On Monday night, Christian Pulisic, the star of the US men’s national soccer team, scored in a match against Jamaica and promptly jogged over to the corner flag. After a jumping fist pump, the red, white, and blue bedecked central midfielder did what’s become known as the “Trump Dance,” laughing as he wiggled his arms and hips.

This dance is more than just “fun.” It’s a symbol of shifts in power and policy.

In a post-game interview, Pulisic—a multi-millionaire who is a registered Republican—was questioned about his celebration, and disavowed that it carried any deeper meaning: “It’s not a political dance. It was just for fun.”

No matter what Pulisic intended, there’s no denying he’s part of a larger wave of athletes, from the NFL to the collegiate level, who in the wake of Trump’s 2024 win have been imitating the president-elect’s dance, which he is known to perform along to “YMCA.” 

In discussing the trend, Fox News liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov identified a hypocrisy in contrast to the national stick-to-sports outrages that followed political statements by stars like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James: “I guess we’ve gotten to the portion of the Trump era where we have moved past shut up and dribble, and now it is fantastic for athletes to talk about their politics.”

There’s no doubt some athletes are doing the dance as a show of support for Trump and his agenda. Take San Francisco 49ers pass-rusher Nick Bosa, who, a week before the election, wore a “Make America Great Again” hat during a post-game appearance. He was eventually docked $11,255 for breaking rules barring displaying written messages on the field, but, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the NFL delayed the fine until after Election Day in hopes of avoiding controversy or retribution from Trump. The following Sunday, Bosa did Trump’s dance in celebration of a sack; a video went viral after being shared by Sean Hannity on social media.

Trump’s election win is visible beyond American athletes. Players from the English football club Barnsley F.C—founded in 1887 and now playing in the third tier of professional British soccer—celebrated a goal with the dance. The display was broadcast to the world by the team’s social media managers, who shared a video backed up by the sounds of YMCA. And this month’s attacks in Amsterdam on Israeli soccer fans were kicked off after at least one supporter of Maccabi Tel-Aviv, the visiting team, was photographed hoisting a Trump banner. 

As Trump’s win reverberates in American culture and across the world, his reelection has confirmed his status as a global right-wing figure. In that sense, symbols that are associated with him will always speak to shifts in power and policy. When they crop up in sports, it’s hard to argue they are simply “just for fun.”

On Monday night, Christian Pulisic, the star of the US men’s national soccer team, scored in a match against Jamaica and promptly jogged over to the corner flag. After a jumping fist pump, the red, white, and blue bedecked central midfielder did what’s become known as the “Trump Dance,” laughing as he wiggled his arms and hips.

This dance is more than just “fun.” It’s a symbol of shifts in power and policy.

In a post-game interview, Pulisic—a multi-millionaire who is a registered Republican—was questioned about his celebration, and disavowed that it carried any deeper meaning: “It’s not a political dance. It was just for fun.”

No matter what Pulisic intended, there’s no denying he’s part of a larger wave of athletes, from the NFL to the collegiate level, who in the wake of Trump’s 2024 win have been imitating the president-elect’s dance, which he is known to perform along to “YMCA.” 

In discussing the trend, Fox News liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov identified a hypocrisy in contrast to the national stick-to-sports outrages that followed political statements by stars like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James: “I guess we’ve gotten to the portion of the Trump era where we have moved past shut up and dribble, and now it is fantastic for athletes to talk about their politics.”

There’s no doubt some athletes are doing the dance as a show of support for Trump and his agenda. Take San Francisco 49ers pass-rusher Nick Bosa, who, a week before the election, wore a “Make America Great Again” hat during a post-game appearance. He was eventually docked $11,255 for breaking rules barring displaying written messages on the field, but, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the NFL delayed the fine until after Election Day in hopes of avoiding controversy or retribution from Trump. The following Sunday, Bosa did Trump’s dance in celebration of a sack; a video went viral after being shared by Sean Hannity on social media.

Trump’s election win is visible beyond American athletes. Players from the English football club Barnsley F.C—founded in 1887 and now playing in the third tier of professional British soccer—celebrated a goal with the dance. The display was broadcast to the world by the team’s social media managers, who shared a video backed up by the sounds of YMCA. And this month’s attacks in Amsterdam on Israeli soccer fans were kicked off after at least one supporter of Maccabi Tel-Aviv, the visiting team, was photographed hoisting a Trump banner. 

As Trump’s win reverberates in American culture and across the world, his reelection has confirmed his status as a global right-wing figure. In that sense, symbols that are associated with him will always speak to shifts in power and policy. When they crop up in sports, it’s hard to argue they are simply “just for fun.”

Archaeologists have discovered numerous ceramic or clay whistles at Aztec sites, dubbed "death whistles" because of their distinctive skull shapes. A new paper published in the journal Communications Psychology examines the acoustical elements of the unique shrieking sounds produced by those whistles, as well as how human listeners are emotionally affected by the sounds. The findings support the hypothesis that such whistles may have been used in Aztec religious rituals or perhaps as mythological symbols.

Archaeologists unearthed the first Aztec death whistles, also known as ehecachichtlis, in 1999 while excavating the Tlatelolco site in Mexico City. They found the body of a sacrificial victim, a 20-year-old male who had been beheaded, at the base of the main stairway of a temple dedicated to the wind god Ehecatl. The skeleton was clutching two ceramic skull-shaped whistles, one in each hand, along with other artifacts. More skull whistles were subsequently found, and they've found their way into popular culture. For instance, in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), Egon Spengler had such a whistle in his secret laboratory collection.

Scholars have puzzled over the purpose of the skull whistles, although given the dearth of concrete evidence, most suggestions are highly speculative. One hypothesis is that it was used in battle, with hundreds of warriors blowing their whistles simultaneously as a battle cry. Music archaeologist Arnd Adje Both has dismissed that idea, suggesting instead that the whistle's purpose was more likely tied to ceremonial or religious practices, like human sacrifice. Yet another hypothesis proposes that the whistles were intended as symbols of a deity. The skull shape, for instance, might allude to the Aztec god of the underworld, Mictlantecuhtli.

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© Sascha Frühholz

Across the country, you can find small town diners and watering holes proudly displaying photos of a president stopping by on the campaign trail. It’s not only a memento of how the person who got the nuclear codes may have ordered a burger or a slice of rhubarb pie—it’s a reminder of how voters have looked to national candidates’ food and beverage choices as one way to understand if inherently elite politicians are salt of the earth.

In forming her public image, Harris has showcased prowess in the kitchen.

This year, campaign season served up a buffet of food-related happenings and candidate signals, that sometimes, explains University of Buffalo political scientist Jacob Neiheisel, reveal politically salient “boundary markers between groups” and “status anxieties.” 

One food gaffe that stands out in history came during incumbent Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, when he bit into a tamale in Texas, husk and all, and nearly choked. Such missteps are consequential, Neiheisel says, because it’s “seen as some kind of indicator that they’re out of touch with the electors, that they don’t know the people who they would be representing.” 

This year, the closest we’ve come was JD Vance’s stop at Holt’s Sweet Shop, a Florida doughnut seller. His inability to engage the counter staff while standing draped in a suit and a seeming expectation that he’d be recognized—along with his order of “whatever makes sense”—brought national derision. As one succinct YouTube commenter put it, they had “never seen a VP candidate act with less charisma.” 

Mountain Dew, also largely thanks to JD Vance, became a token of a certain kind of white manhood, after he, in attempting a jab against overreaching “woke” politics, spoke about drinking a Diet Mountain Dew and how Democrats were for some reason “going to call that racist.” A week later, Democrat vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz proved him wrong by reaffirming his historic love for Diet Dew, telling a voter online that drinking one was the best way to start a morning. In October, the Harris campaign published a video of a blaze orange-bedecked Walz hunting and holding a shotgun, saying he’s looking to “grab a Diet Dew” and “pound one down.” As that guns-and-ammo display suggests, “Diet Mountain Dew has something to say about masculinity,” Contois says, “but also about regionality,” referencing the drink’s “hillbilly”-tied branding and popularity across a so-called “Mountain Dew Belt” spanning parts of Appalachia and rural, middle America.

Despite Walz’s language calling to mind frat basement chugging, the Minnesota governor brings nearly 30 years of sobriety to the ticket. But when Kamala Harris went on Stephen Colbert’s show, the late night host brought up what he called one of the “old saws” of political likability: would I grab a beer with the candidate? (To play along, she was served a can of Miller High Life.) 

But when it comes to playing politics with eating and drinking, Harris has largely been focused on letting voters know she likes to cook. That’s no surprise, according to the University of Tulsa’s Emily Contois, who has written that female candidates, in walking “an impossible line” of identity politics, often “navigate voter perceptions of both gender and electability through food and cooking.” 

“You have to be masculine enough that they believe you can do the job,” Contois, a professor of media studies, says. “You have to be feminine enough that they think you’re a real woman and a believable one.”

Trump’s campaign bought McDonald’s more than 150 times—there’s no record Harris’ has once.

When Hillary Clinton ran for president, it was against the backdrop of the cultural controversy kicked off by her comments, amid her national introduction during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, about how she had prioritized a legal career over staying at home and baking cookies. While men seeking the highest office sometimes seem to relish stuffing their faces on camera, in her 2016 campaign Clinton told the press—during an appearance where she was offered but refused cheesecake—that she had long ago “learned early on not to eat in front of all of you.”

“When it comes to women and food and eating and dieting and bodies,” Contois says, “it becomes a tangled thing.”

In forming her public image, Harris has repeatedly showcased interest and prowess in the kitchen. In her 2020 democratic presidential primary campaign, she ran a video series called “Cooking with Kamala” where she cheffed it up with celebrities, comedians, and politicians. In her speech accepting the party’s vice presidential nomination that year, Contois has written about how, by mentioning cooking Sunday dinner for her family to bolster claim to the nickname of Mamala, Harris sought to “cast herself as politically competent and suitably feminine in the eyes of voters… while also foregrounding her role as a mother and nurturer.”

Contois believes the quirky recipe details shared by Harris on the campaign trail—such as soaking greens in the bathtub—indicates genuineness and true passion, but also a savvy strategy. “It’s coming across as both truth, and a tactic that can help to construct that believably feminine side that people would expect and want to see in a woman,” Contois said.

Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack. As Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has spent time on the campaign trail alongside Trump, posted in September, “Kamala spends more time making cooking videos than she does speaking to the media.” Loomer also, in a tradition that traces at least as far back as stigmatizing Italian migrants’ use of garlic, made a smear out of Harris’ Indian heritage and cooking by posting she would make “the White House smell like curry.”

“The spice and the smell and the difference,” Contois says, “that’s a more than 100-year-old tactic … of how to other someone.” An extreme version was also used to target Haitian migrants by the Trump and Vance ticket, in their comments pushing the false notion the community was eating pet dogs and cats. “To eat the family pet—it’s this huge anthropological, cultural taboo,” Contois said. “That’s why the rumor could take root and do so much harm.”

Donald Trump found his own way to use a kitchen to reshape his public image in the campaign’s closing weeks, by making his stage-managed appearance behind a fryer and drive-thru window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. It was not only a reminder of his love for the company and fast food generally, but a salvo in his one-sided narrative battle about Harris’ actual experience working at a McDonald’s—one that contrasts with his own silver spoon-fed upbringing.

Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack.

Federal Elections Commission campaign spending data shows another clear Trump-Harris contrast related to McDonald’s. While his campaign has paid for food from the home of the Big Mac more than 150 times, there’s no record Harris’ has ordered even once. His team’s second most frequented food business is Dunkin’ Donuts, closely followed by Chick-fil-A, where he has spent over 10 times as much money as Harris. The Harris campaign, since it launched in July, has tended to go big on fast casual spots like Chipotle, where her campaign spent 15 times more than Trump’s, and Sweetgreen, where they spent three times as much as Trump.

Of course, to look beyond symbolism and such spending, the candidates have pushed policies that could affect what and how Americans eat. While Trump loves to blast the rise in cost of groceries, his plan to deport masses of immigrants has been predicted to cause an over 20 percent increase in the price of hand-picked crops while nearly doubling the price of milk. With those kind of stakes, it’s clear this year’s election has left voters with plenty to digest.

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?

Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives. 

We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:  

“Of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions,” he wrote. “I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society.”

For Tocqueville, the “equality of social conditions” is a core principle of democracy that, broadly, meant the absence of aristocracy—a societal state in which, on individual levels, there are few divisions between the people based on birth, wealth, or social status. (Although Tocqueville did note that this equality was one to be found solely among white Christian men. The prejudice against Black Americans was then appearing to “increase in proportion to their emancipation,” he wrote, and he wondered how the United States would recover from being born of the mass genocide of Native Americans.)

“I have looked [in America] for an image of the essence of democracy, its inclinations, its personality, its prejudices, its passions,” Tocqueville concluded. “My wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it.”

We found a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever.

Nearly 200 years later, we set out to examine these social conditions—and to provide an updated record of the state of democracy, local and national, at this moment in American history. 

What we found was a crisis of democracy underlying that of our political fever. A historical, generational, and ongoing inequality and a systemic exclusion—both racial and economic. Scholars like Martin Wolf, author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, have said this inequality has been abetted by the neoliberal system, which “poses the most immediate threat to civil society.”

Neoliberalism is loosely defined as the economic system in play from the late 1970s to the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, a study by the Pew Research Center found that even as the economy was growing following the end of the Great Recession in 2009, the gap in income between upper-income and middle- and lower-income households was also rising, with upper-income households seeing more economic growth faster. In 2023, the World Inequality Database reported that the United States is the only country in North America and Oceania in which more than 20 percent of national income goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, with nearly 50 percent going to the top 10 percent.

We found that this crisis of inequality has festered into near-total disillusionment and consequent democratic atrophying on community levels, what Tocqueville referred to as a “loss of spirit,” which he warned could lead to tyranny. Yet we also observed an impulse to form hyperlocal microcosms of democracy to help keep the community alive on an individual level—in Tocqueville’s words, “spirit of association” or “self-governing” that generates democratic participation. 

Crisis, in this sense, is a paradox, a kind of duality—a sort of pharmakon, as philosopher Jacques Derrida might say—both the sickness that kills democratic participation and perhaps the medicine that restores it.      

In Paradise, California, a wildfire decimated the community while activating a group of individuals to restore its livability and ensure its survival.

The November 2018 Camp Fire—the deadliest in the state’s modern history—devastated Paradise, a town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, killing 85 people in Butte County, displacing 50,000, and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. There, we were told persistently and insistently what a great leveler the fire had been. On Valley View Drive, “the richest street in Paradise,” where “you get the full-sized candy bars on Halloween,” $500,000 homes were reduced to fences left standing guard around empty lots. As federal and nonprofit humanitarian aid came and went, residents grew tired of the restrictions and empty promises they said came with it. They started to decline the help and decided instead, despite being unable to lean on neighbors since so many had lost homes and jobs themselves, to use the community to build the safety net all the outside aid could not. It was through the disaster and around its resulting adversity that the community came to congeal. 

I couldn’t help thinking back to our time in Detroit in July 2019. There, we had a chance encounter with an elder named Elemiah Sanders. I was standing on the street, looking at a burned-out home, when Sanders called out to me from behind: “Young lady! What are you all out here doing?” I introduced myself and our project. He looked around before offering his thoughts: “The people lost their spirit,” he told me about his neighbors. “They don’t participate. I think it might be one of those things where we need a disaster to come up and raise up the neighborhood, but I hope it’s not that way.” 

When independence and authority are no longer accessible to the community, Tocqueville urged, when the liberty to self-govern with representational significance that promotes equality is impeded, the ability and desire to swim against the current, to fight to participate when it is felt that participation has been wrenched from the people, wearies, making certain that the institutions and their communities both falter. Spirit withers. It’s just our human nature. Tocqueville insisted: “Patriotism does not long prevail in a conquered nation.” And I came to realize that was true on hyperlocal levels as well.

In Warner Robins, Georgia, the spirit of patriotism is such a part of life and what residents believe democracy to be that it’s in its official motto: EDIMGIAFAD, or Every Day in Middle Georgia Is Armed Forces Appreciation Day. The city between Houston and Peach counties is home to Robins Air Force Base, and American flags appear on house after house as you drive through its neighborhoods. But at the time of visiting in August 2018, the city also had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. 

Larry Curtis, a manager of the drones called “Blue Seaters” on the Air Force base and owner of the Curtis Office Suites, said it all comes down to both “the haves and the have-nots” abstaining from participation, “not calling out local injustice like misallocation of funds,” because the “haves feel comfortable and the have-nots feel like it won’t make a difference.” 

The afternoon Curtis drove us onto base, the gray skies expected thunderstorms. It was no matter to Curtis, he kept driving all the same, past two officers holding M16s and pulling a car over, giving us the breakdown of the city’s economically organized geographical divide. He took us out onto Watson Boulevard, which was the zero degree—on one side was the north side, or “the blighted areas,” and on the other was the south side. A church marquee on the north side of Watson read, “When you reach the end of your rope, look up.”

I asked Curtis what was the biggest problem Warner Robins faced. He answered first with just one word, “equality,” and then went on to explain. “Because when you see one part of town and then the other, you see it’s not equal, even down to cutting the grass,” he began. “In the nighttime, you see the lights—there’s no lights on this [north] side of town. The street lamps are out and you can’t get nobody to come out and fix it. The money’s on the south side,” he continued, before adding, “I hate to say the word ‘racial’—I’m more about what’s wrong and what’s right.”

“At the city council meetings, they ask every other week about getting the lights fixed and getting the grass cut,” he said. “So the big problem is really down at city hall.” 

We went to one of those city council meetings and watched residents address council members one after the other, to little or no response. It was clear there was a kind of agitated exhaustion among the residents, where they were almost too tired to keep speaking up just to remain unseen and unheard, but all there was to do was keep speaking up, so they did—the few who had the persistence and made the time to deliver it, for the sake of the many who had largely, as Curtis said, given up. 

Democracy is not working, he told us, because the people don’t exercise their right to vote. Instead, he added, they just accept things for what they are, making it hard to know how to help create change.

Despite voting being one of the answers we heard most frequently to the question of what democracy is, it was this loss of spirit, which Tocqueville referred to as a side effect of losing the power to self-govern, we witnessed atrophying democratic participation. And that loss of spirit is not always a choice. In vastly different communities occupying vastly different parts of the country, that loss of spirit in relation to voting was the same, albeit for different reasons. 

In Memphis in 2018, we spoke with ex-offenders working hard to put their lives back together through the community organization Lifeline to Success, only to continue to confront what was for many of them an unthinkable and unending punishment: felony disenfranchisement. They felt subjected to a system of governing they have no say in, despite having paid their dues to society, and that their lives were being irrevocably shaped by decisions being made for them that they might not have made for themselves.  

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2021, locals referred to themselves as a colony, with no say in the colonizer’s impact on their lives. Puerto Ricans, as citizens of a territory of the United States, are not granted the right to vote in presidential elections. Vieques, a small island off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast known outside Puerto Rico as the former US Navy bomb training range and testing site, is known by Viequenses as “the colony of a colony.” The sense of silenced despair was especially pronounced as residents, many of them veterans, struggled with everything from meeting basic needs to transportation and the inexistence of medical care amid astronomically high cancer rates—the result of American military pollution, specifically from plutonium and Agent Orange. 

With respect to voting, of the dozen locations we traveled to across the country, one stands out: New Hampshire. We bounced around more than a dozen towns—places like Laconia and Meredith; Tilton, Salisbury, and Moultonborough; Wilmot, Concord, Andover, and Franklin— visiting town hall meetings, schools, families living off the grid, and libertarians, and each town was largely the same. Participation in local direct democracy was not only high, it was an important and ongoing source of pride in the community. Asked why it was such a central part of life in the “live free or die” state, residents said it had always been that way and was a matter of the personal nature of caring for democracy and a sense of duty. But homogeneity also helps. New Hampshire is more than 60 percent white, with an average household income of $90,000 and a 2.6 percent unemployment rate, as of 2024. Self-governing in the best interest of the whole community is often an infinitely smoother negotiation, a process almost unimpeachably straightforward, when most of the members of that community share a relatively secure lived experience.  

In most communities we visited, an enduring existential struggle with poverty was at the root of a communal loss of spirit, offset by the will of just a few individuals to fight back.

When the coal industry largely responsible for building up McDowell County—the poorest county in West Virginia and among the poorest in the nation—dried up, it took most of the economy, resources, and population with it. The coal industry and the county seat, the city of Welch, were at their peak in the 1950s, with a sudden surge in population from roughly 700 to 100,000 and a thronging city center, but machines began to take over the work of men. The county became the first in the country to receive modern-era food stamps after a 1960 visit by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy—a program residents said decimated the community, because, they said, they needed jobs, not food stamps. More than once, residents referred to their county as “America’s forgotten county,” left to themselves and out of the national conversation when it was no longer carrying the weight of the state’s economy. Today, McDowell County is notorious as the coal country that changed its often-Democratic vote to Republican in the 2016 presidential election. 

By 2019, most of Welch’s downtown area was shuttered—what remained were a few small businesses, local government services, and the Welch News, the last remaining news source in McDowell County. Missy Nester, the owner and publisher, told us that she would “print until she ran out of paper.” But the paper was forced to fold in the summer of 2023.

“Our people have nothing,” Nester told the Associated Press in July of that year. “Like, can any of y’all hear us out here screaming?”  

Nester and the Welch community had pulled together to save the newspaper in 2018 after learning that the owner had plans to close its doors. The Welch News had an entirely voluntary team of local drivers who drove a six-hour route through the hills to hand-deliver papers to readers’ homes. Often, they took bread and milk deliveries with them for the elderly who seldom saw anyone but them, and they checked in on every resident they handed off to. It was an intensely personal system that inspired awe unlike much else does.

“We have been the forgotten place for so long that we’re just used to taking care of each other,” Nester said. “We vote to take care of ourselves.”

In some places, like among a sizable Somali immigrant community in Garden City, Kansas, in 2021, people struggled to build a community infrastructure from scratch where there had never been one at all. What little support they’d once had was provided by the nonprofit outreach organization LiveWell, which offered assistance programs and services to the growing population, but funding dried up and the community was left on its own to face everything from obstacles to medical care, to a bomb threat and the racism that came with it, and landlords that financially exploited refugees. The challenge became how to organize a community that was outward facing, that could integrate itself into American society while holding on to its cultural customs when the people could only turn inward for help, creating—naturally—something far more insular. 

I thought a lot then about the importance Tocqueville placed on the idea of “assimilation” as a means of survival, of a group’s adaptability to the social mores of the new Americans as the evidence of whether or not it would ultimately endure American democracy. I thought about, on the one hand, how well the people of New Hampshire felt democracy was working for them and the role of cultural, racial, and economic homogeneity in that, and, on the other hand, I thought about the damage the demand for adaptability, the forced assimilation, has done to entire populations of people who don’t fit into that homogeneity. 

Could democracy ever withstand the pressures of governing over the pluralist society we not only have become, but have really always been? It’s a conversation I had with Latrice Tatsey, a citizen of the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, while watching her children ride at a rodeo in July 2019. In fact, it was a conversation I seemed to be having with many Blackfeet leaders.

The history of the attempted forced assimilation of the Native Americans at the hands of American settlers is, by now, no secret. Today, it is largely recognized as a genocidal effort that decimated the populations of the country’s nations and tribes not just by the violence of slaughter, but by the violence of cultural destruction and dispossession as well. The result is conditions of living—and sometimes dying, as young people face the challenges of poverty, drug addiction, and suicide—caught between “Western influence” and Native tradition, in which leaders have had to work on ways to “keep the cultures indigenous to their peoples alive,” John Murray, the Blackfeet’s tribal historic preservation officer, told me.

“Is it democracy that ruined it all?” he asked. “Corporate democracy?”

It was a question that had come up more than once for us on the road, as people wondered where the line money draws across for whom democracy works and for whom it does not stops. Could even a perfect democracy subsist within the context of America’s particular brand of capitalism? Does the subsistence of one subset of people require the continued subjugation of another—or all others? 

“We’ve had a very difficult struggle, always at the mercy of the government for survival,” Virgil “Puggy” Edwards, a member of the Blackfeet Constitutional Reform Committee, said as he gave a rundown of the Blackfeet history he was working on that day at the office, where he takes care of archiving and documentation.

Paradoxically, this work the community does to keep culture, family, and tradition alive for the Blackfeet is largely democratic, Tatsey said. It comes down to a duality of spirit, of patriotism, and for the Blackfeet, democratic participation goes back long before the arrival of the first pilgrims to American shores.   

“Our family has adapted to live in both worlds, even though we’re all in this one with our cultural values system, and living in the Western values system—no matter what trauma our people have gone through, they’ve been able to adapt, and that’s why we’re still here today,” she said. “Democracy is, for me, just how our people function for immemorial time, because what you have in our tribal makeup is leaders who, in order to have that leadership role, they had to prove themselves to the people and earn feathers,” she continued. “And so for us, it was what you did for your people and how you were going to guide your people that made the people stand behind you.”

Amid a presidential election—that naturally occurring crisis of democracy, as Tocqueville called it—burning like a wildfire across the country, the slow burn of our secondary crisis, that of the inequality of social conditions, is smoldering. The people, having become incendiary themselves, are a lit powder keg—the spark barreling through the wick. We return to Tocqueville’s words: 

“Of all powers, that of public opinion is the hardest to exploit. It is often just as dangerous [for representatives] to lag behind as it is to outpace it.”

The real test of our democracy, for either side of the party line, will be how we get through it—to the other side of not just the wildfire, but of the slow burn. How we make ourselves hard to exploit and make it hard to exploit each other. 

Tocqueville believed that our loss of spirit would either paralyze our participation, further heighten our passions, and risk a break of the state, or be the catalyst for us to rise up and save what we each believe to be at stake. If we are able to marvel at these communities’ capacity for togetherness in crisis as a feel-good feat of democracy in spite of “democracy” itself, then we should be, to the same extent, able to learn from it that the power of democracy, to self-govern, must sometimes be the power to use democracy to wrench self-governing back. The power to use democracy against itself, for its own good. 

We will perhaps find that the only way to fight for American democracy is for the true equalizer to be us (if we want it). If we must fall to Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” let it be because our heightened passions have unified not against each other, but to number the people together greater than the flawed system of governance so that the tyranny belongs to us all. 

And if it gets too heavy and “you reach the end of your rope,” like that church marquee on the north side of Watson Boulevard in Warner Robins preached, just “look up.” The real work of regeneration comes after the fire. 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The morning temperature is nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit as Keith Seaman sweats beneath his bucket hat, walking door to door through the cookie-cutter blocks of a subdivision in Casa Grande, Arizona. Seaman, a Democrat who represents this Republican-leaning area in the state’s House of Representatives, is trying to retain a seat he won by a margin of around 600 votes just two years ago. He wants to know what issues matter most to his constituents, but most of them don’t answer the door, or they say they’re too busy to talk. Those that do answer tend to mention standard campaign issues like rising prices and education—which Seaman, a former public school teacher, is only too happy to discuss.

“We’ll do our best to get more public money into education,” he tells one man in the neighborhood, before turning to the constituent’s kindergarten-age daughter to pat her on the head. “What grade are you in?”

“Why are you at our house?” the girl asks in return.

Seaman has knocked on thousands of doors as he seeks reelection this year. While his voters are fired up about everything from inflation to abortion, one issue doesn’t come up much on Seaman’s scorching tour through suburbia—even though it’s plainly visible in the parched cotton and alfalfa fields that surround the subdivision where he’s stumping for votes.

That issue is water. In Pinal County, which Seaman represents, water shortages mean that farmers no longer have access to the Colorado River, formerly the lifeblood of their cotton and alfalfa empires. The booming population of the area’s subdivisions face a water reckoning as well: The state has placed a moratorium on new housing development in parts of the county, as part of an effort to protect dwindling groundwater resources.  

Over the past four years, Arizona has become a poster child for water scarcity in the United States. Between decades of unsustainable groundwater pumping and a once-in-a-millenium drought, fueled by climate change, water sources in every region of the state are under threat. As groundwater aquifers dry up near some of the most populous areas, officials have blocked thousands of new homes from being built in and around the booming Phoenix metropolitan area.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan.’ That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

In more remote parts of the state, water-guzzling dairy farms have caused local residents’ wells to run dry. The drought on the Colorado River, long a lifeline for both agriculture and suburbia across the US West, has forced further water cuts to both farms and neighborhoods in the heart of the state. 

Arizona voters know that they’re deciding the country’s future—the state is one of just a half-dozen likely to determine the next president—but it’s unclear if they know that they’re voting on an existential threat in their own backyards. The outcome of state legislative races in swing districts like Seaman’s will determine who controls the divided state legislature, where Democrats are promoting new water restrictions and Republicans are fighting to protect thirsty industries like real estate and agriculture, regardless of what that means for future water availability. 

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

For these lawmakers’ voters, topics like abortion, the economy, and public safety are drawing far more attention than the water in their taps, and it will be these issues that drive the most people to the polls. But for the state officials who win on election day, their most consequential legacy may well be what they decide to do about the future of water in Arizona.

“They keep saying, ‘Well, water is nonpartisan,’” Ferris added. “That’s not true anymore. It’s really not true.”

It’s not hard to see why hot-button issues like immigration and the cost of living are on the minds of Arizona voters: The state sits on the US-Mexico border and has experienced some of the highest rates of inflation in the country over the past few years. Meanwhile, its Republican-controlled state legislature has cut public education funding and allowed a 19th-century abortion ban to remain in effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The state is at the center of almost every major political debate—“the center of the political universe,” in Politico’s words—and its nearly evenly divided electorate makes its swing votes key to determining who controls both the White House and Congress.

Even when the temperature doesn’t top 115 degrees F, the resulting campaign frenzy can make an out-of-state visitor lightheaded. Lawn signs clutter gas station parking lots, highway medians, and front yards; virtually every other television commercial is an ad for or against a candidate for Congress, the presidency, or some state office. A commercial slamming a Democratic candidate as a defund-the-police radical will frequently air right after an ad condemning a Republican as a threat to democracy itself. Mailers and campaign literature clog mailboxes and dangle on doorknobs. 

This avalanche of campaign advertising seldom mentions water. During a week reporting in the state, I saw exactly one ad that focused on the issue. It was a billboard in Tucson announcing that Kirsten Engel, the Democratic candidate for a pivotal congressional seat, supports “Protecting Arizona from Drought”—not exactly the most substantive engagement with the issue.

The reason for this avoidance is simple, according to Nick Ponder, a vice president of government affairs at HighGround, a leading Arizona political strategy firm. He said that while many voters in the state rank water among their top three or four issues, most don’t have a detailed understanding of water policy—meaning it’s unlikely that they’ll vote based on how candidates say they’ll handle water issues.

“They understand that we’re in a desert, and that we have water challenges—in particular groundwater and the Colorado River—but I don’t think that they understand how to best manage that,” he told Grist.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t. It’s all going to California, to the f—ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

And how could they? Understanding Arizona water policy involves a maze of acronyms—AMA, GMA, INA, ADWR, CAWS, DAWS, DCP, CAP, and CAGRD are just the entry-level nouns—and complex technical models that track water levels thousands of feet underground. Even many elected officials on both sides of the aisle aren’t well versed in the issue, so they defer to the party leaders who have the strongest grasp on how the state’s water system works.

One upshot of this confusion — as well as the state’s bitter partisan divide — is that, even as Arizona’s water crisis has gained national attention, state lawmakers have failed to pass significant legislation to address the deficit of this critical resource. Over the past two years, the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has been unable to broker a deal with the Republicans who control both chambers of the state legislature. Hobbs has put forward a series of proposals that would reform both agricultural water use in rural areas and rapid development in the suburbs of Phoenix, but she has come up a handful of votes short of passing them. Republicans have put forward their own plans—which are friendlier to the avowed water needs of farmers and housing developers—that she has vetoed.

Once you cut through the thicket of reports and acronyms, it’s clear that this year’s election is pivotal for breaking this gridlock and determining the future of water policy in the state. Republicans hold one-vote majorities in both chambers of the legislature, so state Democrats only need to flip one seat in each chamber in order to gain unified control of the government. If that happens, Hobbs will be able to ignore the objections of the agriculture and homebuilding industries, which have kept Republicans from signing on to her plans.

Hobbs and the Democrats want to limit or prohibit new farmland in rural areas, while simultaneously making it harder for homebuilders around Phoenix and Casa Grande to resume building new subdivisions. This would slow down, but not reverse, the decline in water levels around the state — and it would likely diminish profits for two industries that are pillars of the state’s economy. If Republicans retain control of the legislature, they would reopen new suburban development and roll out more flexible rules for rural groundwater, giving a freer hand to both industries but incurring the risk of more groundwater shortages in decades to come.

Legislators came close to reaching agreement on both issues earlier this year. Republicans passed a bill that would relax development restrictions on fallow farmland where housing tracts could be developed—a compromise with theoretical appeal to both parties’ desire to keep building housing for the state’s booming population—but Hobbs vetoed it, saying it lacked enough safeguards to prevent future water shortages. At the same time, lawmakers from both parties made progress on a deal that would allow the state to set limits on groundwater drainage in rural areas, but the talks stalled as this year’s legislative session came to a close.

“We had so many meetings, and we’ve never gotten closer,” said Priya Sundareshan, a Democratic state senator who is the party’s foremost expert on water issues in the legislature. “Now we’re in campaign mode.”

In Seaman’s district of Pinal County, where water restrictions have created difficulties for both the agriculture and real estate industries, many of those who are engaged on water issues see a stark partisan divide. Paul Keeling, a fifth-generation farmer in Casa Grande, framed the shortage of water on the Colorado River as a competition between red Arizona and blue California.

“We’re supposed to be able to get a part of that water, and now we can’t,” he told Grist. “It’s all going to California, to the f***ing liberals and the Democrats.” 

Keeling has had to shrink his family’s cotton-farming enterprise over the past few years, because he’s lost the right to draw water from the canal that delivers Colorado River water to Arizona. It’s one reason among many that Keeling said he’s supporting former President Donald Trump this year, as he has in the past two elections.

The Republican leadership of Pinal County has sparred with Governor Hobbs and state Democrats on housing issues as well, albeit in far less animated terms. In response to studies showing the county’s aquifer diminishing, the state government placed a moratorium on new groundwater-fed development in the area in 2019. Homebuilders and developers pinned their hopes on Republicans’ proposed reform allowing new development on former farmland, but Hobbs’ veto dashed those dreams.

Stephen Miller, a conservative Republican who serves on the county’s board of supervisors, told Grist that he views the Democrats’ opposition to new Pinal County development as motivated by partisan politics. The Republicans legislators who represent the area voted in favor of the bill that would restart development, but Seaman, the area’s lone Democratic representative, voted against it.

“We’re just sitting back watching because the makeup of the House and the Senate will determine what happens here,” Miller said. “If they’re both taken over by the Democrats, I think there’s probably very little we can do [to relax the development restrictions].”

As Miller sees it, the restriction on new housing is part of a ploy by the state’s Democratic establishment to suppress growth in a conservative area—or even repossess its water.

“It shouldn’t be a partisan thing at all,” he said. “You’d think that they’d all want to pull this wagon in the same direction. But all they want Pinal County for is to stick a straw in here and take our water.”

Another reason for the relative campaign silence on water issues is that the regions where water is most threatened—areas where massive agricultural groundwater usage has emptied household wells and caused land to crack apart—tend to be represented by the politicians who are most dismissive of water conservation efforts, and vice versa.

Cochise County, where an enormous dairy operation called Riverview has residents up in arms over vanishing well water, backed Trump by almost 20 points in 2020; La Paz County, where a massive Saudi farming operation has drained local aquifers, backed the former president by almost 40 points. The state representatives from these areas are almost all Republicans opposed to new water regulation; many have direct ties to the agriculture or real estate industries.

Meanwhile, the majority of pro-regulation Democrats in the state legislature represent urban areas that have more diverse sources of water, stronger regulations, and more backup water to help them get through periods of shortage. 

The state legislature’s two leading voices on water exemplify this divide. Democratic state senator Priya Sundareshan represents a progressive district in the core of Tucson, where city leaders have banked trillions of gallons of Colorado River water, all but ensuring that the city won’t go dry—and can even continue to grow as the river shrinks.

Sundareshan’s chief adversary is Republican Gail Griffin, a veteran legislator from Cochise County who chairs the lower chamber’s powerful natural resources committee. Griffin, a realtor, has blocked nearly all proposed water legislation for years, preventing even bills from members of her own party from getting a vote. Other legislators and water experts often cite her as the principal reason the state has not moved any major bills to regulate rural water usage—even though the county she represents faces arguably the most acute water crisis of them all. (Griffin did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment.)

Sundareshan, for her part, admits that it’s awkward that urban legislators are trying to set water policy for the rural parts of the state. But she says that Republicans have stalled on the issue for too long.

“It doesn’t look great,” she said. “But right now, rural legislators are setting policy for urban areas. That’s why that’s why legislators like me are stepping up to say, ‘Well, we need to actually solve these issues.’ Water is water, right? And the lack of availability of water in a rural area is going to impact the availability of water in our urban areas.”

The backlash to unsustainable groundwater pumping is not just coming from urban progressives, though—it’s also coming rural Republicans’ own constituents. In 2022, Cochise County voters approved a ballot proposal to restrict the growth of their water usage. (The strictness of the new rules is still being debated.) Even so, there’s no sign that any of these areas will endorse a Democrat. When Hobbs held a series of town halls in rural areas facing groundwater issues last year, she and her staff faced significant blowback from attendees who didn’t want the state meddling in their water usage. This year, elections in these areas are not even close to competitive. Griffin, the legislature’s strongest opponent of water regulation, is running unopposed.

This means that the future of the state’s water policy depends on voters in just a few swing districts that straddle the urban-rural divide: suburban seats on the outskirts of Phoenix and Tucson, where new subdivisions collide with vestigial farmland and open desert. For many voters in these purple districts, Arizona’s water problems are far from a motivating political issue—and likely won’t be for decades to come, as aquifers silently diminish underground. Voters might hear about water issues in other parts of the state, or wince when they see their water bills, but the disappearing water under their feet is all but invisible, and may remain so for the rest of their lives.

This dissonance is best exemplified by the 17th state legislative district, perhaps the most pivotal swing seat in the legislature. The district extends along the northern edge of Tucson, roping in a mix of retirement communities, rural houses, and cotton farms that may soon be replaced by new tract housing. Many of the new developments in these areas, such as the sprawling Saddlebrooke neighborhood, rely on finite aquifers and get water delivered by private companies. To comply with Arizona law, developers have to prove that they have enough water to supply new homes for 100 years, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the aquifers won’t continue drying up. 

It’s difficult to interest voters in a groundwater decline that is happening out of view, in a crisis that almost nobody is talking about publicly. The best that local Democrats can do is make a general pitch that water security is a common sense, bipartisan problem that they are committed to solving—without needing to explain how they would resolve complex questions about the interplay between water regulation and economic growth, among other nuances. 

John McLean, a former engineer who is running against a conservative legislator in an effort to flip the 17th district, has sought to position himself as a straight-down-the-middle moderate. His campaign literature tends not to mention his party affiliation, but it does tout water as one of his three key policy issues, along with public education and abortion access. The campaign pamphlet he’s been leaving in the doorways of homes in Saddlebrooke argues for a “commonsense approaches to secure our water future” and declares that “we must stop foreign and out-of-state corporations from pumping unlimited water out of our state”—something that has happened in the conservative, rural parts of Arizona, but nowhere near Saddlebrooke and the 17th district.

When I joined him as he knocked doors in Saddlebrooke, McLean told me that he’s found that almost every voter he meets agrees with him on the need for sensible water regulations—a far cry from lightning-rod issues like public safety, abortion, and inflation. 

“Everybody is really serious about water independence, and I think that they’re concerned about partisanship,” he said. “I don’t think there’s really much of a partisan difference among citizens when it comes to water.”

That apparent consensus, however, does not extend to the state’s elected officials.

“My Republican opponent voted to relax groundwater pumping restrictions,” McLean, referring to a bill that would have eliminated legal liability for groundwater users whose water usage compromised nearby rivers or streams. “So he was on exactly the wrong side of that one.”

When Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified last week, exploding into a Category 5 storm, large parts of Florida were bracing for disaster. For Cruz Salucio, Milton wouldn’t be the first, or the worst, hurricane he’d endured. But it sparked anxiety all the same.

Salucio works for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ local radio station, Radio Conciencia. The organization primarily serves farmworkers in Southern Florida, but its various programs have a presence in 15 states around the country. 

When hurricanes like Milton, Idalia, and Ian have approached, Salucio and other radio DJs were often the most direct source of reliable, fact-checked information for the region’s Spanish- and Mayan-speaking migrant workers. Climate change is intensifying these types of storms and in the process straining resources, endangering millions of people. For workers with few resources, hurricanes can be isolating and devastating events. But Radio Conciencia tries to fill the gaps as much as possible.

People at the station often answer questions about shelters and evacuation routes. Amid the deluge of information and misinformation, Radio Conciencia has become a trusted resource for many. It helps that, when there’s not a crisis, the station plays traditional genres of music like Banda, a regional Mexican style originally influenced by polka, or marimba-centric music popular in Guatemala. It also supplements the music with messages about workers’ rights and safety, filling a vital knowledge gap. 

Salucio spoke with me, via translation, about what it feels like to provide a lifesaving resource in trying times. His story has been edited and condensed for clarity:

I remember when I first came to Immokalee trying to find a radio station to listen to. Scrolling through the dial, I came across the music that was playing on Radio Conciencia. It was a Sunday, and I remember hearing marimba, which is a traditional Guatemalan instrument, and also hearing the radio host speaking in Q’anjob’al, an Indigenous language from Guatemala. It was so striking to me at that moment to hear not only the music, but also my first language, and to have that direct connection to where I had just come from.

From there, I got really involved. I came to Radio Conciencia because it’s a community radio station. You yourself can get involved and learn how to speak on radio and manage it technologically.

When I was working in the fields back in the 2000s, you’ll often have this experience where the bosses on a particular farm want to get as much harvested as possible, quickly, before the hurricane arrives. They’ll wait till the very last minute to let people leave. Having that experience myself—that’s really what drives me.

When I’m sitting and broadcasting from the radio during these moments of crisis, where I know that members of the community, their lives and their wellbeing are in danger, it feels incredibly important to make sure they know that. I feel a profound commitment to the radio and its purpose, especially in those moments, to the point that, especially now that I have a family, there’s that kind of balancing act of being home with family and sometimes needing to get back to the office to record some last-minute audio tracks or be live on the radio.

Our goal is always to ensure that people have the information they need when they need it, that they know how to prepare for these types of crises, and, especially during a hurricane, to know where they can go to shelter.

Days ahead of a hurricane’s arrival, we will work on original announcements that we can program with important information about what to do, how to prepare, how to stay safe during and after. We’ll record and program those announcements to play to everyone periodically, so even if there’s not someone live in the station, those messages are still getting out there. And of course the other limitation is if power goes out. That does affect the radio but we try to be as prepared as possible for those eventualities.

The good news is that our radio station and community center are in quite a safe building. Even during this most recent hurricane [Milton], some of our staff and radio DJs actually sheltered and stayed here, so they were able to continue broadcasting. We’re safer here than they might have been in their homes. 

The main thing we hear from listeners during these times is just deep gratitude. A lot of people in the community, by phone and on social media, reach out to say thank you for having a place they can go to in their language that has good and reliable information, that isn’t creating panic. They will call us and say, “I live in a really crappy trailer and I don’t feel safe—where can I go? Where are the shelters?” 

These storms not only impact the community but will wipe out entire agricultural fields. So they’ll call and say, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happened in the tomato fields?” 

“I’ve gone to the public shelters as well…It’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.”

Sometimes we’ll give them the terrible news that the entire fields got wiped out, which means no work. It always depends on the nature of the storm. For this particular storm, we could tell, basically in the final hours before the storm, that it wasn’t going to hit as hard here. So I sheltered at home with my family. The worst of it did not come inland to Immokalee. 

During other hurricanes, when I’ve lived in trailers and other insecure housing, I’ve gone to the public shelters not only to be safe myself, but it’s actually kind of a beautiful scene sometimes, and a good place to connect with the community and chat with people and see how everyone’s doing.

The reality for so many farmworkers is, especially when you’re living in trailers and really poor housing, you have so little and you are afraid of losing the little you do have of your belongings. Some people try to ride it out in their housing. Or they’re afraid that if they leave and then come back, what are they going to come back to? It might be nothing. Ideally, people will go when they need to, find a shelter to be safe if it’s going to be an extreme storm—even with that fear of losing everything they have.

Correction, Oct. 18, 2024: This story was corrected to accurately reflect the number of states where the Coalition of Immokalee workers has programs.

As a child, Senegalese-born chef Pierre Thiam took trips from Dakar to the countryside to visit his grandparents. There, he often ate fonio, a locally grown seeded grass rarely found outside rural areas. After making a name for himself at New York restaurants decades later, Thiam’s thoughts returned to the ingredient. “It’s very versatile,” he says. “It’s a delicate grain,” mild and nutty with a fluffy texture that resembles couscous.

But he couldn’t find it anywhere, so he began importing it through his food supply company, Yolélé. It wasn’t just fonio’s texture that he saw as a boon for the US market: The grain has attributes that make it especially enticing in a warming world.

Fonio, grown predominantly in West Africa, is a staple in many African and Asian countries. Part of the millet family, it is fast-growing, highly nutritious, resilient to changing conditions, and able to thrive in poor, arid soils.

Few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops.

Like corn, sorghum, and sugarcane, it is a C4 plant, which, to spare you a long lesson in cellular biology, means it retains water more efficiently than most plants, especially in sunny environments. Millets have among the lowest water requirements of any cereal crop for another reason, too: Their elongated and dense root systems can access moisture deep in the soil, reducing reliance on regular rainfall.

But few farmers grow millets these days, despite the need for adaptable crops. Nearly every region of the world is getting hotter. Twenty-one of the world’s 37 major aquifers—including many in the United States—are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and major rivers are drying up due to prolonged drought. Research published in Nature Climate Change in 2021 showed that human-­caused warming has already reduced global agricultural production by 21 percent since 1961. And a new report by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water warns that half the world’s food production is in areas at risk of serious water shortages by the middle of the century.

If millets are such an attractive choice for our changing climate, why aren’t we growing more of them? Commercialization, it turns out, faces several roadblocks. “It’s relatively difficult to process them,” explains Jonathon Landeck, co-founder of the nonprofit North American Millets Alliance. The seeds are typically sifted for impurities, cleaned, and dried before being dehulled—a task traditionally accomplished by hand with a mortar and pestle—and sorted by size and color. These are tedious tasks, and there isn’t much to be had in the way of efficient, millet-specific processing equipment.

In 2022, a Malian agro-processing venture involving Yolélé and another firm received a $2 million grant from the US Agency for ­International Development to develop a transparent supply chain and better technology. The partnership has collaborated with the Swiss equipment manufacturer Bühler to engineer a machine that virtually eliminates fonio loss during processing—previously as much as half the crop—increasing its output of edible grain from 1 ton per workday to 3 tons per hour.

But markets require demand. Few American consumers are familiar with millet, let alone know how to prepare it, Landeck says. While the UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets, government funding for research and crop subsidies on anywhere near the scale of those enjoyed by corn, wheat, and rice growers “is yet to follow,” says chemist Amrita Hazra, a co-founder of the Millet Project, a research collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The USDA maintains a collection of millet seeds from around the globe, Hazra adds, and should invest in research to determine which species grow best in different climates and altitudes, knowledge that could incentivize farmers to propagate millets.

The agency is, in fact, funding a small-scale exploration of millet as an economically viable US crop. Earlier this year, it granted $4 million to Zego, a company that aims to increase domestic processing capacity, marketing, and consumption of organic millet.

Thiam would be excited if Americans fell in love with fonio, though he’d rather we continue sourcing it from West African farmers who are often overlooked by the global supply chain and have been growing this climate-resilient grain for millennia. Meanwhile, he says, “creating a market for fonio would not only allow this crop to not disappear, it would also create a model for other crops out there that are just waiting to have their potential unlocked.”

Typically, I don’t watch reality television for the politics. After a day spent covering topics like climate misinformation, our crumbling democracy, and the literal death of nature, I watch reality TV to escape politics.

Which is why, last week, I was eager to throw on a pair of sweatpants, pop some corn, melt into my couch, and binge the seventh season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, cocooned in blankets and romanticist fluff. This was my safe place. At least it was supposed to be.

Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.

If you haven’t seen the show, allow me to summarize: Around 30 heterosexual singles sign up to date in individual, single-room “pods” with the aim of getting engaged “sight unseen” after just 10 days. The couples that do get engaged meet face-to-face for the first time in a dramatic, red-carpet reveal. Producers then follow them as they vacation in a tropical locale, return to their jobs, and attempt to date in the “real world” until they split or get married 28 days later. With a few exceptions, most of the couples break up. Love, in fact, is not blind. But it sure as hell is good television.

And like most reality TV shows I watch (and I watch a lot), Love Is Blind normally exists in a political bubble: Aside from one relatively groundbreaking discussion of abortion in season three, any discussions of politics between the couples, if they are filmed at all, are left on the cutting room floor, and the cast members’ political affiliations are left a mystery. (This is your warning: spoilers ahead!)

But in a noticeable deviation from previous seasons, season seven, which takes place in the Washington, DC, area, puts politics front and center. The season includes topics like dating across the aisle, having a change of heart in voting for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and a whopping, 12-minute dinner-table conversation about religion, Barbie vs. Past Lives, and the role of the United States military in American imperialism. It was, as Time magazine described it, “easily the most substantive conversation Love Is Blind has ever aired.”

The conversation, between Ramses Prashad, a 35-year-old program associate at a justice reform nonprofit, and 32-year-old lawyer and former Navy service member Marissa George, begins in episode seven with the two discussing their wedding plans. Having both grown away from their Christian and Mormon upbringings, they agree to “anything but a cis-hetero” officiant—which in turn leads to a conversation about religion broadly.

After George says she believes in past lives, Prashad says they need to watch Past Lives, referring to the 2023 film starring Greta Lee. George agrees—but only after the two watch the 2023 box-office hit Barbie. “Barbie made me realize I’m not accepting any man who supports [the] patriarchy,” George says. “It took Barbie to make you realize that?” Prashad jokes.

“I was working my way up there. I had to leave the military behind,” George says. “People do not realize the, like, brainwashing that [the] military does.”

Prashad, who grew up in Venezuela, notes the US military has “destabilized entire countries.” He references James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, saying that to love a country is to critique it. George responds that while she doesn’t support “half the shit the military does in other countries,” she supports the individual members within it. “I am proud of my service,” she says. “I support the troops, babe.”

“I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism.”

In episode eight, Prashad elaborates, saying that if George were to reenter the military, it would be a deal breaker. “We talk about things like Palestine right now,” he explains to three of George’s friends. “I always stand with people who are under the hammer of US imperialism. I feel for those people and so it’s hard for me to see myself in the future with someone who is actively involved in the military.”

As someone who has dated across the aisle, this sort of discussion felt authentic—and refreshing. It’s not often producers let social commentary slip into the final cut, let alone devote more than a few minutes to it.

Take ABC’s Bachelor franchise, where conversations about religion or politics primarily occur in the “fantasy suites”—the only time the contestants aren’t filmed: In Season 16 of The Bachelorette, which aired in 2020, for instance, Tayshia Adams reportedly ends her relationship with contestant Ivan Hall due to religious differences discussed behind closed doors. (ABC did air a conversation between the two about Black Lives Matter, but only after the franchise was criticized for having a race problem. More on reality TV’s botched attempts to diversify here.)

Two seasons earlier, after Huffington Post first reported that Bachelorette finalist Garrett Yrigoyen had liked transphobic memes, and memes mocking “leftist women” and immigrants, he apologized on-air, without addressing specifics. “Some stuff came out about my social media,” he said on the live, After the Final Rose special, “and I didn’t realize the effect behind a double-tap or a like on Instagram…I didn’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings or do anything like that.”

On the most recent season of Love Island USA, the only conversation I can recall that remotely references a world outside the islander’s plush, colorful villa is when 22-year-old contestant Kaylor Martin asks, after seeing her UK-based love interest, Aaron Evans, in short shorts, “The UK isn’t Europe, right?“

To be sure, Love Is Blind doesn’t deserve any major awards for airing a conversation about the military. As Time put it, “The conversation doesn’t settle their conflict, which they continue to hash out in subsequent episodes.” (I flipped through the newest episodes, which aired Wednesday—things aren’t looking good for Ramses and Marissa.) “Nor does it have the specificity or factual rigor to genuinely educate viewers on the issue at hand.” And it certainly doesn’t excuse legitimate criticisms of the show, like its platforming of outdated beauty standards and allegedly exploitative labor practices.

But the plotline does inch reality TV closer to an acknowledgment that relationships, love, and marriage are political. Whatever promise of neutrality drew me to Love Is Blind in the first place is broken, my safe space momentarily disrupted. And you know what? I’m okay with that, because reality television is a little more real for it.

We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which in turn form specialized growths that are harvested for food. But other ant species cooperate with fungi—in some cases strains of fungus that are also found growing in their environment.

Genetic studies have shown that these symbiotic relationships are highly specific—a given ant species will often cooperate with just a single strain of fungus. A number of genes that appear to have evolved rapidly in response to strains of fungi take part in this cooperative relationship. But it has been less clear how the cooperation originally came about, partly because we don't have a good picture of what the undomesticated relatives of these fungi look like.

Now, a large international team of researchers has done a study that traces the relationships among a large collection of both fungi and ants, providing a clearer picture of how this form of agriculture evolved. And the history this study reveals suggests that the cooperation between ants and their crops began after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, when little beyond fungi could thrive.

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We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which in turn form specialized growths that are harvested for food. But other ant species cooperate with fungi—in some cases strains of fungus that are also found growing in their environment.

Genetic studies have shown that these symbiotic relationships are highly specific—a given ant species will often cooperate with just a single strain of fungus. A number of genes that appear to have evolved rapidly in response to strains of fungi take part in this cooperative relationship. But it has been less clear how the cooperation originally came about, partly because we don't have a good picture of what the undomesticated relatives of these fungi look like.

Now, a large international team of researchers has done a study that traces the relationships among a large collection of both fungi and ants, providing a clearer picture of how this form of agriculture evolved. And the history this study reveals suggests that the cooperation between ants and their crops began after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, when little beyond fungi could thrive.

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Early into his new book, The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos, ecologist Mark Easter poses a playful, but loaded, question: “How could a morning piece of toast or a plate of dinner pasta be such a world-altering culprit?” This, like many ideas Easter digs into in his illuminating debut, is a glimpse at how the author goes about breaking down the climate toll of the US agricultural system: One dish at a time.  

Seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and pie are just some of the quintessentially “American” kitchen table staples Easter structures the book around as he tries to help readers understand how greenhouse gases move into and out of soils and plants on land across the country. Each of the nine chapters examines how a single dish is made; from the soil needed to grow the ingredients, to the people who manage the land and the laborers who toil to get it to the table, and the leftovers that remain—documenting the emissions created each step of the way. 

The Blue Plate also takes a look at some of the innovative practices being implemented around the US to make such culinary favorites more climate-friendly. Stopping off at an Arizona produce farm, a Wyoming fertilizer plant, a Colorado landfill, an Idaho fish farm, and several dairies, Easter shows how small businesses are making conscientious changes to how they work. He theorizes how each could be applied at scale while quantifying how the widespread adoption of such techniques, and minimal shifts in consumer purchasing and consumption habits, could reduce agriculture’s gargantuan role in warming. 

It’s a topic driven by Easter’s own family history. His great-grandmother was a farmer during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s who, along with others growing grain at the time in the Great Plains, unknowingly contributed to the release of one of the greatest known pulses of carbon emissions. The book uses her story to probe how the Great Plains was transformed from one of the planet’s most carbon-rich grasslands into one of its largest agricultural complexes. 

By analyzing the emissions released when food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped, The Blue Plate makes the case that curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It’s already happening, in bite-sized cases across the country. 

Grist sat down with Easter, a research affiliate at Colorado State University, to discuss what his vision of eating our way out of the climate crisis would look like in practice. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

In The Blue Plate, you dig into the emissions impact of the production and consumption of everything from husks of corn to hunks of meat. What led you to decide to focus on the ingredients of, in your words, “a typical meal at an American weekend dinner party”? 

I sat down one evening with a plate of food in front of me, and I looked at it, and I realized that there were critical stories tied to the climate crisis in every single item of food that was on the plate. I also realized I’ve been working with farmers and ranchers around the world who were already implementing the practices that could help reduce and actually reverse those emissions. And I saw the basis for the book in that moment. 

At Colorado State University, you belonged to a team of “greenhouse gas accountants” who tally the tens of billions of tons of carbon that move each year between the Earth’s plants and atmosphere—a huge focus of the book. What, exactly, does that look like? 

It’s very much like what an accountant for a business or a bank does. We’re basically trying to tally the flow of carbon and nitrogen back and forth between the Earth and the atmosphere and try to understand, “Do we have too much flowing in the wrong directions?” And that’s basically what’s been happening. Not just from the fossil fuel industry, and for generating electricity, for heating homes, for transportation, but also from the way we’ve been growing food and managing forests. We’ve been essentially exhausting the ecosystem capital of organic matter and sending that into the atmosphere. When really, what we need is for that flow to be stabilized and reversed, so that we have that flow of carbon back into forests, into pastures, into crop fields, and into the plants that sustain us through agriculture. 

The carbon and nitrogen in ecosystems, they’re really like the capital in businesses. If you’re burning through your capital, that’s a warning sign for business, and they can’t sustain it very long, eventually they’ll go bankrupt. And that’s essentially what’s been going on with agriculture. 

Let’s talk more about that, through the lens of bread. Something that has stayed with me is a line in the book where you note that although humans eat more of it than any other food, bread and grains have some of the smallest carbon footprints, on average, of any food—about a pound and half of CO2 equivalent for every pound of bread, pasta, or tortillas. But you argue that the emissions impact of producing bread and grain is larger than that, because of its soil impact.  

This is one of the most interesting stories when we think about the food that’s on our plates: the role that carbon, organic matter, has in the soil, supporting the crops that we grow. The more organic matter we have in the soil, the more fertile the soil is going to be, the more abundant the crops will be, the more resilient the plants will be in terms of being able to fight off disease and be able to deal with drought. 

It’s part of that ecosystem capital. The carbon that’s in the soil there accumulates over millennia. It can take five to ten thousand years for that ecosystem capital to build up and fill what we call the soil carbon vault that sustains the ecosystem. If we’re not careful, we can burn through that soil carbon vault over a short time. We essentially exhaust that capital. Burning through that vault, and that’s just an enormous amount of carbon in the soil, that is essentially a climate burden that comes with every loaf of bread. 

You visited a Colorado farm where the farmers have eliminated things like mechanically tilling the soil or leaving land fallow, both of which degrade soil. They’ve also weaned off of chemical fertilizers and planted cover crops. In what way are these compounding practices restoring the carbon that past generations of farmers have mined from their soils? 

What these growers are doing is reversing that process of degradation that started when the land was first settled, and what we now know as industrial agriculture was brought to those fields. And they are restoring it through these really straightforward practices that have been around in some form or another since the beginning of agriculture, and they’re implementing it at a scale that’s very focused on ending that cycle of degradation and actually restoring, regenerating, the soil. 

A story I tell in my book is of Curtis Sayles, who talks about how his soil had hit rock bottom. His focus has pivoted entirely to looking at the health of the soil, and he tracks that through the amount of organic matter, the carbon, that’s in his soil. And he’s steadily adding back the carbon into his soil. It’s extraordinary to see it come back to life. 

What would scaling this require? The book notes that many US farmers still intensively till cropland every year. Is it feasible to imagine large-scale changes? 

It’s important to understand that the decisions to regenerate soil, and to improve soil health, and to increase the organic matter in the soil, happen one farmer at a time, one rancher at a time, one field or pasture at a time. And there are hundreds of thousands of farmers and millions of pastures and fields around the country where the effects of those decisions can play out. 

There’s been a tremendous emphasis upon soil health within the farming and ranching community today. As soon as the US Department of Agriculture started talking about this in the context of soil health, it really started getting people’s attention. And now, we see some of the fastest-growing practices in the country are changes to reduce tillage and to start to incorporate cover crops. There’s still a lot of barriers to it, and those barriers are cultural and social. And some people are uncomfortable with change. But that said, farmers are increasingly seeing this as an opportunity for them to increase their yields. 

In the book, you pay homage to your great-grandmother and how she lost her farm during the Dust Bowl. How do you see her story, and historical accounts of farmers like her, reflected in how we talk about the role of agriculture in driving climate change? 

The story of my great-grandmother Neva and the story of her farm was a story that played out on literally billions of acres across the world. And not every farmer at the time was generating the kinds of emissions, degrading the soil, the same way that she was. But her story was not unique. What she did on that 160 acres of land in southeastern Colorado was similar to what was happening on farm parcels everywhere across the US, especially where people were homesteading under the Great Plains. 

In the process, they emitted as much carbon dioxide from the soil as we produce in a single year, in total, for all the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The magnitude of that was just extraordinary. And that is what really made my great-grandmother Neva’s story so personal to me. To realize that one of my ancestors had played a role there, unwittingly, in just trying to live a good life and fight for herself, and for her family. 

Soil is a cornerstone of the global food system, and very much a focus of The Blue Plate. But it’s not the only focus. For one, you examine the emissions footprint of things like steak and salmon, but you notably do not advocate for Americans to stop eating meat or seafood or dairy altogether. In fact, you explore what the solutions could look like if these emissions-intensive foods remain on kitchen tables. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? 

A lot of people are asking me about meat and their consumption of meat and “Do we need to stop eating meat?” I think what’s become clear is that we eat too much meat, whether it’s cattle or pigs or poultry. But I don’t think the answer is as simple as stopping eating meat. In some parts of the world, where millions of people live, trying to grow wheat or tomatoes, or other crops, would be an environmental disaster. It would completely deplete the soils. And some of those places, the best choice for the landscape, where it’s compatible with local wildlife and with the ecosystem as a whole, is to graze livestock. We have to be cognizant of that. 

I think the message that I’m trying to get across to the public is that if they eat meat, they need to consider pastured poultry, or try to source from regeneratively grown livestock herds and dairy products, wherever possible. And farmed shellfish, which can help restore oceans, estuaries, or our coastlines. People should search for foods in the grocery store that have a “regeneratively farmed” label attached to them. Finally, to avoid foods that travel by air, and the carbon emissions that come from that. And I know that’s not possible for everybody.

The through line of The Blue Plate is this question: “Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis?” You wrote that the answer is “a partial yes” but that we need to reframe the question. How would you like to see it reframed? And how would you answer it? 

How can we end the process of burning fossil fuels? And then what role can the way we grow, process, ship, cook our food, and deal with the leftovers, play in reducing the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels? 

We are burning fossil fuels at such a high rate and the impacts are so large we have to stop, as quickly as possible. Growing food differently, using regenerative methods, using these carbon farming methods, has the greatest potential to draw down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and back into the soil, back into the Earth, where we need more of it to lie. In that process of drawing down carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we’re going to be helping to cool the planet, and reduce the impacts of more than a century of burning fossil fuels. 

Native Hawaiians have always understood the value of water. In the Hawaiian language, the word for fresh water is “wai”—and the word for wealth is “waiwai.” An essential asset, water was a resource Hawaiians shared, and they made sure to return what they didn’t use back to the stream.

But the 19th-century sugar barons who diverted water to irrigate their plantations did not share those traditions. On Maui, the most important was Alexander & Baldwin, founded in 1870 by the sons of missionaries, which wielded great political and economic power for more than a century. At its height, it sustained its operations by draining plentiful streams of 165 million gallons a day to irrigate its plantation in Maui’s central plain, moving it through 70 miles of tunnels, ditches, flumes, and reservoirs. As stream levels dropped and taro patches dried up, Native Hawaiians, unable to grow their own food, were forced to move.

The network became a subsidiary company—East Maui Irrigation—which still controls this water diversion system. Today, EMI is jointly owned by Alexander & Baldwin and agribusiness company Mahi Pono.

EMI has been the source of long-running legal battles on Maui, as farmers and environmental groups seek to stop it from sucking up fresh water from the island’s streams. “For more than two decades, Native Hawaiians and the environmental community have been using legal avenues to try to restore at least some flow to these streams,” says Sierra Club attorney David Frankel. “At every turn, A&B and [the Board of Land and Natural Resources] have worked hand-in-hand to thwart those efforts.”  

An A&B spokesperson disputes this. “There are laws and statutes in Hawaii that govern the flow of water in streams and these legal processes were followed by the BLNR, A&B, and the Native Hawaiian and environmental communities,” the spokesperson says. “Significant amounts of water have been restored to East Maui streams. A number of priority streams…have been permanently and fully restored and will not be diverted in the future.”

The battle over Maui’s water supply intensified last August, when wildfires tore through the island and devastated the community of Lahaina. Earlier that summer, EMI’s legal opponents had scored a victory when a state court reduced the amount it could suck up from Maui’s streams by a quarter. But a day after the historic town was all but wiped out, the state of Hawaii petitioned its Supreme Court to stop the court order and increase the amount of water diverted, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting fires in Upcountry Maui.

The state’s petition seemed like a backdoor way to reverse the earlier ruling against EMI, especially when it soon became clear there was more than enough water available to fight the Upcountry fires. And it raised local suspicions that the state was doing the bidding of corporations.

Frankel called the effort a “brazen attempt to capitalize on tragedy to subvert the judicial process.” The state Supreme Court ultimately denied the petition. But a year after the Maui fires, the fight at the heart of that case—over who controls the island’s water supply, public or private interests—remains as fierce as ever.

Hawaii’s sugar plantations started closing one by one in the 1950s, as production moved to countries where costs were lower. The last of them, A&B’s Central Maui sugar operation, shut down in 2016. The company is now in the commercial real estate and development business, with a portfolio spanning 39 properties and 3,500 acres across Hawaii.

On Maui, A&B’s legacy remains complicated. For some it is an extractive force that has denied Native farmers their cultural lifestyle. For others, it is a benevolent presence that provided jobs, medical care, housing, and scholarships for students. “A&B was a major employer on Maui for over a century,” says Lucienne de Naie, the chairperson of Sierra Club Maui Group. “There were people who were very grateful to A&B. They gave immigrants a chance to work in the fields.” But cross the company, de Naie says, and “you were blackballed. It was hard to get any kind of job on Maui.”

Because of its history on the island, any issue having to do with A&B, including water, has deeply divided the island community. “While we can’t speak for our predecessors, we are encouraged by the re-emergence of taro cultivation as a cultural practice and important food source in East Maui,” says an A&B spokesperson.

De Naie lives in Huelo, a small town in northeastern Maui, where there is no public water supply. Residents retrieve water from streams or through water catchment. If those sources are dry, they have to purchase water. “We live in an area where our water is taken for other people to use, but we have to buy water from people that come in trucks and deliver it,” de Naie says.

Hawaii’s constitution declares that water is a public trust for the benefit of all citizens, and the state government is the only entity that can administer this resource. But there’s a loophole: Businesses, such as A&B, can control and sell the use of their water diversion systems.

“The operators of the diversion system end up having a significant amount of leverage over who gets how much water,” says Jonathan Scheuer, co-author of the book Water and Power in West Maui. “This is partly because of the amount of information they have available on how the system operates. Other players have to trust them often when they say this is how much water is available.”

The state leases water rights to EMI and other companies. For decades, EMI has received one-year revocable permits from BLNR to divert water from Maui’s streams. In exchange for the use of water for its own purposes, EMI must deliver water to rural residents in Upcountry Maui, for which it is paid 6 cents per thousand gallons by the Maui Department of Water Supply.

In 2018, the newly incorporated company Mahi Pono bought 41,000 acres of former plantation lands from A&B for $262 million, making it Maui’s largest landowner. The deal also included a 50 percent interest in EMI for $2.7 million.

The company currently employs 350 Maui residents. By the end of 2024, it projects it will complete planting 14,830 acres with a variety of crops, including citrus, coffee, macadamia nut, watermelon, and onions.

Though Mahi Pono’s name is Hawaiian—it means “to grow responsibly”—the company is not. It is majority owned by Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP), which manages approximately $200 billion in assets and has been buying up water rights worldwide as long-term investments.

“It makes perfect sense for them to invest in water,” says Shay Chan Hodges. She served as vice chair of the Maui County Board of Water Supply from 2018 to 2019, and chair from 2019 to 2021. “Obviously there’s value to 40,000 acres of land, but the real value is the water attached to that land.”

That’s something A&B and Mahi Pono evidently agree on, too. Per their sales contract, if A&B is unable to secure water leases with the state of at least 30 million gallons per day or if it’s unable to secure a long-term water lease of 30 years, it must pay Mahi Pono rebates of up to $62 million. Indeed, Mahi Pono’s allocation had been cut below that contractual threshold shortly before the state and A&B petitioned to increase the water usage of the East Maui Irrigation System last August in the wake of the Lahaina blaze.

“If Mahi Pono can obtain a 30-year lease from the state allowing for tens of millions of gallons a day (upwards of 90 mgd), the lease itself is an asset that can be monetized and potentially transferred or sold. This adds significant value to Mahi Pono’s holdings,” says Hodges.

After the Mahi Pono deal, A&B moved quickly to pursue a 30-year lease to divert up to 92 million gallons per day from Maui’s streams, with 85 mgd earmarked for Mahi Pono’s agricultural holdings. As part of its lease application, EMI filed an environmental impact statement that made plain the Faustian bargain at the heart of Maui’s water system. If it was not granted water rights, its water deliveries “would terminate,” a prospect that would leave tens of thousands of Maui residents without access to fresh water.

This language predictably caused local alarm, and the Maui County Board Department of Water Supply created a Temporary Investigative Group in 2019 to research the feasibility of purchasing and maintaining the EMI system.

“The Temporary Investigative Group believed that public ownership of the system was necessary for protecting the public health,” says Hodges, who was part of the group. “Because why are we being held hostage? The basic message was, ‘if you don’t do what we say, you won’t get any water.’”

Hodges and her colleagues recommended either purchasing or condemning the EMI system, or for the mayor to step in to acquire the long-term leases and give control back to the government, but nothing came of it.

For years, A&B and Mahi Pono have sought to influence local politics. “These corporations’ executives have held a number of influential positions in both the state and county governments,” says Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, a member of the Maui County Council. “A&B and Mahi Pono have long donated tremendous amounts to elected officials’ campaigns.”

Hannibal Tavares, one of Maui’s former mayors, was a veteran of the sugar industry and an employee of A&B prior to winning office in 1979. The current vice president of A&B also served on the state’s Commission on Water Resource Management (the arm that decides how much water companies can divert) from 2002 to 2005 while working for A&B. Another sugar industry leader twice served on the commission.

Since 2006, A&B and its top executives have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to state and county politicians. They’ve donated more than $10,000 to Gov. Josh Green in the past two years. Mahi Pono’s executives began donating to political campaigns in 2020. Thousands of those contributions flowed to Green, too.

“This is a case of our elected leaders choosing to be beholden to a private entity,” Hodges says.

Even before last year’s wildfires reinvigorated the fight over Maui’s water supply, activists had begun to gain some ground in their effort to wrest control from A&B and Mahi Pono.

Since the former and present mayor didn’t step in, in 2022, voters approved the creation of the East Maui Community Board water authority, which gives the people the power to negotiate water leases with the state. Hodges says she was surprised there was no pushback from corporations when it was put on the ballot, but there was some controversy with the appointment of its 11-member board. After the deadline to apply had closed, the county council received requests to open the process up again.

When the county did so, new applicants included a former Mahi Pono executive and former Mayor Alan Arakawa, who had opposed the water authority and said it would “kill Mahi Pono.” (When the 11-member board was eventually approved, it included Arakawa, taro farmers and several water resource experts, including Scheuer, who became the chair.)

Delayed by the fire, the water board began holding bimonthly meetings in February, and the director seat will soon be filled. But whether the community water authority and board successfully take East Maui water leases out of the hands of A&B and Mahi Pono, or if more challenges emerge, remains to be seen. If successful, it would be the first time in more than 100 years that the people of East Maui, and not a private corporation, will determine how its water is divided and shared. It could prove to be a model for the rest of the island, where other corporations hold its own separate systems.

Currently, EMI has a one-year lease from the state covering 2024, allowing 31.25 million gallons per day to be diverted from East Maui’s streams to Mahi Pono’s land—and the Sierra Club Maui is keeping a sharp eye as its legal battles continue. It’s fighting to stop the issuance of one-year leases, which avoids the rigorous review afforded to long-term leases.

De Naie says these court battles will make a difference for the future. “Eventually…we will see a standard set for trusteeship of public resources that should have been in place in the first place.”

The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”

The world’s first Ohlone restaurant is nestled in a lush outdoor space at the edge of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Cafe Ohlone/mak-’amham (“our food” in the Chochenyo Ohlone language) tempts customers with soft-boiled quail eggs, black oak acorn soup, and chia-seed flour brownies. Also, Cowgirl Creamery cheese with herb bread. “Some people ask why these foods are on the menu, even though our ancestors didn’t have that,” says co-founder Vincent Medina. “It’s because Ohlone people like it.”

Part of a growing movement of Indigenous restaurants dedicated to reclaiming cultural heritage and educating the public, Cafe Ohlone opened in 2018 with the goal of bringing oṭṭoy (repair) to a place where the Ohlone were long denied sovereignty. Kickapoo chef Crystal Wahpepah runs Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, and there’s Mitsitam Cafe at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “Indigenous foods are the original foods of this continent,” writes Sean Sherman, who helms Owamni in Minneapolis. “It’s important we recognize that and start celebrating those foods.”

Thousands of Ohlone once lived along California’s coast and inland in roughly 50 groups, but Spanish missionaries and 19th-century state-backed massacres fractured their communities and left some survivors in exile. Medina (East Bay Ohlone), who runs the cafe with his partner, Louis Trevino (Rumsen/Carmel Valley), notes that the Ohlone presence has endured despite the hardships: “Our culture is beautiful, and we have always been here.”

At Cafe Ohlone, traditional foods meet modern tastes, highlighting continuity and adaptation. The restaurant incorporates recordings, storytelling, and education into the dining experience. Medina, an Indigenous language activist fluent in Chochenyo, is a powerful orator who often enlightens diners about Ohlone traditions. When I stopped by in May for a sunny lunch on the patio, I appreciated the recorded sounds of crickets, birds, and Chochenyo songs sung by the tribe’s youngest and eldest members. My grandma, a We Wai Kai Nation member, would adore the multigenerational Chochenyo rendition of “Angel Baby.”

The cafe serves another role, too: an attempt by the university to atone for past wrongs. For much of a century, the adjacent anthropology museum housed a vast collection of Native artifacts and bones. As I walk by, I queasily remember Ishi, one of the last Yahi Tribe members, who lived in the museum and was made to fashion arrows at the behest of anthropology professor Alfred Kroeber. In 1925, Kroeber controversially declared the Ohlone people “extinct” in Handbook of the Indians of California. This led to the Ohlone Tribe losing its federal recognition, while the building housing the museum was later christened Kroeber Hall.

After much upheaval, the university removed Kroeber’s name in 2021, but his legacy endures. He and other anthropologists of his era had led the widescale theft of 9,000 Native American remains and around 200,000 sacred artifacts. The campus still houses thousands of them, which it has been slow to return to tribal nations, though a university spokesperson tells me that some of the resources of the museum, now closed to the public, have been “redirected to the repatriation efforts.”

Medina sits on a university committee working to ensure that the remains are returned in accordance with the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Looking to “our ancestors as property,” Medina says, “has never been appropriate or right.”

He and Trevino are also trying to increase Ohlone visibility beyond the restaurant’s walls. For the past year, they’ve been raising money to buy a piece of local land. They imagine native plant gardens, a tearoom, and a dining space in a traditional tule house—a place for the Bay Area Ohlone to gather and practice cultural traditions. Their efforts align with the Land Back movement, which advocates for restoring Indigenous lands taken by colonization.

Obstacles include a hot real estate market and the considerable cost and complexity of launching and funding a nonprofit—easier tasks for federally recognized tribes. In late 2023, the pair were close to inhabiting a site with historical and symbolic meaning in Sunol, some 37 miles southeast of Berkeley. That deal fell through, but they remain optimistic. “Our work,” they note on their website, “is an act of love.”

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Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said a lot of wild things during his Sunday morning media blitz. But one of his comments has received far less attention than the others: Vance described a federal program that has distributed nearly $2 billion to mostly Black farmers who experienced discrimination as “disgraceful,” suggesting that it is racist against white people.

And now, the head of the largest group of Black farmers across the country is condemning Vance’s assertions.

“He owes us an apology,” John Boyd, Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told me. The remarks, Boyd added, were “disgraceful, deplorable, dumb, degrading, and disrespectful to the nation’s Black farmers, the oldest occupation in history for Black people.”

A spokesperson for Vance also did not respond to questions from Mother Jones beyond requesting that we include the senator’s full remarks, which came during an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, during which Vance was asked about the racist attacks against his wife, Usha Vance. After condemning them, he added:

I frankly think that unfortunately, a lot of people on the left have leaned into this by trying to categorize people by skin color and then give special benefits or special amounts of discrimination. The Harris Administration, for example, handed out farm benefits to people based on skin color. I think that’s disgraceful. I don’t think we should say, you get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer. All farmers, we want to thrive, and that’s certainly the President Trump and JD Vance view of the situation.

But Vance’s assertions here are an inaccurate portrayal of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, the federal program established through the Inflation Reduction Act. Contrary to Vance’s claim, applicants were not limited to Black farmers; Any farmer who had experienced discrimination by the US Department of Agriculture—including based on sexual orientation or gender identity, religion, age, or disability—was eligible to apply. Last month, the USDA announced it had distributed payments to more than 43,000 people in all 50 states through the program, which Congress allocated $2.2 billion for.

While the USDA has not released data on the racial breakdown of farmers who received money through DFAP, Boyd said 85 percent of the funds went to Black farmers “because it’s obvious we were treated the worst.” The history of the government’s discrimination against Black farmers specifically is well-documented, including in Mother Jones‘ recent award-winning investigation, “40 Acres and a Lie“—done in collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal—which documents how the federal government stole land it gave to Black farmers following the Civil War. Black farmers also faced barriers to receiving loans, credit, and support compared to white farmers.

Still, that hasn’t stopped some white people—including Vance and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—from trying to claim federal aid to Black farmers perpetuates “reverse racism.” White farmers have also filed lawsuits against promised debt relief for Black farmers that Congress approved in 2021, claiming it discriminated against them.

Supporting the Trump-Vance ticket was now “off the table,” Boyd said in response to Vance’s remarks. Though he called Vice President Kamala Harris a “breath of fresh air,” Boyd called on Harris to commit support to Black farmers before the election—specifically, through debt relief for Black farmers. The Harris campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

In the meantime, Boyd is still waiting for an apology from Vance—but he’s not holding his breath. “We got the money,” Boyd said. DFAP, he added, was “a huge victory for Black farmers.”