavers that they deem a nuisance on their land. Last year, a hundred and fifteen animals—slightly more than ten per cent of the Scottish beaver population—were killed. Ill-founded rumors of the damage that beavers can cause (such as eating fish; they are herbivores) are widespread. The perfect circle of death remains. Gow senses a conflict looming in England, as well. Last month, the government proposed a “cautious approach” to reintroducing beavers, which would depend on the support of local farmers, landowners, and river users. “I think we have a bigger fight in our hands than we ever imagined possible,” Gow said. “And I don’t think any of us that began this journey—to get the animals, to bring them back to release—at least some, ever thought it would come to this. But I think that’s going to be elemental. And I think it’s going to be really brutal.”
It was time to feed the wildcats. Gow has been breeding the creatures, which are Britain’s rarest mammal, on his farm for the past three years. Their scientific name, Felis silvestris, means wood cat, just like their old English name, and they used to be common, shy inhabitants of the country’s forests. Their name and their reputation became fearsome over time. Gow carried a white bucket of dead, day-old chicks into a large cage where a family of tame wildcats, which were no larger than tabby house cats, with thicker, barred tails, hopped out of the undergrowth to snatch them off the grass.
“It’s a tiny animal, isn’t it?” he said. The cats watched Gow through the leaves as he spoke. “There’s nothing to alarm you in this. . . . They’re not going to take sheep. They’re not going to take children. They’re not going to change your social order.” Britain’s first official reintroduction of captive-bred wildcats is due to take place in the Cairngorm Mountains, in Scotland, in 2023. Gow told me about a meeting he attended where he was told that the process in England and Wales—which would involve the design of nesting boxes, scientific models, and consultations with cat-welfare groups—would take at least seven years. “Before you’ve bred one kitten, opened one door, put one radio collar on, the whole thing has been sucked of its essence by deviations and cul-de-sacs,” Gow said. “No.” He was planning to work quicker than that.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at a conference in 2018. (photo: Anthony Quintano/Flickr)
Dozens of far-right extremists use Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to promote their brands, new research shows
The Battle of the Nibelungs — a reference to a classic heroic epic much loved by the Nazis — is one of dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.
All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a non-profit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
CEP also found 39 related Instagram profiles, 16 Twitter profiles and 34 YouTube channels, which have gotten over 9.5 million views. Nearly 60% of the profiles were explicitly aimed at making money, displaying prominent links to online shops or photos promoting merchandise.
Click on the big blue “view shop” button on the Erik & Sons Facebook page and you can buy a T-shirt that says, “My favorite color is white,” for 20 euros ($23). Deutsches Warenhaus offers “Refugees not welcome" stickers for just 2.50 euros ($3) and Aryan Brotherhood tube scarves with skull faces for 5.88 euros ($7). The Facebook feed of OPOS Records promotes new music and merchandise, including “True Aggression," “Pride & Dignity,” and “One Family” T-shirts. The brand, which stands for “One People One Struggle,” also links to its online shop from Twitter and Instagram.
The people and organizations in CEP's dataset are a who’s who of Germany’s far-right music and combat sports scenes. “They are the ones who build the infrastructure where people meet, make money, enjoy music and recruit,” said Alexander Ritzmann, the lead researcher on the project. “It’s most likely not the guys I’ve highlighted who will commit violent crimes. They’re too smart. They build the narratives and foster the activities of this milieu where violence then appears.”
CEP said it focused on groups that want to overthrow liberal democratic institutions and norms such as freedom of the press, protection of minorities and universal human dignity, and believe that the white race is under siege and needs to be preserved, with violence if necessary. None has been banned, but almost all have been described in German intelligence reports as extremist, CEP said.
On Facebook the groups seem harmless. They avoid blatant violations of platform rules, such as using hate speech or posting swastikas, which is generally illegal in Germany.
By carefully toeing the line of propriety, these key architects of Germany’s far-right use the power of mainstream social media to promote festivals, fashion brands, music labels and mixed martial arts tournaments that can generate millions in sales and connect like-minded thinkers from around the world.
But simply cutting off such groups could have unintended, damaging consequences.
“We don’t want to head down a path where we are telling sites they should remove people based on who they are but not what they do on the site,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
Giving platforms wide latitude to sanction organizations deemed undesirable could give repressive governments leverage to eliminate their critics. “That can have really serious human rights concerns,” he said. “The history of content moderation has shown us that it’s almost always to the disadvantage of marginalized and powerless people.”
German authorities banned the Battle of the Nibelungs event in 2019, on the grounds that it was not actually about sports, but instead was grooming fighters with combat skills for political struggle.
In 2020, as the coronavirus raged, organizers planned to stream the event online — using Instagram, among other places, to promote the webcast. A few weeks before the planned event, however, over a hundred black-clad police in balaclavas broke up a gathering at a motorcycle club in Magdeburg, where fights were being filmed for the broadcast, and hauled off the boxing ring, according to local media reports.
The Battle of the Nibelungs is a “central point of contact” for right-wing extremists, according to German government intelligence reports. The organization has been explicit about its political goals — namely to fight against the “rotting” liberal democratic order — and has drawn adherents from across Europe as well as the United States.
Members of a California white supremacist street fighting club called the Rise Above Movement, and its founder, Robert Rundo, have attended the Nibelungs tournament. In 2018 at least four Rise Above members were arrested on rioting charges for taking their combat training to the streets at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A number of Battle of Nibelungs alums have landed in prison, including for manslaughter, assault and attacks on migrants.
National Socialism Today, which describes itself as a “magazine by nationalists for nationalists” has praised Battle of the Nibelungs and other groups for fostering a will to fight and motivating “activists to improve their readiness for combat.”
But there are no references to professionalized, anti-government violence on the group’s social media feeds. Instead, it’s positioned as a health-conscious lifestyle brand, which sells branded tea mugs and shoulder bags.
“Exploring nature. Enjoying home!” gushes one Facebook post above a photo of a musclebound guy on a mountaintop wearing Resistend-branded sportswear, one of the Nibelung tournament’s sponsors. All the men in the photos are pumped and white, and they are portrayed enjoying wholesome activities such as long runs and alpine treks.
Elsewhere on Facebook, Thorsten Heise – who has been convicted of incitement to hatred and called “one of the most prominent German neo-Nazis” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the German state of Thuringia — also maintains multiple pages.
Frank Kraemer, who the German government has described as a “right-wing extremist musician,” uses his Facebook page to direct people to his blog and his Sonnenkreuz online store, which sells white nationalist and coronavirus conspiracy books as well as sports nutrition products and "vaccine rebel” T-shirts for girls.
Battle of the Nibelungs declined to comment. Resistend, Heise and Kraemer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Facebook told AP it employs 350 people whose primary job is to counter terrorism and organized hate, and that it is investigating the pages and accounts flagged in this reporting.
“We ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission, or are engaged in violence,” said a company spokesperson, who added that Facebook had banned more than 250 white supremacist organizations, including groups and individuals in Germany. The spokesperson said the company had removed over 6 million pieces of content tied to organized hate globally between April and June and is working to move even faster.
Google said it has no interest in giving visibility to hateful content on YouTube and was looking into the accounts identified in this reporting. The company said it worked with dozens of experts to update its policies on supremacist content in 2019, resulting in a five-fold spike in the number of channels and videos removed.
Twitter says it’s committed to ensuring that public conversation is “safe and healthy” on its platform and that it doesn’t tolerate violent extremist groups. “Threatening or promoting violent extremism is against our rules,” a spokesperson told AP, but did not comment on the specific accounts flagged in this reporting.
Robert Claus, who wrote a book on the extreme right martial arts scene, said that the sports brands in CEP’s data set are “all rooted in the militant far-right neo-Nazi scene in Germany and Europe.” One of the founders of the Battle of the Nibelungs, for example, is part of the violent Hammerskin network and another early supporter, the Russian neo-Nazi Denis Kapustin, also known as Denis Nikitin, has been barred from entering the European Union for ten years, he said.
Banning such groups from Facebook and other major platforms would potentially limit their access to new audiences, but it could also drive them deeper underground, making it more difficult to monitor their activities, he said.
“It’s dangerous because they can recruit people,” he said. “Prohibiting those accounts would interrupt their contact with their audience, but the key figures and their ideology won’t be gone.”
Thorsten Hindrichs, an expert in Germany’s far-right music scene who teaches at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, said there’s a danger that the apparently harmless appearance of Germany’s right-wing music heavyweights on Facebook and Twitter, which they mostly use to promote their brands, could help normalize the image of extremists.
Extreme right concerts in Germany were drawing around 2 million euros ($2.3 million) a year in revenue before the coronavirus pandemic, he estimated, not counting sales of CDs and branded merchandise. He said kicking extremist music groups off Facebook is unlikely to hit sales too hard, as there are other platforms they can turn to, like Telegram and Gab, to reach their followers. “Right-wing extremists aren’t stupid. They will always find ways to promote their stuff,” he said.
None of these groups’ activity on mainstream platforms is obviously illegal, though it may violate Facebook guidelines that bar “dangerous individuals and organizations” that advocate or engage in violence online or offline. Facebook says it doesn’t allow praise or support of Nazism, white supremacy, white nationalism or white separatism and bars people and groups that adhere to such “hate ideologies.”
Last week, Facebook removed almost 150 accounts and pages linked to the German anti-lockdown Querdenken movement, under a new “social harm” policy, which targets groups that spread misinformation or incite violence but didn’t fit into the platform’s existing categories of bad actors.
But how these evolving rules will be applied remains murky and contested.
“If you do something wrong on the platform, it’s easier for a platform to justify an account suspension than to just throw someone out because of their ideology. That would be more difficult with respect to human rights,” said Daniel Holznagel, a Berlin judge who used to work for the German federal government on hate speech issues and also contributed to CEP’s report. “It’s a foundation of our Western society and human rights that our legal regimes do not sanction an idea, an ideology, a thought.”
In the meantime, there’s news from the folks at the Battle of the Nibelungs. “Starting today you can also dress your smallest ones with us,” reads a June post on their Facebook feed. The new line of kids wear includes a shell-pink T-shirt for girls, priced at 13.90 euros ($16). A child pictured wearing the boy version, in black, already has boxing gloves on.
Lyrics Marvin Gaye, What's Going On.
Written by Marvin Gaye, Al Cleveland and Renaldo "Obie" Benson.
From the 1971 album. What's Going On.
Hey, hey-hey
Hey, what's happenin'?
Hey, brother, what's happenin'?
Boy, this is a groovy party (Hey, how you doin'?)
Man, I can dig it
Yeah, brother, solid, right on
What's happenin'?
Hey, man, what's happening?
Woo
Everything is everything
We're gonna do a get down today, boy, I'll tell ya
Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some loving here today, yeah
Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some loving here today, oh (Oh)
Picket lines (Sister) and picket signs (Sister)
Don't punish me (Sister) with brutality (Sister)
Talk to me (Sister), so you can see (Sister)
Oh, what's going on (What's going on)
What's going on (What's going on)
Yeah, what's going on (What's going on)
Oh, what's going on
Ah-ah-ah-ah (In the meantime, right on, baby)
Woo (Right on, baby), woo
Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya, ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Woo (Right on, baby, right on), woo
Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Ba-da-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo
Ba-da-boo-boo-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo-ba-ba-do
Mother, mother
Everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply 'cause our hair is long?
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today, oh-oh
Picket lines (Brother) and picket signs (Brother)
Don't punish me (Brother) with brutality (Brother)
Come on, talk to me (Brother), so you can see (Brother)
Oh, what's going on (What's going on)
Yeah, what's going on (What's going on)
Tell me what's going on (What's going on)
I'll tell you what's going on (What's going on)
Woo-ooh-ooh-ooh (Right on, baby, right on)
Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya, ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Woo, woo (Right on)
Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Ba-da-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo-doo
Ba-da-boo-boo-boo-doo, ba-da-da-da-da-da-da
Woo (Right on, baby, come on, right on)
Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Woo (Right on)
Listen, ah-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya
Da-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo-doo
Da-boo-boo-doo, boo-boo-boo
READ MORE
British primatologist Jane Goodall walks at the CosmoCaixa science museum in Barcelona, Spain, in 2018. (photo: Enric Fontcuberta/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Trees for Jane will support efforts underway, mostly in the developing world, to replenish the earth's trees.
Goodall, a longtime National Geographic Explorer, made it clear that planting is just one aspect of Trees for Jane; there’s something even more important. “The key is protecting existing forest because those big trees already have stored CO2,” she said in a National Geographic interview.
Trees for Jane is one of a growing number of tree-planting campaigns around the world, aimed at removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Among others, Goodall’s effort joins the Trillion Tree Campaign and 1t.org, backed by the World Economic Forum and partnering with Trees for Jane.
Goodall, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, feels a strong “spiritual connection” to trees, she said in a Zoom conversation from her family home in southern England. “Trees absorb carbon dioxide. They give us oxygen. They help to make rain. So they are a gift.”
In A Trillion Trees, a short film being released during the UN’s Climate Action Week, which started on Monday, Goodall calls trees “God’s gift to humanity.” The number of trees Trillion Trees Campaign, 1t.org, and Trees for Jane seek to plant or preserve is staggering: 128 trees for every human on Earth.
Yet there’s a reason for that goal, Goodall said. The world now contains roughly three trillion trees, and the planet loses 15 billion trees a year, according to a 2015 mapping study in the journal Nature.
“I know that a trillion sounds like an insane number,” said Jeff Horowitz, Trees for Jane’s co-founder. “We’re not saying flat out that we’ll be able to succeed, but we want to come as close as we can.”
Supporting existing efforts
Trees for Jane will support “existing on-the-ground efforts” to protect and restore our planet’s biodiversity, Horowitz said. “Right out of the chute, we'll probably have 300 to 400 groups ready to go when it comes to planting trees for Jane. Shovels ready, trees in the ground on day one.”
Donations to Trees for Jane will support local groups working to stop deforestation, he said. And those who plant are asked to agree to care for the trees and monitor them until they’re established.
Forest preservation and tree planting are among natural climate solutions that together could provide up to one-third of the mitigation needed by 2030 to “avoid catastrophic warming,” said Susan Cook-Patton, senior forest restoration scientist for The Nature Conservancy. “We don’t always need to plant trees. When conditions are right, trees can grow back perfectly well on their own at a fraction of the cost.”
Of course, tree planting is not a substitute for reducing emissions, Cook-Patton said. “The most important action is to reduce fossil fuel emissions. However, even if we rapidly reduce emissions, we’re still going to need to remove carbon from the atmosphere to prevent catastrophic warming. That’s why carbon removal strategies like re-growing trees remain important.”
Some tree-planting efforts have come under fire from some scientists as being ineffective and counterproductive, since many programs don’t plant native species, essentially creating tree farms, not helping forests.
Cook-Patton’s message is clear: “Plant the right trees, in the right places, in the right way.” This means planting native trees where they historically lived. Goodall said this aligns precisely with the mission of Trees for Jane.
The U.N. warned last Friday that the world isn’t doing nearly enough to curb climate-changing emissions and is predicted to warm by a “catastrophic” 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit [2.7 degrees Celsius].
Advancing a movement
Tree planting to help the environment isn’t a new concept; it advanced in the 1970s when Kenyan activist Wangari Muta Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement. The group organized local women to plant a million trees as part of a broader environmental restoration effort in Kenya. Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, showed how tree planting could improve local ecosystems and empower communities by giving them new sources of income.
Trees for Jane seeks to build on that model and will work with communities in Africa and throughout the developing world. The TACARE program in Tanzania, supported by the Jane Goodall Institute, works to preserve the Gombe forest where Goodall studied chimpanzees. It’s one of many groups ready to work with Trees for Jane, Goodall said.
Re-greening urban centers is also part of the Trees for Jane plan. This could help take the heat off cities, said Ellie Cohen, CEO of The Climate Center, a California-based policy-action group. “Tree planting in urban areas with appropriate species can have benefits in addition to sequestering carbon, particularly in mitigating the heat-island effect,” she said.
“Study after study has shown that the poorest neighborhoods have the least amount of cooling vegetation. So tree planting in those areas can be essential to the survival of our communities.”
Goodall, noting that Trees for Jane encourages people to plant trees themselves or donate to support global efforts, said her love for trees dates back to her childhood. “Out there in the garden is Beech,” she said of the beech tree she could see through the window of the home where she grew up, and where she is now living.
“When I was a child, I loved Beech so much. I did my homework up there. I read books up there. I went to the tree when I was sad. When I was ten, I wrote out my own version of a will,” Goodall said. It stated that her grandmother, who owned the house, would leave Jane her favorite tree. “She signed it and left me Beech.”
Nearly eight decades later, Goodall is working tirelessly to share the gift of trees with the entire world, for the sake of the planet.
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